Freud and Einstein

A letter, a form letter, already marked the start of Albert Einstein‘s career: The employment-seeking graduate, who had a decent diploma from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich in his pocket, sent out stacks of postcards in 1901. The 22-year-old aspiring physicist, highly qualified but with a reputation for being difficult, applied everywhere for a position as a scientific assistant – in vain. In his desperation, Einstein‘s father Hermann sent a letter to the renowned chemist Wilhelm Ostwald in Leipzig to beg for a job for his “ambitious and diligent” offspring: “My son now feels deeply unhappy in his current unemployed state. Every day he becomes more convinced that he and his career have been derailed and that he no longer will find employment.” As everyone knows, Einstein’s career got back on track after all when he was hired by the Patent Office in Bern as of 1902. And, of all people, Ostwald was the first to recommend Albert Einstein – who was soon the most famous physicist in the world – for the Nobel Prize years later.



Fateful Letter

“There is not the slightest sign that we will ever be able to develop atomic energy.” Even in 1932, Berlin resident Albert Einstein – who was already lauded by his contemporaries as the “new Isaac Newton” and “one of the greatest scholars in the history of humanity” – still underestimated the development of nuclear power. The gigantic explosive power of atom bombs was based on the conversion of matter into energy: Even though the physicists of that era were already aware of the tremendous forces concealed in the nucleus of an atom, which is composed of protons and neutrons, no one was able to say how these forces could be released.

Niels Bohr brought the sensational news of the uranium fission by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann to America within the scope of a lecture in Washington on January 26, 1939. Physicists such as NS-era emigrant Leo Szilárd recognized that the process also had a military application. Szilárd, who came from a Hungarian-Jewish family, assumed that Germany could import uranium en masse from the colony of Belgian Congo with the help of occupied Belgium and would attempt to build an atom bomb. When Szilárd and physicist Edward Teller told their colleague Einstein about this situation at the start of August 1939, the latter also immediately understood the potential danger and dictated a letter to U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt. It emphasized “the necessity” of conducting experiments on a large scale to explore the possibility of building atom bombs. As he later said, Einstein was aware of the associated danger but the prospect of preempting a breakthrough by the Germans led him to believe that there was no other choice. Leo Szilárd gave Einstein’s letter to one of Roosevelt’s friends, who then passed it on to the president. In response, Roosevelt immediately installed a committee – and thereby “began what was seen by the USA as a race for the atom bomb but was actually a solo effort by the USA,” according to the physicist, psychologist, and Einstein-researcher Johannes Wickert.

Estrangement from Germany

Albert Einstein, who was awarded the title of honorary doctor by Oxford in 1931, already felt uneasy about the developments in Germany long before 1933. While the international renown and reputation of the scientist who was distinguished with the Nobel Prize in 1921 increasingly grew, the eccentric scholar, politically involved as a leftist and pacifist – as well as a Jew, was increasingly subjected to hostilities in his homeland. He made no secret of his aversion against the National Socialists as they continued to achieve more power. Einstein’s stage was now outside of Germany. Celebrated in the USA, the founder of the Theory of Relativity also held guest lectures in other countries. When Hitler became the Reich Chancellor in 1933, the citizen of the world was just returning from America. Einstein preempted expulsion from the Prussian Academy of the Sciences through his own resignation. He met with Churchill and warned about the approaching danger of war. Then he travelled by ship to America: Princeton – where many prominent exile Germans sought refuge – had offered the emigrant a professorship and the directorship of an institute. Once in America, the exile ultimately warned the US government about the construction of a German atom bomb. When Einstein accepted the April 1914 offer by the Prussian Academy of the Sciences in Berlin, the seminal catastrophe of the 20th century – the First World War – was looming over Europe at that time. And when he decided to turn his back on Germany, the old continent was once again facing the abyss. After 1945, the victory over Germany that Einstein had longed for took on an ambiguous nature because he was now concerned about the militarization of unfettered world powers. These volatile developments also accompanied the correspondence of Albert Einstein with his colleague Max Born through the decades, ranging from 1916 to 1955. The fact that Einstein acknowledged Born’s findings on quantum mechanics, in which coincidences play a large role on the atomic level, with the legendary sentence “God does not play dice,” harmed the friendship of the two highly distinguished physicists just as little as their ethical differences with regard to weapons technology.

“Dear Mr. Freud!”

A type of ammunition was also provided by the theses of Sigmund Freud, which originated during almost the same period as Einstein’s perceptions. Freud’s diligent exchanges of letters are important components of his work as he crossed the borders between the natural sciences and the humanities. The letters represent almost a parallel oeuvre, a running commentary on the emergence of psychoanalysis and its challenges. Praised and appreciated as a first-rate stylist, Freud corresponded through the years with his later wife Martha, his friends, and his family members on the one hand; on the other hand, he communicated with numerous intellectuals and artists such as Thomas Mann, Arthur Schnitzler, Romain Rolland, Stefan Zweig, Herbert George Wells, and Yvette Guilbert, as well as quite a few colleagues such as Carl Gustav Jung, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Princess Marie Bonaparte – and Albert Einstein. Freud supposedly wrote more than 20,000 letters during the course of his life. But among the thousands of letters that he penned, primarily the ones addressed to Albert Einstein wrote world history.

The invitation to discuss the highly charged topic of war with Einstein reached Freud in the summer of 1932. The two great scholars of the 20th century had personally met once in 1927. Although the two men were very different at first glance, they were united by an accomplishment: Both had illuminated the concealed, invisible universes – Einstein’s was that of space and time, and Freud’s was that of the unconscious psyche. Einstein sat down at the desk of his summer house in Caputh near Potsdam, just beyond the gates of Berlin, on the July 30, 1932. Mediated by Leon Steinig, the League of Nations representative, this is how the correspondence between the Nobel Prize winner and the founder of psychoanalysis began on the topic of “Why War?” As if the physicist had foreseen what an unprecedented calamity the imminent war catastrophe would soon bring to the world, Einstein directed a central question to the addressee: “What is to be done to rid mankind of the war menace?” He suggested a solution: fighting militarism through the example of the “men of real stature,” an intellectual elite. Freud allowed two months’ time before he responded to the physicist in September. At length – but pessimistically. Freud saw “no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity’s aggressive tendencies.” Yet: “Perhaps our hope that these two factors – man’s cultural disposition and a well-founded dread of the form that future wars will take – may serve to put an end to war in the near future, is not chimerical.” He advocated a supranational institution in order to solve the problems of international security and be able to mediate in disputes. Everything that creates bonds of sentiment among people and everything that promotes cultural development must counter war, Freud decided. The correspondence was published with a small number of copies in 1933, just as the National Socialists seized power for themselves. And as the signs once again pointed to war.●

Katja Behling is a journalist and publicist. She lives in Hamburg.