Einstein's German World: New Edition by Fritz Stern

Einstein's German World: New Edition Reviews

• 
  Jan-Maat

  One has to be imaginative, and generous, to stretch the title Einstein's German World round all the essays collected in this volume. This wouldn't be a problem, a book must have a title after all, but for the fact that five of the nine essays are loosely linked thematically; relating to Einstein (a man best not to be married to, to have as a father, or to have making jokes about you - he comes across as being particularly skilled at skewering somebody right through their ideals, but apart from all that he comes across as being all right), the interrelationship of science and business in Germany before WWI, reactionsto, and ways of being, Jewish with Haber, Rathenau, Ehrlich, Einstein and Weizmann forming a kind of spectrum from conversion to Zionism and how how the men discussed here emerged from the confluence of those social currents. This is sufficiently promising that the remaining essays on Goldhagen's book (
  Hitler's Willing Executioners Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust which is described as unhistorical, immodest but worst of all takes quotations from Stern's own work while chopping off any nuance they may have), the New Germany, Historians and the Great War and Lost Homelands come as a disappointment since they detract from the common themes of the other chapters. A shorter volume might have made for a more satisfying read.
  
  It is wrong of me to refer to the chapters as essays. Each was written for a different occasion and naturally that affects the way that Stern writes about each subject.
  
  The chapter on Lost Homelands for instance was the opening lecture, followed by a panel debate at a formal event, while the chapter on Goldhagen's book was a piece of criticism originally published in the journal Foreign Affairs, the chapter on Paul Ehrlich was originally a lecture read at the dedication of the Paul Ehrlich Institute. The circumstances shape the message.
  
  Leaving all that to one side these are readable, interesting and offer insights which precisely because these essays are dealing with unusual people offer correctives to more usual narratives. For example in the long parallel lives of Haber and Einstein, Stern describes Haber as understanding that a German victory depended on withstanding the British blockade, that German science would have to contribute alternative sources for the indispensable raw materials that the nation had once imported...Without this effort, Germany's military capacity would have been exhausted by the spring of 1915 for the lack of munitions, and the German people would have starved for lack of fertilisers (pp 118-9). This recognition spins off into many directions, the war would have been over if not by Christmas then by Easter but for the application of science working together with industry, the ability of modern societies to wage war is not as Lizzie Collingham also explores in
  The Taste Of War World War Two And The Battle For Food a matter of generalship and fighting but of the ability to feed an army and the population that supports it, but far beyond WWI the Haber-Bosch process for the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen is something that we still depend on for fertilising soil in non-organic farming.
  
  The issue raised in Wehler's study
  The German Empire that exclusion from the pinnacles of the military elite served only to make the wish to belong to it all the more powerful is something that crops up repeatedly in the lives Stern discusses. Of those born in German only Einstein, who escaped military service altogether, seems to have been free of the allure of official position and honour in the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm.
  
  The citation of Sir William Crookes' presidential speech to the British Association for the Advancement of Science given in 1898 Unless we can class [the fixation of nitrogen] among certainties to come, the great Caucasian race will cease to be foremost in the world, and will be squeezed out of existence by races to whom wheaten bread is not the staff of life would be an alternative summation of the issues, attitudes and emotions knotted together in the lives dealt with in much of this book. Science is not here pure or abstract, but a tool in dealing with 'practical' problems, even more it is a weapon in the struggle for dominance in a world defined by fear. That is a world perceived by many from a Social-Darwinist viewpoint, so fearful of other people that the struggle for survival is a problem that science must address from a purely national perspective, but clearly the position of Jews, given this racial outlook, itself becomes a problem and a particularly complex issue. Haber's work was indispensable to the German war effort in 1914-1918, but in line with that complexity he lived long enough to be written out of history.
  
  At their best Stern's essays step upon those knots that defined much of European history in the Twentieth century: exclusion, belonging, prejudice, loss, cultural values and the deployment of science. The worse aspect of reading them is the sense of an unwritten book lurking in the background, but as Stern says in the introduction to this volume, he finds "the essay a particularly congenial mode" (p.7) so essays are what we have got.
• 
  John David

  The French political philosopher Raymond Aron once remarked to Fritz Stern that the twentieth century could have been Germany’s century.” This remark, which Stern mentions in the introduction to his book, creates a opening in which Stern examines reemerging themes like material strength, nationalism, militarism, and German culture all through the eyes of many of Einstein’s scientific coevals. In fact, from the biographical sketches that Stern produces here, he offers the uncontroversial opinion that Germany’s decline into moral nihilism under Nazi rule and the varying effects that had on the professional classes within Germany were some of the forces that prevented Germany from realizing its fullest potential. For this reason, the book is more than a little underwhelming.
  
  The first half of the book contains a series of miniature Plutarch-like biographies of the immunologist Paul Ehrlich, physicist Max Planck, and the chemist Fritz Haber (the only major convert to Christian Stern mentions). Despite the title, some were much close to Einstein than others, but of the four, Einstein was the only one who never embraced militarism and who encouraged Zionism.
  
  Later in the book, Stern offers a couple of essays which discuss Zionism and some of its earlier discussants, including Walther Rathenau and Chaim Weizmann, whose early faith in the movement would later develop into disappointment. Two more essays – “Travails of the New Germany” and “Lost Homelands” – explore broader themes in contemporary Germany historiography; these explore the tragic psychic cost of German reunification. There’s also a wonderfully polemical essay titled “The Goldhagen Controversy,” which argues against Daniel Goldhagen’s supposed thesis set forth in “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” that there was something in the German people themselves that drove them to orchestrate the Holocaust. (I use the word “supposed” here because I haven’t read his book and wouldn’t want to criticize it without doing so.)
  
  I have previously read and reviewed Stern’s “The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of Germanic Ideology,” and thought it to be one of the better books that I read in 2012. While I’ve taught science and math, I read precious little of it for pleasure, but was immediately interested when I was Stern’s name. I don’t know what it is about this book, but he never seems as fascinated by his subjects here. He admits that he’s never had a formal background in science, even though most of his subjects are professional scientists. While it is always a historian’s task to remain as objective as possible, Stern seemed cold and sometimes even uninterested toward his subjects – and quite frankly, he rarely says anything about them that hasn’t been said before. If you’re really interested in science in early twentieth-century Germany from a biographical side, this might have something of interest to offer. Otherwise, this is going to be a lot of general history with which you’re probably already familiar.
• 
  Zheng

  It is an interesting topic, discussing Germany in the early part of the 20th century through the stories of the great German scientists, including Eistein. But the book was somewhat boringly written.
• 
  Dena

  A series of essays about important people in Einstein's life in Germany and after plus essays about important issues affecting Einstein and his colleagues. Supplies some details I had not read in other works particularly about Rathenau and Fritz Haber.