Albert Einstein and World Peace

By LAWRENCE WITTNER

Throughout much of his life, Albert Einstein worked to eliminate violence and to promote world peace. Einstein’s pacifism became known in 1914, shortly after he moved to Berlin to become director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics. When World War I began in the summer of that year, he was shocked: “Europe, in her insanity, has started something unbelievable,” he informed his friend Paul Ehrenfest. “In such times one realizes to what a sad species of animal one belongs.” Writing to the French author and pacifist Romain Rolland, Einstein wondered whether “three centuries of painstaking cultural effort” have “carried us no further than… the insanity of nationalism.”

Unlike most others with misgivings about the war, however, Einstein sought to resist it. He helped draft an antiwar retort with German pacifist George Friedrick Nicolai called the “Manifesto to Europeans.” Condemning “this barbarous war,” the Manifesto argued that “nationalist passions cannot excuse this attitude which is unworthy of what the world has heretofore called culture.” But although the Manifesto was widely circulated, only two other German intellectuals joined Einstein and Nicolai as signatories. Consequently, lacking the support needed to make it effective, the Manifesto was not publicized until years later. Einstein was also founder of the antiwar group the New Fatherland League, which was established around the program of prompt peace without annexations and the formation of a world government to make future wars impossible.

Why, it might be asked, did Einstein, the world-renowned savant, become involved in this dissident—and dangerous—antiwar activity? In part, if seems, because he believed that war fostered irrationality and, also, represented a direct assault upon the sublime order of the universe.

Einstein’s hostility toward war also may have reflected his Judaism. Raised in a nonreligious Jewish household and devoted to scientific inquiry, Einstein considered himself a freethinker and a religious skeptic to the end of his life. Nevertheless, he always considered himself Jewish, at least in part because of the anti-Semitism he encountered as a child. It left him, he recalled, with “a vivid feeling of not belonging” and with some degree of contempt for Jews who abandoned their culture in an effort to assimilate. At roughly the time that he began his antiwar activities, Einstein became involved in Jewish ventures, including Zionism. During his own exile from Nazi Germany, he worked to assist other Jewish refugees from fascist persecution. In 1952, in recognition of his fame and his Jewish commitments, Einstein was even offered the presidency of Israel. And although he declined the position, claiming that he lacked aptitude for the task, he continued to show a keen interest in Israeli affairs.

Certainly, Einstein repeatedly linked pacifism to Jewish traditions. “To be a Jew means to bear a serious responsibility not only to his own community, but also toward humanity,” he declared in 1938. Five years later, he argued that “our Jewish forbears… understood and proclaimed that the most important factor in giving shape to our human existence is the… establishment of… a community of free and happy human beings who… strive to liberate themselves from the inheritance of anti-social and destructive instincts.” In 1949, addressing the Jews of Israel, Einstein declared that one of the most significant Jewish ideals “is peace, based on understanding and self-restraint, not on violence.”

Sometimes Einstein’s pacifism and internationalism clashed with his Jewish commitments, but only modestly. For one thing, Einstein advanced a rather relaxed form of Zionism, arguing that it meant a respect for Jewish rights around the world. Moreover, appalled by Arab-Jewish violence in Palestine, he pleaded for cooperation between the two groups. Even after the partition of Palestine and the war that secured Israel’s independence, Einstein regretted the failure to secure an Arab-Jewish agreement, which he blamed on British imperialism, and chided Israeli Jews because their relations with the Arabs fell short of the Jewish ideal of peace.

But the greatest challenge to Einstein’s pacifism would arrive with the Nazi takeover of Germany and the launching of the nation’s imperialist juggernaut in 1933. By that time, Einstein had already declared that “the world has had enough of war” and engaged Sigmund Freud in a famous public exchange of letters in 1932 on the abolition of war, which focused on the role of “cultural development” in fostering pacifism. And yet, a year after that exchange Einstein reluctantly dropped his staunch pacifism. In his heart, he said, he continued to “loathe violence and militarism as much as ever; but I cannot shut my eyes to realities.” For this reason, Einstein became of proponent of collective security against fascism. In 1939, Einstein agreed to dispatch a letter of warning to President Franklin Roosevelt about the possibilities of Germany producing an atomic bomb.

Einstein considered the ensuing Manhattan Project as no more than an insurance policy against the waging of atomic war by Nazi Germany. Therefore, as Germany’s war effort neared collapse and with no sign that U.S. officials shared his perspective, he encouraged Roosevelt to forgo the use of atomic bombs by the United States. Moreover, he wrote an impassioned appeal to Niels Bohr arguing that scientists must take the lead in heading off a postwar nuclear arms race. To Einstein’s dismay, neither effort proved successful. Viewing the atomic bombing of Japan as a catastrophe, he later remarked that his letter to Roosevelt had been the worst mistake of his life. Convinced that humanity now faced the prospect of utter annihilation, Einstein threw himself into a new campaign for peace: “We shall require substantially new manner of thinking,” he insisted, “if mankind is to survive.”

Einstein’s last peace appeal appeared posthumously. In the final months of his life, he had been working closely with Bertrand Russell to fashion a public critique of war by the world’s most eminent scientists. Written largely by Russell and released by him on July 9, this Russell-Einstein Appeal, as it came to be known, made the case that in the nuclear age, there was no alternative to the abolition of war. “We are speaking… not as members of this or that nation continent or creed, but as human beings… whose continued existence is in doubt,” declared the Appeal. People “have to learn to think in a new way. We have to learn to ask ourselves, not what steps can be taken to give military victory to whatever groups we prefer” but “what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous.” Must people “choose death because we cannot forget our quarrels?” it asked. “We appeal, as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity and forget the rest.”

As the last document Einstein ever signed, the Appeal provides a revealing glimpse at his final thoughts, as well as at those humane concerns that animated so much of his life.

“Albert Einstein and World Peace” originally appeared (in slightly longer form) in The Challenge of Shalom (New Society Publishers, 1994), edited by Murray Polner and Naomi Goodman. “Albert Einstein and World Peace” is reprinted with author’s permission.