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.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Blumenthal, O., Karl Schwarzschild, Jber. dt. Math.-Verein. 26 (1916), 56–75.
Debever, R. (ed.), Elie Cartan-Albert Einstein, Letters on Absolute Parallelism, 1929-1932, Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, 1979.
Corry, L., Renn, J., Stachel, J., Belated Decision in the Hilbert-Einstein Priority Dispute, Science 278 (1997), 1270–1273.
Earman, J., Glymour, C., Einstein and Hilbert: Two Months in the History of General Relativity, Arch. Hist. Exact Sci. 19 (1978), 291–308.
Earman, J., Janssen, M., Einstein’s Explanation of the Motion of Mercury’s Perihelion, in: Earman, J., Janssen, M., Norton, J.D. (eds.), The Attraction of Gravitation (Einstein Studies, vol. 5), Birkhäuser, Boston, 1993, 129-172.
Einstein, A., Die Feldgleichungen der Gravitation, Sitzungsberichte der Königlichen Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (1915), 844-847.
Einstein, A., Gedächtnisrede des Hrn. Einstein auf Karl Schwarzschild, Sitzungsberichte der Königlichen Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (1916), 768-770.
The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, vol. 5, Engl, trans. Anna Beck, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1995.
The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, The Berlin years: Correspondence, 1914-1918, vol. 8, Schulmann, R., Kox, A.J., Janssen, M., Illy, J., Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1998.
Eisenstaedt, J., The Early Interpretation of the Schwarzschild Solution, in: Howard, D., Stachel, J. (eds.), Einstein and the History of General Relativity (Einstein Studies, vol. 1), Birkhäuser, Boston, 1989, 213-233.
Fölsing, A., Albert Einstein: A Biography, Viking, New York, 1997.
Hentschel, K., Erwin Finlay Freundlich and Testing Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Arch. Hist. Exact Sci. 47 (1994), 143–201.
Hilbert, D., Die Grundlagen der Physik (Erste Mitteilung), Nachrichten der Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, Mathematisch-Physikalische Klasse (1915), 395-407.
Norton, J., How Einstein Found his Field Equations, in: Howard, D., Stachel, J. (eds.), Einstein and the History of General Relativity (Einstein Studies, vol. 1), Birkhäuser, Boston, 1989, 101–159.
Pais, A., Subtle is the Lord…, The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1982.
Pyenson, L., The Young Einstein, Adam Hilger, London, 1986.
Reich, K., Die Entwicklung des Tensorkalküls, Vom absoluten Differentialkalkül zur Relativitätstheorie, Science Networks, vol. 11, Birkhäuser, Basel, 1992.
Renn, J., Sauer, T., Einstein’s Züricher Notizbuch, Physikalische Blätter 52 (1996), 865–872.
Roseveare, N.T., Mercury’s Perihelion from Leverrier to Einstein, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1982.
Seelig, C., Albert Einstein, Europa Verlag, Zürich, 1954.
Stachel, J., Einstein’s Search for General Covariance, 1912-1915 in: Howard, D., Stachel, J. (eds.), Einstein and the History of General Relativity (Einstein Studies, vol. 1), Birkhäuser, Boston, 1989, 63–100.
Vizgin, V.P., Unified Field Theories in the First Third of the 20th Century, Science Networks, vol. 13, Birkhäuser, Basel, 1994.
Weyl, H., Gravitation und Elektrizität, Sitzungsberichte der Königlichen Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (1918), 465-480; reprinted in Engl, trans, in: The Principle of Relativity, A Collection of Original Memoirs by H.A. Lorentz, A. Einstein, H. Minkowski, and H. Weyl, Dover, New York, 1952.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1998 Springer Basel AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rowe, D.E. (1998). Einstein in Berlin. In: Begehr, H., Koch, H., Kramer, J., Schappacher, N., Thiele, EJ. (eds) Mathematics in Berlin. Birkhäuser, Basel. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-8787-8_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-8787-8_14
Publisher Name: Birkhäuser, Basel
Print ISBN: 978-3-7643-5943-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-0348-8787-8
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive