Bitter as never before

David Blackbourn

• Einstein's German World by Fritz Stern
  Princeton, 335 pp, £15.95, October 1999, ISBN 0 691 05939 X

On Einstein’s 50th birthday in 1929, the chemist Fritz Haber wrote to him: ‘In a few centuries the common man will know our time as the period of the World War, but the educated man will connect the first quarter of the century with your name.’ This salute from one German-Jewish Nobel laureate to another was written six months before the Wall Street Crash helped to make National Socialism a mass movement, and it introduces some of Fritz Stern’s central themes. They include the impact of the First World War, which we can now see as the foundational event in the history of the short 20th century, the nature of scientific achievement in an age when science lost its innocence (but not its association with ‘educated men’), and that hardy perennial, the German-Jewish symbiosis. The mood of this essay collection is elegiac. The German edition was called Verspielte Grösse, or ‘Lost Greatness’, with the implication of something that has been gambled away. That something was the prospect of a ‘German century’, ended by what Stern calls a ‘stoppable self-destruction’.