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Was Einstein Really Religious?

When he was a boy, yes. He lovingly studied the Bible, sensed no contradiction between Catholicism and Judaism, stopped eating pork, wrote little songs to God, and sang them as he walked home from school. But at the age of twelve, by reading science books, he abruptly abandoned all of his religious beliefs. He kept a “holy curiosity” for the mysteries and wonders of nature.

It is well-known that decades later, he made witty statements about God: that He does not play dice and that God is crafty but not malicious. Einstein famously wrote: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” And the year he died, in 1955, a student quoted him as having once said “I want to know how God created this world. I’m not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know his thoughts, the rest are details.”

Young Albert Einstein circa 1890. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Yet Einstein’s statements on God were notoriously ambiguous. Therefore, many Jews, Christians, atheists, and others have embraced Einstein as one of their own—by picking his most appealing quotations. Atheists such as Richard Dawkins are glad that sometimes Einstein clarified that by “God” he actually meant to say “nature.” Yet sometimes he remarked “I am not an atheist.” Other times Einstein said that he believed in the God of Spinoza. In the 1670s, the Dutch philosopher expressed great reverence for the lawful harmony of nature, arguing that God has no personality, consciousness, emotions, or will. In 1929 Einstein praised Spinoza’s outlook as a “deep feeling in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience.” Yet at the same time he expressed doubts as to whether he could fairly describe himself as a pantheist like Spinoza.

In his #1 New York Times bestselling biography of Einstein, Walter Isaacson argues that Einstein did not use the word God as just another name for nature. Isaacson insists that Einstein was not secretly an atheist but instead, that Einstein believed in an impersonal Creator who does not meddle in our daily lives. Likewise, many other writers also think that since Einstein did not believe in a personal God, a fatherly Creator who cares about us, and not being an atheist, that therefore he believed in an impersonal God.

In 1936, Einstein wrote a letter to a little girl, in which he explained: “Everyone seriously engaged in science becomes convinced that the laws of nature manifest a spirit which is vastly superior to man, and before which we, with our modest strength, must humbly bow.” This certainly sounds religious, but what did he mean by “a spirit”? Einstein’s replies to inquisitive strangers, children, reporters, or close friends sometimes were markedly different. In some cases, he used colloquial expressions that he preferred to rephrase in more exacting contexts. He voiced regrets that many of his casual expressions later became subject to public dissection.

In contrast to the famous quotations that portray the old Einstein as a religious man, it is less well known that he privately described himself as agnostic. In 1869, “Darwin’s bulldog,” Thomas Henry Huxley coined the word “Agnostic” as an attitude of temporary reasoned ignorance, to not pretend to know conclusions that have yet to be demonstrated scientifically. Twenty years later, Huxley commented: “I invented the word ‘Agnostic’ to denote people who, like myself, confess themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning a variety of maters, about which metaphysicians and theologians, both orthodox and heterodox, dogmatise with the utmost confidence…” Popularly, agnosticism became known simply as the position of admitting that one does not know whether God exists.

Albert Einstein 1921 by F Schmutzer.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

In 1949 Einstein wrote a letter to a curious sailor in the US Navy, explaining that “You may call me agnostic.” In 1950 he replied to another correspondent: “My position concerning God is that of an agnostic. I am convinced that vivid consciousness of the primary importance of moral principles for the betterment and ennoblement of life does not need the idea of a law-giver, especially a law-giver who works on the basis of reward and punishment.” Then in 1952, in a letter to a philosopher, Einstein frankly expressed his unsweetened opinions: “The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends aplenty. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can change this (for me).” Einstein added that the Jewish people were no better that any other groups of people: “I can ascertain nothing Chosen about them.” He said that all religions are “primitive superstitions.”

He wrote such stark comments in private letters, in contradistinction to his published pronouncements about God and religion. So, was Einstein really religious? Or was he politically correct in public? In 1930, at the age of fifty-one, an article was published in which he described himself as “deeply religious.” But by then he was a world-wide celebrity. He knew that every word he said might be analyzed and interpreted. Over the years, he explained that he was religious only inasmuch as he felt a deep sense of wonder and reverence for the laws and mysteries of nature.

But what do we usually mean when we say that someone is religious? Most of the beliefs and practices that we distinctively associate with religious people were absent in Einstein. He denied the existence of a God that cares for humans, he argued that there is nothing divine about morality, he did not believe in any holy Scriptures, he had no faith in religious teachings, he rejected the authority of all churches and temples, he belonged to no congregation, he denied the existence of souls, life after death, divine rewards or punishments. He denied the existence of miracles that suspend the laws of nature. He rejected all mysticism, he did not believe in free will, he did not believe in any prophets or saviors. He denied that there is any goal in life or in the order of the universe, he practiced no religious rituals, and he did not pray.

Having rejected most aspects of religion, the young Einstein had some options: either say that he was not a religious person, or instead, find an alternative way to define religiosity. He chose the latter path. In science, Einstein had great success by redefining traditional concepts: he redefined concepts of time, energy, mass, gravity, and more. So he tried to do the same thing with religion. In 1950, he explained to his close friend from youth, Maurice Solovine: “I have found no better expression than ‘religious’ for confidence in the rational nature of reality as it is accessible to human reason.”

