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1920s was not a good place or time to be an internationalist, pacifist, intellectual Jew.<br />
The milestone that marked the passage of German anti-Semitism from being a nasty undercurrent to a public danger was the assassination of<br />
Walther Rathenau. From a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin (his father founded AEG, an electricity firm that competed with that of Einstein’s father<br />
and then became a huge corporation), he served as a senior official in the war ministry, then reconstruction minister and finally foreign minister.<br />
Einstein had read Rathenau’s politics book in 1917, and over dinner told him, “I saw with astonishment and joy how extensive a meeting of minds<br />
there is between our outlooks on life.” Rathenau returned the compliment by reading Einstein’s popular explanation of relativity. “I do not say it<br />
comes easily to me, but certainly relatively easily,” he joked. Then he peppered Einstein with some very insightful questions: “How does a<br />
gyroscope know that it is rotating? How does it distinguish the direction in space toward which it does not want to be tilted?” 62<br />
Although they became close friends, there was one issue that divided them. Rathenau opposed Zionism and thought, mistakenly, that Jews like<br />
himself could reduce anti-Semitism by thoroughly assimilating as good Germans.<br />
In the hope that Rathenau could warm to the Zionist cause, Einstein introduced him to Weizmann and Blumenfeld. They met for discussions, both<br />
at Einstein’s apartment and at Rathenau’s grand manor in Berlin’s Grunewald, but Rathenau remained unmoved. 63 The best course, he thought,<br />
was for Jews to take public roles and become part of Germany’s power structure.<br />
Blumenfeld argued that it was wrong for a Jew to presume to run the foreign affairs of another people, but Rathenau kept insisting that he was a<br />
German. It was an attitude that was “all too typical of assimilated German Jews,” said Weizmann, who was contemptuous of German Jews who<br />
tried to assimilate, and especially of those courtiers who became what he dismissed as Kaiserjuden. “They seemed to have no idea that they were<br />
sitting on a volcano.” 64<br />
As foreign minister in 1922, Rathenau supported German compliance with the Treaty of Versailles and negotiated the Treaty of Rappallo with the<br />
Soviet Union, which caused him to be among the first to be labeled by the fledgling Nazi Party as a member of a Jewish-communist conspiracy. On<br />
the morning of June 24, 1922, some young nationalists pulled alongside the open car in which Rathenau was riding to work, sprayed him with<br />
machine-gun fire, lobbed in a hand grenade, and then sped away.<br />
Einstein was devastated by the brutal assassination, and most of Germany mourned. Schools, universities, and theaters were closed out of<br />
respect on the day of his funeral. A million people, Einstein included, paid tribute in front of the Parliament building.<br />
But not everyone felt sympathy. Adolf Hitler called the killers German heroes. Likewise, at the University of Heidelberg, Einstein’s antagonist<br />
Philipp Lenard decided to defy the day of mourning and give his regular lecture. A number of students showed up to cheer him, but a group of<br />
passing workers were so enraged that they dragged the professor from the class and were about to drop him in the Neckar River when police<br />
intervened. 65<br />
For Einstein, the assassination of Rathenau provided a bitter lesson: assimilation did not bring safety. “I regretted the fact that he became a<br />
government minister,” Einstein wrote in a tribute he sent to a German magazine. “In view of the attitude that large numbers of educated Germans<br />
have towards Jews, I have always thought that the proper conduct of the Jews in public life should be one of proud reserve.” 66<br />
Police warned Einstein that he might be next. His name appeared on the target lists prepared by Nazi sympathizers. He should leave Berlin,<br />
officials said, or at least avoid any public lectures.<br />
Einstein moved temporarily to Kiel, took a leave of absence from his teaching duties, and wrote to Planck, backing out of the speech he was<br />
scheduled to give to the annual convention of German scientists. Lenard and Gehrcke had led a group of nineteen scientists who published a<br />
“Declaration of Protest” aimed at barring him from that convention, and Einstein realized that his fame had come back to haunt him. “The<br />
newspapers have mentioned my name too often, thus mobilizing the rabble against me,” he explained in his note of apology to Planck. 67<br />
The months after Rathenau’s assassination were “nerve-wracking,” Einstein lamented to his friend Maurice Solovine. “I am always on the alert.” 68<br />
To Marie Curie he confided that he would probably quit his positions in Berlin and find someplace else to live. She urged him to stay and fight<br />
instead: “I think that your friend Rathenau would have encouraged you to make an effort.” 69<br />
One option he considered briefly was a move to Kiel, on Germany’s Baltic coast, to work at an engineering firm there run by a friend. He had<br />
already developed for the firm a new design for a navigational gyroscope, which it patented in 1922 and for which he was paid 20,000 marks in<br />
cash.<br />
The firm’s owner was surprised but thrilled when Einstein suggested that he might be willing to move there, buy a villa, and become an engineer<br />
rather than a theoretical physicist. “The prospect of a downright normal human existence in quietude, combined with the welcome chance of<br />
practical work in the factory, delights me,” Einstein said. “Plus the wonderful scenery, sailing—enviable!”<br />
But he quickly abandoned the idea, blaming it on Elsa’s “horror” of any change. Elsa, for her part, pointed out, no doubt correctly, that it was really<br />
Einstein’s own decision.“This business of quietude is an illusion,” she wrote. 70<br />
Why didn’t he leave Berlin? He had lived there for eight years, longer than anywhere since running away from Munich as a schoolboy. Anti-<br />
Semitism was rising, the economy collapsing, and Kiel was certainly not his only option. The light from his star was causing his friends in both<br />
Leiden and Zurich to try repeatedly to recruit him with lucrative job offers.<br />
His inertia is hard to explain, but it is indicative of a change that became evident in both his personal life and his scientific work during the 1920s.<br />
He had once been a restless rebel who hopped from job to job, insight to insight, resisting anything that smacked of restraint. He had been repelled<br />
by conventional respectability. But now he personified it. From being a romantic youth who fancied himself a footloose bohemian he had settled,<br />
with but a few stabs at ironic detachment, into a bourgeois life with a doting hausfrau and a richly wallpapered home filled with heavy Biedermeier<br />
furniture. He was no longer restless. He was comfortable.<br />
Despite his qualms about publicity and resolve to lie low, it was not in Einstein’s nature to shy away from saying what he thought. Nor was he<br />
always able to resist demands that he play a public role. Thus he showed up at a huge pacifist rally in a Berlin public park on August 1, just five<br />
weeks after Rathenau’s assassination. Although he did not speak, he agreed to be paraded around the rally in a car. 71<br />
Earlier that year, he had joined the League of Nations’ International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, which sought to promote a pacifist<br />
spirit among scholars, and he had persuaded Marie Curie to join as well. Its name and mission was sure to inflame German nationalists. So in the<br />
wake of the Rathenau assassination, Einstein declared that he wished to resign. “The situation here is that a Jew would do well to exercise restraint<br />
as regards his participation in political affairs,” he wrote a League official. “In addition, I must say that I have no desire to represent people who<br />
would certainly not choose me as their representative.” 72<br />
Even that small act of public reticence did not hold. Curie and the Oxford professor Gilbert Murray, a leader of the committee, begged him to stay<br />
a member, and Einstein promptly withdrew his resignation. For the next two years, he remained peripherally involved, but eventually he broke with<br />
the League, partly because it supported France’s seizure of the Ruhr region after Germany was unable to make reparation payments.<br />
He treated the League, as he did so many parts of life, with a slightly detached and amused air. Each member was supposed to give an address<br />
to Geneva University students, but Einstein gave a violin recital instead. One evening at a dinner, Murray’s wife asked him why he remained so