Einstein in Berlin

Abstract

On 12 November 1913, Kaiser Wilhelm II officially approved the appointment of Albert Einstein to membership in the Prussian Academy of Sciences. The following month Einstein accepted an offer, arranged by Max Planck and Walther Nernst, to become director of the newly established Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin. Thus began the most dramatic period in a singularly eventful career. Aside from a brief stay in Prague, Einstein had spent his entire adult life in Switzerland, where since 1912 he was professor of physics at the ETH in Zürich. Although born and raised in southern Germany, he had given up German citizenship in 1896 to become a Swiss citizen five years later. Accepting the offers from Berlin thus meant not only leaving these familiar surroundings but also giving them up to enter the hectic scientific life and turbulent political atmosphere of late Wilhelmian Germany. Few, least of all someone like Einstein, could have imagined the precarious events that lay just ahead. Einstein’s arrival nearly coincided with the outbreak of the war that eventually brought about the fall of imperial Germany; his departure for the United States in December 1932 came as the Weimar Republic found itself on the brink of collapse. He broke his own official ties with Berlin by resigning from the Prussian Academy on 28 March 1933, eight days after a band of Nazis raided his unoccupied summer home in Caputh.