V O L U M E 8 , D O C U M E N T 4 1 a 1 3
and an indescribable joy on her face when you were slowly regaining your
strength.[2] It never became clear to me where your refinement and sensitivity and
your quick reflexes came from, besides the Germanic blood coursing through your
veins.
What a horrific picture the world is now offering! Nowhere is there an island of
culture where people have retained human feeling. Nothing but hate and a lust for
power![3]
The question, where can justice be found? is becoming sheer mockery.
One lives the life of a stranger on this planet, happy when one isn’t done in for out-
moded sentiments. I feel so strangely drawn to early Christianity and feel as acutely
as never before how much nicer it is to be anvil than hammer. What galls me most
is that now even the best talent is being forced into this senseless butchery and
henchman’s service. I have blind luck to thank that I was spared this.
I sit all day long peacefully at work in my lodgings. Yesterday I discovered a
pretty method for deriving the fundamental formulas for the absolute differential
calculus indispensable to gravitational
theory.[4]
My wife and my boys are in
Zurich. In the future they will live apart from me, hard though it is for me to be
without my boys. I could not stand the wife any longer. It is hardly conceivable to
me now how I wasn’t able to summon the moral energy to come to this
decision.[5]
In part it depended on the fact that my means could not have permitted living
separately.
The observations of the solar eclipse have surely been suppressed by Russia’s
floggers, so I won’t live to see the decisive results about the most important finding
of my scientific wrestling.[6]
I hear that Debye will be Kleiner’s successor. An invaluable acquisition for your
university![7]
Abraham seems not to have made it to the Poly, mainly because of
Weiss.[8] This will surely have grim repercussions. I fear that my success ion or in
Zurich is not going to be chosen with sufficient expertise and objectivity.
Cordial regards from your
Einstein.
Vol. 8, 41a. To Heinrich Zangger
[Berlin, after 27 December
1914][1]
Dear friend Zangger,
Many thanks for your friendly lines. I almost came to see you to make arrange-
ments about caring for a son of Planck’s who was wounded and captured in
France.[2]
But he is now out of danger & on his way toward a recovery.
The world is like a madhouse now. What drives people to kill and maim each
other so
savagely?[3]
I think, in the end, it is the sexual character of the male that