Instead of accepting Scriptures, rituals, or traditions, Einstein focused on the wonders of nature. By redefining religion to include at its core the emotions and attitudes that Einstein did cultivate, then and only then could Einstein describe himself as a deeply religious man. For example, he called himself deeply religious, but he did not pray. Therefore, in his new definitions, not praying became an act of a deeply religious man, one who fully trusts the laws of nature. He once wrote to Leo Szilard: “as long as you pray to God and ask him for some benefit, you are not a religious man.”

Summing up, good old Einstein was agnostic, I don’t think that he was very religious. Forgive me for making an unscientific analogy. Suppose someone tells us that he really loves pizza, but then he says that he prefers no sauce, dislikes dough, is allergic to cheese, and believes that anyone who asks for toppings does not really like pizza. Then we ask: but how can you say that you really love pizza? He answers: “because I have a deep appreciation for its essence.”

The Letter

In 2008, the letter from Einstein on the subject of religion stunned the public and was sold at auction for a staggering £207,000 ($404,000) instead of the £6000-8000 estimated by Bloomsbury Auctions.

Einstein-Gutkind_1954_p2 — Einstein’s letter.
Source: Albert Einstein to philosopher Eric B. Gutkind, 3.1.1954, Einstein Archives, item 33-33.

Alberto Martínez translates part of the letter here:

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends aplenty. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can change this (for me). Such refined interpretations are naturally highly varied and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the unmodified Jewish religion, like all other religions, is an incarnation of primitive superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mindset I have a deep affinity, have no different quality for me than other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better at anything than other human groups, though at least a lack of power keeps them from the worst excesses. Thus I can ascertain nothing “Chosen” about them.

Overall, I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and seek to defend it with two walls of pride: an outer one as a man, and an inner one as a Jew. As a man you claim a certain exemption from otherwise valid causality; as a Jew, a privilege for monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer causality, as our wonderful Spinoza had first said in the strongest terms. And the animistic interpretations of natural religions are also through monopolization not invalid. With such walls we fall essentially into self-deception, but they do not help us in our search for a higher morality. On the contrary.

Now, though I have in all honesty expressed our different beliefs, I still have the certainty that we largely agree on important matters, e.g. in our assessment of human conduct. What separates us, in Freud’s terms, are intellectual “supports” and “rationalizations.” I therefore believe that we would understand each other well if we were to talk about concrete things.

With friendly thanks and best wishes,

your

A. Einstein.

A Medieval Nun, Writing

by Martha G. Newman

On a research trip last summer, I found a previously unidentified thirteenth-century manuscript in a library in Poznan, Poland, and recognized that it contains the writings of a late twelfth-century monk named Engelhard of Langheim. One of the Latin texts in this manuscript is the saintly biography of a religious woman named Mechtilde of Diessen. The following story, found only in this one Polish manuscript, appears as a postscript:

Saint Mechtilde, as was said earlier, was in the habit of writing. She did so to avoid eating the bread of leisure, and in this especially she believed she greatly pleased her God. She frequently brooded like a mother hen over the writing of missals and psalters because she thought – or rather she hoped – to serve the divine more earnestly in doing this. Her hope did not betray her. For one day, when she still had work remaining, she wished to repair a blunt pen, but she did not succeed. The pen was very troublesome to prepare. She was knowledgeable about cutting quills, but once cut, this quill did not respond when tested. This caused in her not a little disturbance of her spirit. “Oh,” she said, “if God would only send me his messenger, who could prepare this pen for me, for I have rarely suffered this difficulty, and it is now greatly troubling me.” As soon as she said this, a youth appeared. He had a beautiful face, a shining robe, and sweet speech. He said, “What troubles you, O beloved?” And she said, “I spend my time uselessly, I toil for nothing, and I do not know how to prepare my pen.” He said, “Give it to me, and perhaps you will not be hindered anymore by this knowledge when you wish to prepare it.” She gave it to him, and he prepared it in such a way that it remained satisfactory for her until her death: she wrote with it for the many years that she lived. After this miracle, when she spent time writing, no one could write so well, no one so quickly, no one so readily, and no one so correctly, nor could anyone imitate in likeness her hand. The pen’s preparation, as I said, was permanent, but the preparer disappeared and appeared in the work of which he was the maker. I have reported this just as the daughter of the duke of Merania, herself a holy virgin, has testified. She, reading this little work on the life of Mechtilde, asked to add what was missing.[1]

