KAISER WILHELM II put Germany on a path to destruction, but the fire of war requires a match. It was struck on June 28, 1914, when Gavrilo Princip, a young Serbian nationalist, raised a .32 caliber pistol in the direction of Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and pulled the trigger. “Where I aimed, I do not know,” Princip later said.
That Princip did not know where he was shooting mattered little. The devil’s bullet knew which way to go. Franz Ferdinand died; Austria-Hungary made plans for war, and Kaiser Wilhelm II promised Germany’s unconditional support. On August 1, 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm II signed the mobilization order that launched World War I. That same day, Jacques Loeb, sitting at his desk on the other side of the Atlantic, wrote a letter to Otto Warburg. Loeb was responding to a letter Warburg had sent to him in June. Warburg, still waiting for construction to finish on the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology, wanted to spend the winter of 1914 doing research with Loeb at Stanford University’s Hopkins Seaside Laboratory. “Would the sea urchins be fully developed at the time?” Warburg had asked. Though Loeb left open the possibility of Warburg’s visit, he was not optimistic. He hoped, he told Warburg, that “the war clouds in Europe” would “be dispelled” by the time his letter arrived.1
A committed pacifist, Loeb was monitoring Europe’s “terribly stupid aristocratic governments” with disgust. He believed the process through which war propaganda convinces people to sacrifice themselves could be understood scientifically. The idea stemmed from his own research on insects. Loeb was struck, in particular, by one observation: upon emerging from their nests, typically near the bottom of a plant, newly hatched caterpillars would invariably make their way up the stalk, where they would find their first meal in the form of the plant’s leaves. How, Loeb wondered, did the newborn caterpillars always know which way to go? It was as if they were born already knowing where to find food.
There had to be a signal, Loeb reasoned, something in the environment that instructed a newborn caterpillar to make its ascent. There were plenty of possibilities. The caterpillars might have been responding to a specific visual cue or smell. But Loeb had another guess. He suspected that light itself was the signal. To test the idea, he brought caterpillars into his lab and placed them inside test tubes that had been arranged horizontally. Loeb put the insects’ “favorite leaves” on one side of a tube and then shined a lamp on the other side. The effect was even stronger than Loeb had anticipated. The caterpillars always went toward the light and stayed near it. They were “slaves of the light,” Loeb wrote. Their food, only inches away on the other side of the tube, might as well have been a continent away. The caterpillars would starve to death in the grip of the light rather than go in search of sustenance.
Though Loeb didn’t think that people were as simple as insects, he did believe that people were strictly mechanical and that they could be controlled by manipulative language in much the same way that his caterpillars could be controlled by light. While the possibility that we are under the sway of hidden forces sounds chilling to modern ears, Loeb saw his mechanistic understanding of mental life as a source of hope. Scientists studying hormones and behavior, he argued, would soon be able to explain how the process worked; Ivan Pavlov, through his experiments on salivating dogs, had already made great progress to that end. And once people recognized how their brains were being controlled, they would be set free from superstition and hatred—from nationalism and war.
Loeb eventually realized that his optimism was misplaced. He might have been right about the power of slogans to shape the human mind, but in 1914, there were no signs of anyone breaking free. The German masses were being lured toward their own destruction exactly like the starving caterpillars at the wrong end of the test tube.2
AFTER SIGNING THE mobilization order, Wilhelm returned to his Berlin palace and stepped out onto the balcony. Some 50,000 Germans were gathered below singing patriotic songs. The kaiser had stood on the same balcony the day before, telling the crowd that “envious people” were forcing “the sword” into Germany’s hand. But with war now set to motion, the kaiser chose to stress the importance of unity at home. “Today,” the kaiser said, “we are all German brothers and only German brothers.”3
The kaiser’s call for a “civil truce”—a message he would repeat in the following days—would give rise to feelings of togetherness in a country previously marked by intensely felt social and political divisions. German Jews, who would sign up to defend the fatherland by the tens of thousands, were particularly enthusiastic about the new sense of German unity. Jewish newspapers reprinted the kaiser’s speech, declaring with pride that Jews could no longer be considered different from any other Germans. Some German Jewish Zionists who had emigrated to Palestine even returned to fight for Germany.4
If there was a note of desperation in the German Jewish response to the kaiser’s small gesture, it was perhaps because German Jews were increasingly perplexed by their place in German life. In the eighteenth century, the vast majority of Germany’s estimated 60,000 Jews lived on the fringes of society. Forbidden from most trades, they eked out livings as peddlers and pawnbrokers. Some roamed the countryside in groups of beggars or thieves. (Legend has it that the Jewish highwaymen of the time did not rob on the Sabbath.)
And then, decade by decade, throughout the nineteenth century, Enlightenment thinking reshaped German Jewish life. New laws granting Jews equal status spread from one German state to the next. By the second half of the century, the children of peddlers were studying to become lawyers and doctors, bankers and scientists. The new legal protections did not give Jews anywhere near full equality with Christians. Jews who hoped for success in the civil service or to reach the upper ranks of the military or academic institutions would often first have to convert to Christianity. Thousands of Jews would pay this steep price, including Emil Warburg. But German Jews were succeeding in ways that would have been unimaginable a century before.
