Key ideas: Published in 2003. “A frighteningly vivid picture of the political and cultural upheavals that shook Germany…One of history’s most absorbing periods, refracted in the career of a key figure.” —Kirkus Reviews
Einstein never reconciled himself to the shock of 1914—not merely the fact of battle but the naked joy that everyone, it seemed, took in the good fight.
That a man can take pleasure in marching in fours to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him,” he wrote years later, looking back on the war. Such a man “has only been given his big brain by mistake; unprotected spinal marrow was all he needed.”
In August he wrote to his friend Ehrenfest that Europe was gripped by madness, and that humankind was “a sorry species” to rejoice at the outbreak of such collective insanity. These feelings never abated. In war he saw the destruction of what he most prized: the collapse of reason, the loss of the ability to think as individuals.
Heroism on command, senseless violence and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism—how passionately I hate them. How vile and despicable seems war to me!
But even Einstein’s walls could be breached if the shock was great enough. What finally struck home was the way Planck greeted the war —Planck of all people, the man whom Einstein would eventually eulogize in a letter to his widow, saying, “How different and how much better it would be for mankind if there were more like him.” Yet even Planck eagerly sent his students into the army.
Germany was the victim, Germany was a peace-loving nation, but Germany could not show patience forever, Planck told the young men before him, so now, “Germany has drawn its sword against the breeding ground of perfidy.”
For Einstein, that was the real tragedy, the fact that the community of science and intellect that he believed he had joined in Berlin had collapsed so swiftly and so completely. What truly galled him was that the men he considered his peers were so eager to prostrate themselves in a paroxysm of nation worship, sacrificing their intellectual honesty to do so….
But soon after the war began, he diagnosed a special pathology in Germany, a disease of culture and society that propelled it into war. The masses were “immensely submissive, ‘domesticated,’ he told the French author and committed pacifist Romain Rolland in a conversation that took place in neutral Switzerland in 1915. The elites were worse. They were hungry, Einstein told Rolland, driven by their urge for power, their love of force, and the dream of conquest.
Einstein’s worst forebodings of the move to Germany had never stretched to this. The war was madness, he wrote to a friend, and as the battles pressed on into autumn he added, “In living through this ‘great epoch’ it is difficult to accept the fact that one belongs to that species that boasts of its freedom of will.” He dreamed of “an island for those who are wise and magnanimous,” where even he could be a patriot. There was no such place.
Einstein rarely minced words. The war revealed that the Germans were sheep, as he told Rolland, the elites as well as the masses, all of them a strange, violent, murderous breed, but still sheep.
Einstein generalized from there, asking the larger question: were men like Planck and Haber and the rest just like everyone everywhere, ordinary victims of a madness that knew no borders? Or were they and Germany exceptional, the distinctive products of a psychology and a culture peculiarly devoted to state violence and pathological nationalism?
The issue still provokes bitter controversy, especially within Germany. In that first autumn of the war Einstein quickly came to his own conclusion. He told Ehrenfest that all Europe seemed mad to him, without distinction.
But even a collective derangement sweeping across the continent did not fully account for the stands taken by most German intellectuals. For Einstein, the first months of the war provided an object lesson in what it might mean to be a good German, a willing subject of the reich. As he watched both his friends and what he could grasp of the broader German experience, he came to his conclusion. A Germany that could transform even such wise men as Planck into unthinking agents of the state had to be truly different among the warring nations.…
The French psychologist Gustave Le Bon in his book The Psychology of the Great War declared that
Prussia transformed the mental orientation of the German people in less than fifty years. Her historians persuaded them of their superiority over all the other nations in the world; her philosophers taught them that right was a feeble illusion when confronted by might; her politicians caused visions of universal domination to glitter before their eyes; and her harsh barrack system [of education] enslaved their wills.
Chlorine compounds are intensely poisonous: exposure to chlorine gas can produce burning throats, scarring of the lungs, choking and suffocation. Haber set himself the task of finding the right formulation that could poison entire sections of the enemy line.