This brief little anecdote tells us a great deal about the literacy of medieval nuns. First, it reminds us that nuns as well as monks copied manuscripts. In recent years, our understanding of medieval literacy has become more nuanced. Scholars have separated the ability to read, to write, and to compose texts into discrete aspects of what we now call “literacy.” We know that many nuns and many aristocratic women could read: noble women in the later middle ages commissioned elaborate prayer books called Books of Hours, mothers were pictured reading to their daughters, and convents sometimes had extensive libraries. We also know women composed texts, but they often did so with the cooperation of male scribes who wrote down what the women dictated. Female scribes, however, are hard to locate. Scribes did not always sign their names to their work, and women may have been particularly reticent to do so. But we are beginning to realize that writing was a form of work for nuns as well as for monks and that, at times, religious men and women even worked together to produce manuscripts. Monks also sent drafts of their compositions to nuns to be copied. As one twelfth-century monk told the abbess of a convent, “having no scribe at my disposal, as you can see by the irregular formation of the letters, I wrote this book with my own hand.” As a result, he asked to have his text “copied legibly and carefully corrected by some of your sisters trained for this kind of work.”[2]

This is a 15th century image of Christine de Pisan (1363 – c. 1430), one of the best known authors of medieval Europe. She is shown writing her own book, but she is using the same tools that Mechtilde would have employed: she has a pen in one hand and a scraper in the other

Mechtilde probably did not copy texts that she herself composed. The story depicts writing as a form of spiritual labor that prevented a dangerous leisure: Mechtilde’s irritation that she wasted her time trying to fix her pen demonstrates her concern for purposeful work. But the content of the books still mattered.

A second interesting element of this story is that Mechtilde associated her careful copying of missals and psalters with serving God, a phrase more frequently used to describe the prayers and rituals that these texts depicted. The Psalms formed the fundamental prayers for monks and nuns; in praying six times a day and once at night, monks and nuns sang the entire psalter every week and repeated some Psalms daily. By copying psalters, Mechtilde could pray while she wrote. Copying missals, however, had a different implication, for the missal was the liturgical book for the mass. Mechtilde could not perform the mass, but the story suggests a parallel between her writing and the actions of a priest. Although Mechtilde asked God to send his messenger to assist her, the young man’s appearance and his reference to Mechtilde as his “beloved” suggest that he was Jesus. Just as a priest, using the prayers and instructions laid out in a missal, transformed the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, so Mechtilde, in copying missals with devotion, filled those books with the presence of Jesus: “he appeared in her work of which he was the maker.” As a woman, Mechtilde was unable to serve at the altar, but she had found another way to participate in the performance of the mass.

Finally, the transmission of the story is noteworthy. The author of Mechtilde’s life, the monk Engelhard of Langheim, never met Mechtilde, but he knew members of her family: they were important patrons of his monastery. In the saint’s life, Engelhard had mentioned briefly that Mechtilde was a scribe but he did so only to emphasize her willing obedience to put down her pen immediately when summoned. He learned the story about the pen from Mechtilde’s niece. The niece, a daughter of a duke, was also a nun, and she placed more emphasis on her aunt’s writing. Her memories of her aunt suggest that in the middle ages, as today, family histories were often the preserve of women and that tales were often recounted orally from one generation to the next. The niece’s story, as Engelhard recorded it, gives us a brief glimpse into the family legends of this one aristocratic lineage.

Bad Blood: Newly Discovered Documents on US Funded Syphilis Experiments

by Philippa Levine

On September 13, 2011, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues released its report on the syphilis experiments that were funded and conducted by the US government in Guatemala in the 1940s. Over 1300 prisoners, prostitutes, psychiatric patients, and soldiers in Guatemala were infected with sexually transmissible diseases (through supervised sexual relations among other methods), in an attempt to better understand treatments for diseases such as syphilis. The researchers also drew blood from thousands of Guatemalan children to further another aspect of the study.

The Guatemala case has close links to the notorious Tuskegee syphilis study, which withheld treatment for syphilis from some four hundred black men in Macon County, Alabama, between the 1930s and the 1970s for similar reasons. Though the Tuskegee experiment had its roots in a treatment program begun in the optimistic 1920s, the depression transformed it into a study that would end only after negative publicity in the early 1970s. In Alabama, there was no deliberate attempt to infect the subjects of the study. In Guatemala treatment was the norm, but subjects were deliberately infected. In neither case were the risks, or indeed the aim, of the studies fully explained to those who participated. Indeed, the Commission’s report explicitly notes the “deliberate efforts to deceive experimental subjects and the wider community that might have objected to the work.” In Alabama the men in the study were led to believe they were being treated for what the doctors routinely called ‘bad blood.’

Both experiments were underway before the widespread adoption of the ethics code hammered out after the Nüremberg trials, the so-called ‘doctors’ trial’ of Nazi war criminals, but the code did not put an end to the Tuskegee study. There is a long history, and not just in the US, of using people without power – those considered ‘inferior,’ those in disciplinary regimes such as prisons or the military, and those regarded as less likely to protest or even to comprehend – as human subjects in medical and scientific experiments. Indeed, experiments very similar to the Guatemalan one (without the supervised sex) were carried out in the federal prison at Terre Haute, Indiana in the early 1940s and again at Sing Sing in New York in the 1950s.

In Guatemala and in Alabama, the idea of racial difference played a significant role in determining the shape of the studies. Scientists debated whether there were racial differences in sexually transmissible diseases. Prejudices that saw some populations as more sexual than others fuelled such ideas. The theory that syphilis may have originated in Central America made some scientists wonder if the indigenous population had thus acquired immunity. Ideas such as these made already under-privileged populations targets for invasive research.

