EINSTEIN IN BERLIN(ISBN=9780553378443) 下载 pdf 百度网盘 epub 免费 2025 电子书 mobi 在线

In a book that is both biography and the most exciting form of

history, here are eighteen years in the life of a man, Albert

Einstein, and a city, Berlin, that were in many ways the defining

years of the twentieth century.

Einstein in Berlin

In the spring of 1913 two of the giants of modern science

traveled to Zurich. Their mission: to offer the most prestigious

position in the very center of European scientific life to a man

who had just six years before been a mere patent clerk. Albert

Einstein accepted, arriving in Berlin in March 1914 to take up his

new post. In December 1932 he left Berlin forever. “Take a good

look,” he said to his wife as they walked away from their house.

“You will never see it again.”

In between, Einstein’s Berlin years capture in microcosm the

odyssey of the twentieth century. It is a century that opens with

extravagant hopes--and climaxes in unparalleled calamity. These are

tumultuous times, seen through the life of one man who is at once

witness to and architect of his day--and ours. He is present at the

events that will shape the journey from the commencement of the

Great War to the rumblings of the next one.

We begin with the eminent scientist, already widely recognized for

his special theory of relativity. His personal life is in turmoil,

with his marriage collapsing, an affair under way. Within two years

of his arrival in Berlin he makes one of the landmark discoveries

of all time: a new theory of gravity--and before long is

transformed into the first international pop star of science. He

flourishes during a war he hates, and serves as an instrument of

reconciliation in the early months of the peace; he becomes first a

symbol of the hope of reason, then a focus for the rage and madness

of the right.

And throughout these years Berlin is an equal character, with its

astonishing eruption of revolutionary pathways in art and

architecture, in music, theater, and literature. Its wild street

life and sexual excesses are notorious. But with the debacle of the

depression and Hitler’s growing power, Berlin will be transformed,

until by the end of 1932 it is no longer a safe home for Einstein.

Once a hero, now vilified not only as the perpetrator of “Jewish

physics” but as the preeminent symbol of all that the Nazis loathe,

he knows it is time to leave.

From the Hardcover edition.

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Thomas Levenson is an Emmy and Peabody award-winning documentary

filmmaker whose credits include a two-hour biography of Einstein

for the PBS series Nova. He has written two previous books, Measure

for Measure: A Musical History of Science and Ice Time: Climate,

Science, and Life on Earth. He lives outside Boston.

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Chapter One

"Suspicion against every kind of authority"

The Berlin suburb of Dahlem remains a pretty place,

quiet, dominated by its university and the science institutes

renamed after the disasters of two World Wars in honor of Max

Planck. In 1914 it was less than an hour by train on a good day

from the heart of Berlin, and its houses are large and comfortable,

ideal for a professor and his family. On his arrival, Einstein

moved into an apartment in one of those houses, a flat that his

wife, Mileva, had chosen on a visit the previous winter. She and

their two sons, aged twelve and four, joined him in mid-April, two

weeks later. That household was to survive less than four

months.

Marriages end. People once consumed with love grow older, more

distant. In this, Einstein and Mileva made a relentlessly ordinary

couple. They married; they separated; eventually (despite

Einstein's promise to the contrary) they divorced. At first glance,

only the speed of the collapse surprises. In Zurich, the Einsteins

had seemed to be a functioning family. In Berlin, within weeks,

Einstein refused to remain in the same building as his wife. It was

no coincidence that the break coincided with the move. A transition

that had first appeared as a simple career boost became, or he used

it, as the chance to forge a much deeper breach with his past. He

had married Mileva at the tail end of a tumultuous adolescence.

Moving to Berlin at the near edge of midlife, Einstein found that

he could--or would--no longer tolerate the consequences of that

choice. Arrival in Berlin was not merely a beginning; it marked the

dismal end of a drama in which Einstein had once been the

hero.

