(mellow music)
I'm not only a pacifist,
but a militant pacifist, militant.
I'm willing to fight, to fight for peace.
(voice echoing)
(static crackling)
I do not know how the Third World War will be fought,
but I can tell you what they'll use in the Fourth:
rocks.
The myth of Einstein was created in 1919.
You can date it very specifically.
(elegant classical music)
The British astronomer Stanley Eddington
confirmed Einstein's general theory of relativity
through observations of a solar eclipse.
He announced them in a very dramatic fashion
in November 1919 to a joint session of the Royal Society
and the Royal Astronomical Society.
And that was then followed by sensational headlines
in "The Times of London" and "New York Times."
There was almost a conspiracy
of the great newspapers
to elevate this man into the firmament.
When Einstein's general theory of relativity was confirmed
by Eddington in 1919,
this really was the start for big public enthusiasm
but also for a big public controversy.
The English-speaking world was quicker to accept him
as this greater-than-life figure.
Much more so, interestingly enough, than in Germany.
They were making jokes about the theory of relativity,
saying when people go dancing, when they dance waltz,
then you will lose weight
when you dance in the direction where the Earth rotates
or you gain weight
when you dance turning in the other direction.
So the theory of relativity was really present
in the public sphere everywhere.
(playful twangy music)
The theory of relativity was really a topic
in all areas in the public that you can think of.
This world is a strange mad house.
Every coachman and every baker
is debating whether relativity theory is correct.
As a consequence
of his celebrity status overnight,
photographers and journalists
started besieging his apartment,
and from that moment on, basically,
every public utterance that he would make
and every trip that he undertook
would be reported in great detail.
With me, every peep becomes a trumpet solo.
(triumphant fanfare)
(bright music)
(choir singing)
Einstein!
(choir chanting)
Einstein!
(crowd cheering)
Professor and Mrs. Einstein,
it is my pleasure to welcome you to the City of San Diego
and to the State of California.
(Albert speaking German)
When Einstein came to America,
there were parades turned out to meet him,
and there were parades in several places,
and he was invited here, there, and everywhere.
He was the first intellectual pop star.
People go out into the streets to greet him.
He's a big celebrity.
Everybody knows what Einstein looks like.
(elegant classical music)
A young Einstein felt encouraged to enter science.
He had a teacher at his home, Max Talmud,
later called Talmey, who was a medical student,
enthusiastic about science,
and who took the younger Einstein as an equal,
discussing with him science.
Science was not the esoteric world to be admired from below.
It was a time of development,
of sophisticated industrialization, of electrotechnology,
of technology conquering the world.
It was a world in which one could enter,
actively contribute, become part of it.
And so, the young Einstein did.
And he went to Italy and experienced the freedom there
and the great culture but also the open mindedness
towards exactly this kind of development.
With his uncle,
he communicated about electrotechnical developments.
My dear uncle,
I'm really very glad that you are still interested
in my humble doings.
It is rather naive and imperfect.
This might be expected from such a young fellow like myself.
And was quite familiar with this growing world,
which really extended from technical equipments
that were changing the daily life,
electric lighting was being spread in the cities,
to the intellectual challenges this implied.
You could have the feeling, as a young person,
of challenging the foundation of your world,
and this gave Einstein a lot of courage
that there was something to be achieved,
you could make a difference.
Even if you were not born into the center of the world
and if you came from the margins,
there was this way of entering the big world.
The class of people that made it,
people who were open-minded, who were believing in progress
and not just in technological but also in social progress,
in a bright, international, communicative world.
And that's the world in which Einstein grew up.
His parents were from a rural Southern German,
more of a egalitarian ethos
than the typical Prussian military ethos
that we're familiar with when we think of German culture.
Part of Einstein's support for social justice
comes from his experiences of anti-Semitism at school
from quite an early age.
He would be bullied on the way to school,
even physically assaulted sometimes.
A Catholic teacher once brought a nail to school
and presented it to the children and said, "This is the nail
with which the Jews killed our Lord and Savior."
And then everybody turned to Einstein,
and he was quite mortified.
Ever since Einstein was very little,
he was a revolutionary.
He revolted against the way German teaching
basically crushed imagination out of young children,
the tedious memorization.
You weren't supposed to question the teacher.
The teacher was god in the classroom.
As a teenager,
Einstein had to confront the issue of war and peace.
Einstein did not want to go into the German Army,
and so, he became a draft dodger.
How many 16-year-old kids have the political maturity
to say to themselves that they are against war
so they're gonna renounce their citizenship?
Young Einstein leaves Germany for Italy
to reunite with his parents
because he cannot stomach the idea
of being part of a war machine.
Einstein had a political learning curve
at the end of the 19th century,
a son of a liberal Jewish family.
So his family went to Italy, he studied in Switzerland.
It was an important place for him, also,
to experience what a democracy is like,
gave him an internationalist outlook
that portrayed to him the model republic.
When he came to Berlin at the eve of the First World War,
most of his colleague were German nationalist,
considered German militarism as a necessity
to defend German culture.
Einstein was taken aback by it, and he had other views
on the basis of this different background that he had.
That vilest offspring of the herd mind,
the odious militia.
He wasn't a political animal at this time
but he mobilized some of the intellectual moral resources
that his education had give him to become more and more
of a politically conscious human being.
And so, his strong sense of justice,
his strong sense of universal and globalism,
and his participation as a Jew
are the foundation of his morality.
Only morality in our actions
can give beauty and dignity to life.
And he, like in physics, is a revolutionary thinker.
He could identify with the underdog.
Following his studies,
when he was then looking around desperately for a position,
he was the only one in his class who, ironically,
did not secure a position as an assistant,
the first step on the ladder of an academic career.
