Einstein's German World by Fritz Stern, Albert Einstein

From the Publisher

In 1900, Germany was Europe's preeminent power, poised to achieve greatness. Here Fritz Stern explores the ambiguous promise of Germany before Hitler, as well as its horrifying decline under Nazi rule, and aspects of its remarkable recovery since World War II. Stern gracefully blends history and biography in a sequence of finely drawn studies of Germany's great scientists and of German-Jewish relations before and during Hitler's regime. He also examines the challenges and prospects facing Germany today.

The Wall Street Journal - Omer Barov

[The] heart of the book concerns the relationship between Albert Einstein and Fritz Haber, the German-Jewish nationalist who invented a process to extract nitrogen from the air. Haber was involved in the production and use of gas in warfare and worked on the insecticide, later known as Zyklon-B, that was used in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Here, in the friendship and mutual admiration of these two men with opposing personalities and world views, we have a fascinating portrayal of the ambiguities, contradictions and vicissitudes of German-Jewish scientists in the first decades of the century. Through the prism of their private lives, we come to understand something about the fabric of this world that no abstract social or cultural theory can provide....But it was a bright and shining moment, and we should thank Fritz Stern for bringing it back to life so vividly.

Times Literary Supplement - Michael Burleigh

Elegiac, subtle and wide-ranging, Fritz Stern's book goes a long way to restoring one's hopes for a Germany that once included Einstein.

Foreign Affairs - Stanley Hoffmann

A superb and gripping collection of essays. The book's first half depicts how a group of distinguished German Jews grappled with German antisemitism, World War I, and their predicament as German patriots in a nation that did not fully trust them. The immunologist Paul Ehrlich, the physicist Max Planck, and the chemist Fritz Haber (who helped produce poison gas during World War I) all supported the German war cause; only Albert Einstein remained antimilitaristic and embraced Zionism. Meanwhile, industrialist and statesman Walther Rathenau was deeply ambivalent about his Judaism, holding the Prussian officer up as his ideal. With subtlety and compassion, Stern also offers a fine biographical sketch of Chaim Weizmann, the great Zionist leader whose faith in Great Britain later turned into bitter disappointment.

Financial Times - Jackie Wullschlager

Stern's portrait of [Einstein] is sparklingly comic and profound....He writes with the wisdom and truth of a historian who never fails to empathize with the human uncertainty and frailty that operate in extreme as well as everyday historical conditions....No one has written better on the country's rise and fall than Fritz Stern.

Nature

Revealing, absorbing, and often poignant....Fritz Stenr's writing has an unmatched authority and a magisterial sweep that throws a brilliant light on the tragic disintegration of a noble culture, one in which science reigned supreme.

Foreign Affairs

A superb and gripping collection of essays.

London Review of Books

Fritz Stern is alive to moral and historical ambiguity, arguing that there is no simple judgement on the compromises of a Max Planck, any more that there is a simple way to characterize German-Jewish relations or the circumstances that made the Holocaust possible.

Publishers Weekly

Distinguished historian Stern (Gold and Iron, Dreams and Delusions, etc.) presents a rich collection of essays--some scholarly, others more personal--written during the past decade. The book's first part centers around the lives of four visionary scientists (Paul Ehrlich, Max Planck, Fritz Haber and Albert Einstein), allowing Stern to draw attention to what he calls "Germany's second Geniezeit," or Age of Genius, an era filled with great promise and yet punctuated by war and violence. His subjects, internationally acclaimed figures in modern science, were also committed German patriots, all of whom (except Einstein) were outspoken supporters of the German war effort in 1914. The extended chapter on Haber and Einstein meticulously documents the careers of these two highly assimilated German Jews who, despite numerous obstacles, managed to become leading public intellectuals of their time. In the second half of the book, Stern reevaluates major debates concerning the First World War, German unification, the representation of the Holocaust and contemporary German-Polish relations. Without ever pointing an accusatory finger, Stern's approach helps readers to grasp how the extraordinary potential for "what could have been "Germany's century" ended so disastrously. Stern launches a corrective to the notion of German peculiarity, insisting instead on the greater universal import of interpreting the German past. As he persuasively argues, "No country, no society, is shielded from the evils that the passivity of decent citizens can bring about. That is a German lesson of the twentieth century--for all of us." (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Columbia historian Stern (Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichr der and the Building of the German Empire) presents a collection of compelling essays written over the last decade. The loose theme of the first section is Jewish men who succeeded in pre-Nazi Germany; in the second section, Stern delves into themes of current German historiography. Collections of essays can be uneven in quality, but the only weakness here is an essay on Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, which seems out of place. "Historians and the Great War" is a fascinating look at how personal experience in the trenches of World War I affected the later writing of historians. "The Past Distorted: The Goldhagen Controversy," in which Stern points out flaws in Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners (LJ 3/15/96), is worth the price of the book. Biographical essays on Paul Ehrlich, Max Planck, Fritz Haber, and Walther Rathenau illuminate figures who have not received much attention in English-language publications. Highly recommended for academic libraries and any public library that holds Goldhagen's book.--Randall L. Schroeder, Wartburg Coll. Lib., Waverly, IA Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

The Jerusalem Post - Meir Ronnen

However, central to historian Fritz Stern's setting of Einstein against his German background is Einstein's long friendship with the brilliant German chemist Fritz Haber. Each in his own way was a humanist, but their relations to their Fatherland and their common Jewish background were startlingly different. The value of Professor Stern's account of Haber's career is in demonstrating that this notable German patriot was everything that Einstein was not. Einstein despised everything connected with imperial German society and its values. Early on, he fled from army service and its mindless drills to a haven in Switzerland. He later saw the Great War and German jingoism as an eruption of madness. His pacifism did not endear him to Germany; there were calls for his detention.

The Washington Times - Viola Herm Drath

In his wide-ranging collection of nine essays, lectures and Festschriften, the eminent historian Fritz Stern, who grew up in Germany "in the shadow of the First World War," assembles a complex mosaic - mainly from historical and personal profiles of eminent Jewish scientists - illustrating the attitudes, prejudices, complexities, intricacies and subtle ambiguities of the relationship between Germans and Jews before Adolf Hitler and thereafter. Anti-Semitism, Mr. Stern finds, came in the most diverse guises - from irritation at Jewish successes to paranoid fear and fury at the thought of Jewish power threatening German life and virtue. He dismisses the view that the rabid anti-Semitism in Hitler's party was a reflection of the sentiments of German culture and questions theories that it formed an important bond between Hitler and the German population.