Albert Einstein was born in the south German city of Ulm in 1879,

the first child of Hermann and Pauline Einstein. Hermann came from

Buchau, a small town in WYrttemberg, one of the petty Germany

states. He was one of what were known as the "meadow Jews," from

long-established communities scattered through the small towns and

farm villages of south Germany. There had been Einsteins,

originally Ainsteins, in Buchau since 1665, but by the time of

Hermann's birth in 1847, small-town routines had begun to crumble.

The emancipation of Germany's Jews had begun in the wake of

Napoleonic reforms, though it took until 1862 for the kingdom of

WYrttemberg to grant its Jewish subjects full civil rights. For

Hermann, the first step was to attend secondary school in a big

city--Stuttgart. He did well there, showing a marked mathematical

bent, but his family was large and his two sisters needed dowries,

so university was out of the question. Faced with the need to make

a living, he abandoned Buchau, this time for the old cathedral city

of Ulm, where he sold feathers for mattress stuffing. There, in

1876, he married a young woman--a teenager--named Pauline Koch.

They remained in Ulm until 1881, when the young family moved to

Munich.

Hermann had married up. The Koch family had been small-town

merchants, but they made their move sooner and more aggressively

than the Einsteins had. Pauline's father and uncle had entered the

wholesale grain trade in the 1850s, building a business near

Stuttgart that ultimately became a government supplier. The Kochs

educated their daughters. Pauline was thus relatively rich, raised

to city customs, sophisticated and smart; eleven years younger than

her husband, she nonetheless was the sparking center of her

household. She became pregnant in 1878, and almost from the moment

that Albert emerged, she fixed on him all the ambition a bright,

ambitious young mother could bring to bear.

Einstein inspired some worry early on--his grandmother complained

that baby Albert was "fat, much too fat," and he was slow to speak.

Family legend had it that he remained silent until his third year,

when he finally came out with complete sentences. His first

recorded utterance came when he was two. Pauline was pregnant with

her second child and Einstein was promised a toy when mother and

baby came home from the hospital. On seeing his sister, Maja, for

the first time, he is supposed to have asked "But where are its

wheels?" He could be a willful child, prone to tantrums that could

extend to the point of real violence. He struck out at his sister,

once trying to drive a hole in her skull with a toy hoe, and he

valiantly resisted the first imposition of formal education,

finally striking his tutor with a chair. The woman fled in horror,

never to be seen at the Einstein house again. But Albert was

Pauline's prize, and she would persuade, flatter, labor as

necessary to nurture him. Maja remembered her mother sitting for

hours at the piano coaxing, cajoling and ultimately compelling the

cantankerous six- and seven-year-old Albert through his violin

practice, until finally the boy discovered his genuine love of the

instrument. Behavior like this did not go over well at school. At

the start, Maja recalled, he was "considered only moderately

talented, because he needed time to mull things over, and he wasn't

even good at arithmetic, in the sense of being quick and accurate."

Unfortunately, in Einstein's first encounter with modern German

methods of instruction, his teacher held his pupils' attention by

rapping the knuckles of any child who did not answer fast or

precisely enough to please him. Einstein suffered.

But not too much. Despite Maja's claim, Einstein was always capable

of fine performance, to his mother's immense satisfaction. In his

first year of elementary school, when he was seven, she wrote to a

relative that "Albert got his grades yesterday. He was ranked first

again." The myths that Einstein did poorly at school or that he

failed mathematics are only that--myths. With a few exceptions, his

marks ranged from good to excellent from primary school into

university--and that included creditable work in fields far removed

from those he truly cared for. He performed acceptably in the

required Greek and Latin lessons at gymnasium, and at university he

followed his father's wishes that he gain at least a sliver of

useful knowledge by taking--and passing--business classes like

Banking and the Stock Exchange and the Mathematical Foundations of

Statistics and Personal Insurance. There is no evidence that he

ever made any significant use of what he learned in those courses,

but the image of Einstein on Wall Street has its charms.