President Obama issued an apology to Guatemala in 2010 for the actions of government officials. President Clinton issued an apology to the subjects of the Tuskegee study in 1997.

Do studies like this go on today here or elsewhere? In theory, the answer is “no,” since there are rules in place that require scientists and doctors to explain their work to subjects and because some techniques simply aren’t allowed any longer. In practice, the situation is more complex. The Guatemala research came to light only when a researcher stumbled across evidence in the papers of the lead scientist. Tuskegee was never a secret; throughout the years of the study, leading science journals openly published its results. For the historian, all this is familiar territory: the accidental unearthing of evidence, the evidence hidden in plain sight. Students often ask me: how could this have happened? How could this have been allowed? There are good lessons to learn here, and ones in which historians can play a crucial role. While it’s too late for the Guatemalan prisoners of the 1940s and the men of Tuskegee, it has nonetheless often been the work of historians that has either uncovered or kept in the public eye actions that might otherwise go unnoticed and unremarked. Better late than never.

In Spring Semester 2012, Prof. Levine will debut a course entitled “Science, Ethics and Society.”

Government documents and Media Coverage on the experiments:
http://bioethics.gov/cms/node/306
http://www.examiningtuskegee.com/
http://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/timeline.htm
http://www.hsl.virginia.edu/historical/medical_history/bad_blood/report.cfm
http://www.thehastingscenter.org/Bioethicsforum/Post.aspx?id=5544&blogid=140

Books on the Tuskegee Experiments:
James H. Jones, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Study
Susan M. Reverby, Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy
Allan M Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880

Photo Credits:

Doctor injecting subject, Tuskegee Syphilis Study, US National Archives and Records Administration, via Wikimedia Commons

Nuremberg Trials, Karl Brandt, Reich Commissar for Health and Sanitation, was indicted with 22 other Nazi doctors and SS officers on war crimes charges, including horrific medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners. US Army. Photo No. OMT-I-D-144. Telford Taylor Papers, Arthur W. Diamond Law Library, Columbia University Law School

Lend-Lease Live: The Video

To accompany Charters Wynn’s story about US aid to the USSR during World War II, we offer this video of Lend-Lease in action.The narration is translated below.

“On the evening of June 24, 1941, Prime Minister of Great Britain Winston Churchill came on the radio. He declared: “Any person belonging to a country fighting against fascism will receive British aid.” He went on to say that he will give Russia and its people all the help that the British government can offer. On October 2, 1941, the agreement was signed. Under the terms of the agreement, Great Britain and the United States pledged to dispense aid to the Soviet Union beginning on October 1, 1941 until the end of June 1942 by providing approximately 400 airplanes, 500 tanks, rockets, tin, aluminum, lead, and other wartime materials. It was declared that Great Britain and the United States will help mobilize and deliver these materials to the Soviet Union.

Hitler spared Murmansk. He expected to capture it quickly in order to use it for its port system, repair and maintenance factories, and docks. Murmansk was the only port in Northern Russia that did not freeze in the winter. Its direct access to Moscow by rail lent it even more geostrategic value. However, Hitler’s army hit an impasse approximately 80 kilometers from Murmansk. Successful naval operations implemented by the Russian military further ruined the Fuhrer’s plans to capture the city by land, leading him to issue an order to destroy the city from above. Consequently, Murmansk endured the longest bombing campaign in the history of the Second World War.”

Scum of the Earth by Arthur Koestler (1941)

Arthur Koestler lived a remarkable life – as dramatic a death-defying tour of twentieth century Europe as you can find. He was born in Budapest (in 1905) and went to school in Vienna. As a young man, he took up any number of political causes, beginning with socialism and Zionism. He went to Palestine as a reporter, but found it too remote, so he repaired to Paris and in 1930 went from there to Berlin — just as the Nazis were making their electoral breakthrough. He became a communist and went as a journalist to visit the Soviet Union. (Langston Hughes visited at the same time; the two men met in Turkestan.) By 1933, the Nazis had taken over Germany, and a Jewish Communist could not return there, so Koestler resumed his writing and political activity in Paris. He was next dispatched to report (and spy) in the Spanish Civil War, working for the Loyalists. (The Loyalists tried to defend the Spanish Republic against General Francisco Franco’s Nationalists and their allies in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The war, which in ended in 1939 with Franco’s victory, is sometimes called a “dress rehearsal for World War II.”) Koestler was captured by Nationalists in 1937, locked in solitary confinement, and told he would be executed. In Darkness at Noon (his most famous book, a novel about the Soviet terror of the 1930s), the chilling scenes of men being dragged from their cells in the middle of the night to be shot by Stalin’s police are based on Koestler’s own experience of imprisonment in Seville. An international campaign of journalists, the League of Nations, the Red Cross, and others got Koestler released to the British. For the next three years he tacked between France and Britain, writing first Spanish Testament, then Darkness at Noon before being arrested by the French in the fall of 1939. After escaping that ordeal, he worked for the British Ministry of Information, reported on the war and recounted more of his own experiences in Scum of the Earth and Dialogue with Death.

By the late 1940s he was an intellectual celebrity, best known as a disillusioned former Communist with anti-fascist credentials. Koestler also wrote about science, however, flirted with parapsychology, and pursued women, by all accounts treating them very badly. He and his younger, third wife committed suicide together in 1983, about five years after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. All of this is well chronicled by Michael Scammell in Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic but Koestler tells the political part of his own story with more verve than any biographer.

Scum of the Earth (1941) is the best volume of Koestler’s memoirs – not as well known as Darkness at Noon, but almost as frightening, and not fiction. It begins in August of 1939, in the surreal and depressing quiet on the eve of World War II. Since it is August in Europe, Koestler is the south of France, eating bouillabaisse in St. Tropez. The war would not come to France itself until May of 1940, but even before that, the French Republic began to round up “undesirable” foreigners. One might expect an anti-fascist intellectual who had been condemned to death for fighting in Spain to find asylum in France, which was after all the land of the revolution of 1789, the longest standing republic in Europe, officially anti-Nazi and preparing to fight Hitler. Koestler certainly hoped he could count on the French state’s protection. So did thousands of other political refugees from Nazi Germany and its affiliates, like Hannah Arendt. But he was arrested, held outside of Paris (at the Roland Garros stadium) and then shipped to a remote interment camp, Le Vernet, in the Ariège, near the Spanish border. He managed to escape at the end of the year, and then chronicled the fall of France (“a country which has reached the bottom of humiliation”) and his and others’ desperate search for visas or permits to get off the continent.

Scum of the Earth takes us through Koestler’s fears of being arrested at any moment and his bewilderment in face of the implacable French police. It gives us an excellent feel for France during the war – the more remarkable because it takes place before the collaborationist Vichy government was set up. Koestler offers moving portraits of some of his fellow prisoners: a Jewish socialist refugee from Czechoslovakia; an Italian who had spent nine years in prison and been tortured by Mussolini; two fellow fighters from the Spanish Civil War; and a Polish Jew who had fled the pogroms and worked as a tailor in Paris for decades. “What nearly all of them had in common was being anti-fascist, and having been persecuted in their country of origin.” Koestler doesn’t pretty up their political views or personalities; they are disillusioned, sometimes prejudiced, with odd judgments. But each had resisted the Nazis and plainly would have continued to do so. The French Republic, “their natural ally,” nonetheless “abandoned and betrayed” them. Koestler shows us the psychological effects of internment and how the prisoners’ capacity to resist was destroyed: once courageous dissenters became so demoralized that they were simply “thankful that they were not shot.” Le Vernet was not Dachau, or Auschwitz; it was not at the heart of the Nazi terror. But Koestler and those who were interned there had witnessed ten years of defeats: electoral failure and political terror in Germany, mayhem in Austria, persecution in Poland, military downfall in Spain, and so on. “The essence of politics is hope,” writes Koestler, “and hope had gone.” Scum of the Earth covers only one year, but it makes this larger, sad story of Europe’s surrender to Hitler human and real. Fortunately, we know that 1940 was not the end of the story.

Photo Credits
Arthur Koestler, 1948, by Pinn Hans (www.gpo.gov.il) (Public domain) via Wikimedia Commons
Clandestine photo of Le Vernet, photographer unknown

The “Einstein Letter” — A Tipping Point in History

by Michael B. Stoff

On a mid-July day in 1939, Albert Einstein, still in his slippers, opened the door of his summer cottage in Peconic on the fishtail end of Long Island. There stood his former student and onetime partner in an electromagnetic refrigerator pump, the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, and next to him a fellow Hungarian (and fellow physicist), Eugene Wigner. The two had not come to Long Island for a day at the beach with the most famous scientist in the world but on an urgent mission. Germany had stopped the sale of uranium from mines in Czechoslovakia it now controlled. To Szilard, this could mean only one thing: Germany was developing an atomic bomb.

Szilard wanted Einstein to write a letter to his friend, Queen Mother Elisabeth of Belgium. The Belgian Congo was rich in uranium, and Szilard worried that if the Germans got their hands on the ore, they might have all the material they needed to make a weapon of unprecedented power. First, however, he had to explain to Einstein the theory upon which the weapon rested, a chain reaction. “I never thought of that,” an astonished Einstein said. Nor was he willing to write the Queen Mother. Instead, Wigner convinced him to write a note to one of the Belgian cabinet ministers.

Pen in hand, Wigner recorded what Einstein dictated in German while Szilard listened. The Hungarians returned to New York with the draft, but within days, Szilard received a striking proposal from Alexander Sachs, an advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt. Might Szilard transmit such a letter to Roosevelt? A series of drafts followed, one composed by Szilard as he sat soaking in his bathtub, another after a second visit to Einstein, and two more following discussions with Sachs. Einstein approved the longer version of the last two, dated “August 2, 1939,” and signed it as “A. Einstein” in his tiny scrawl.