To Einstein, the chemist’s zealotry for his task was clear evidence of a kind of madness. He would widen his indictment as the war went on.
“Our whole, highly praised technological progress, and civilization in general, can be likened to an ax in the hand of a pathological criminal.”
If so, it was his friends who forged that ax while he watched, fully aware of what was happening around him.
A civic organization called the Berlin Goethe League announced plans to publish a Patriotic Album intended to ease the public’s mind about the rightness of the cause. Perhaps naively, the league sought a contribution from Einstein. In October in the midst of the final dash to general relativity, he wrote a three-page credo titled “My Opinion of the War.” The organizers, taken aback, sought his permission to cut two paragraphs that ridiculed the German love of the state.
On November 11, the day of his second gravitation lecture to the Academy, he paused to tell them that he wanted to keep the offending paragraphs.
All genuine friends of human progress,” he wrote, should combat “the glorification of war….This, in my opinion, includes everything that goes by the name of patriotism.
In the end, though, he surrendered, agreeing to publish his article in its truncated version.
[Source: My opinion of the war - by A. Einshtein]
One can ponder the question: Why does man in peacetime (when the social community suppresses almost every representation of rowdyism) not lose the capabilities and motivations that enable him to commit mass murder in war? The reasons seem to me as follows.
When I look into the mind of the well-intentioned average citizen, I see a moderately illuminated cozy room. In one corner stands a well-tended shrine, the pride of the man of the house, and every visitor is loudly alerted to the presence of this shrine upon which is written in huge letters “patriotism.” It is usually a taboo to open this shrine.
Moreover, the master of the house barely knows, or does not know at all, that this shrine holds the moral requisites of bestial hatred and mass murder, which he dutifully takes out in case of war in order to use them. This type of shrine, dear reader, you will not find in my little room, and I would be happy if you would adopt the attitude that in that same corner of your little room a piano or a bookshelf would be a more fitting piece of furniture than the one you find only tolerable because you have been used to it since your early youth.
Rather than dwelling on the hard facts of the human cost of war, Berliners now sought and found a kind of entertainment in the spectacle. As a matter of conscious effort, even of public policy, artists, writers, and the government itself began to institutionalize the romantic enthusiasm of the first weeks, creating an experience of the war as carnival, something to obliterate the emotional dullness of everyday life.
Berlin’s nightlife did its part. Movie theaters had banished foreign films within weeks of the start of the conflict, French productions first of all. In their place came grimly predictable patriotic movies with familiar titles like Die Wacht am Rhein. Vaudeville acts and legitimate theaters alike leaped into the breach as well, offering uplifting fare like My Life for My Fatherland and Nun woll’n wir sie verdreschen!—C’mon Let’s Beat Them! One long-running show proclaimed: “As a Neanderthal in the trenches/I’m living through a lovely time/I’m sitting here in silent solitude/…with nothing to do but shoot/as soon as the enemy shows his head…
By day, much the same message was hammered home. In the spring of 1915, the once left-leaning newspaper Vorwärts loyally described Berlin’s newest tourist attraction: a life-size replica of a front-line trench. It was complete in every detail, the newspaper assured its readers:
“The full length of the war- trench is fenced with thin wooden branches tied together with wires….Every few meters, the trench is protected by shoulder works that prevent exploding grenades from scattering fragments too widely. Observation posts…interrupt the continuous line of the trench every twenty or thirty meters.”
Best of all, the trench showed the comfortable circumstances in which German boys fought their war.
“The most interesting [sights] are the soldiers’ quarters…equipped with every comfort of modern times except a roof garden…as in the cabin of a boat, the smallest place offers enough room for the peaceful, sleeping soldiers”
That, of course, was the reason the exhibition was built. From the start, this was something more than a simple tourist destination. Rather, these clean and well- finished trenches served to domesticate the war, transforming it into the familiar rhythms of civilian life. The soldiers on the line clearly had all that was required for modern existence. Why long for peace when war was so well organized and so comfortable?