To some extent, he blamed anti-Semitism for that.
It was also probably to do with his personality
of not really getting on with the powers that be.
In 1914, Einstein came to Berlin, where he discovered,
as he said, for the first time, Jews.
When there was a influx of Eastern European Jews
into Germany as a consequence of the war in the East,
he identified with their plight.
(sorrowful music)
German voices are increasingly heard
that demand legal measures against Eastern European truce.
Measures that devastate so many individuals
must not be triggered by slogan-like assertions.
Agitation by demagogues diverts from the true problems.
The expulsion of the Eastern European Jews,
resulting in unspeakable misery,
would only appear to the whole world
as new evidence of German barbarism.
Because, of course, in his childhood,
he had been one of an outsider minority.
Now in Berlin, he found very large numbers,
especially from Eastern Europe,
who did not have access to higher education.
He was very concerned
that young Eastern European Jewish academic talent
was going to waste.
For him, the most important thing was free,
uninhibited research, scientific research.
His sister later described his sense of justice
to that very thing in founding the Hebrew University,
a place where people like himself, young Jews,
could be educated.
This institution of research and scholarship,
the Hebrew University in Jerusalem,
was founded long before the establishment
of the independent State of Israel.
But Einstein wasn't quite yet the political animal
that he was to become.
That developed only over time.
He early on saw the dangers of the Nazi regime.
He knew his German colleagues,
both their strength in terms of scientific competence
and their weaknesses in terms of willing to cooperate,
to subordinate themselves under the authorities.
I have always found repulsive
the undignified addiction to conformity of many of my peers.
At times like this,
one realizes what a sorry species one belongs to.
He was politically unconventional.
I mean, his taking a stand on the First World War
already was an extremely courageous thing
for someone in his position.
Remember, there are so few Jewish professors
in Germany and Austria at that point
that somebody had to write a letter
claiming he was free of unpleasant Jewish characteristics.
So, he could have retreated,
and it would have been the easiest thing in the world
for him to do, to not be outspoken.
I think we all, as humans, to some extent,
compartmentalize domains of our lives.
We separate work from friendship from family.
So, compartmentalization is just the usual way
of dealing with complex situations one experiences in life.
Haber is just an extreme case.
Haber really was enthusiastically supporting the war
and putting science at its service.
But Einstein certainly felt close to Haber intellectually.
He was one of the leading physical chemists of the time.
Einstein made great contributions
to the foundations of physical chemistry.
Both had Jewish backgrounds, and both problematic marriages.
So these two men certainly were like-minded in many ways
on an intellectual level, but Haber was no exception.
Other close friends of Einstein
also were signing the famous declaration
in favor of German militarism and the occupation of Belgium
and of the cruelties that the German Army committed.
("Es braust ein Ruf wie Donnerhall")
That was the way
that all of Einstein's colleagues were thinking.
Einstein really was the great exception.
How do you deal with the fact
if you are so incredibly lonely in your political position?
You are not there as a political ambassador,
you are called there as a scientist.
Feeling that your colleagues were doing excellent work,
and some of the leading scientists were there.
Most of them were nationalist conservatives,
to say the least.
Some, like Fritz Haber, war criminals.
From our perspective,
Einstein should have broken with Haber,
should have told him to stop his war efforts,
but that was an unthinkable breaching of wars at the time.
If people are working on dubious issues
in the military industry,
and they see consequences, dangerous consequences,
do they have the courage
of becoming what they call whistleblowers?
So, whistleblowing,
that's what we would have expected from Einstein.
But I think it is, again, not just our general way,
and certainly not the specific way of Einstein,
but it's the particular situation of the time
that people were just more compartmentalizing
than we do today.
It's really one of the historical lessons
that Einstein learned, that we have learned,
that there is a danger in such compartmentalization.
To come to the extreme, many Nazis,
it seems we were friendly to their dogs
and even to their family.
Isn't that an extreme form of this compartmentalization,
and don't we despise this today?
Yes, but it's a historical lesson that we have learned
that we should look across such boundaries
and see what the full personality is,
the full implications in the public life
or in the private life are.
I think Einstein wasn't at the point of having drawn
or having taken in all those lessons yet,
but he soon was to do that.
(soothing classical music)
Nationalism is an infantile disease.
It is the measles of mankind.
Anti-Semitism in all of Europe and also in Germany
has a long history, of course.
I saw worthy Jews basely caricatured
and the sight make my heart bleed.
The gentile majority undermines the confidence
even of the best of my fellow Jews,
and I felt this could not be allowed to continue.
And in Germany,
it was accentuated by the spectacular success of some Jews
in the German political and economic system,
which didn't compensate in any way
for the repression that was still ongoing
at other layers of social life,
but it made the Jews so much more visible.
And in the crisis of the First World War
and after the crisis,
after the German defeat in the First World War,
people needed to find scapegoats,
and the Jews were quite appropriate, in a way,
because they were so internationally-minded,
much more than the rest of the German averages
and they were so exposed.
Some of them were highly visible
as part of the political and intellectual elite
of the Weimar Republic, so they were targets, easy targets.
Ever since the abominable murder of Rathenau,
I myself am being constantly warned to be cautious.
Anti-Semitism is very widespread.
(sorrowful music)
By 1922, there are over 300 political murders
by right-wing radical groups, and this was
a particularly dangerous time, also, for Einstein.
Einstein was, in the '20s,
Weimar's prized public intellectual,
one of the very few people
who'd spoken out against the First World War,
and he was very happy to put himself
in the services of the Weimar Republic
and do whatever could be done to strengthen it,
the first democratic republic in Germany.