Kirkus Reviews

This volume brings together a decade's collection of essays that brilliantly profile the lives of key figures—primarily German and Jewish—in the context and in the aftermath of the century's two world wars. Stern, a noted historian and Columbia University professor emeritus, brings enormous scholarship as well as personal memoir to the history. Stern was the godson of the chemist Fritz Haber, who, with Einstein, is the subject of the book's centerpiece, a marvelous study in contrasts. Haber was a Jew who converted to Protestantism. He was also a loyal German, dedicating his Nobel-winning talents to research to further arms development and even chemical warfare (he thought it more benign than weapons that killed). Einstein not only remained Jewish, but was forever contemptuous of Germany and thoroughly pacifist. Yet the two remained friends; and Stern illuminates their emotional and temperamental bonds—-keen intellects, unhappy marriages, a deep love and passion for research. Here and throughout the volume, Stern describes the complexity of being German and Jewish—what it was like to recognize one's status as second-class citizen yet also to attain elite status as eminent scientist or statesman. On the other hand, Stern also provides a sympathetic portrait of Max Planck, a non-Jew who was a patriot but unhappy at the plight of his Jewish colleagues and who tried to help when he could. Stern also provides portraits of Paul Ehrlich and Chaim Weizmann, an essay on German historians, and speculations on the future of Germany since reunification. These nuanced essays see complexity and contradictions in human behavior against the background of German history sinceBismarck. They thus set the stage for Stern's essay attacking as simplistic, unhistorical, and distorted Daniel Goldenhagen's thesis that Germans en masse were Hitler's willing executioners in the Holocaust. A combination of passion and compassion mark Stern as not only a dedicated and gifted historian, but also one committed to the hope, expressed by Vaclav Havel, that humankind may yet learn to live in trust and in truth.

What People Are Saying

The essays are clearly from a master's hand--well-crafted, thoughtful, learned, and wise. The biographical essays display Stern's gifts as a portraitist. With a few swift and confident strokes, he captures a series of extraordinary characters at moments of personal and public crisis. The historiographical essays display the author's critical intelligence and synthetic ability.

Abraham Pais
Stern,prominent historian of Germany,who knew Einstein personally,a cousin of the late Otto Stern,intimate friend of Einstein,is uniquely qualified to write of Einstein's world. His main essay on Einstein and Haber,Stern's godfather,brilliantly sketches the contrast between those who saw the Nazi threat in time and those who saw it too late. A splendid book.

Richard Holbrooke
This wide-ranging collection of essays reminds us again that Fritz Stern is a living national treasure -- in both Germany and the United States. It will interest and delight anyone who wishes to think deeply about how and why Germany,with all its potential,wrecked the century that it tried to dominate,and left a legacy that haunts us still. From Einstein to Goldhagen,Fritz Stern shows us again the extraordinary depth of his historical insights,and raises our understanding to a different level.

Max Perutz
Stern gives us penetrating character sketches of eminent Jews in pre-Nazi Germany,and he makes us feel for those whose lives ended in tragedy.

Ambassador Richard Holbrooke
This wide-ranging collection of essays reminds us again that Fritz Stern is a living national treasure -- in both Germany and the United States. It will interest and delight anyone who wishes to think deeply about how and why Germany, with all its potential, wrecked the century that it tried to dominate, and left a legacy that haunts us still. From Einstein to Goldhagen, Fritz Stern shows us again the extraordinary depth of his historical insights, and raises our understanding to a different level.

James Sheehan
The essays are clearly from a master's hand--well-crafted,thoughtful,learned,and wise. The biographical essays display Stern's gifts as a portraitist. With a few swift and confident strokes,he captures a series of extraordinary characters at moments of personal and public crisis. The historiographical essays display the author's critical intelligence and synthetic ability.

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INTRODUCTION

The small circle of men who earlier were bound
together harmoniously was really unique and in
its human decency something I scarcely encountered again.
—Einstein to Max von Laue, 1934, about their common past in Berlin

You ask about my attitude to Germany . . . I can
best express it metaphorically: I feel like a
mother who sees that her favorite child has gone
hopelessly astray.
—Lise Meitner to a Dutch physicist friend, October 1945

A country of mass murderers.
—Einstein to Max Born, October 12, 1953

IT WAS IN April 1979 in West Berlin. Raymond Aron and I were walking to an exhibit commemorating the centenary of the births of Einstein, Max von Laue, Otto Hahn, and Lise Meitner. We were passing bombed-out squares and half-decrepit mansions of a once proud capital, our thoughts already at the exhibit, when Aron suddenly stopped at a crossing, turned to me, and said, "It could have been Germany's Century." Aron, French scholar and Jew who had studied in Berlinin the early 1930s and had seen German promise turn to nemesis, mused on what might have been. In the ensuing years I have extended my studies of German scientists, of German creativity and destruction, which I had already begun then. In preparing this work on Einstein's German world for publication twenty years later, I recognize the resonance of the theme that Aron had so casually, so memorably set.

In the history of modern Europe, there has always been a preeminent power—successively Spain, France, Holland, Britain—a nation that combined material strength with cultural greatness. In the three decades before the Great War, Germany was the country in ascendancy, and its physical power, with its strident militaristic ethos, seemed to be balanced by cultural, especially scientific achievement. This was Germany's first chance to achieve European preeminence. The only other country at the time growing with similar dynamic energy was the United States, it too marked by immense material power, embarked on an imperial course, and exemplary in the promotion of scientific-technological innovation. The German theologian and academic statesman Adolf von Harnack was right when he said in 1907: "Geographically America is for us among civilized countries the most distant; intellectually and spiritually, however, the closest and most like us." In the twentieth century these two powers had violent alternations of intimacy and enmity; the American Century began as the German one ended. And for the last half of this century, historians have tried to understand the German question. Increasingly they have sought their answers in what I have always believed is its inescapable context, Europe, a context I now happily realize includes the United States as well. This book is part of that quest.

In the late eighteenth century a cultural renaissance erupted in the German lands; Europeans, in awe of artistic and philosophic achievements, began to speak of Germany as a land of poets and thinkers. Germans themselves referred to that period, roughly 1770-1830, as the Age of Genius, the Geniezeit. (For Germans, the word Genie has a special ring, denoting creative powers of demonic magnitude.) By the mid-nineteenth century in economic terms, after 1871 and unification in political terms, and by the end of the century in scientific-technological terms—Germany was transformed into a country of doers and innovators, of world-renowned natural scientists still steeped in Germany's humanistic culture. The very names of Einstein, Ehrlich, Planck, and Haber—and the extended and sometimes fractious family of scientists among whom they lived and worked—evoke the greatness of this period, expressed as it was also in German culture more broadly defined, when German writers and artists had the intuition of uneasy modernity. This might be called Germany's second Geniezeit, one fraught with danger.