But while Pauline could boast of his ability there was always cause

for concern. Even as a small child, Einstein could not hide his

contempt for whatever seemed to him arbitrary, coercive or simply

stupid in school. For example, Bavaria required all students to

take religious instruction, so despite his parents' lack of

interest in Judaism, the nine-and-a-half-year-old dutifully began

to study with a more pious relative. Almost immediately, he found

himself entranced by Jewish tradition, a devotion that lasted about

two years. He refused to eat pork, composed religious songs to sing

on his way to school, and pondered the biblical stories of creation

and miracles. But when he turned eleven he received as a gift Aaron

Bernstein's series of popular science books--brightly illustrated

introductions to the big ideas of the day. The shock was enormous

and immediate. More than half a century later, Einstein recalled

that he read the Bernstein series "with breathless attention," and

that "through the reading of popular scientific books I soon

reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could

not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of

freethinking, coupled with the impression that youth is

intentionally being deceived by the state through lies."

Einstein went on to write that this loss of faith was "crushing,"

and that "suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of

this experience, a skeptical attitude towards the convictions which

were alive in any specific social environment--an attitude which

has never again left me . . ." The immediate consequence of this

revelation came in secondary school, where he found himself

virtually at war with the faculty at Munich's prestigious Luitpold

Gymnasium. As he remembered it decades later, the school had been a

maelstrom of arrogance and stupidity, its acts of intellectual

violence directed at his independence of mind and will, committed

not only by the school but by the state of which it was an

arm.

One almost pities his teachers. As Maja recalled, one of his

instructors lost patience one day and snapped that nothing would

ever become of him. When Einstein complained that he had done

nothing wrong, the teacher replied that it was impossible to lead a

class with him in the room because his attitude lacked the required

respect. He hated being treated like this. "The style of teaching

in most subjects was repugnant to him," Maja wrote, adding that

"the military tone of the school, the systematic training in the

worship of authority that was supposed to accustom pupils at an

early age to military discipline was also particularly unpleasant

for the boy."

The crisis came in 1894, when his parents, uncle and sister moved

first to Milan, then to Pavia, in northern Italy, so that Hermann

Einstein and his brother could establish a new business there.

Einstein remained behind with distant relatives to complete his

schooling at the gymnasium. He fought yet again with one of his

instructors, and using the incident as a pretext, he persuaded his

family doctor to write a note saying he was suffering from an

unspecified nervous ailment that prevented him from attending

school. He left Munich, made his way to Italy, arrived at his

parents' house without warning, and announced his decision to them:

he was going to renounce his German citizenship. Statelessness was

preferable to allegiance to a Germany he already disdained.

There was a little more to the story, of course. Einstein had a

very practical motive for escape. If he remained in Munich past his

sixteenth birthday he was subject to conscription into the imperial

army. Should he fail to appear when summoned, the law would

consider him a deserter. It is hard now to even imagine him as a

soldier. As the historian Fritz Stern put it, "The image of

Einstein in a field-gray uniform does boggle the mind"--and pity

the poor sergeant who would have had to try to turn the young

Einstein into any sort of trooper. But the issue was more than just

a simple desire to avoid military service. When Einstein became a

Swiss citizen in 1901 (after Zurich's municipal police had

concluded that he was "a very eager, industrious and extremely

solid man"), he did so knowing that the privileges of citizenship

brought with them the obligation to enter the Swiss army. As

required, he presented himself to the military medical examiners on

March 13, 1901, but they found that he had varicose veins and flat

and sweaty feet and concluded that he was unfit for duty. There is

no suggestion that he minded the snub. At this moment in his life

he did not hate all uniforms, just the kaiser's.