The result was the “Einstein Letter,” which historians know as the product not of a single hand but of many hands. Regardless of how it was concocted, the letter remains among the most famous documents in the history of atomic weaponry. It is a model of compression, barely two typewritten, double-spaced pages in length. Its language is so simple even a president could understand it. Its tone is deferential, its assertions authoritative but tentative in the manner of scientists who have yet to prove their hypotheses. Its effect was persuasive enough to initiate the steps that led finally to the Manhattan Project and the development of atomic bombs.

Stripped of all jargon, the letter cited the work of an international array of scientists (“Fermi,” “Joliot,” “Szilard” himself), pointed to a novel generator of power (“the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy”), urged vigilance and more (“aspects of the situation call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action”), sounded a warning (“extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed”), made a prediction (“a single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with the surrounding territory”), and mapped out a plan (“permanent contact between the Administration and the group of physicists working on chain reactions in America . . . and perhaps obtaining the co-operation of industrial laboratories”). A simple conclusion, no less ominous for its understatement, noted what worried the Hungarians in the first place: “Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over.”

Looking back at the letter, aware of how things actually turned out, we can appreciate its richness. For one thing, it shows us a world about to pass from existence. Where once scientific information flowed freely across national borders through professional journals, personal letters, and the “manuscripts” to which the letter refers in its first sentence, national governments would now impose a clamp of secrecy on any research that might advance weapons technology. The letter also tells us how little even the most renowned scientists knew at the time. No “chain reaction” had yet been achieved and no reaction-sustaining isotope of uranium had been identified. Thus the assumption was that “a large mass of uranium” would be required to set one in motion. No aircraft had been built that could carry what these scientists expected to be a ponderous nuclear core necessary to make up a bomb, so the letter predicts that a “boat” would be needed to transport it.

More than the past, the letter points to the shape of things to come. Most immediately, it shows us that the race for atomic arms would be conducted in competition with Germany, soon to become a hostile foreign power. And in the longer term, of course, the postwar arms race would duplicate that deadly competition as hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union led them to amass more and more nuclear weapons. The letter also presents us with nothing less than a master plan for what became the Manhattan Project, the first “crash program” in the history of science. After the war, other crash programs in science—to develop the hydrogen bomb; to conquer polio; to reach the moon; to cure cancer—would follow. Finally, by stressing the entwining of government, science, and industry in service of the state, the letter foreshadows what Dwight Eisenhower later called “the military-industrial complex.”

In the end, the “Einstein Letter” is a document deservedly famous, but not merely for launching the new atomic age. If we read it closely enough, it gives us a fascinating, Janus-faced look at a tipping point in history, a window on a world just passing and one yet to come, all in two pages.

You can read the letter in its entirety here.

Photo Credits:
Albert Einstein, 1947, by Oren Jack Turner, The Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons
Dr. Norman Hilberry and Dr. Leo Szilard (right) stand beside the site where the world’s first nuclear reactor was built during World War II. Both worked with the late Dr. Enrico Fermi in achieving the first self-sustaining chain reaction in nuclear energy on December 2, 1942, at Stagg Field, University of Chicago. U.S. Department of Energy via Wikimedia Commons

The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 by Saul Friedländer (2007)

by David Crew

Saul Friedländer’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945, argues that the Holocaust must be understood as a European event. Without murderous German anti-semitism and racism, the Holocaust would certainly not have happened, but German policies could not have been put into practice on such a previously unimaginable scale without the acquiescence, support, even active participation of a wide range of historical actors in all of the occupied countries.

Friedländer shows that “the events we call the Holocaust” cannot properly be understood as the step-by-step implementation of a preconceived plan. Certainly, Hitler was unwavering in his belief that the Jews were Germany’s most dangerous enemy and that they must be eliminated completely, first from German, then from European life. Yet what the “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem” actually meant was neither clear nor consistent, even in the minds of Nazi leaders, until the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. As late as the autumn of that year, it was still possible to imagine other (incredibly brutal but less systematically murderous) options, such as the mass deportation of Jews to northern Russia after the Soviet Union had been conquered. Yet the Nazi decision for genocide was not simply a response to the failure to defeat the “Jewish-Bolshevik” enemy in Russia. Friedländer argues that Nazi policies in occupied Poland between September 1939 and 1941 had already made genocide both thinkable and possible: “the ongoing violence in occupied Poland created a blurred area of murderous permissiveness that, unplanned as it was, would facilitate the transition to more systematic murder policies.”

However, it was the attitudes and behavior of Europeans in the occupied countries that permitted the Nazi fantasy of genocide to become a murderous reality. Many Europeans played active roles in the machinery of mass murder; the local governmental authorities in the occupied European countries who implemented the German racial laws, the local police forces who helped round up Jews for deportation to the death camps, the Eastern Europeans who functioned as guards in those camps, the ordinary Europeans who enriched themselves with Jewish property. Others simply remained silent, above all the political and religious elites. Some Europeans did resist. In Belgium, for example, resistance organizations worked with the Jewish underground to hide about 25,000 Jews. Nor did all the Jewish victims continue to follow German orders in the hope of surviving until the end of the war. In the eastern European ghettos, some Jews engaged in armed revolts. But the bitter irony of these courageous acts of Jewish resistance, such as the April 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising, was that they convinced Himmler and Hitler to move even faster with the annihilation of European Jews so that Nazi Germany would not have to deal with more Jewish revolts.

