"Einstein needs to be rehabilitated" in both countries, said Jacob Szer, a theoretical physicist at the Technical University in West Berlin. Despite universal admiration for his early scientific work, Szer said, scientists and politicians on each side of the Iron Curtain remain uncomfortable with aspects of Einstein's political beliefs.
The current intense public debate over national identity made Szer's paper one of the best-attended of the week-long conference. And his words evoked heated comments from the large audience. Supporters of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Szer noted, commonly praise Einstein's socialism and humanism while suppressing or reinterpreting his commitment to the Jewish people. Thus Friedrich Herneck, a historian of physics in East Berlin, has argued that Einstein's "brief" interest in Zionism, stimulated by his contact with Israel's first president, scientist Chaim Weizmann, was "a regrettable and faulty development in the great scientist's personality." Einstein never favored a Jewish state, Herneck ...