(scoffs) Funny people, these Germans.
To them, I'm a stinking flower,
yet they put me into their lapel time and again.
And it was a brave stand
because the Foreign Minister of Weimar, Walter Rathenau,
was actually murdered as a Jew, and a left-leaning Jew,
and some of the same group who murdered him
offered to pay a reward to anyone who would murder Einstein.
Einstein, he received warnings
that he's on the list of that group
that murdered Walter Rathenau.
And he was withdrawing from all public appearances
at that time, he canceled his lectures.
It seems I belong to that group of people
whom the radical right plan to assassinate.
There was a grand big lecture he was supposed to give
that was a centennial
of the German Society of Natural Sciences and Physicians,
it was their 100th anniversary celebration,
and Einstein's lecture had to be rescheduled, I guess.
It was a big lecture for that celebration,
and he had to cancel that.
Many scientists, like Max Planck and von Laue,
couldn't believe that it was possible
that one of the most important scientists in Germany,
Einstein, that he was somehow forced to withdraw
from giving this lecture by right-wing radicals
who threatened his life.
And it extended, one may be surprised at that,
also to the field of science.
There were different groups of people
opposing the theory of relativity.
There was a political opposition.
Einstein, as a democrat, as a Jew in the Weimar Republic,
he was a target of many people
who had nationalistic motivation, who were anti-Semites,
attacking Einstein as a person.
And there was also an opposition which mainly motivated
by different understandings of science.
It was not Einstein who put the topic of anti-Semitism
on the agenda.
He was responding to a widespread anti-Semitism
in the public area but also among his academic colleagues.
The Einstein opponents established their own academy.
So, an academy of the Einstein opponents.
So, this was a network
mainly between the United States and Germany.
(bright classical music)
Under the pretentious name
Association of German Natural Scientists
for the Preservation of Pure Science,
a society has assembled whose purpose of existence
seems to be to degrade the theory of relativity
as well as me as its originator.
He left town,
but it did not deter him from continuing to speak out.
People who survey the situation in Germany well
are indeed of the opinion
that a certain threat to my life does exist.
A yearning for the Far East
led me to accept the invitation to Japan.
Another part was the need to get away for a while
from the tense atmosphere in our homeland
for a period of time.
After the murder of Rathenau, I was certainly relieved
to have an opportunity for a long absence from Germany,
taking me away from the temporarily heightened danger.
(gentle music)
I seek solace in Mozart, but when I am improvising
and it appears that something may come of it,
I require the clear construction of Bach.
The picture of Einstein
that gets presented by so many Einstein specialists
is yes, he was absolutely brilliant,
but he was a sort of childish, sad fool.
The things that were most important to him
are described as being the sort of ideas of a childish fool,
of a luftmensch.
A luftmensch being a Yiddish expression,
not a German expression,
which basically means somebody who has a lot of ideas
but keeps his head in the air, luft,
without keeping his feet on the ground, a naive person.
Is actually a way of undermining, dare I say castrating him.
Einstein, who was often portrayed
as somebody who kept a distance from other people,
which he certainly tried to do and needed to do
in order to be able to keep working,
given that he was such a public celebrity,
but I think he was a realist of a way.
He had experience enough about people and their weaknesses
not just to dream about a utopian, peaceful world.
If you think when he was talking against militarism,
against the wrong way to be a nationalist,
before we knew that there's the First World War,
there will be a second one, there will be the atomic bomb,
(bomb rumbling)
beware of what can happen.
It's a realistic political thinking.
One should be impressed that he could say these things
so early and he was one of the very few people who said,
"Oh, be aware."
It is strange that science,
which in the old days seemed harmless,
should have evolved into a nightmare
that causes everyone to tremble.
He was very distressed by his celebrity status
at the beginning.
It's dangerous, because if you admire someone,
you follow him without thinking about it, really,
without using your own responsibility.
So, without doing what Einstein always did,
thinking himself and thinking in a responsible way,
thinking in a political way, also.
So I think this is the reason why famousness in general
was not something he could admire
or he could tolerate, really.
Einstein really lends himself
to that kind of mythologization
insofar as he was a great ham and the press loved him.
What do you think of prohibition, Professor?
(Albert speaking German)
(all laughing)
He doesn't drink at all,
so he's not interested in this question.
And he would laugh,
and he apparently had a laugh like a barking seal.
He was ideal as a kind of matinee idol.
Mr. George Bernard Shaw in honor of Professor Einstein.
(audience applauding)
There's an order of men who are makers of universes.
(audience applauding)
Ptolemy made a universe which lasted 1,400 years.
Newton also made a universe which has lasted 300 years.
Einstein has made a universe,
and I can't tell you how long that will last.
(all laughing)
He was not naive but he saw very well
it's useful for his goals, for his political goals,
for helping people.
He saw it, basically, as a curse.
Worshiped today,
scorned or even crucified tomorrow,
that is the fate of people whom, God knows why,
the bored public has taken possession of.
He didn't quite understand why, of all the scientists,
he'd kind of been singled out
for this unpleasant development,
but eventually he learned how to use his celebrity status
to promote causes that were important to him.
(singer humming)
As it contradicts the image of him as being naive,
he became quite shrewd in deciding what he would approve.
We scientists who released this immense power
have overwhelming responsibility
in this world life-and-death struggle to harness atom.
I agree.
Which petition he would sign,
which committee he would become the honorary chairman of.
He was pretty discretionary about it and selective.
I have tried to be very economical
with my public utterances.
This is the best way
not to lose the small beneficial influence
one is able to exercise.
He thought,
"Okay, if my famousness is part of my moral capital,
I can use it to help or to have a political influence."
