THE following item was written by Einstein in Princeton, probably in 1935. On the manuscript appear the words “not published.” After Einstein’s death it was published by Otto Nathan and Heinz Norden in their book Einstein on Peace. It is an unusually vehement statement and perhaps that is why Einstein did not publish it. Writing it, however, must have brought him a feeling of relief:
To the everlasting shame of Germany, the spectacle unfolding in the heart of Europe is tragic and grotesque; and it reflects no credit on the community of nations which calls itself civilized!
For centuries the German people have been subject to indoctrination by an unending succession of schoolmasters and drill sergeants. The Germans have been trained in hard work and made to learn many things, but they have also been drilled in slavish submission, military routine and brutality. The postwar democratic Constitution of the Weimar Republic fitted the German people about as well as the giant’s clothes fitted Tom Thumb. Then came inflation and depression, with everyone living under fear and tension.
Hitler appeared, a man with limited intellectual abilities and unfit for any useful work, bursting with envy and bitterness against all whom circumstance and nature had favored over him. Sprung from the lower middle class, he had just enough class conceit to hate even the working class which was struggling for greater equality in living standards. But it was the culture and education which had been denied him forever that he hated most of all. In his desperate ambition for power he discovered that his speeches, confused and pervaded with hate as they were, received wild acclaim from those whose situation and orientation resembled his own. He picked up this human flotsam on the streets and in the taverns and organized them around himself. This is the way he launched his political career.
But what really qualified him for leadership was his bitter hatred of everything foreign and, in particular, his loathing of a defenseless minority, the German Jews. Their intellectual sensitivity left him uneasy and he considered it, with some justification, as un-German.
Incessant tirades against these two “enemies” won him the support of the masses to whom he promised glorious triumphs and a golden age. He shrewdly exploited for his own purposes the centuries-old German taste for drill, command, blind obedience and cruelty. Thus he became the Fuehrer.
Money flowed plentifully into his coffers, not least from the propertied classes who saw in him a tool for preventing the social and economic liberation of the people which had its beginning under the Weimar Republic. He played up to the people with the kind of romantic, pseudo-patriotic phrase-mongering to which they had become accustomed in the period before the World War, and with the fraud about the alleged superiority of the “Aryan” or “Nordic” race, a myth invented by the anti-Semites to further their sinister purposes. His disjointed personality makes it impossible to know to what degree he might actually have believed in the nonsense which he kept on dispensing. Those, however, who rallied around him or who came to the surface through the Nazi wave were for the most part hardened cynics fully aware of the falsehood of their unscrupulous methods.
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Leo Baeck was the leading Rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin, and a scholar of world renown. When the Nazis came to power he received many attractive offers of positions outside Germany that would have provided physical escape from the Nazi anti-Semitic terror. He refused them all, choosing to share the dangers with his fellow Jews in Germany. After being arrested several times, he was sent to the concentration camp in Terezin, where he remained until the collapse of the German armies, when he was freed by Russian soldiers.
In May of 1953, in a moving tribute to Leo Baeck on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, Einstein wrote from Princeton:
What this man meant to his brethren trapped in Germany and facing certain destruction cannot fully be grasped by those whose outer circumstances permit them to live on in apparent security. He felt it an obvious duty to stay and endure in the land of merciless persecution in order to provide spiritual sustenance to his brethren till the end. Heedless of danger, he negotiated with the representatives of a government consisting of vicious murderers and, in every situation, maintained his own and his people’s dignity.
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When asked to contribute to a Festschrift in honor of Rabbi Baeck, Einstein replied on 23 February 1953 as follows:
Wishing to assist your fine undertaking and yet being incapable of producing a contribution in the field of our revered and beloved friend, I hit upon this bizarre idea: to put together in the form of pills something out of my own experience that could give our friend a little pleasure—where, though, only the first pill would be allowed to claim a connection with him.
The “pills,” for the most part, turned out to be biting aphorisms, of which the following is a sample:
In order to be an immaculate member of a flock of sheep, one must above all be a sheep oneself.
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The first of the “pills” was addressed to Baeck. It was not an aphorism but an affirmation:
Hail to the man who went through life always helping, who knew no fear, and to whom all aggressiveness and resentment were alien. From such timber are carved the models on which we pattern ourselves, and in whom mankind finds solace in the midst of suffering of its own making.
On 17 March 1954 Rabbi Baeck sent the following letter to Einstein for Einstein’s seventy-fifth birthday:
“In days when the question of the existence of morality seemed to find only the answer “no,” or when the very concept of humanity remained in doubt, I was privileged to think of you, and feelings of peace and affirmation came over me. How many a day have you stood before me in my mind and spoken to me.”
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Einstein died in Princeton on 18 April 1955. On 26 April 1955 Cornelius Lanczos sent these words to Einstein’s daughter Margot:
“… One feels that such a man lives forever, in the sense that a man like Beethoven can never die. But there is something forever lost: his sheer joy of living, which was so much a part of his being. It is hard to realize that this man, so unbelievably modest and unassuming, abides with us here no longer. He was aware of the unique role that Fate had bestowed on him, and aware, too, of his greatness. But precisely because this greatness was so towering, it made him modest and humble—not as a pose but as an inner necessity. …”
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Early in 1933, Einstein received a letter from a professional musician who presumably lived in Munich. The musician was evidently troubled and despondent, and out of a job, yet, at the same time, he must have been something of a kindred spirit. His letter is lost, all that survives being Einstein’s reply. Since that reply was dated 5 April 1933, it was presumably sent from Le Coq. Here it is in part. Its haunting despair is timeless, relieved only by the fact that Einstein himself never gave up the fight against darkness. Note the careful anonymity of the first sentence—the recipient would be safer that way:
I am the one to whom you wrote in care of the Belgian Academy. … Read no newspapers, try to find a few friends who think as you do, read the wonderful writers of earlier times, Kant, Goethe, Lessing, and the classics of other lands, and enjoy the natural beauties of Munich’s surroundings. Make believe all the time that you are living, so to speak, on Mars among alien creatures and blot out any deeper interest in the actions of those creatures. Make friends with a few animals. Then you will become a cheerful man once more and nothing will be able to trouble you.
Bear in mind that those who are finer and nobler are always alone—and necessarily so—and that because of this they can enjoy the purity of their own atmosphere.
I shake your hand in heartfelt comradeship,
E.
Einstein was the greatest scientist in the world. But the world was such that he signed the letter with a solitary E and not with
