EINSTEIN IN BERLIN(ISBN=9780553378443)pdf/txt下载_在线阅读全文

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In a book that is both biography and the most exciting form ofhistory, here are eighteen years in the life of a man, AlbertEinstein, and a city, Berlin, that were in many ways the definingyears of the twentieth century.

Einstein in Berlin

In the spring of 1913 two of the giants of modern sciencetraveled to Zurich. Their mission: to offer the most prestigiousposition in the very center of European scientific life to a manwho had just six years before been a mere patent clerk. AlbertEinstein accepted, arriving in Berlin in March 1914 to take up hisnew post. In December 1932 he left Berlin forever. “Take a goodlook,” he said to his wife as they walked away from their house.“You will never see it again.”

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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作者简介

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 institutesrenamed after the disasters of two World Wars in honor of MaxPlanck. In 1914 it was less than an hour by train on a good dayfrom the heart of Berlin, and its houses are large and comfortable,ideal for a professor and his family. On his arrival, Einsteinmoved into an apartment in one of those houses, a flat that hiswife, Mileva, had chosen on a visit the previous winter. She andtheir two sons, aged twelve and four, joined him in mid-April, twoweeks later. That household was to survive less than fourmonths.

Marriages end. People once consumed with love grow older, moredistant. In this, Einstein and Mileva made a relentlessly ordinarycouple. They married; they separated; eventually (despiteEinstein's promise to the contrary) they divorced. At first glance,only the speed of the collapse surprises. In Zurich, the Einsteinshad seemed to be a functioning family. In Berlin, within weeks,Einstein refused to remain in the same building as his wife. It wasno coincidence that the break coincided with the move. A transitionthat had first appeared as a simple career boost became, or he usedit, as the chance to forge a much deeper breach with his past. Hehad married Mileva at the tail end of a tumultuous adolescence.Moving to Berlin at the near edge of midlife, Einstein found thathe could--or would--no longer tolerate the consequences of thatchoice. Arrival in Berlin was not merely a beginning; it marked thedismal end of a drama in which Einstein had once been thehero.

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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