Einstein's German world illustrates the ambiguities of German greatness—even before the Great War began the nation's process of stoppable self-destruction. We see clusters of excellence in the lives of some of its representative individuals; they were imbued with a faith in science that was then still innocent, a faith akin to religion; they were shielded by ties of friendship, supported by a disciplined society, driven by organized ambition, empowered by an unrivaled educational system.* German science and German society were intricately linked—hence the historian may justifiably pay heed to the nonscientific aspects of the scientists' lives.

By the late nineteenth century, Germany had developed an academic-industrial and, later, military complex that was supported and sustained by its authoritarian state, whose leaders combined class-induced political myopia with a confident grasp of the immense utility of science. Fritz Haber, inventor of the process for the fixation of nitrogen from the air, was one of the first German scientists to forge exceptionally close and profitable ties to German industry. In his and other scientists' lives we see the attractiveness of this new and dynamic Germany, and often an almost unreflective subservience to the state. In the case of Einstein, there was a distaste for Germany's authoritarian militarism, whose most aggressive elements became dominant in the Great War and survived after Germany's defeat, in infinitely more embittered fashion, subverting the brave attempts to build a German democracy on the ruins of the old empire. Einstein's comprehensive yet simplistic hostility to what might be called the official Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm's times, like his experience of nationalist rage in Weimar Germany, had an analogue in the deep anxiety over Germany's political capability expressed by self-conscious patriots such as Walther Rathenau, Max Weber, and the theologian Ernst Troeltsch.

Put too simply, Germany's elites—most especially the materially declining old agrarian-feudal class, many of the rising captains of industry and banking, and the professoriate—saw themselves as guardians of the nation's special character; they thought or imagined that Germany was beset by a ring of external enemies, and more importantly by internal enemies. The mounting tide of Social Democracy seemed to them to threaten their values, their privilege, their property.* Only a nation so internally divided could have welcomed the outbreak of war in 1914 with the extravagant hope that war would unify its people through sacrifice. Instead, the long war—conducted on the German side under ever more radical leadership—bred an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust that, upon Germany's defeat, erupted into both actual and latent civil war. Rathenau's life and his assassination in 1922 exemplify the travails of the postwar Weimar Republic, the impressive efforts made to salvage German promise that finally the horror of National Socialism totally perverted.

Einstein's German world was one in which Christians and Jews (or individuals of Jewish descent) lived and worked together; in the relatively protected realm of science, prejudice against Jews gradually yielded to a recognition of talent and of shared values. (In the Protestant states of Germany, Catholics probably fared worse than Jews—and the conflict between the two Christian religions ran very deep.) German society as a whole was rife with every kind of prejudice—anti-Semitism came in the most diverse guises—from irritation at Jewish success to paranoid fear and fury at the thought of Jewish power threatening German life and virtue. So while German Jews before 1914 prospered in spite of and sometimes even because of these rampant prejudices, they did so at great psychic cost, as the lives of Haber and Rathenau make clear. In no other country were Jews met with so peculiar a mixture of hospitality and hostility, while being so attracted to a country that in many ways treated them—still or forever more?—as second-class citizens. Chaim Weizmann had contempt for what he regarded as ignoble servility and wanted to deliver Jews from it. The full range of Jewish responses to German life before Hitler emerges in these various lives, as does the still terrifying failure of the German elites to resist Hitler's march to total power. That failure was the precondition of Nazi success.

ON earlier occasions I have acknowledged that I find the essay a particularly congenial mode: it allows for a more speculative, a more tentative tone, for a more personal voice. Some of the essays in this book were originally given in the form of lectures; some of them involved extensive study in private and public archives on three continents, a journey of discovery that was a pleasure in itself. My focus is largely biographical; I have tried to find the points where private lives and public realms intersect that illuminate them both. In a life like Planck's we see the collision between the commands of personal integrity and the commands of criminal political power.

The work of historians, their spoken and unspoken premises, have been an abiding interest of mine. We know that history is both a science—or an academic discipline—and an art, that the very openness of the past and the role of contingency within it demand analytical and imaginative judgment, both of which are affected by the historians' engagement with their own times. Hence my concern with the response of major historians to the experience of the Great War: their interpretations influenced the development of the discipline itself and, as always, they helped to mold a people's collective memory; their work is often a political datum. Beyond obeying the austere demands of their professional discipline, historians bear a moral responsibility, and the greater the reach, the heavier the responsibility.

The centrality and, eventually, the terror of German history in our century have made its study and interpretation compelling and infinitely complex. The record of German historians before Hitler—to say nothing of their record under Hitler—was largely dictated by nationalist imperatives and, in the Weimar years, by a studied avoidance of the self-critical inquiries that Germans often call fouling your own nest. Immediately after 1945, there was among German historians a wish to explain National Socialism as having been an aberration, an accident of German history.* Allied publicists—not historians— painted a similarly distorted picture in reverse, insisting that National Socialism was the very culmination of German history, a view that the National Socialists had themselves propagated. What has been achieved in the half-century since has been extraordinary: a gradual reexamination of German history and the place of National Socialism in it, beginning within Germany with the work of Karl-Dietrich Bracher in the mid-1950s and continuing with several generations of truly outstanding German historians, not to mention non-Germans such as Alan Bullock or Gordon Craig or James Sheehan, who have contributed so much to an understanding of the German past. These years have witnessed great historical debates, but they no longer run along nationalist lines; German history has been largely integrated into European and international history and freed from narrow ideological entrapments. A recent exception—Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust—has had the unusual fate of being sharply criticized by historians yet widely read by a public that seems to welcome simplistic answers to the most terrifying questions. I have included my own essay on this historiographical-political phenomenon.

Some of these essays bear a personal note. I caught glimpses of the world I wrote about, I learned from many conversations, I read candid letters of the past. Some of the lectures express my concern for those Germans who have committed themselves to build and preserve a liberal society and a democratic state, for the colleagues who with such acuity and professional energy have analyzed German history and have helped to build an international community of scholars.

In the same personal vein I have written of present-day events. I was thrilled by the world-historical transformation of 1989 and the self-liberation of Eastern Europe, but I was concerned about the long-term psychological difficulties of uniting the peoples of two German states held apart for so long. I realized that formal unification gave Germany that rarest of opportunities, a second chance: this time to become the preeminent power of Europe in a peaceful fashion. To seize that chance would require rare feats of statesmanship and the recognition of the responsibilities of power. One instance of such statesmanship has been the belated reconciliation between Germany and Poland, to which I devote the final and most personal essay. "Lost Homelands" is an all-too-human experience of our collective past.

