American Scientist reported that “Levenson does a superb job of conveying the unusual relationship Einstein had with Berlin, neither ever fully at ease with the other… Einstein in Berlin is a fine book on a subject that has simply cried out for a readable narrative account.” This book tells that story, using Einstein’s unique vantage to examine how a time and a place with (in some sense) every advantage and great reserves of intellectual and cultural accomplishment managed to destroy itself, and so much besides.

And he was a committed political activist from the earliest days of the war, playing a part and serving as witness to Germany’s descent into Nazism. He witnessed and even became a a symbol, of Berlin’s post-World War I cultural renaissance. Those eighteen years in Berlin saw Einstein reach the height of his scientific career he made his greatest discover there, the account of gravity known as the General Theory of Relativity, and went on to give birth to modern cosmology, help lay the foundations of modern quantum theory, and much more besides. By the time Einstein left Berlin in December of 1932, the plunge into the abyss was complete in a development already clearly on the cards, Hitler would become Chancellor the next month. Four months later, Germany and its allies and opponents tragi-comically stumbled into continent- and then world-wide war. Europe as a whole understood itself as – and was - master of most of the world, directly as imperial rulers, and indirectly, through the wealth concentrated there, its science and its machines, and the evident superiority of its culture, its ways of living and thinking. In April 1914, the month Albert Einstein came to Berlin, Germany’s capital was the center of the most powerful state in Europe, an ambitious and hungry city that prided itself on its pre-eminence – in knowledge, technical capacity, in culture and all the apparatus of modern living. I wrote this book for one reason: I wanted to understand how the 20th century went to hell, so thoroughly and so fast.

The other einstein