einstein

So Einstein, yearning to be nearer to his boys, found himself briefly tempted to move back to Zurich. During his Baltic vacation that summer of
1918, he considered a combined offer from the University of Zurich and his old Zurich Polytechnic. “You can design your position here exactly as
you wish,” the physicist Edgar Meyer wrote. As Einstein jokingly noted to Besso, “How happy I would have been 18 years ago with a measly
assistantship.” 47
Einstein admitted that he was tormented by the decision. Zurich was his “true home,” and Switzerland was the only country for which he felt any
affinity. Plus, he would be near his sons.
But there was one rub. If he moved close to his sons he would be moving close to their mother. Even for Einstein, who was good at shielding
himself from personal emotions, it would be hard to set up household with Elsa in the same town as his first wife.“My major personal difficulties
would persist if I pitched my tent in Zurich again,” he told Besso, “although it does seem tempting to be close to my children.” 48
Elsa was also adamantly opposed to the prospect, even appalled. She begged Einstein to promise it would not happen. Einstein could be quite
solicitous about Elsa’s desires, and so he backed away from a full-time move to Zurich.
Instead, he did something he usually avoided: he compromised. He retained his position in Berlin but agreed to be a guest lecturer in Zurich,
making month-long visits there twice a year. That, he thought, could give him the best of both worlds.
In what seemed like an excess of Swiss caution, the Zurich authorities approved the lecture contract, which paid Einstein his expenses but no
fee, “by way of experiment.” They were in fact wise; Einstein’s lectures were initially very popular, but eventually attendance dwindled and they would
be canceled after two years.
The Social Democrat
Which would finish first, Einstein had wondered half-jokingly to Mari , the world war or their divorce proceedings? As it turned out, both came to a
messy resolution at the end of 1918. As the German Reich was crumbling that November, a revolt by sailors in Kiel mushroomed into a general
strike and popular uprising. “Class canceled because of Revolution,” Einstein noted in his lecture diary on November 9, the day that protestors
occupied the Reichstag and the kaiser abdicated. Four days later, a worker-student revolutionary council took over the University of Berlin and
jailed its deans and rector.
With the outbreak of war, Einstein had become, for the first time, an outspoken public figure, advocating internationalism, European federalism,
and resistance to militarism. Now, the coming of the peace turned Einstein’s political thinking toward more domestic and social issues.
From his youth as an admirer of Jost Winteler and a friend of Friedrich Adler, Einstein had been attracted to the ideal of socialism as well as that
of individual freedom. The revolution in Berlin—led by a collection of socialists, workers’ councils, communists, and others on the left—caused him
to confront cases when these two ideals conflicted.
For the rest of his life Einstein would expound a democratic socialism that had a liberal, anti-authoritarian underpinning. He advocated equality,
social justice, and the taming of capitalism. He was a fierce defender of the underdog. But to the extent that any revolutionaries edged over toward
a Bolshevik desire to impose centralized control, or to the extent that a regime such as Russia’s struck him as authoritarian, Einstein’s instinctive
love of individual liberty usually provoked a disdainful reaction.
“Socialism to him reflects the ethical desire to remove the appalling chasm between the classes and to produce a more just economic system,”
his stepson-in-law wrote of Einstein’s attitudes during the 1920s. “And yet he cannot accept a socialist program. He appreciates the adventure of
solitude and the happiness of freedom too much to welcome a system that threatens completely to eliminate the individual.” 49
It was an attitude that remained constant. “Einstein’s basic political philosophy did not undergo any significant changes during his lifetime,” said
Otto Nathan, a socialist, who became a close friend and then literary executor after Einstein moved to America. “He welcomed the revolutionary
development of Germany in 1918 because of his interest in socialism and particularly because of his profound and unqualified devotion to
democracy. Basic to his political thinking was the recognition of the dignity of the individual and the protection of political and intellectual
freedom.” 50
When the student revolutionaries in Berlin jailed their rector and deans, Einstein got to put this philosophy into practice. The physicist Max Born
was in bed that day with the flu when his telephone rang. It was Einstein. He was heading over to the university to see what he could do to get the
rector and deans released, and he insisted that Born get out of bed and join him. They also enlisted a third friend, the pioneering Gestalt
psychologist Max Wertheimer, perhaps in the belief that his specialty might be more useful than theoretical physics in accomplishing the task.
The three took the tram from Einstein’s apartment to the Reichstag, where the students were meeting. At first their way was blocked by a dense
mob, but the crowd parted once Einstein was recognized, and they were ushered to a conference room where the student soviet was meeting.
The chairman greeted them and asked them to wait while the group finished hammering out their new statutes for governing the university. Then
he turned to Einstein. “Before we come to your request to speak, Professor Einstein, may I be permitted to ask what you think of the new
regulations?”
Einstein paused for a moment. Some people are innately conditioned to hedge their words, try to please their listeners, and enjoy the comfort
that comes from conforming. Not Einstein. Instead, he responded critically. “I have always thought that the German university’s most valuable
institution is academic freedom, whereby the lecturers are in no way told what to teach, and the students are able to choose what lectures to attend,
without much supervision and control,” he said. “Your new statutes seem to abolish all of this. I would be very sorry if the old freedom were to come
to an end.” At that point, Born recalled, “the high and mighty young gentlemen sat in perplexed silence.”
That did not help his mission. After some discussion, the students decided that they did not have the authority to release the rector and deans.
So Einstein and company went off to the Reich chancellor’s palace to seek out someone who did. They were able to find the new German
president, who seemed harried and baffled and perfectly willing to scribble a note ordering the release.
It worked. The trio succeeded in springing their colleagues, and, as Born recalled, “We left the Chancellor’s palace in high spirits, feeling that we
had taken part in a historical event and hoping to have seen the last of Prussian arrogance.” 51
Einstein then went down the street to a mass meeting of the revived New Fatherland League, where he delivered a two-page speech that he had
carried with him to his confrontation with the students. Calling himself “an old-time believer in democracy,” he again made clear that his socialist
sentiments did not make him sympathetic to Soviet-style controls. “All true democrats must stand guard lest the old class tyranny of the Right be
replaced by a new class tyranny of the Left,” he said.
Some on the left insisted that democracy, or at least multiparty liberal democracy, needed to be put aside until the masses could be educated
and a new revolutionary consciousness take hold. Einstein disagreed. “Do not be seduced by feelings that a dictatorship of the proletariat is
temporarily needed in order to hammer the concept of freedom into the heads of our fellow countrymen,” he told the rally. Instead, he decried