Einstein in Berlin by Thomas Levenson

Author:Thomas Levenson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-05-22T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

“THAT BUSINESS ABOUT CAUSALITY”

At about 10:40 a.m. on June 24, 1922, Walther Rathenau left his house in the countrified suburbs of Berlin. He settled into the backseat of his jaunty open car. His chauffeur got behind the wheel. There was no need for conversation between the two. Rathenau, appointed Germany’s foreign minister less than three months before, drove to work each day along the same route at much the same time. The driver put the car in gear and set out as usual up the Königsallee. Germans are often parodied as creatures of order, and there was never a man who more aspired to be the perfect German than Rathenau. By mid-1922 in Berlin, however, his precision had become not so much a routine as an invitation.

Rathenau’s driver drove on sedately, hugging the middle of the road. About three blocks from the house he slowed to cross a set of streetcar tracks. As he did so, a six-seater open touring car drew level with Rathenau’s automobile. There were a driver and a young man in the front and two more young men in the back, all wearing leather coats and driving caps. A witness said that Rathenau looked over, as if worried the cars might crash. At that moment, Erwin Kern, twenty-five years old, a former navy officer, leaned from the window of the overtaking car. He rested the butt of his automatic pistol on his other arm and aimed at Rathenau. The range was no more than a few feet. Rathenau was looking at his killer as the man fired. Kern shot rapidly, five times—the witness said it sounded like a machine gun—and Rathenau slumped over. As he fell, one of Kern’s accomplices stood up and pitched a hand grenade into Rathenau’s car.

Rathenau’s driver pulled over, then sped on to the nearest police station. As he drove, the grenade went off, jolting the car forward. The driver kept the car moving, though, and a young woman walking by, a nurse named Helene Kaiser, leaped into the passenger compartment. “Rathenau, who was bleeding hard, was still alive,” she said. “He looked up at me, but seemed to be already unconscious.”1 The chauffeur turned the car around and raced back to Rathenau’s house. His bleeding body was carried inside and set down in the study. By the time the doctor arrived, Walther Rathenau was dead.

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EINSTEIN’S FRIENDSHIP with Rathenau dated back to the war. It was a unique relationship, perhaps the only one in which the arrogant and exceptionally successful Rathenau acknowledged someone else’s intellectual superiority. In their initial encounters, Rathenau emerges as a kind of academically ambitious puppy attempting to attract the notice and approval of the scientist. In mid-1917, for example, he sent off a truly extraordinary letter commenting on Einstein’s physics in a series of brief queries, including a rather grim (and prescient) reinterpretation of the simultaneity thought experiment. Instead of Einstein’s two lightning bolts striking a moving train, Rathenau imagined a scene in which an assassin tosses two sticks of dynamite onto a train carrying the czar of all the Russias.

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