DOC. 14 NEED FOR NATIONAL ASSEMBLY
77
26
EINSTEIN
ON
PEACE
election of
a
constituent
assembly,
thereby
eliminating
all fears of
a new
tyranny
as soon as
possible.
Only
after such
an
assembly has
been convoked and has
satisfactorily completed
its
task-only
then
can
the German
people
glory
in
the
freedom they
have
won
for
themselves.
[6]
Our
present
social democratic leaders deserve
our
wholehearted
support.
Confident
of
the
power
of their
ideals,
they have
already
gone
on
record
in
favor of
a
constituent assembly. Thus
they
have
shown
that
they respect
democratic
ideals.
May they
succeed
in
leading us
out
of the
grave
difficulties into which
the
sins
and in-
adequacies
of their
predecessors
hurled
us.
[7]
Although
in
those
years
Einstein
felt close to
the
Social Democratic
party
and
occasionally may
have
attended
some
of
its
meetings,
he
probably never
joined
the
party.18
He
was
not
a man
of
partisan politi-
cal
affiliations.
When
he
perceived
that the Weimar
Republic
was
not
fulfilling
the
great promise
he had
once seen
in it,
Einstein
soon
be-
came
disillusioned, and his
disappointment
grew
with the
passage
of
time.
However,
as
his
many writings testify
over
the
years,
his funda-
mental belief in
democracy
and socialism
never
changed.19
In
1944,
in
a
letter
to his friend and
colleague
Max
Born,
he
made
some
pertinent
remarks
which
quite
probably
referred to the
students’
incident
in
the
winter of
1918-19:
Do
you
recall the
time,
a
little
less
than
twenty-five
years
ago,
when
we
took
a
trolley
car
to the
Reichstag building,
convinced
that
we
could
really help
turn those
fellows
into honest demo-
crats?
How naive
we
were,
even as men forty
years
old!
I
can only
laugh
when
I
think about it.
Neither
of
us
realized how
much
more
powerful
is
instinct
compared
to
intelligence.
We
would do
well
to
bear
this in
mind
or
the
tragic
errors
of those
days
may
be
repeated.