It has not been Germany's century—at least not in the sense that Aron meant that it might have been. But German terror, at its most savage in the Holocaust, haunts the moral imagination of all of us. It could not be otherwise. There are also lessons to be learned from the German catastrophe, one of which was intimated in a letter Lise Meitner wrote in 1945: "It is tragic," she remarked, "that even people like Laue and Otto [Hahn] did not understand to what fate their passivity delivered their own country." No country, no society, is shielded from the evils that the passivity of decent citizens can bring about. That is a German lesson of the twentieth century—for all of us.

Read a Sample Chapter

Chapter One

Paul Ehrlich: The Founder of
Chemotherapy

* * *

A natural scientist must be at once a general and a spy.

Richard Willstätter, 1913

* * *

In May 1990 I gave the opening lecture at the dedication of the new Paul Ehrlich Institute in Langen, near Frankfurt am Main. The lecture, a historical-biographical portrait, was followed by a scientific symposium. Subsequently, my friend Günther Schwerin, Paul Ehrlich's grandson, presented Rockefeller University with the complete Ehrlich Archive, which he had ingeniously retrieved after the Second World War. To make use of these materials proved irresistible, and I revised the previously unpublished lecture utilizing these new and untapped sources. I am indebted to the Rockefeller Archive Center in Tarrytown, New York, for their friendly assistance.

* * *

I am a historian with but a limited knowledge of the natural sciences. Still, I have been trying to understand certain aspects of the history of science in the decades preceding and following the First World War, chancing into this area as a result of my research on Fritz Haber and Albert Einstein, their circle of friends, and the political-scientific ambience they worked in. I was fascinated by these figures, and especially intrigued by their devotion to a science that then still seemed to be innocent, untainted. One could sense the passion that inspired their great accomplishments. What, we may ask, were theprerequisites for their commitment and success? What was the scientific ethos of the era? What factors lay behind that burst of creativity which propelled German scientists to such prodigious and pioneering achievements?

    The life of an individual scientist, such as Paul Ehrlich, may help to shed light on the wellsprings of scientific progress. He was both genius and a representative figure. Though he was totally centered on and committed to his research, with little interest in the world about him, that world—and his friends and rivals—helped to shape his life. His biography shows how external factors both impeded and facilitated his creativity. Perhaps there is a certain gap in our understanding of these interrelations: literature in the natural sciences often neglects the human-historical dimension, while historians until recently have paid too little attention to the sociopolitical importance of natural scientists.

    I realize that the historical guild may view my fascination with the human side of natural scientists as old-fashioned at best. The great physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz once spoke about the "inner psychological history" of science; even Einstein stressed the "reciprocity between scientific accomplishment and greatness of character." Though one can be intrigued by that "inner" history, one must not lose sight of the close connections in earlier eras between scientists and the intellectual, political, and economic world.

    Sheer energy and fortitude, disciplined intuition and stamina, appear to be determinative in the life of the scientist, despite the dangers and disappointments they experience. And in Germany during the early years of the twentieth century, there were geniuses of research. The word "genius" in German has a special overtone, even a tinge of the demonic, a mysterious power and energy; a genius—whether artist or scientist—is considered to have a special vulnerability, a precariousness, a life of constant risk and often close to troubled turmoil. It was precisely in the same era that Thomas Mann embarked on his lifelong preoccupation with and analysis of the vulnerability of the artist. Artists and great scientists have a certain affinity. Someone observed that although Ehrlich "never created works of art in the strict sense, he had qualities closely akin to those of the artist." There are also many differences: the artist is commonly an isolate, living in a kind of permanent jeopardy; the scientist, by contrast, usually has an institutional home, a cluster of collegiality and even friendship that makes bearable the inevitable frictions and occasional meanspiritedness of colleagues. Ehrlich had his full taste of the good and the bad—the latter perhaps more clearly discernible in the private correspondence.

    In writings by and about Ehrlich, certain words recur: "genius," "leader," "warrior-hero." This is also true of Rudolf Virchow, Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, and many others. It was how they were characterized, and it was the tone of public praise. Theirs was a historical moment in which often heroic individual researchers, putting their very lives at risk, forged a new world. Ehrlich's generation stood on the threshold of what the theologian Adolf Harnack termed in 1905 "science as a large-scale enterprise." And perhaps more than anyone else, Paul Ehrlich proved just how much one individual could accomplish: thanks to his discoveries in the laboratory, clinicians were able to save countless lives. The later historian Felix Gilbert was correct in observing that "in the intellectual life of the modern era, natural scientists became the new heroes."

    I believe that Paul Ehrlich, born in 1854, was part of a second Age of Genius in Germany, indeed one of its key representatives. Only recently have we recognized this era for what it was, an era of pioneering discovery and invention when scientific and experimental medicine was making its first huge strides. In Germany the enormous advances made in the chemical industry during the nineteenth century, and the invention of synthetic dyes, became the foundation for progress in biological and virological research. There was widespread, unbounded faith in the perfection of empirical or positivistic science—a conviction that humans could comprehend nature and control its forces. Rudolf Virchow, physician, research scientist, and a fierce champion of liberalism against Bismarck, speaking in 1865 at the fortieth Congress of German Natural Scientists and Physicians, observed: "For us, science has become a religion." And in 1873: "We too have a creed: faith in the progress of our knowledge of the truth." Emil Du Bois-Reymond spoke of "natural science as the world conqueror in our day." Until the First World War, this was the predominant tone in the world of science and industry. At the founding convention of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Society in January 1911, the renowned chemist Emil Fischer—in Ehrlich's presence and alluding to his work—declared that the future did not lie in the conquest of colonial empires; rather, "chemistry and with it, more generally, all of natural science is the true land of boundless opportunities." And there was solid evidence to back up this faith: practical knowledge was triumphing in the struggles against infection, against epidemic diseases, against the scourge of infant mortality.

    In public, many scientists averred their trust in the progress and potential of science, yet in numerous unpublished documents—private letters from Ehrlich, Einstein, Haber, and Willstätter, for example—one can sense their unpretentiousness, their doubts, their dissatisfaction with their own work. This was precisely because they were animated by such a powerful faith in science: the more lofty the aspirations of science as a collective enterprise, the more understandable the modesty of the individual researcher. Certainly there were also human frailties: ambition, jealousy, desire for fame. But Willstätter's plea to Ehrlich in 1903 was characteristic: "Please lower very greatly the scientific assessment you so generously accord me. I find it depressing to be overestimated by a research scientist for whom I have such great admiration. I feel I'm just a beginner."