Einstein did take minimal precautions before abandoning Munich. He

used the doctor's note that declared he was unfit to attend classes

to get his formal release from gymnasium, thus avoiding the stigma

of school failure. When he reached his parents' new home in Pavia,

he promised them he would study on his own for the entrance

examination to Zurich's Polytechnic, which was not only a leading

technical university but happily did not require candidates who

passed the requisite examinations to have completed secondary

school. Even so, Maja wrote, his parents were "alarmed by his

high-handed behavior," and apparently tried to nudge him back on

course; but he "adamantly declared that he would not return to

Munich" under any circumstances. Of necessity, Pauline and Hermann

"resigned themselves to the new situation with grave

misgivings."

Einstein delivered. Maja reported that he worked systematically

through the necessary textbooks, though she did admit that "his

work habits were rather odd: even in a large, quite noisy group, he

would withdraw to the sofa, take pen and paper in hand, set the

inkstand precariously on the armrest, and lose himself so

completely in a problem that the buzz of voices stimulated rather

than disturbed him." The work was not only play for him, it was

devotion, almost prayer. The religious metaphor is his. He dated

the discovery of his vocation back to a gift he received when he

was twelve: "A wonder . . . a little book dealing with Euclidean

plane geometry." It was revelation: "Here were assertions," he was

to write, "as, for example, that the intersection of the three

altitudes of a triangle in one point, which--though by no means

evident--could nevertheless be proved with such certainty that any

doubt appeared to be out of the question. This lucidity certainly

made an indescribable impression on me."

That book was a German version of Euclid, given to Einstein by Max

Talmud, a medical student who was a friend of the family and

tutored Albert on the side. Responding to the boy's hunger, Talmud

followed with more advanced texts, which he also devoured, until,

before long, the teacher could no longer keep up with his

student.

The examination for the Polytechnic came in October 1895, ten

months after Einstein had left Munich. As he had expected--and

promised his parents--he did well on the math and physics tests.

But his humanities papers were another matter, and Einstein

admitted that although his examiners were perfectly kind to him,

"that they failed me seemed . . . entirely just." Chastened just

enough, Einstein enrolled at the cantonal secondary school at

Aarau, a small town near Zurich, with the promise that after

graduation, he would be guaranteed a place at the Polytechnic.

Aarau gave him an academic experience unlike anything he had yet

encountered. He lodged with Jost Winteler, the classics teacher at

the cantonal school, and the Winteler family became a surrogate for

his own. Winteler was liberal in his politics and contemptuous of

what both he and his lodger saw as the German love of guns and

bluster. In the evenings, the Wintelers would sit around the supper

table, reading to one another and debating, and Einstein was

welcomed into the circle and expected to speak his mind. The Aarau

school was similarly progressive, with a new laboratory facility

that could have been purpose-built as Einstein's playground. Even

his musical talent drew praise. The contrast with the Luitpold

Gymnasium could not have been more stark. Aarau became "an oasis of

civilization within that European oasis, Switzerland."

Einstein responded exuberantly to the change in circumstances, and

delivered on his side of the bargain. Final exams came in September

1896, and he ranked first in his class. Again, the math and natural

science tests posed no difficulties, but a hint of what his year in

Aarau meant for him came in his French examination. His thoroughly

mediocre grade of 3 out of a possible 6 was entirely deserved,

given his cavalier approach to the language's grammar and syntax.

But he titled his essay "My Plans for the Future" (Mes Projets

d'Avenir), and brief as it is, only three paragraphs, it conveys

confidence, ambition, and a ready sense of irony: ". . . young

people especially like to contemplate bold projects," he wrote, and

"it is natural for a serious young man to envision his desired

goals with the greatest possible precision." Since no one could be

more serious than he, he detailed his prospects. Assuming he passed

his exams, he expected to study mathematics and physics at the

Zurich Polytechnic, with his objective a teaching job focused on

"the theoretical part of these sciences." What drove him to this

plan? "Most of all, my individual inclination for abstract and

mathematical thinking"--though he also acknowledged that his "lack

of imagination and practical sense" might have something to do with

his choices. He saved the most telling statement for last. He would

become a theoretician and a teacher because, in the end, he was

"much attracted by a certain independence offered by the scientific

profession."

From the Hardcover edition.

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