Such idealized mockeries of the real thing were not unique to Germany, of course. The other combatants also faced the problem of making the war palatable to the civilian population, and they found similar solutions. In London, troops built exhibition trenches in Kensington Gardens—a display that, like its Berlin counterpart, was surreal in its perfection. It had straight, almost precision- engineered walls, and sandbags stacked in exquisite order. The display was popular and may have been a comfort to those who imagined that it resembled the real thing. Official descriptions from the front were equally sanitized and equally unreal. A report from 1916 uncovered by the historian Paul Fussell brings the war fully into the embrace of the familiar:
The firing trench is our place of business—our office in the city, so to speak. The supporting trench is our suburban residence, whither the weary toiler may betake himself periodically (or, more correctly, in relays) for purposes of refreshment and repose.
Diaries, though, were a different matter. The Englishman Thomas Hulme, a literary critic and occasional poet, wrote a typical private description of trench life in his diary entry for January 17, 1915:
I had to crawl along my hands and knees through the mud in pitch darkness, and every now and then seemed to get stuck altogether. You feel shut in and hopeless. I wished I was about four feet. This war isn’t for tall men. I got in a part too narrow and too low to stand or sit and had to sit sideways on a sack of coke to keep out of the water….You can’t sleep and you sit as it were at the bottom of a drain with nothing to look at but the top of the ditch, slowly freezing. It’s unutterably boring….I feel utterly depressed at the idea of having to do this for forty-eight hours every four days.
[so you don't get any wrong ideas, here is a more vivid description of trench life by George Orwell from Homage to Catalonia]:
The position stank abominably, and outside the little enclosure of the barricade there was excrement everywhere. Some of the militiamen habitually defecated in the trench, a disgusting thing when one had to walk round it in the darkness. But the dirt never worried me. Dirt is a thing people make too much fuss about. It is astonishing how quickly you get used to doing without a handkerchief and to eating out of the tin pannikin in which you also wash.
With that, Haber’s chlorine research took the lead. After the 1914 explosion that killed one member of his laboratory working on a more volatile compound, he turned to the problem of how to release clouds of chlorine gas that could simply drift across no-man’s-land to the unprotected trenches of the enemy. The idea was good enough to earn Haber what he seems to have valued beyond all else: a commission as a captain in the German army, a nearly unprecedented reward for a once-Jewish civilian scientist.
There were naysayers. Haber’s boss, Emil Fischer, a fellow chemist and director of the institutes, “wished him failure from the bottom of my patriotic heart,” for he foresaw that once Germany used lethal gas, everyone else would do the same…
But Haber still saw gas as a potential war winner, and the German General Staff agreed. They asked the chemists how long they had before their enemies could retaliate. Duisberg guessed that it would take five to six months for anyone else to catch up—and the generals chose to go ahead…
So early in the spring, several thousand chlorine canisters were shipped west to a staging area near the town of Langemark. On their arrival, though, the winds refused to cooperate. For weeks the gas did produce casualties, but they were all Germans, wrestling with the balky and unfamiliar weapon…
… the order was given for an attack on April 22. As dusk approached, German soldiers released 168 tons of chlorine along a four-mile front… The Germans waited and watched until the billowing mass of chlorine reached the Allied line.
The effect was dreadful, as General Sir John French reported to his superiors. Hundreds of soldiers “were thrown into a comatose or dying position.” Chlorine killed slowly enough to enable its victims to experience all the details of their dying. To onlookers, gassed soldiers lying in rows seemed as if they were drowning on dry land. They gasped for air, their lungs filling with fluid. Their doctors could do nothing but watch.
The winter of 1915–1916 marked the start of truly life-threatening hunger on a wide scale. In what became known as the turnip winter, turnips took pride of place on Berlin’s tables…
In the big cities, and especially in Berlin, there was simply not enough food to keep everyone alive. The actress Asta Nielsen, on a visit to Berlin from neutral Denmark, witnessed a typical scene. One morning, she saw a horse collapse dead in the street.