    The advance of natural science also had critics and opponents—Nietzsche, for example, and, in an analogous but different way, Max Weber—who sensed the profound hazards lurking in the unqualified faith in science. There were also groups of people who thought that science endangered their interests, who imagined that positivistic science threatened their monopoly on morals in education and religion. We know that various church and religious leaders opposed the claims of science. Distortions and misunderstandings abounded. Many of the great scientists experienced in themselves a sense of the mystery of the universe; they hoped to serve and aid humanity without destroying its faith in the abiding mystery of the universe.

    Paul Ehrlich was born into this world of progress, which he came to enrich with singular success. He was born in 1854 in Strehlen (now a Polish town, Strzelin), near Breslau (Wroclaw), the son of a prosperous Silesian-Jewish family. His scientific interests were awakened by his mother's cousin, the distinguished pathologist Carl Weigert. Already as a medical student he was fascinated by physiological research and recognized the huge potential for physiological experimentation that industrially manufactured dyes made possible. He had a special "love," as Willstätter noted, for the new dyes, especially methylene blue and its potential as a biological reagent. And he had an intuitive grasp of the bond linking chemistry, biology, and medicine. His earliest investigations led him to the concept that governed his future work: "that chemical affinities govern all biological processes." It was "the dawn of that great age in which medicine and chemistry forged their alliance for the benefit of all mankind," as Otto Warburg wrote.

    Ehrlich's path as a scientist was not an easy one. He was a loner: though a physician, he was unwilling to enter clinical practice; though a researcher, he was devoid of ambition to teach. There had already been renowned successes in biomedical research, such as Pasteur's developing a vaccine for rabies. Ehrlich worked in the developing field of immunology, convinced that the body's natural immune system could be fortified by chemical means. Finally, it was he who invented chemotherapy, indeed coined the term. But neither his passion for independence nor his work plans fitted the structure of scientific research at the time. Only the support given him by three exceptional personalities gave him the chance to develop his brilliant gifts to the full.

    In 1878, the famous internist Theodor Frerichs, for a time Bismarck's personal physician, brought the young Ehrlich to the famed Charité Hospital in Berlin. Frerichs himself was convinced that the exactitude of physics and chemistry should have its analogue in medicine; under his sympathetic aegis, Ehrlich was able to dedicate himself totally to research. Frerichs recognized the young genius, of whom these lines by Theodor Fontane, written at the time, serve as a fitting description:

Gifts, who is without them? Talents—mere toys for children. Seriousness makes the man, application the genius.

    For even then, the young Ehrlich was distinguished by seriousness, unswerving commitment, by his impassioned, iron concentration and his sublime forgetfulness regarding all trivialities. In 1882, Robert Koch delivered his lecture "On Tuberculosis," in which he set forth his discovery of the rod-shaped tubercle bacilli responsible for what he insisted was the infectious disease of tuberculosis. Ehrlich later wrote: "Everyone in attendance was deeply moved, and for me that evening has remained etched in my mind as my greatest scientific event." Soon thereafter Ehrlich developed an improved method of staining tubercle bacilli—and he and Koch became friends.

    In fact, Frerichs and Koch became models for Ehrlich, and at the same time important promoters of his work. When Koch, only eleven years Ehrlich's senior, died in 1910, Ehrlich wrote a long obituary that reveals a good deal about his own life; the unconscious autobiographical elements of such eulogies should be listened to. He spoke of the "epoch-making work of the young doctor from Wollstein, Robert Koch," who demonstrated the "specificity of bacterial strains and their sole responsibility in the genesis of infectious diseases." Then he went on to the external circumstances that had helped Koch:

Unknown and far removed from centers of scientific research ... he was deeply engrossed in problems which the foremost scientists had struggled in vain to solve. By astute and unflagging application, he was able to provide answers so authoritative as to earn him the admiration and unqualified recognition of his contemporaries. And perhaps it was propitious that his genius and energy were given free rein to pursue his trailblazing ideas, undisturbed and unimpeded—a genius and an energy that in so exceptional a way combined to form his personality.

Was this not an apt description of Ehrlich himself?

    He went on:

It seems only natural that upon such a man—champion of science, bold and victorious leader in the battle against the deadliest common epidemics, universally acclaimed cultural celebrity—the highest honors were bestowed.... All of us who knew him will always admire his masterful genius as a researcher, his superior intellect, his inexhaustible capacity for work, his prodigious energy, and, last but not least, his heroic courage. That courage enabled him to defy the greatest dangers. Through it he became the great figure he was for us all and will remain for future generations: a defender of the common welfare, a victorious commander and leader in the fight against its fiercest foes.

    Commemorating the memory of a paragon, Ehrlich did not realize the extent to which he himself had come to emulate his model, but posterity is well aware of it.

    Ehrlich sounded a military note, jarring perhaps today, but normal in Wilhelmine Germany and in the developing field of bacteriology; Koch himself had often invoked similar metaphors, especially in his successful struggle to put bacteriological research and knowledge at the service of German public health, improving sanitary conditions in overcrowded cities. It was also an era when the "chief" was deemed almighty, the embodiment of scientific authority, surrounded in clinic and laboratory by a retinue of subalterns. Since Ehrlich's career was also shaped by strife, his use of these military metaphors seems all the more understandable.

    In March 1885, Frerichs died suddenly; his successor did not properly appreciate Ehrlich's worth and had him transferred to clinical duty—this at the cost of his scientific work. That marked the beginning of an unhappy period at the Charité for Ehrlich and his wife, Hedwig Pinkus, whom he had wed a short time before. Her love and understanding, not to mention her private wealth, were to prove enduring sources of solace and comfort for him.

    In 1890, Koch announced that he had successfully created tuberculin, the sterile liquid containing substances extracted from the tubercle bacillus, which could be used in the diagnosis and cure of tuberculosis. This internationally acclaimed success led in Germany to the establishment in 1892 of a state Institute for Infectious Diseases, which was deemed a necessity in the globally competitive world of medicine. (The fact that in the same year, Bismarck's banker Gerson von Bleichröder, acting anonymously, made a million marks available for a hospital where patients would be treated in accordance with Koch's methods, has not been noted, not even in a standard biography of Koch.) In 1892, Koch brought Ehrlich, whom he held in high esteem, to the institute as "research associate." The institute was intended to deal with all infectious diseases, not just tuberculosis, particularly after tuberculin proved a failure in therapy.

