l x x v i i i I N T R O D U C T I O N T O V O L U M E 1 6 VIII. The Brouwer Affair Toward the end of 1928, Einstein was drawn into a complicated power struggle within the editorial board of Mathematische Annalen. Its two main protagonists were Göttingen’s David Hilbert and the Amsterdam topologist L.E.J. Brouwer, who enjoyed strong support among the mathematicians in Berlin.[58] Einstein dubbed this a modern-day “battle between frogs and mice” (“Froschmäusekrieg,” Doc. 323), an affair he considered both pointless and bizarre. Einstein had taken on this editorial position in 1920, when the Annalen was facing an economic crisis, and was by now one of four principal editors. Ferdinand Springer then acquired it for his Berlin publishing house, which had only recently launched the Mathema- tische Zeitschrift. Springer’s plan was to give the older journal a new profile with an expanded editorial board that had strong ties with physics. Alongside its four principals—Felix Klein, Hilbert, Einstein, and managing editor Otto Blumenthal— there were twelve associate editors, including the three physicists Max Born, Theodor von Kármán, and Arnold Sommerfeld. Although he had little to do with the inner workings of the Annalen, Einstein’s association with it carried strong symbolic significance. He and Hilbert were both outspoken internationalists during a period when Franco-German scientific rela- tions had come to a standstill, in large part because of the boycott policy instituted by the Conseil international de recherches (CIR).[59] Brouwer, on the other hand, strongly sympathized with German nationalists who felt victimized by the French. He regarded the CIR’s ostracizing of German scientists as morally repugnant and went out of his way to decry it and all other perceived forms of French cultural imperialism. Einstein was well aware of Brouwer’s various political campaigns within the Amsterdam Academy, some of which tested H. A. Lorentz’s patience. Still, when Hilbert wrote to him on 15 October 1928 seeking his support to remove Brouwer from the editorial board (Doc. 282), Einstein refused to cooperate. In his reply, Einstein ended somewhat ambivalently. On the one hand, he could not bring him- self to approve of the message Hilbert had drafted to initiate Brouwer’s dismissal, on the other, he did not oppose the action as such, since Hilbert deemed this neces- sary (Doc. 291). Having learned some of the background behind this conflict from Constantin Carathéodory’s account (Abs. 704), he began to see the seriousness of the affair, from which he hoped to extricate himself. He took the standpoint that the fanatical Dutchman was a harmless fool, a “psychopath,” and “an involuntary sup- porter of Lombroso’s theory of the close connection between genius and insanity” (Doc. 291). Otherwise, however, he held Brouwer in high regard, “not only as a thoroughly clairvoyant intellect, but also as a straightforward person of character” (Doc. 294).