Berlin

One of the Manifesto signers was the great chemist Fritz Haber. His work in the war was representative of the close and fateful cooperation between the academy— especially that of Berlin—and the military. While working at the Technical University in Karlsruhe in the early years of the century, Haber had discovered the process of fixing nitrogen from the air, a vital breakthrough for industry and agriculture. His achievement was rewarded with a call to Berlin, where in 1911 he became head of the newly founded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry. When the war broke out three years later, Haber was quick to place his institute on a war footing, turning it (in the words of Fritz Stern) into a kind of “Manhattan Project before its time.” The parallel is apt, for the institute’s most important wartime contribution was the development of poison gas, that horrific new addition to mankind’s arsenal of evil. Haber found satisfaction in the Germans’ surprise deployment of gas at Ypres and on the Eastern Front, though he wished the weapon might have been more effective against the Russians. As he reported: “The panic which the first attack at Ypres caused among the enemy could be observed in the East with the Russians only after repeated attacks at the same place, then, however, regularly.” A few years later, the terrible irony of Haber’s contribution would become apparent, for the scientist was a Jew. During the war, however, Haber saw nothing untoward about his work for the German military: he was, like so many of his Jewish colleagues, deeply assimilated (in fact, he had converted to Protestantism). His ultimate reward for devoted service was banishment from Germany and death in exile.

One of the few major voices in Berlin’s scientific community to oppose the enlistment of the intellect on behalf of the war was Albert Einstein. He had moved to Berlin in April 1914 from Zurich, where he had worked out his Special Theory of Relativity. Anxious to bring him to Berlin, two of that city’s most famous scientists, Max Planck and Walter Nernst, had personally traveled to Switzerland to convince him to make the move. Their task had not been easy, for Einstein deeply distrusted the German Empire as a bastion of militarism and hypernationalism; upon settling in Zurich he had renounced his German citizenship. Planck’s and Nernst’s most powerful ammunition against Einstein’s reservations was Berlin’s status as the best possible place for the scientist to carry on his pioneering work. When told once that only a dozen men in the world understood relativity, Nernst had replied: “Eight of them live in Berlin.” To sweeten their offer, the Berliners promised Einstein a generous salary with no obligation to teach, the secret fantasy of most academics. After listening at length to their blandishments, Einstein told them to go away for a few days while he made up his mind. They would know his decision when they returned by the color of the rose he carried; if white, he would stay in Zurich; if red, he would go to Berlin. To the immense relief of Planck and Nernst, Einstein showed up to meet them at the train station carrying a red rose.

The behavior of Einstein’s new colleagues once war had broken out caused him to wonder if he had made the right decision to come to Berlin. He was horrified by all the war enthusiasm at the university, the Prussian Academy of Sciences, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. As a response to the Manifesto of the Ninety-three (which Planck and Paul Ehrlich had also signed), Einstein coauthored a “Manifesto to Europeans,” which among other points chastised the German scientific and artistic communities for behaving, “almost to a man, as though they had relinquished any further desire for the continuance of international relations.” They had “spoken in a hostile spirit and failed to speak out for peace.” Alas, when this counter-manifesto was circulated among the faculty at the University of Berlin, only three professors, in addition to Einstein, signed it. Frustration over this state of affairs drove Einstein more actively into the political realm. In November 1914, along with Ernst Reuter, who would become mayor of West Berlin after World War II, he helped to establish the Bund Neues Vaterland, which agitated for an early peace. Later, he joined prominent socialists and pacifists from the Allied countries in calling for a cessation of hostilities. Planck, who remained committed to the German war effort, must have wondered if Einstein’s selection of a red-colored rose had meant more than just his yes-to-Berlin.