    Ehrlich now began to work with Emil von Behring at the Koch institute. The Koch institute in general and Behring and Ehrlich in particular benefited from the growing eagerness of the German chemical industry, Farbwerke Hoechst especially, to support academic research that would produce practical and profitable results—in this instance involving the production of immunizing serum. Behring and Ehrlich were markedly different in personality: Behring rather authoritarian and contentious, Ehrlich vulnerable and yet stubborn, reticent and even reclusive. Together they concentrated their work on fighting diphtheria: at the time, some 45,000 children in Germany alone contracted the disease every year, and half of these died agonizing deaths. Behring discovered an antitoxin, but it was Ehrlich who learned how to develop the serum in live horses by slowly increased injections and then to standardize the required dosage for humans. With the help of August Laubenheimer, research director of the chemical company Farbwerke—Hoechst, that plant was commissioned to produce the substance: "Every vial of diphtheria serum from Farbwerke-Hoechst bears the label: manufactured according to Behring-Ehrlich." Behring and Ehrlich had come to an agreement in 1892 regulating the distribution of profits between them, and their joint labors liberated humankind from a horrible scourge. Their initially successful cooperation alternated with bitter disputes. Ehrlich was convinced that Behring had taken advantage of him financially, while denigrating his superior scientific achievement.

    At this point in his career, Ehrlich needed help, and he found it in the person of Friedrich Althoff, a department head in the Prussian Ministry of Education from 1882 to 1907; he was the commanding figure in Prussia's academic life. He was controversial in his time and remains so today: his achievements were great, his methods questionable. His ambition was to make Prussia's universities and research centers the best in the world, even against the will of opinionated professors with their insistence on autonomy, and in the teeth of prevailing religious biases. Althoff knew that in the battle against infectious diseases, Ehrlich was one of the most brilliant scientists anywhere—and, ultimately, one of the most successful. Soon a genuine friendship developed between the two, a bond that brought professional benefits to both men.

    Althoff recognized that Ehrlich was unhappy with his subordinate position in Koch's institute, so in 1896 he set up a new state Institute for Serum Research and Serum Testing in Steglitz, a suburb of Berlin, and named Ehrlich its director. But that, too, was to prove only a temporary solution. Althoff succeeded in convincing the mayor of Frankfurt am Main, Franz Adickes, that his city's fame would be enhanced by establishing a Royal Institute for Experimental Therapy there, headed by Ehrlich and jointly financed by the city and the Prussian state, with contributions from industry and private donors—a further example of the emergence of an industrial-scientific-state complex that gave German science its all-important social setting. Ehrlich moved to Frankfurt, where the institute was inaugurated in 1899.

    In 1906, a dream long cherished by Althoff and Ehrlich finally came true: the widow of the Jewish banker Georg Speyer donated an additional building to Ehrlich for his biomedical research and experimental chemotherapy, and the Speyer Foundation provided generous funding for his work. The Georg-Speyer House, as it was called, was interdisciplinary from the outset and had close ties with industry. Ehrlich was working with modest, even primitive facilities and equipment, but the institute grew, and even though operations were always kept on a tight budget, new tasks were taken on, new staff appointed. Scarce funds restricted research, and Althoff, knowing how fierce the foreign competition was and adept at raising private money, complained to Ehrlich, "It is truly lamentable that we in Germany don't also have wealthy people who can provide for our institutes along the lines of the largesse given the Pasteur Institute [in Paris].... Why can't the tycoons in Frankfurt like B. Metzler ... etc., donate millions for your institute!"

    It was in Frankfurt that Ehrlich made his great theoretical and practical discoveries. Here he conducted his celebrated research on immunity, here he proved that antibody formation could be stimulated, and therefore that substances protecting against infection could be produced in strengths that made their use in medical treatment possible. In 1906 Ehrlich defined his hopes dramatically; he thought that "in the chemist's retort" substances would be created that would "be able to exert their full action exclusively on the parasite harbored within the organism and would represent ... magic bullets which seek their target of their own accord." Ehrlich's English friend and colleague, the Nobel laureate Sir Henry Dale, noted in 1950 that "Ehrlich's imaginative genius" led him to develop his side-chain theory of the formation of antibodies, which is still today the basis of chemotherapy. He searched for "substances which, by virtue of their chemical structure and combining properties, would directly attach themselves to, and be able thus to kill or weaken, the infecting organisms, but would leave the tissues of the infected patient unharmed."

    Ehrlich's private letters attest to his close bonds of friendship with Althoff and report on his vexing difficulties. Althoff was his friend, benefactor, and go-between, but the main troublemaker was Behring, another protégé of Althoff's. As early as 1900, Althoff had to assure Ehrlich, "We shall never launch any campaigns against you.... In your mutual interest, the constant feuding [with Behring] must not be allowed to become a permanent fixture." Money was one problem here, as well as Behring's limited regard for Ehrlich's merits. Six years later, Ehrlich complained that Behring had been unfair to him over the diphtheria serum, and was now making new demands that would gravely injure the work of Ehrlich's institute: "A feeling of deep bitterness still wells up in me when I recall that time—not because of the material losses I suffered and have forgotten, but because of the enormous ruthlessness with which von Behring began the game and played it out. It was only thanks to my help that he could mount the saddle and his first act was to kick the man who had aided him, and whose assistance, however uncongenial, was indispensable."

    But any further harm to his institute Ehrlich found intolerable: "Without being immodest, I think I can say that the Institute has everywhere won full recognition and even emulation in the development of modern research on immunity—and that not only as an Institute for testing new products—but that also my work and that of my associates have contributed importantly to the advance of modern science."

    Ehrlich had wanted to dedicate his most important work to Althoff, who, understandably gratified, accepted the honor: "I have been deeply moved by your intention to dedicate the publication of your path-breaking studies on side-chain theory to me. I feel in no way deserving of such a great honor, but since in the past I have endured so many and in part truly undeserved attacks, I shall now gratefully accept this honor, equally undeserved, bestowed on me by such an outstanding friend."

    And when in 1907 Althoff for reasons of health resigned from his post, Ehrlich wrote him an official letter, the text of which so pleased Althoff that he copied it out and distributed it to friends:

You have done more to further the advance of science in all fields than anyone else, and I believe we have you to thank above all others for the fact that we are still today in the leading position. May the future keep this primacy from slipping from us. I myself owe you both my entire career and the chance I had to bring my ideas to practical fruition. Shunted about as an assistant, forced into impossible conditions, totally ignored by the university, I thought myself quite useless. I never received a call to even the most minor position and was regarded as a person without a field—i.e., as totally useless. If you, with your strong hand and brilliant initiative, had not come to my aid and, in your untiring zeal and benevolent friendship, had not arranged a place where I might work, I would have been left to wither away entirely.

This generous appraisal was typical of Ehrlich, though somewhat unfair to Frerichs and the others who had earlier supported him.