He was a political human being before his American years.
It would be sad to waste much energy
on the meager soil of politics.
From time to time, however,
the moment arrives when I cannot help myself.
If you read his texts about peace, about human rights,
about human beings in the world, it's easy to think,
"Okay, this is very fundamental."
But it's really a political engagement because, for him,
the point of all things is the human being.
It's not the German one, the American one, the French,
it's the human being's right for freedom,
for his individuality.
He's being besieged all the time
for requests to give a kosher stamp to (chuckling)
or an un-kosher stamp to all kinds of enterprises.
Magnus Hirschfeld had a very important institute in Berlin
in the '20s,
when people were becoming more open about sexuality,
but there was still a lot of pushback,
and Hirschfeld's institute was one of the first things
the Nazis closed.
They described him as decadent.
He was gay, and not simply in favor
of what we came to call gay liberation,
but women's rights to open sexuality
and a whole host of other things
that were quite controversial at the time.
When asked to support Hirschfeld's institute, Einstein said:
Abortion up till a certain stage of pregnancy
should be permissible at the request of the woman.
(jazzy music)
Homosexuality should be exempt from punishment.
In regard to sex education, no secretiveness.
Exactly the right things that are as valid, I think,
and important today as they were in 1929.
Einstein is often criticized,
and I'm sometimes asked how can I, as a woman,
defend Einstein's relationship toward women and his wives.
Einstein's first wife, Mileva, was older than him,
partly crippled, not Jewish, and anathema to his parents.
She was the only woman physics student in Zurich.
Einstein fell in love with a woman
who could share his intellectual passions,
and he only got permission to marry her
on his father's deathbed.
They had a daughter out of wedlock
before his parents would permit them to marry.
My dearest sweetheart,
it's such a shame that our dear Lieserl
must be introduced to the world in this way.
I love her so much and don't even know her yet.
She probably gave the daughter,
all we really know about her is that she was named Lieserl,
up for adoption, and not only did they never see her again,
no one, and many Einstein researchers
have tried to find out what happened to Lieserl, no one has.
Diagnoses at a distance are always a problem,
but that was probably a trigger for Mileva's depressions,
which continued and became more serious
and more tinged with rage as the marriage went on.
She wound up failing her PhD exam in physics,
which cannot have been easy for her
to be living with someone
who was writing world historical physics papers.
And the marriage fell apart.
There's a letter that he wrote for Mileva
in which he tells her to keep her distance
and it is harsh and it is hostile.
You will renounce all personal relations with me
as far as maintaining them
is not absolutely required for social reasons.
And all that I would say to that,
he did take care of her financially.
He knew he was gonna get the Nobel Prize eventually.
He gave it almost in its entirety to her.
So then, people say,
"Ah, well, what do you say about his marriage to Elsa?"
Elsa was his cousin.
I suppose they had some kind of familial bond.
She was a divorced woman with two daughters
whom Einstein treated as his own.
She cared for him when he nearly died in Berlin.
I have to have someone to love.
Otherwise, life is miserable.
And this someone is you.
He was just in the process
of getting out of a really crazy marriage,
so it seemed like stability
and something that he could feel happy and comfortable in.
She also does, in those pictures,
really look more like his mother than his lover,
and Einstein was a man on fire all his life,
and he needed to connect with other women
in ways that he simply couldn't with Elsa.
He made two completely different bad marriages.
He was sad about that.
What I admired in him the most as a person
is that he succeeded in living for many years,
not just in peace,
but in constant consonance with one woman,
an endeavor in which I failed twice, quite ignominiously.
For his 50th birthday,
the City of Berlin decided to give him as a gift
a house in the woods where he could go sailing,
which everybody knew was his favorite way of relaxing,
and a group of right-wing people
highly objected to the City of Berlin
giving a birthday gift to that socialist Jew.
Einstein said, "Okay, I'll buy it myself."
(playful twangy music)
What attracted and appealed to Elsa about Einstein's life
was exactly what Einstein did not want,
the social celebrity, the being invited to aristocrat's,
and so on.
She had no pretension of trying to understand his physics,
but she really wanted to be a sort of high bourgeois wife.
The house was not only used for him to get away from Berlin.
It was a place where, really,
some of the great minds of his generation came to.
Rabindranath Tagore came from India,
Heinrich Mann, Chaim Weizmann, Max Planck,
just a whole row of people came out to discuss,
as they say in German, God and the world,
or sometimes to play string quartets on the terrace.
Mozart's music is so pure and beautiful
that I see it as a reflection
of the inner beauty of the universe.
There is a rumor that describes Einstein as antisocial.
I've even seen him described as autistic.
This is nuts.
Einstein was an extremely socially engaged person
when he wanted to be, but he did not like formalities.
A delegation of ministers was coming out to visit him
from Berlin, and Elsa said,
"Albert, the ministers are coming.
It's time to put on your suit."
And Einstein said, "If they wanna see me, I'm here.
If they wanna see my clothes, you can open the closet."
(chuckling) So, that says something
about the way that he dealt with people.
Einstein preferred to spend as much time as possible
in the house in Caputh
in those four years before he left Germany.
(patriotic music)
(crowd cheering)
(Adolf shouting in German)
(crowd cheering)
I cannot understand
the passive response of the whole civilized world
to this modern barbarism.
Doesn't the world see that Hitler is aiming for war?
(crowd clamoring)
(dramatic music)
(woman laughing)
(train bell ringing)
(crowd chattering)
(suspenseful music)
(gentle music)
In all these years, I have only enhanced Germany's prestige
and never allowed myself to be alienated
by the systematic attacks on me in the rightist press,
especially those in recent years
in which no one took the trouble to stand up for me.
