Einstein Defiant: Genius Versus Genius in the Quantum Revolution

NOT GERMAN AT ALL 13

to make him. Then, as the pastor was about to begin his sermon,
Baader rose and shouted out, “Just a minute. I’m asking you what Jesus
Christ means to you. . .”.
He had more to say but already there was a commotion. Baader
was seized and silenced. The authorities wanted to charge him with
blasphemy, but the speaking notes he carried demanded only greater
respect for Jesus. The next day Berlin’s newspapers were full of tales of
Baader’s “insult” to propriety. Baader was one of those strange proph-
ets, a member of the Dada movement, trying to rescue Berlin.
Dada was provocateur art that sought to replace “bourgeois” Eu-
rope with the ideals of international art. Its aims cannot be defined
more precisely.The previous summer, in a famous statement of enthu-
siastic contradiction, the Berlin Dadaists had issued a manifesto that
concluded, “To be against this manifesto is to be a Dadaist!”
That was Dada’s version of a Yes-No reply, and if Einstein thought
he could get away with saying,“To reject Zürich’s offer is to accept it,”
he probably would have tried. Might the land of strict accounting and
precision clocks accept such an answer? Well, Zürich was Dada’s birth-
place. Guarded by the Alps, neutral Zürich had long avoided the fates
of Paris and Berlin, cities on the plains where armed warriors found
easy maneuver. Lenin and James Joyce were Switzerland’s most fa-
mous anti-war refugees, but many anonymous ones had come there as
well to express, under authority of their own souls, their visions. Some
anti-warriors with artistic imaginations had, at a boîte called the Caba-
ret Voltaire, begun a protest movement that spread to the warring
capitals on both sides of the battle lines. When the war ended, Dada
and communism were the only radical movements found in both the
conquered and conquering nations. Communism was already becom-
ing a Soviet tool, but Dada remained a decentralized, international
movement. It marked postwar Germany’s encounter with romantic
irrationality.
One of Dada’s earliest statements boasted, “The Cabaret’s role is
to remind us that, beyond the war and nationalities, there are inde-
pendent men who live by other ideals.” It sounds like a movement
Einstein could have joined, and, indeed, he was as independent and as
anti-national as any Dada poet. Einstein saw science the way Dada’s

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