    Althoff died in 1908—shortly before his protégé was awarded the Nobel Prize (shared jointly with Élie Metchnikoff) for his work on immunology. Ehrlich had earned earlier distinctions, and others followed: honorary doctorates from Oxford and elsewhere, medals and honors, an honorary professorship and an imperial appointment to the rank of Privy Councillor (with the address Your Excellency, a rare high honor). Ehrlich was a founding member of the executive board of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Society. He was nominated for a second Nobel after inventing Salvarsan, but his early death prevented his receiving this very rare double distinction.

    All this recognition and success came with repeated strife and animosity. For example, Ehrlich had to defend himself against attacks by the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius, for whom a Nobel Institute for Physical Chemistry had been founded in 1905. Commenting in a letter to his old friend and colleague Albert Neisser on this feud, Ehrlich noted, "Physical chemists comprise one of the best-organized cliques anywhere in the world, acting in unison to push each other forward."

    Ehrlich's ties were international, his fame widespread throughout the scientific community. In medicine, there already emerged something like "globalization," albeit dominated by the West. In 1904, he lectured in the United States, later in England and across Europe; his often improvised talks, as he himself described them, gained him close friends in the Anglo-American world, some of whom induced John D. Rockefeller to donate $10,000 for the support of Ehrlich's institute. He cultivated contacts with colleagues everywhere: he asked for snake venom from Africa, studied tropical diseases such as sleeping sickness, maintained close ties with Japanese and, of course, with European scientists. The major (and for a time last) international medical congress in London in 1913 feted Ehrlich as the most eminent research scientist in the world.

    In 1911, Ehrlich gave a paper on Salvarsan at the Congress of Natural Scientists in Karlsruhe, the gathering, as we will see, where Fritz Haber and Albert Einstein first met; a year later, he delivered the principal lecture, "Modern Initiatives in Therapy," at Haber's Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute. Ehrlich, Haber, and Einstein: two generations of German-Jewish scientists who intellectually and materially enriched their country and enhanced its worldwide prestige. A triumvirate of diverse personalities, all three outstanding representatives of the second Age of Genius.

    Ehrlich's institute—the equal and rival of the Institut Pasteur and the Rockefeller Institute—investigated the etiology of and possible therapy for various diseases and was among the first to undertake cancer research. But Ehrlich's greatest triumph—after years of experimentation—was his discovery of Salvarsan, the "magic bullet" also known as 606—605 earlier solutions having proved ineffectual. The trade name alluded to one of its ingredients, arsenic, which he, together with his Japanese colleague Sahachiro Hata, had developed as a chemotherapeutic agent against the syphilis spirochete. It made possible the most effective treatment to date for syphilis, which at the turn of the century was claiming more and more victims; its third stage—paresis—ended in wretched and painful death. The great dramas of the time, such as Ibsen's, alluded to the tragedy of syphilis, even if decorum dictated that its name be unmentioned. Only a few decades earlier, the famous English doctor Samuel Solly had praised syphilis as God's retribution for sinners, admonishing people to live a moral life (not unlike the situation today, where the battle against AIDS is waged with extremely limited funding and against similar moralizing). Through Ehrlich's work, humanity was largely freed from this scourge—a fact that the sanctimonious hypocrites of the day greeted critically.

    Ehrlich himself had other worries. At the 1910 Congress of Internists in Wiesbaden, he had distributed 65,000 units of Salvarsan gratis to colleagues and was extraordinarily meticulous in following up on the results. A "Salvarsan war" erupted: countless complaints alleged adverse side effects or unsuccessful treatment. "But the most unpleasant thing," he wrote in 1910, "is that there is a marked contrast between my own personality, which is anything but bold, and my scientific conviction that the disease ought to be vanquished by one mighty, possibly hazardous, blow, rather than to apply a mild but ineffective therapy, leaving the patients to their fate."

    Ehrlich's enemies gleefully made his setbacks known, and his wife noted in her diary: "Paul is in very low spirits.... He says a Brazilian told him that Professor Finger [in] Vienna had two cases of deafness in his clinic as a result of 606, considered the drug poisonous and would campaign against it." There was even a legal suit involving Salvarsan therapy, and Ehrlich had to appear in court. But Ehrlich himself unceasingly tracked the results of his cure, concerned about the effectiveness of Salvarsan, worried about improper applications of it. He knew that "the step from the laboratory to the patient's bedside ... is extraordinarily arduous and fraught with danger." Correctly sensing enemies lurking in the field, in early 1911 he wrote to his friend Simon Flexner at the Rockefeller Institute: "The past year was a very hard one for me and I really feel how nervously exhausted I am. I must also say that I could have become old and have died without having had any notion of the meanness of mankind, which I now have had to experience." Constant conflicts exacerbated the burden of a furious work schedule. But Salvarsan proved a success: Ehrlich cured countless sufferers from what had once been all too often a fatal affliction. His labors, however, did grave harm to his own health.

    In 1914, on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, Ehrlich's unique standing was internationally celebrated. A comprehensive commemorative volume offered a "description of his scientific contributions." Despite his motto, "Work hard, publish little," he had some 212 publications to his name by then, the first having appeared when he was only twenty-three. His colleagues admired him not just for his successful results, but for the masterly methods he employed in achieving them, which in turn expressed his unfailing sense for science's proper tasks and potential: "We are not masters of nature, but its pupils." The guiding principle at his institute was "a unified direction in research, while allowing the individual the greatest possible scope for independent work." To another American friend, Samuel Meltzer, he wrote, "I was always particularly proud of the art of `marching off' [Die Kunst des Abmarsches]"—by which he meant his ability to leave a field that had become barren. And it is true that he lost no time with matters that gave him no pleasure, leaving it to others to reap the harvest of many of his ingenious ideas. Most scientists praised his exemplary ethical attitude, and the enormous care he took in introducing new medicines. Ever self-critical, he resented the unfair, denigrating criticisms of some colleagues.

    In the volume honoring Ehrlich's sixtieth birthday, Richard Willstätter wrote: "Before our eyes the images of the great thinkers and artists of the past rise up ... when we admire the universality of Paul Ehrlich's work, and recognize how versatile was his work as a chemist and how deeply, the breadth notwithstanding, he penetrated into the problems of organic chemistry.... As a chemist, Ehrlich is the pupil of no other master; he is not borne along, or even influenced, by any tide of his time; by his intuition and the power of his personality, vast new fields are being opened up for us." A genius originated the field of modern chemotherapy—a field of incomparable medical importance for our century.