Friedländer draws extensively from diaries written by Jews across Europe during the war. Their voices help to make this a powerful book. It deserves to be read by anyone interested in the Holocaust.

Related stories on Not Even Past:
The Normandy Scholar Program on World War II
Review of Sarah’s Key, by Tatiana de Rosnay
Review of The Shop on Main Street, directed by Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos
David Crew on Photographs from Jewish Ghettos during WWII

Sarah’s Key (2011)

by Julia M. Gossard

Just before dawn on July 16, 1942 the French Police began Opération Vent Printanier, or “Operation Spring Breeze.” That morning over 13,000 Jews were forcibly removed from their homes and trudged through the streets of Paris to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, the Winter Bicycle Racetrack, on the rue Nélaton in the city’s fifteenth arrondisement. Situated next to the Bir-Hakeim métro, not far from the Eiffel Tower, the Vel’ d’Hiv’ (as it was commonly called) was the first indoor track in France that hosted numerous sport and cultural shows. But in July 1942 the Vel’ d’Hiv’ hosted a much different spectacle: the inhumane detainment of Jews before their deportation to concentration camps in Parisian suburbs, such as Drancy and Beaune-la-Rolande, that sent Jews directly to Auschwitz. Inside of the Vel’ d’Hiv’ the French Police denied Jews water, food, medical attention, and even lavatories, treating the prisoners worse than livestock. Despite the atrocities that took place at the Vel’ d’Hiv’ and later in the concentration camps where families were separated and eventually convoyed to Auschwitz for extermination, the French rarely acknowledged or spoke about the Vel’ d’Hiv’. It was not until 1995 that the French Government, under the leadership of Jacques Chirac, addressed Vichy French compliance in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup and the Nazis’ ultimate answer to the “Jewish Question.”

Philippe Pétain meeting Hitler in October 1940. (via Wikipedia)

Though a work of fiction, Tatiana de Rosnay’s poignant novel, Sarah’s Key, helps inform the reader about the lesser-known atrocities committed against French Jews under Nazi occupation and the Vichy government. Simultaneously set in July 1942 and sixty years later in July 2002, the novel alternates narratives between the lives of Sarah Starzynski, a ten-year old Jewish girl imprisoned with her parents in the Vel’ d’Hiv’, and Julia Jarmond, an ex-patriot American journalist writing a piece on the sixtieth anniversary of the Roundup. In researching her article, Julia begins to discover tragic secrets about Sarah’s life that have a devastating impact on Julia’s own life sixty years later.

Weaving together mystery, history, and intense emotion, de Rosnay provides an engrossing story. Though at times the plot can seem somewhat predictable this does not significantly undermine the book’s success. What is most significant and moving about the book is de Rosnay’s piercing criticism of France’s seeming ambivalence and long denial of involvement in the atrocities of the Holocaust including the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup. As one character poignantly remarks, “Nobody remembers the Vel’ d’Hiv’ children, you know… Why should they? Those were the darkest days of our country.” Despite the dedication of several sites in Paris to the memory of those deported during the war, such as the Mémorial de la Shoah and the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation, there still remains a certain amount of unfamiliarity with Vichy France’s role in the Holocaust in France today. Sarah’s Key reminds readers that Vichy France’s compliance in the “Jewish Question” is not something to be forgotten or swept underneath the rug. It is a topic that deserves reexamination and further explanation.

Wikipedia on the round-up of French Jews
Mémorial de la Shoah website
A walking tour of the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation with informative pictures

Trailer for the new film version of Sarah’s Key

Photo credits:
Jewish women in Paris, just before the roundup
Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive) via Wikimedia Commons

Churchill: A Biography by Roy Jenkins (2002)

After a long career among both politicians and literary lights, Roy Jenkins perhaps found his ideal subject in his last great biography, Churchill. Fans of the reputation-blackening revisionism common to the genre will find little to love in this laudatory account. The political battles and courageous stands that typified Churchill take center stage over more personal details, though his literary achievements provide a constant subtheme. A former Labour Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jenkins brings an unparalleled level of Parliamentary knowledge to the recounting of his subject’s long political career. As a result, Churchill stands as not just a biography of an almost mythic figure but also a fascinating account of rough and tumble British politics from the end of the Victorian era to the dawn of the Cold War.

