Einstein's Escape from Hitler | Genius
Albert Einstein lived through, and was, in fact, a central figure in some of the most important moments of the first half of the 20th century. You know the world was in a real state of chaos. Things were shifting hugely. Huge plates were shifting.
The big part of our story is about a Jewish man who is living in Europe in a time of extraordinary anti-Semitism and the rise of fascism. And a big part of our story is—is he going to stay in Germany? Is he going to leave? And it becomes an immigration story.
No. I will not kowtow to police. And I will not sit by and wait for fascists to kill my husband. He took an awful lot of persuading to leave Germany.
I want to leave, Albert. Please! Had Elsa and his family not taken the steps, he'd have been lost to us. He would had been exterminated.
On a personal level, this is a fascinating story about somebody doing all of that amazing stuff, which isn't even at the forefront of this story. The forefront of this story are these personal relationships, and the drama that he suffered along the way whilst trying to achieve these amazing things for humanity.
He wanted to give these things to the world, and interpret things as his reason for being, as his reason for existing. And he faced huge adversity in doing so. These tragedies and relationships that disintegrated, and governments that didn't support him or ostracized him as a Jew, that forced him out of the country.
Take an individual who is struggling, complete underdog. Come back when you wish to be taken seriously! You know, he was brilliant. But he struggled within the world of formal academia.
They didn't really know what to make of him. He was working in a patent office when he was making his breakthroughs, because he couldn't even get a teaching position.
However, it's all heightened because Albert Einstein was Jewish at a time when his religion was a tremendous liability, if not a physical threat. This is what he lived through. And he faced it.