Is not the destruction of German truce by starvation
the official program of the present German government?
(dramatic music)
Einstein definitely was a realist,
and he moved from pacifism to militant pacifism
and then he abandoned it, of course,
when confronted with Hitlerism.
It was pacifism that, when confronted with odds
that were overwhelming, would make concessions.
I'm not only a pacifist, but a militant pacifist.
I am willing to fight for peace.
He felt that the danger,
after the discovery of nuclear fission,
of building atomic bombs, was a real one.
He was right that there was such a danger,
and it was hard to assess how realistic
and how long it would take, actually, to build such a bomb.
So that he supported it by the famous letter to Roosevelt,
which he signed.
In the letter itself,
it talks about the bomb being so heavy
that it would have to be delivered by ship
and exploded in the harbor,
so there was no concept of feasibility, then,
of transporting it by plane.
The American engagement in building the bomb
was quite understandable, given the situation.
Therefore, I'm saying Einstein had become,
I think he didn't change his fundamental positions,
but he was becoming more and more of a realist.
And so, he found that this was an important move to take
at the time.
Organized power can be opposed
only by organized power.
Much as I regret this, there is no other way.
Einstein deeply regretted, eventually,
writing the famous letter to FDR.
He thought that it was very instrumental
in setting up the Manhattan Project.
He thought that that was his major contribution
to the dawning of the atomic era.
He didn't think that his formula
had played any role in that.
(dramatic classical music)
Albert Einstein felt very much his responsibility
for young scientists who want to came to America
or didn't have an affidavit or any help to get a job there,
and he tried whatever he could to help other emigres,
other scientists, and a lot of time, a lot of power,
a lot of money, he gave to these people,
and he tried nearly to help all he could help.
He had something like a little grove for emigres.
I think it's a very important part
of the man Albert Einstein,
of the immigrant Albert Einstein, of the exiled,
and of the political human being Albert Einstein too
because I think this engagement for other emigres
is part of his responsibility, of course,
because he was a famous one and he could help them, really.
But it's also part of his political thinking
that this is now what one should do
to make it possible for them to come to America,
to get a chance to get a job there.
My dad had left Germany in December '35
to come to the United States.
The idea was the family would follow.
In May of '36, we all went to the American consulate.
My mother and my brother each got their visa,
but I was turned down, allegedly for having tuberculosis.
My dad was a physician.
The likelihood that I had tuberculosis was just very remote.
My mother had me examined by German physicians,
colleagues of my dad, and they all said,
"There's no evidence of tuberculosis.
This must be a mistake."
My mother and my brother left to come to the United States
and join my dad.
The idea was that you could reapply after three months
for a visa, and since this obviously was a mistake,
I would get the visa then.
After three months,
my grandmother now took me to the American consulate again,
and I even had some medical statements
that there was no evidence of tuberculosis
but, much to everybody's surprise, I was turned down again.
This went on for a total of four times.
Each time I was turned down
by a physician from the American consulate.
My parents, of course, were in the United States,
they were getting frantic about all this.
They enlisted all kinds of help.
Finally, Albert Einstein got interested in this.
Einstein then wrote two letters, very strong letters,
one to the Surgeon General Thomas Parran.
(elegant classical music)
I shall spare no effort
to straighten out this matter.
And one to an assistant secretary of state
by the name of Messersmith.
And he wrote them himself because in one case, at least,
I have the handwritten original draft.
My dad was able to get the consul in Zurich
to make an exception.
An aunt of mine brought me to Switzerland.
I got my physical examination, I passed it,
and I arrived in the United States on March 4th, 1938.
I finally had an opportunity to visit him in Princeton.
He had never met me before but he remembered the case.
The way we talked
was the way I might talk to just a nice elderly gentleman,
I mean, to my grandfather.
I was already working in industry at that time,
and he wanted to know exactly what I was doing.
He was very interested in it
and we sorta discussed technical details.
We talked just like we were colleagues, I mean,
in a very warm and simple kind of friendly way.
Einstein apparently worked very hard
on behalf of German Jewish immigrants all along,
so my case was not that unusual.
There's a little anecdote
that four young men came to a hospital to get a job there
and each of them had a letter of Albert Einstein (chuckling)
telling, "Yes, you should give him this job."
Of course, this is an anecdote.
I think it's not true because he knew very well
if you do it like this, it won't help anybody.
His recommendations are serious.
They did try and actively save
and did actively save individuals
from the claws of Hitler and of Nazism.
So he knows that Jews have to go some place,
he sees the great tragedy.
With respect to his political attitudes
toward Israel and the Palestinian problem,
some of his ideas of how to solve the problem
seem unrealistic to our modern ear,
given the intransigence of both sides.
He was opposed to the establishment of a Jewish state.
He had advocated vociferously against it for decades,
even after the Holocaust.
By '33, Einstein can see the disaster that's unfolding
because of nationalism.
And even in the First World War,
he can see the great conflict of it.
So, in that context,
why support a national expression for the Jews?
He had been very concerned already,
even from his first visit to Palestine in 1923,
of tendencies towards narrow nationalism
and what he termed to be chauvinism.
And he saw that being played out
even in the early years of the state,
and even in pre-state Jewish community in Palestine.
He was in favor of more of a binational solution.
I should much rather see a reasonable agreement
with the Arabs on living together in peace
than the creation of a Jewish state.
He was in favor of a Jewish homeland
and he was in favor of joint institutions and, basically,
of the formation of a committee of technocrats.
He wanted the politicians out of the picture
and he wanted technocrats from both sides
to make the important decisions in a most objective,
neutral, unbiased, unemotional manner.
The state idea is not according to my heart.