“Within less than a second, women rushed towards the cadaver as if they had been poised for this moment, knives in their hands.” The death of a carthorse was almost enough to set off a riot on its own. “Everybody was shouting,” Nielsen observed, “fighting for the best pieces. Blood spattered their faces and their clothes.” Others rushed up, struggling to sop up some of the blood if they could not lay their hands on any flesh, until finally, she wrote, “when nothing more was left of the horse beyond a bare skeleton, the people vanished, carefully guarding their pieces of bloody meat tight against their chests.
To the enormous frustration of Germany’s generals, however, Czar Nicholas II’s abdication did not lead to an immediate end to the war in the east, because Russia’s new, moderately leftist provisional government promised the western Allies on June 18 that it would continue to fight. In response, the German military looked for ways to push the situation in St. Petersburg over the edge and into total disarray.
It had long been part of the German strategy to foment revolution in Russia. As early as 1915, political radicals captured as prisoners of war had been identified, funded, and sent back to Russia to sow such seeds. But when the czar’s fall failed to bring an end to the conflict, it was time for stronger measures. German political intelligence had identified an exile then living in Switzerland as a suitably vicious revolutionary, one who could accomplish Germany’s real goal: “to create the utmost chaos in Russia.”
To the German military, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was the decisive weapon that could destroy Russia as a military power. They organized his safe passage back home, and Lenin, traveling with his wife and thirty comrades, all technically enemy nationals, arrived at Berlin’s central train station on April 11, 1917.
The next day the group was escorted to another train that would take them on to Petrograd, as the revolutionists had renamed St. Petersburg. Lenin’s deputy, the propaganda expert Leon Trotsky, soon followed, as did nine tons of German gold—50 million deutsch marks—all to be directed to the sole end of destroying Russia as a military power in the Great War.
Lenin performed exactly as desired. Kerensky’s government had been hobbled from the start by its commitment to continue in a war that neither the army nor the Russian people wanted to fight. The Bolsheviks, with their platform of “Peace, Land, Bread,” used any means necessary to create the impression that the provisional government was edging ever closer to collapse.
It worked. Lenin’s campaign culminated in a swift decapitating coup in October that drove Kerensky’s moderates out of the Winter Palace; in essence, a handful of men simply walked into the building and ordered its occupants out of their way. This was a triumph for German policy, made concrete when Lenin announced his Peace Decree on November 8, 1917. On December 15, an armistice was proclaimed between Russia and Germany.
George Grosz captured the loathing that some of the rank and file felt for their masters in his most famous wartime drawing, titled The Faith Healer, a work even more explicit than his Metropolis paintings. Around the edges of the drawing is a group of bored, contemptuous officers. They gossip, doodle, smoke cigars, ignoring the action in the center of the room. There, a fat and comfortable doctor, complete with pince-nez and a Prussian mustache, holds an ear trumpet up to the belly of a corpse in the late stages of rot.
Bits of skin and hair, the remnants of genitals and guts, hang off the almost completely exposed but still bespectacled skeleton. The doctor listens, and renders his verdict: KV —“Kriegsverwendungsfähig”—“fit for active duty.” The bitter punch line is that the phrase also evoked a bit of wartime jargon: “Kadavergehorsam”—“the obedience of a corpse.”
It was no joke; the truth was too close for satire. When the playwright Carl Zuckmayer suffered a head wound, he was evacuated to an army hospital. But in only one week, still barely able to stand, he was sent back to the front. He was well enough to die, Zuckmayer was told, “and that’s all we need young officers for now.”
Grosz himself, when ordered to return to duty in 1917, tried to drown himself in a latrine. He was to be executed for what his officers termed an attempted desertion, but Count Harry Kessler, a well-connected art lover and man-about-town, intervened to secure his provisional release back to the hospital. Thus rescued three times—from the front, his own hand, and his commanders—Grosz poured out his rage in the paintings and drawings that rendered the fighting man’s judgment on the war. But he had already made his point. Better dead in a pool of shit than face the trenches once more.