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From Periphery to Center: Einstein’s Path from Bern to Berlin (1902–1914)
Abstract
In 1916, two years after moving to Berlin, Albert Einstein wrote to one of his closest friends in Zurich that he had accepted membership in the Prussian Academy of Sciences and a position at the University of Berlin without teaching obligations because of “a cousin, who drew me to Berlin in the first place.”1 Recently recovered letters reveal that Einstein had been corresponding with this cousin, a divorcée named Elsa Löwenthal née Einstein, since at least 1912.2 Relying in part on this correspondence, I would like to suggest here that Einstein’s reasons for coming to Berlin were far more complex than he indicated to his friend.
This chapter shows how a group of prominent physicists, with whom Einstein had interacted scientifically during previous years, promoted his call to Berlin, and the establishment of a research institute under his directorship in the expectation that Einstein and the institute would take the lead in advancing quantum physics in its early phase. It explores the expectations placed upon him in the context of his achievements, the establishment of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, and the state of physics during the first decades of the twentieth century.
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