It is connected with many difficulties
and a narrow mindedness.
I believe it is bad.
After the establishment of the state, he resigned himself
to, basically, to the fait accompli.
Wasn't happy with it, to lend the state his support,
but became very critical of certain policies,
even in the early years.
He cosigned a letter
together with other prominent Jewish intellectuals in 1948
to "The New York Times,"
in which he protested the visit of Menachem Begin
to the U.S. and called him a terrorist leader.
At the time he was here, he was the head of the Irgun.
It only plays into the more conflict
and, of course, if you look at the current sadness
about the State of Israel,
you could congratulate Einstein, you could say,
"Yes, look at it, you were right."
Nationalism is, no matter what kind of nationalism,
is gonna be difficult.
The absolute disaster of not having a Jewish state
is in front of his eyes.
My awareness of the essential nature of Judaism
resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army,
and a measure of temporal power.
Einstein is the poster child
for everything in the universe
but also for Jewish peoplehood.
He needs a nation to back up the people.
I really believe
he thought that all the nations would get together
and just start to dissolve nationalism.
The United Nations General Assembly,
which helped to create the State of Israel,
now elects her a member nation.
Assembly President Evatt announces.
Formally declare Israel admitted to membership
in the United Nations. (crowd cheering)
The young republic, born of war,
now joins the Council of Peace.
The blue and white Star of David.
So, once we participated in it, we could understand it,
we could be a complete people.
Complete peoples have a land, a language,
a history, a culture.
And then we could,
as Jewish participants in the human family,
to begin to reduce nationalism
and bring more global harmony.
Prime Minister Ben-Gurion of Israel
arrives at Princeton, New Jersey
to call on Dr. Albert Einstein.
The man whose physics formula
led the way to the atomic explosion
plays host to the leader who played a great part
in the creation of the Israeli nation.
(bright classical music)
I am deeply moved
by the offer from our State of Israel,
and at once sad and abashed
that it is impossible for me to accept it.
All my life, I have dealt with objective matters.
Hence, I lack the natural aptitude and the experience
to deal properly with people
and to exercise official functions.
For these reasons,
I do not feel able to fulfill the requirements
of this great task.
I am the more distressed over these circumstances
because my relationship to the Jewish people
has become my strongest human bond.
If I were to be president,
sometimes I would have to say to the Israeli people
things they would not like to hear.
He saw the humor in situations,
he saw the irony in situations,
and it ties in partly with his playfulness.
He had a very playful, childlike appreciation of things.
(interviewer speaking German)
(Einstein speaking German)
(Elsa speaking German)
One of the things that makes him very appealing,
aside from his great sense of humor,
is that he was genuinely a modest human being.
You can tell just by looking at his eyes,
this is a man with incredible spark.
I like to call it a sense of being alive,
a sense of intense curiosity about the real world.
The ability to relate to all kinds of different people,
from kings and queens to small children, when he wanted to.
He hated hierarchy, hated class distinctions,
and that was obvious, also, then, in America,
where he was outraged by racism.
The distinctions
separating the social classes are false.
In the last analysis, they rest on force.
Many people don't realize
that Albert Einstein was at the forefront
of the struggle for racial equality in the United States.
It pained him to see the plight of African Americans.
♪ When Israel was in Egypt's land ♪
♪ Let my people go ♪
He was right there,
right there with W. E. B. Du Bois,
right there with Paul Robeson, right there with the struggle
of African Americans for equality.
♪ Let my people ♪
In order for the American people
to wake up to the plight of discrimination
here in our own backyard. ♪ Moses ♪
The race problem
is a disease of the white people.
♪ In Egypt's land ♪
♪ Tell old Pharaoh ♪
I say segregation now, ♪ Let my people ♪
segregation tomorrow,
and segregation forever! (crowd clamoring)
♪ Go ♪
There is a somber point
in the social outlook of Americans.
Their sense of equality and human dignity
is mainly limited to men of white skins.
The more I feel an American,
the more the situation pains me.
I can escape the feeling of complicity in it
only by speaking out.
Albert Einstein not only pioneered new strategies,
new ways of looking at the heavens,
not only did he open up new pathways
by which we can oppose fascism, he also was at the forefront
for the struggle for racial equality in the United States.
When he moved to Princeton,
Marian Anderson was playing a sold-out concert in Princeton
but the Nassau Inn would not allow her to stay there.
(Marian singing opera)
(audience applauding)
When Einstein found out about it,
he invited her to stay at his place
and they became friends for the rest of his life.
Similar stories with Paul Robeson.
There's a story the first time Robeson came to meet him
at his house in Princeton,
the man accompanying Robeson, whose name I now forget, said,
"Oh, Mr. Einstein, it's such a privilege
to meet a great man."
And Einstein said, "You just came with a great man."
So, enormous respect for Robeson
and enormous commitment to civil rights as human rights.
He accommodated to the realities of the situation,
and he was not an ideologue.
Most important for Einstein in the political sphere
was the need for human beings
to have peace with one another.
And this comes, really, from Einstein's own background
and his physics career.
He is someone who realizes that scientific progress
can only be made through cooperation,
can only be made through the sharing of information,
through the sharing of sensibilities
and the taking into account
what the wishes and the views of others are.
He was, of course, not a man of the people,
although he certainly was presented as such,
but he was an elitist.
And for him, the elite that mattered
was the elite of intellectuals
who live in a society in which the exchange of information,
the exchange of knowledge, is everything.
Don't think it was anything peculiar
about Einstein's character
that made him reject any membership of German institutions
after the war.
It has to more to do with Germany that with Einstein.
