einstein

new chancellor of Germany.
Einstein initially seemed unsure what this meant for him. During the first week of February, he was writing letters to Berlin about how to calculate
his salary for his planned return in April. His sporadic entries in his trip journal that week recorded only serious scientific discussions, such as on
cosmic ray experiments, and frivolous social encounters, such as: “Evening Chaplin. Played Mozart quartets there. Fat lady whose occupation
consists of making friends with all celebrities.” 24
By the end of February, however, with the Reichstag in flames and brownshirts ransacking the homes of Jews, things had become clearer.
“Because of Hitler, I don’t dare step on German soil,” Einstein wrote one of his women friends. 25
On March 10, the day before he left Pasadena, Einstein was strolling in the gardens of the Athenaeum. Evelyn Seeley of the New York World
Telegram found him there in an expansive mood. They talked for forty-five minutes, and one of his declarations made headlines around the world.
“As long as I have any choice in the matter, I shall live only in a country where civil liberty, tolerance and equality of all citizens before the law prevail,”
he said. “These conditions do not exist in Germany at the present time.” 26
Just as Seeley was leaving, Los Angeles was struck by a devastating earthquake—116 people were killed in the area—but Einstein barely
seemed to notice. With the acquiescence of an indulgent editor, Seeley was able to end her article with a dramatic metaphor: “As he left for the
seminar, walking across campus, Dr. Einstein felt the ground shaking under his feet.”
In retrospect, Seeley would be saved from sounding too portentous by a drama that was occurring that very day back in Berlin, although neither
she nor Einstein knew it. His apartment there, with Elsa’s daughter Margot cowering inside, was raided twice that afternoon by the Nazis. Her
husband, Dimitri Marianoff, was out doing errands and was almost trapped by one of the roving mobs of thugs. He sent word for Margot to get
Einstein’s papers to the French embassy and then meet him in Paris. She was able to do both. Ilse and her husband, Rudolph Kayser, successfully
escaped to Holland. During the next two days, the Berlin apartment was ransacked three more times. Einstein would never see it again. But his
papers were safe. 27
On his train ride east from Caltech, Einstein reached Chicago on his fifty-fourth birthday. There he attended a Youth Peace Council rally, where
speakers pledged that the pacifist cause should continue despite the events in Germany. Some left with the impression that he was in full
agreement. “Einstein will never abandon the peace movement,” one noted.
They were wrong. Einstein had begun to mute his pacifist rhetoric. At a birthday luncheon that day in Chicago, he spoke vaguely about the need
for international organizations to keep the peace, but he refrained from repeating his calls for war resistance. He was similarly cautious a few days
later at a New York reception for an anthology featuring his pacifist writings, The Fight against War. He mainly talked about the distressing turn of
events in Germany. The world should make its moral disapproval of the Nazis known, he said, but he added that the German population itself
should not be demonized.
It was unclear, even as he was about to sail, where he would now live. Paul Schwartz, the German consul in New York who had been Einstein’s
friend in Berlin, met with him privately to make sure that he did not plan to go back to Germany. “They’ll drag you through the streets by the hair,” he
warned. 28
His initial destination, where the ship would let him off, was Belgium, and he suggested to friends that he might go to Switzerland after that. When
the Institute for Advanced Study opened the following year, he planned to spend four or five months there each year. Perhaps it would turn out to be
even more. On the day before he sailed, he and Elsa slipped away to Princeton to look at houses they might buy.
The only place in Germany that he wanted to see again, he told family members, was Caputh. But on the journey across the Atlantic, he received
word that the Nazis had raided his cottage under the pretense of looking for a cache of communist weaponry (there was none). Later they came
back and confiscated his beloved boat on the pretense it might be used for smuggling. “My summer house was often honored by the presence of
many guests,” he said in a message from the ship. “They were always welcome. No one had any reason to break in.” 29
The Bonfires
The news of the raid on his Caputh cottage determined Einstein’s relationship to his German homeland. He would never go back there.
As soon as his ship docked in Antwerp on March 28, 1933, he had a car drive him to the German consulate in Brussels, where he turned in his
passport and (as he had done once before when a teenager) declared that he was renouncing his German citizenship. He also mailed a letter,
written during the crossing, in which he submitted his resignation to the Prussian Academy. “Dependence on the Prussian government,” he stated,
“is something that, under the present circumstances, I feel to be intolerable.” 30
Max Planck, who had recruited him to the Academy nineteen years earlier, was relieved. “This idea of yours seems to be the only way that would
ensure for you an honorable severance of your relations with the Academy,” Planck wrote back with an almost audible sigh. He added his gracious
plea that “despite the deep gulf that divides our political opinions, our personal amicable relations will never undergo any change.” 31
What Planck was hoping to avoid, amid the flurry of anti-Semitic diatribes against Einstein in the Nazi press, were formal disciplinary hearings
against Einstein, which some government ministers were demanding. That would cause Planck personal agony and the Academy historic
embarrassment. “Starting formal exclusion procedures against Einstein would bring me into gravest conflicts of conscience,” he wrote an Academy
secretary. “Even though on political matters a deep gulf divides me from him, I am, on the other hand, absolutely certain that in the history of
centuries to come, Einstein’s name will be celebrated as one of the brightest stars that ever shone in the Academy.” 32
Alas, the Academy was not content to leave bad enough alone. The Nazis were furious that he had preempted them by renouncing, very publicly,
with headlines in the papers, his citizenship and Academy membership before they could strip him of both. So a Nazi-sympathizing secretary of the
Academy issued a statement on its behalf. Referring to the press reports of some of his comments in America, which in fact had been very
cautious, it denounced Einstein’s “participation in atrocity-mongering” and his “activities as an agitator in foreign countries,” concluding, “It has,
therefore, no reason to regret Einstein’s withdrawal.” 33
Max von Laue, a longtime colleague and friend, protested. At a meeting of the Academy later that week, he tried to get members to disavow the
secretary’s action. But no other member would go along, not even Haber, the converted Jew who had been one of Einstein’s closest friends and
supporters.
Einstein was not willing to let such a slander pass. “I hereby declare that I have never taken any part in atrocity-mongering,” he responded. He
had merely spoken the truth about the situation in Germany, without resorting to purveying tales of atrocities. “I described the present state of affairs
in Germany as a state of psychic distemper in the masses,” he wrote. 34
By then there was no doubt this was true. Earlier in the week, the Nazis had called for a boycott of all Jewish-owned businesses and stationed
storm troopers outside of their stores. Jewish teachers and students were barred from the university in Berlin and their academic identification