Berlin

The Great Inflation did not dull Berlin’s cultural and intellectual scene in the early years of the Weimar Republic. On the contrary, the collapse of the mark was one of the factors that helped make Berlin, for the first time in its history, a true world capital of the arts. The city’s cultural industry profited from people’s need for distraction in a time of general misery. The low cost of living attracted legions of foreign artists for whom the German capital was now a bargain. The climate of social improvisation accompanying the collapse of the economy encouraged experimentation, and there was now no reigning political orthodoxy to impose restraints. Budgetary cuts did hurt the city’s great universities and scientific institutes, but these survived the inflation to become even more dominant on the world scene. Of the twenty-five Germans who won the Nobel prize between 1918 and 1944, only two were not associated with Berlin. Chancellor Gustav Stresemann could justifiably call the city “a metropolis of brain power.”

Yet Berlin in the early 1920s was anything but an unalloyed paradise for the artists and intellectuals who worked there. As the dramatist Carl Zuckmayer recalled:

This city hungered after talents and human energies with unprecedented voracity, only to chew them up and spit them out with equal gusto. Like a tornado it sucked in everyone in Germany who wanted to get to the top, the genuine articles as well as the impostors, and at first it showed them all the same cold shoulder. Those who had not yet made it in Berlin spoke of the city as a desirable woman, known for her coldness and coquetry, all the more worthy of curses the less likely she was to yield.

Berlin had certainly “yielded” to Albert Einstein, and in the postwar period he began to yield to her, shedding some of the distaste he had long harbored for his native land. As a democrat, he believed that the Weimar Republic deserved every chance to prosper; if it succeeded, he thought, Germany might become the kind of place in which a citizen of the world would be proud to live. Thus when Max Planck urged him to stay on in the German capital despite tempting offers from Zurich and Leiden, he agreed “not to turn [his] back on Berlin.”

Einstein made this decision at a time when he was becoming internationally famous for his general theory of relativity. Few laymen understood this theory, but they knew that it challenged basic assumptions about the structure of the universe. With Einstein becoming the subject of innumerable newspaper and magazine profiles, the world learned that he was the perfect “weird scientist”: a Chaplinesque figure with wild hair, luminous eyes, and disheveled clothes. People also learned a little about his nonscientific endeavors—his work on behalf of international understanding, world peace, and Zionism.

The very qualities and ideals that made Einstein a world celebrity made him persona non grata among some elements at home. Right-wing nationalists attacked him as an internationalist Jew who was endangering the interests of German science. In 1920 an anti-Einstein movement calling itself the Study Group of German Natural Philosophers attacked the general theory as a hoax. On August 27, 1920, they rented the Berlin Philharmonic Hall to present their views. Their spokesman, a charlatan named Paul Weyland, claimed that the uproar about relativity was hostile to the German spirit. Einstein himself showed up at the meeting, sitting in the back and giving mock applause to all the inanities. “That was most amusing,” he said at the end.

But in reality the matter was not so funny. As the attacks continued Einstein felt obliged to reply to his detractors in a long article in the Berliner Tageblatt, an unprecedented gesture that struck some of his friends as demeaning. To such criticism he replied: “I had [to respond in public] if I wanted to remain in Berlin, where every child recognizes me from the photographs. If one is a democrat, one has to acknowledge the claims of publicity.” Einstein’s stance was not without an element of bravery, for the campaign against him was becoming increasingly vicious. Anti-Semites accosted him outside his apartment, denouncing him as a purveyor of “Jewish science.” Rightist students disrupted a lecture he was giving at the university, one of them shouting, “I’m going to cut the throat of that dirty Jew.” A racist demagogue offered a reward to anyone who would assassinate the scientist. His family worried that he might meet the same fate as his friend Walther Rathenau. Without his knowing it, his wife hired a bodyguard to watch over him.

Einstein stayed on in Berlin largely because he was committed to Weimar democracy, but he was motivated also by the belief that no other place was so culturally rich. Why should he leave, he asked, when the city was being sought out by some of the most exciting people in the world?