All the scientific institutions,
the academic institutions in Germany
have gotten deeply involved,
and not necessarily under external force
but most often also voluntarily, with the Nazi regime,
and at the time when Einstein, after the war,
had interactions with them, hadn't cleansed themselves
from these interactions, hadn't worked up their own history.
It was the most natural and understandable position
that Einstein took.
(bright classical music)
(gentle classical music)
So I don't think he didn't even need to be
a particularly upright man, which, of course, he was,
in order to take that position.
It was just a position of good common sense that he took.
Einstein was prescient
on every political issue he ever engaged with,
with one exception: he thought Germany was irredeemable.
Germany had started two world wars
and there was no way to atone for that sin.
He never wanted to set foot there again.
But about the mid-'60s,
the Germans did a look at their history.
People were outraged, as they came of age
and saw the Auschwitz trials or the Eichmann trial,
that their parents had, at the very least, been bystanders,
and at the very worst, been Nazis.
To the point where the government would actually say,
"This is our identity, we do not forget."
And the slogan is not collective guilt
but collective responsibility for the future
by continuing to look at the past.
Einstein could not have seen that coming.
(gentle classical music)
And so, I don't see him there as a dreamy scientist
who didn't see the realities.
He saw the dangers
that were connected with nuclear armaments,
and he could foresee such dangers
as they come with the uncontrolled spreading
of radioactive materials.
This is the "CBS Evening News," Dan Rather reporting.
Every indication is that it was a serious nuclear accident.
Chernobyl is a string of four nuclear reactors
some 80 miles north of the Ukrainian capital of Kiev,
an urbanized region
believed populated by 2 1/2 million people.
Several hours
before the Soviets admitted the accident,
increased radiation was first detected
at this nuclear power plant North of Stockholm.
600 workers were evacuated
after one of them set off an alarm
while passing through a routine radiation check.
Soon, there were reports of higher than usual
radiation levels throughout Scandinavia.
Winds blowing in a northwesterly direction
apparently carried the radioactive pollution
nearly 1,000 miles from the Ukraine.
"That," say experts,
"indicates the accident was extremely serious."
And the danger that small conflicts
might escalate into larger ones,
and so, his only hope, his only perspective was control,
was understanding communication on a global scale.
Human beings are not condemned
because of their biological constitution
to annihilate each other
or to be at the mercy of our cruel self-inflicted fate.
(sorrowful music)
He was one of the first intellectuals
to clearly see the full dimension of a globalized world
because the world became globalized
once these arms had the potential of destroying the planet.
However, later, when he saw what the consequences were,
he felt, first of all, even more compelled
to take an explicit public stance
in regard to political measures
in terms of nuclear armaments.
The war is won, but the peace is not.
The great powers, united in fighting,
are now divided over the peace settlements.
He took it on as a deep moral obligation
and he saw it as a moral obligation for all scientists
to become responsible for their deeds, for the knowledge,
for the use of their knowledge.
This is the political learning curve
that Einstein had undergone.
His capacity to take up challenges,
to deal with those challenges,
to intellectually digest them, and to draw consequence.
He is known as a proponent of a world government
that one needed to establish a peaceful world order.
And this in the midst of the period of the Cold War
when he became engaged with these issues
in a very strong way,
arguing against nuclear armament and against the arms race.
Mr. Welch talks about this being cruel and reckless.
He was just baiting.
He has been baiting Mr. Cohn here for hours,
requesting that Mr. Cohn before sundown
get out of any department of the government
anyone who is serving the Communist cause.
Now, I just give this man's record,
and I want to say, Mr. Welch, that it has been labeled
long before he became a member, as early as 1944-
Senator, may we not drop this?
We know he belongs to the Lawyers Guild.
Let me finish- Let us not
assassinate this man further, Senator.
Let's, let's- You've done enough.
Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?
Have you left no sense of decency?
(gentle piano music)
Because of the alleged external danger
to our country, freedom of the press is obstructed.
This is done by creating a situation
in which people fear their economic positions endangered.
This is a state of affairs
which a democratic government cannot survive.
The U.S. is no longer a free country.
My house is closely watched. (sorrowful music)
He not only spoke out against the blacklist,
but encouraged younger people to do the same.
You may appear with flowers
on the day when the last witch hunter has been silenced,
but not before.
And the beautiful thing about it is,
he didn't just encourage people to refuse to testify,
he tried to help them find jobs afterwards
and did what he could to leverage his name.
Reactionary politicians
have managed to instill suspicion
of all intellectual efforts into the public.
They are now proceeding to suppress the freedom of teaching
and to deprive of their positions
all of those who do not prove submissive,
in effect, to starve them.
What to do against this evil?
Frankly, I can only see
the revolutionary way of non-cooperation
in the sense of Gandhi's refuse to testify.
He must be prepared for jail and economic ruin,
for the sacrifice of his personal welfare
in the interest of the welfare of his country.
It is shameful for a blameless citizen
to submit to such an inquisition
that violates the spirit of the Constitution.
I believe that older people
who have scarcely anything to lose
ought to be willing to speak out
on behalf of those who are young
and who are subject to much greater restraint.
We're really talking about the character feature
of Einstein, and I don't think it's so much the loneliness
or the aloofness of Einstein.
If you see pictures, movies of the '20s,
Einstein was quite a party animal.
He was talkative, communicative.
He had, from his early days, an incredible self-confidence,
and I think that is the self-confidence
that gave him so much inner freedom.
And it was, of course, confirmed by his life's achievement,
which gave him even greater freedom, and it made him capable
of sustaining contradictions, rejections.
The loneliness that he experienced
in his political positions in the First World War
was a loneliness that he didn't choose.
How vile and despicable war seems to me.