    Renowned for his passion for work and his scintillating spontaneous monologues about scientific questions, Ehrlich was also a loving husband and the happy father of two daughters, whose weddings he lived to see. Unlike Haber or Einstein, his family life was tranquil and happy. Prodigiously well-read in science (though not in literature), Ehrlich developed what he dubbed the technique of "diagonal reading," rapidly scanning a page from top left to bottom right, pausing only for what was important to him. He was always pressed for time. His wife commented: "Paul can only work at the very last moment." Like Haber, he relaxed by reading detective novels. Arthur Conan Doyle's portrait hung on the wall of his study, and the author sent him some of his books as presents. Perhaps he had a kind of elective affinity with Sherlock Holmes: his motto, "We have to learn how to take aim," also applied to Holmes's practiced knack for discovery. Both unearthed deadly secrets.

    Ehrlich had no regard for his own health. He lived for his work, and from our perspective he seemed unwise: it was said that his absolute staples were mineral water and an all-day diet of the strongest cigars. He tended to view vacations and regular meals as disagreeable interruptions that he tolerated out of love for his family. In the winter of 1914-15, he collapsed from exhaustion and in August 1915 succumbed to a second stroke. By then, science had lost its innocence in the Great War, and Ehrlich's world lay in ruins.

    Emil von Behring spoke at his open grave, lauding Ehrlich as a "magister mundi" in medical science, his personality an "anima candida": "In our harsh era of a ruthless struggle for existence, you [Du] always remained so pure and untainted in your disposition, so tender in your sentiments, that any who knew you had to sense sharp pangs of conscience if ever they dared to treat you harshly." Were these belated pangs of Behring's own conscience, a graveside confession? Nonetheless, the friend-foe had understood him.

    Ehrlich scarcely had time for or interest in politics, yet we know of two somewhat contrary instances when he was a participant in historical events. In 1913, Chaim Weizmann visited Ehrlich in his laboratory and persuaded him to join the project of establishing a Jewish university in Jerusalem; Weizmann regarded Ehrlich's support as uniquely important. After a trip to Paris in February 1914, Ehrlich reported his impressions of the possible French assistance that would come for the planned university, to be financed by Edmond de Rothschild. Weizmann hoped that Ehrlich would work out a plan for a research institute at the university in Jerusalem, a project to be presented to Baron Rothschild for additional support. The outbreak of war put a quick end to the projected venture, but it is clear that Ehrlich, unlike most German Jews, wanted to champion the "Jewish-national" cause. His report on a conversation with the physician and scientist Georges Widal provides insight into his own views: "Widal is rather indifferent when it comes to [Jewish] national questions.... One factor, partially affecting his case, is that although he is Jewish, he has never had any adverse personal experiences because of this and has enjoyed a brilliant career right from the start. Of course, he is a very outstanding and capable individual."

    But in consonance with the great majority of Jews in Germany, Ehrlich was also quite able to support the "German-national" side in the war. He too signed the ill-conceived Manifesto of the 93 in October 1914—undoubtedly much to the chagrin of his many friends and admirers in the Allied countries. The Ehrlich Archives offer no clue as to who might have solicited his signature, but, as we shall see in the next Chapters, other great scientists, Planck, Haber, and Willstätter for example, signed as well.

    Paul Ehrlich was a Jew and remained so all his life, yet at the same time, his identity as a German was for him an absolute given. And it was as a German that he was celebrated abroad. In Germany, he suffered the disappointments that were the common lot there of all Jews. I doubt that any of the great Jewish scientists could escape the virtually unquestioned bias of the day; neither baptism nor outstanding achievement could shake society's fundamental outlook. Ehrlich triumphed after he had encountered hindrances and hostility; he was troubled by the far worse obstacles faced by fellow Jews who lacked genius. In his own case, and this was symptomatic of the times, the slights were mitigated by the personal engagement of colleagues and superiors who gave him both practical and moral support—Frerichs, Koch, Althoff, and others. At its higher levels, Germany was distinguished by harmonious creativity. Yet prejudice—and I intentionally avoid the term anti-Semitism, due to its racist and populist overtones—was practically universal.

    This ressentiment of Jews had a certain seductive force for Germans, and it may have also brought them some advantage, permitting them a sense of moral superiority while categorizing certain specific traits—ruthless ambition, dogged self-assertion, a desire for power and money—as typically Jewish. That prejudice expressed a sense of one's own uprightness. At the same time, it masked a double anxiety: fear of possible contamination by those very traits that one maligned or might already be infected with; anxiety that Jews, by these very same qualities, might effectively challenge the position and intellectual patrimony of their Christian colleagues.

    So German Jews encountered both animosity and friendship. The obstacles that prejudice put in their way often had a contrary effect: anti-Semitism served as the sting that spurred Jews on to overachievement, to maintain their own in often subliminal competition. The biographies of Ehrlich and his colleagues suggest that the widespread antipathy to Jews in a society marked by a high degree of assimilation proved an unintended impetus for success. Thus Wilhelmine society derived several benefits from its legacy of prejudice: Christians could enjoy the psychic satisfaction of moral superiority and society at large could benefit from the fortuitously enhanced capacity and austere dedication of Jewish scientists. Ehrlich's and Haber's achievements were an immeasurable boon to Imperial Germany, to German industry, to Germany's international prestige. Shulamit Volkov has investigated this pattern of Jewish success in medicine and the natural sciences: the talented young Jewish researcher was initially often placed at a disadvantage and appointed to less demanding posts; he was frequently passed over and condemned to the limbo of a nontenured lectureship (Privatdozent) for longer than others; yet this allowed him time to pursue his own research and develop as a specialist. Ehrlich was spared having to witness the destruction of this unique bond of Christian-Jewish cooperation, or to suffer the abominations of later years.

    This newly established Paul Ehrlich Institute is living proof of historic change. Ehrlich had once commented that if he had to, he could work in a barn, and the institute named for him today is a far cry from a barn. But change also brings new hazards. Today the value of the natural sciences is generally allowed, as are their enormous costs, but science has lost its former innocence, and the technology it helped to create, in all its ambiguity about human life, is a source of concern. The person in the white coat is no longer quite the god he or she once was—true still in my childhood; they too have been demythologized. They too are measured by the degree to which they act responsibly. Increasingly, current science has become "big science," and is dominated less by individual geniuses or giants like Koch, Ehrlich, or, more recently, perhaps, Robert Oppenheimer.

    The name of Paul Ehrlich recalls an illustrious era and remains an admonition, a specific summons to moral and civic responsibility. The German catastrophe in part made possible by German science enfeebled its scientific community. German scientists committed terrible atrocities or kept silent in the face of crimes that violated all human decency. German science and the nation as a whole have been offered something grand and rare in human history and life: a second chance, an open door to a new beginning in a new Europe. I wish the Paul Ehrlich Institute every success in realizing this opportunity and this promise. To conclude with a variation on a favorite phrase of Ehrlich, I wish it "the four essentials—money, patience, skill, and luck."