Jenkin’s depiction encompasses the whole of his subject’s extended and exciting life. The author ably navigates the uneven waters of Churchill’s early years, from his daring escape from an enemy prison during the Boer War to his role behind the disastrous Gallipoli raid in World War I. According to Jenkins, the young Member of Parliament (MP) attained high rank in governments under two parties despite repeated blunders because “He was too good a trumpet and too dangerous an adversary” to be omitted. Characteristic energy and outspokenness explain Churchill’s meteoric rise, but his impulsive style and conventional, imperialist sympathies led to marginalization when he failed to adapt to the dynamic politics of interwar England. During these “wilderness years,” Churchill bucked the pro-Chamberlain mood of the nation with calls for a more aggressive response to German rearmament. Such opinions, while contentious at the time, helped position the maverick politician for his return to power at the beginning of World War II. In this congruence of events, Jenkins finds the promise of Churchill’s personality and political career realized. The new prime minister’s strategic mind, Edwardian optimism, disdain for unnecessary slaughter, and enthusiasm for combat made him “the perfect man for 1940 and 1941.” The generous depiction of the wartime years clearly recounts the important political debates that helped define allied strategy, but it also makes room for amusing anecdotes – including Churchill’s use of a golden bathtub after his triumphal arrival in liberated Paris.

The biography examines the Cold War largely as a dénouement after the triumph of the mid-1940s, but Jenkins provides an interesting discussion of the politician’s preoccupation with nuclear weapons and his ambiguous approach to European unification. Thorough and expansive in scope, Churchill serves as a panoramic view of the first half of the twentieth century through the eyes of one of its most famous and colorful figures.

Erudite, astute, and clearly written, Jenkins’ work stands as a model for the epic life story. The biography excludes few details, but even the most complicated and tedious aspects of policymaking– including the balancing of the British budget – appear contentious and exciting in the author’s able hands. Jenkins invests his work with a level of dynamism and historical importance from its very first page, demonstrating how Winston Churchill’s life served to prepare him for the role of wartime leader. The result is a sterling biography of a truly impressive personality, whom Jenkins glowingly describes “as the greatest human being to ever occupy 10 Downing Street.”

Photo credit:

Churchill on the East Bank of the Rhine, south of Wesel, Morris (Sgt), No 5 Army Film & Photographic Unit, Imperial War Museum Collection, via Wikimedia Commons

Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary by Bertrand M. Patenaude (2009)

by Andrew Straw

Within the span of thirty years, Lev Davidovich Bronshtein (Trotsky) went from living as a revolutionary in exile to being one of the world’s most successful revolutionary leaders, only to spend the waning years of his life back in exile and on the run from the regime whose creation defined his life’s work. In Trotsky: The Downfall of a Revolutionary, Stanford Lecturer and Hoover Archives Fellow Bertrand M. Patenaude provides the definitive account of the events leading up to Trotsky’s assassination by a Soviet agent in August 1940 at his Mexican residence. Patenaude’s work highlights the paranoia, contradictions, ideological stubbornness, cultural intrigues, and violence that led to Trotsky’s eventual exile from the Soviet Union and his tense journey through European exile to Mexico, where Trotsky’s violent past caught up with him.

Few authors bring their extensive archival research to life in the way Patenaude does as he ushers the reader through the last years of Trotsky’s life as if writing a fictional thriller. While thoroughly examining the chronology of events during Trotsky’s exile, Patenaude takes strategic pauses in order reflect on Trotsky’s revolutionary career and give events both global and regional historical context. The author reminds readers how Trotsky lost the power struggle to Stalin, delves into family and sexual matters, addresses arguments made by earlier biographers and examines Trotsky’s influence among Communists and Socialists in the Americas and Europe.

Patenaude explores the tensions that Trotsky’s arrival in Mexico created for that country’s leftists and shows how much of his support in the later years came from American Trotskyites from New York to Minneapolis. His friendships with world-renowned artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera mix into the narrative alongside Trotsky’s rivalries with Soviet political contemporaries Stalin, Bukharin, and Kamenev. His relationship with wife Natalia and the sad story of his family both in and out of the Soviet Union is another constant thread. Some of the most intriguing parts of the book examine the assassins and GPU (Soviet secret police) infiltrators whose work eventually led, after one failed attempted, to Trotsky’s mortal wounds.

Pantenuade uses his story-telling skills to highlight both the contradictions of Trotsky’s ideological arrogance and portray his real human concerns and sensitivities. Trotsky was an ideologue so stubborn that he could barely agree with many Trotskyites, but he was also talented at seducing women and had a profound love for cactuses. The way in which Trotsky and those around him became increasingly paranoid leads up to the shock and horror of the assassination as it unfolded. One can easily picture oneself standing in the guard’s place and contemplating what steps might have been taken to prevent the inevitable.

Still, the humanization of Trotsky does not necessarily force the reader to sympathize with “the Old Man.” In fact, readers may even be agitated by how such an intelligent and human character could be so stubborn and un-recanting. After all, how could a man who pointed out the dangers in Lenin’s program of centralized terror before 1917 never once question the original Bolshevik revolution, even as the same ideas he once feared were actively hunting him down? Patenaude’s work gives the reader an enhanced understanding of Trotsky’s life and the relevant characters and events leading up to that paradoxical, and bloody fate.

More on Lev Trotsky:

Rare, high quality photographs of Trotsky in Mexico from the Hoover Archives
Bertrand Patenaude discussing his work on Trotsky’s life in Mexico (video)
Trotsky denouncing Stalin (in English) from Mexico (video)

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