I would rather be hacked into pieces
than take part in such an abominable business.
But this self-confidence
into his intellectual capabilities,
into his own moral autonomy,
gave him the strength to sustain those differences.
One needs courage not to go with the crowd,
but to stay different.
One is, and I think that's very important,
never quite alone in these things
because there is, on the one hand, an intellectual community
of the great people with whom one communicates,
the people one reads and one identifies with,
the great scientists of the past
but also the great moral thinkers of the past.
Einstein loved Spinoza.
He had this world of philosophical and intellectual thinking
with which he communicated,
but there were also the real friends
that were not necessarily the famous scientists
but people like Michele Besso,
with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship,
with whom he shared many views about life and science.
And from the early days on,
from the famous Olympia Academy youth club,
Akademie Olympia, the friends, the Habicht, the Solovine,
Einstein had a group of people that actually,
in certain occasions of his life,
also helped him to stay stubborn.
Einstein thinks about the world
from Spinoza's perspective,
which is that the world is radically one because God is one
and, therefore, he has to be able to come up with a theory
to explain everything.
Spinoza believed that the universe was God
and, therefore, he believed that every part of the universe
had the impact of God.
This is different than atheism.
This would be called pantheism.
All the aspects of the world are determined
and all of them are God.
You think about Spinoza,
he is a completely independent thinker,
he's a Jew without community, he's a Jew without constraint,
he's a Jew without tradition, he's a Jew without ritual.
And Einstein also.
Albert Einstein is a Jew,
he's called that in a consistent way.
And so, Albert Einstein sees himself very much
as a secular Jew, of the Jewish people,
and this is an understanding of his that's indelible.
I will never not be a Jew.
And he's happy,
eventually becoming more and more happy to be a Jew.
From a philosophical or religious
or, in particularly, physics perspective,
think about Spinoza and the idea that the universe is God.
There can be no random action in the universe.
Einstein is reading Spinoza
and he's saying nothing can be random.
If I have a theory, it has to explain everything.
And it has to be the most simple explanation
that you can come up with.
Einstein believes if you can figure out the cause,
you can figure out the effect.
His morality is based on that.
We have to be a cause for good.
He doesn't believe
that following Jewish tradition and rituals
is going to be the heart of his morality.
I myself am non-observant,
yet consider myself a loyal Jew.
He thinks that the Jewish tradition and rituals
were for the theocracy that existed in the land of Israel
thousands of years before,
and they're no longer relevant in their details,
but they are relevant in their impact.
So if we are going to be citizens of the world,
part of the people who are thinking rigorously for justice,
then that justice has to be worked on.
And Einstein worked hard on that justice.
He can make, and does make, lots of moral pronouncements
because he thinks they're for the betterment of the world.
The most important human endeavor
is the striving for morality in our actions.
Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it.
Only morality in our actions
can give beauty and dignity to life.
And he does live
at one of the most extraordinary times of change,
both disaster and creation, in Jewish history.
Einstein says, and I quote, "I believe in Spinoza's God,
who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of the world,
not in a God who concerns himself
with the faith and the doings of mankind."
It's a beautiful sentence, it's an elegant sentence.
We don't have a God sitting on cloud.
We don't have a God that's making for human progress.
We don't have a God that's going to stop evil.
And in Einstein's life, there's plenty of evil in the world.
He's alive during some of the greatest evil
in the history of humankind.
Einstein knows the terrible disasters of the world,
of the 20th century.
But he also thinks that the God that he believes in
is Spinoza's God, which is about the harmony of the world,
and it's his job, both in physics and morality
and even in politics, to build a world
which is more harmonious, and that is God.
If something is in me
that can be called religious,
then it is the unbounded admiration
for the structure of the world,
as far as science can reveal it.
It's very empowering to humanity,
it doesn't give you the sense
that God will intervene at the last minute.
After all, in the '30s and the early '40s,
if God could've, He really should've.
For you to pray for the change of some kind of physical law
or that the gas or bullets don't kill the people,
this is worthless.
You have to stop the war.
There is no other salvation for civilization
and even for the human race
than in the creation of a world government.
And for Einstein, this is a very significant,
and I think one could say, significant religious belief.
I think that Einstein has the most benevolent image
of any philosopher, theologian, or physicist
of the 20th century.
He was, in some ways, fearless, he was deep, he was active.
He believed that his imagination
was the most important of all of his tools.
Not his reason, not his learned intellect,
not his schooling, not his degrees.
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Knowledge is limited, imagination encircles the world.
Einstein was described much later
by the last woman in his life as a revolutionary to the end.
There was so much more to Einstein besides physics.
There were his humanitarian endeavors, his love of music,
his love of children and animals and ice cream
and just talking to everybody
who was not necessarily on the faculty or higher up.
He made himself available to all kinds of people.
He is, in some ways, the victorious child.
A lucky boy, oh he was a lucky boy, yeah.
Eventually, in the final years,
mellowing to a certain extent
and then he becomes that kind of chubby teddy bear figure
that we all like and love.
Not the real Einstein, but (chuckling),
but a nice mythical figure.
Abortion, up till a certain stage of pregnancy,
should be permissible at the request of the woman.
Homosexuality should be exempt from punishment.
It is strange that science,
which in the old days seemed harmless,
should have evolved into a nightmare
that causes everyone to tremble.
The race problem is a disease of the white people.
Their sense of equality and human dignity
is mainly limited to men of white skins.
(mellow music)
Reactionary politicians have managed to instill suspicion
of all intellectual efforts into the public.
(elegant classical music)
Yes, I'm an old revolutionary.
Politically, I'm still a fire-spewing Vesuvius.
(elegant classical music)