Einstein in Berlin

  • Thomas Levenson
Bantam Doubleday Dell: 2003. 400 pp. $25.95
Credit: ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID NEWTON

Thomas Levenson is a film-maker who produces documentary films for public television. He has a sharp eye for the dramatic events and personal details that bring history to life. His latest book is a social history of Germany from 1914 to 1933, when Albert Einstein lived in Berlin. The picture of the city's troubles comes into clearer focus when viewed through Einstein's eyes. He was a good witness, observing the life of the city in which he played an active role but from which he remained emotionally detached.

Einstein wrote frequent letters to his old friends in Switzerland and his new friends in Germany, recording events as they happened and describing his hopes and fears. His daily life and activities come intermittently into the narrative, but are not the main theme. The main theme is the tragedy of the First World War, a tragedy that began in 1914 but did not end with the war in 1918. It continued to torment the citizens of Berlin until 1933, and led them finally to put their fate in the hands of Hitler. Hitler was able to gain power by promising to erase the tragedy and bring back the happy days of the empire when Germany was prosperous and united.

“There are, to be sure, too many biographies of Einstein and not enough of Poincaré,” writes Peter Galison in a forthcoming book, Einstein's Clocks and Poincaré's Maps. Every aspect of Einstein's life — the personal, the political, the scientific and the philosophical — has been described in detail and analysed in depth by his various biographers. The world does not need another Einstein biography. Fortunately, Einstein in Berlin is not a biography. Levenson has borrowed everything he needs from the published correspondence and the existing biographies of Einstein, with full acknowledgements and an excellent bibliography. The new and original aspect of this book is the context in which Einstein is placed: an in-depth study of the social pathology that gripped Berlin from the day that Einstein arrived in 1914 to the day he left in 1932.

The tragedy is a play in two acts: the first act covers the years of war, and the second act the years of the Weimar Republic. The most remarkable feature of the first act is the general belief among Einstein's friends in Berlin that the war was winnable. The war was widely welcomed as an opportunity for Germany to achieve its proper status as a great power. Einstein observed that his academic friends and colleagues were even more deluded with patriotic dreams of grandeur than the ordinary citizens that he met in the street.

For example, in June 1918, after the last great German offensive on the Western front had failed, Felix Klein, a mathematician second only to David Hilbert in fame and authority, spoke in Göttingen to an audience of leading industrialists and government officials. He talked confidently of the coming victorious conclusion of the war, of the harmonious collaboration of German science with industry and the armed forces, and of the expected increase in support for mathematical education and research after the victory was won.

The state of mind of the mandarins in Berlin was very different from that of their enemies in Paris and London. In Paris the war was seen as a desperate struggle for survival. The guns on the Western front were so close that everyone in Paris could hear them. In Britain the war was seen as a tragedy that had done irreparable harm to Britain and to European civilization, no matter who won it. When the war came to an end in November 1918, the British public looked back on it as an unspeakable horror that should never under any circumstances be allowed to happen again. But a large part of the German public looked back on it differently, as a test of strength that they could have won if they had not been stabbed in the back by traitors at home. This book explains how that fatal German sense of betrayal came into being.

The second act of the tragedy is the story of the slow collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rapid rise of Hitler. Einstein was a firm supporter of the republic, but he saw which way the wind was blowing. One episode in the tragedy epitomizes the whole story. Erich Remarque's book Im Westen Nichts Neues was published in 1929 and immediately became an international bestseller. It is the finest fictional account of the First World War, as seen through the eyes of a group of young Germans who die pointlessly in the carnage of the Western front. In 1930 it was made into a Hollywood film, All Quiet on the Western Front, which was shown all over the world — except in Germany. When the film's distributors tried to show it in Berlin, Hitler's friend Joseph Goebbels organized a riot in the cinema. Further Nazi demonstrations and violent protests against the film followed. The Weimar government then banned the film throughout Germany because the Nazis considered it unpatriotic.

This episode explains a mystery in my own family. One of my relatives, who is now 94 years old, has lived in Germany all her life and grew up in the Weimar years. Many years ago I gave her Remarque's book to read and she found it very moving. “This book is wonderful,” she said. “Why didn't they let us read it when it was published? That was before the Hitler time, but we were told it was disgusting and shameful, and that respectable people should not read it.” So the respectable Germans of her generation, even those who were not Nazis, did not read Remarque. I had always wondered why, and now I know.