As they assimilated, Germany’s Jews came to think of themselves as fully German. Like a suitor whose advances have finally been accepted after a long period of rejection, they couldn’t help but feel grateful for their gains. “Before Hitler rose to power, other Europeans often feared, admired, envied, and ridiculed the Germans,” the Austrian-born Israeli author Amos Elon wrote. “Only Jews seemed actually to have loved them.”5
And yet, rather than fading away as Jews entered the mainstream of German society, the animosity toward Jews only spread and turned more virulent. Some of the new anti-Semitism wasn’t new at all. It was the same Christian bigotry that had plagued Europe for centuries. In 1891, riots broke out in the German town of Xanten after a Jewish butcher was accused of ritually murdering a 4-year-old Christian boy.
But there was something genuinely different about the anti-Semitism of the late nineteenth century, which gave rise to modern political parties devoted to combating the Jewish influence on German society. The rapid industrialization of Germany had created great wealth, but, for many, also anxieties about how they would fare in a new economic system. Romantic nationalists looked back to preindustrial times through a mythical lens in which ethnic Germans had supposedly lived in spiritual communion with nature. The Jews, as a separate people, could never be a part of this German Volk. It wasn’t only that Jews had the wrong blood. Insofar as German Jews were associated with industrial and urban development, they were responsible for the destruction of an agrarian utopia, enemies of the soil itself.
The anti-Semitism of the Romantic nationalists blended easily with the pseudoscientific theories of the period that explained history as a struggle among races. That the German or Aryan race was superior was a given. Less certain was whether it would maintain its superiority. According to Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, the French writer who had helped popularize scientific racism in the middle of the nineteenth century, the downfall of society came about when a superior race mixed with an inferior race. For German scientific racists, the gravest threat posed by the Jews wasn’t that they were manipulative or dirty or any of the other old anti-Semitic tropes. It was that they were assimilating and marrying non-Jewish Germans.
By World War I, German Jews had made extraordinary contributions to virtually every facet of German life. And yet the modern anti-Semites, with their mantra of “the Jews are our misfortune,” seemed only more and more aggrieved. Like Boveri’s sea urchin embryos with the wrong number of chromosomes, Enlightenment thinking, corrupted by the wrong information, was turning hollow and collapsing in on itself.6
AMONG THE MOST prominent anti-Semitic ideologues of the time was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an Englishman who had relocated to Germany. Chamberlain, a friend of the kaiser and the son-in-law of the famously anti-Semitic composer Richard Wagner, saw the entire history of the West not merely as a struggle among races but specifically as a struggle between Aryans and Jews. In addition to their countless other crimes, Chamberlain maintained, Jews were responsible for the debasement of science. In 1912, Chamberlain singled out Jacques Loeb’s “soulless mechanist technological Jewish science.”7
The attack on Loeb might as easily have been made on his mentee. In 1914, Warburg would have sensed his vulnerability even as he was poised to assume one of the most prestigious positions in German science. Warburg might not have identified as Jewish, but Germany identified him as a Jew. He would have understood, as did most German Jews, that his commitment to his country needed to be made public. Not long after the kaiser’s call for unity, Warburg was among the tens of thousands of Germans of Jewish heritage to sign up to fight.
The army probably had another, more distinctive appeal to Warburg. He might have been the rising star of Chamberlain’s “soulless” science, but he was also an aristocrat and a snob. The kaiser’s army was exactly the type of old-fashioned, hierarchical nineteenth-century institution to which he was drawn. Warburg joined an uhlan (cavalry) regiment made up of men who still carried titles, including “Count” and “Baron.” Despite their pedigree, the Prussian uhlans had earned a reputation outside of Germany as ferocious warriors. Charles Darwin, upon encountering an uhlan for the first time, confessed that he thought they “belonged to a half-civilized tribe on the Eastern frontiers of Germany.”8
By the First World War, the uhlans, who rode with 10-foot lances, were already an anachronism. Their elaborate uniforms included a field-gray tunic and a czapka, a square-topped helmet that gave the appearance of a graduation cap. In the dawning new era of trench warfare and deadly machine guns, the uhlans galloping on their horses with lances were almost comically unsuited for battle.
After the war began, Germany’s military leadership quickly concluded that cavalry regiments would be better suited to the Eastern Front, where the rougher terrain might make horses more useful. In the first years of the war, Warburg sometimes rode in patrols in advance of the front lines. He had spent almost all of his adult life, to that point, in a laboratory, and he could only keep the charade going for so long. He once acknowledged that his ranking officers had doubts about his future in the army, given his ineptness. But with time, Warburg seems to have gained the respect of his fellow soldiers. He rose to the rank of lieutenant, and after suffering a minor injury, received the Iron Cross, First Class.9
Otto Warburg in his military uniform, 1916.
In 1917, Warburg’s regiment was attached to an infantry division on the Eastern Front, for which Warburg served as an aide-de-camp, a role far more suited to his skills. In addition to acting as the regiment’s physician, Warburg was named a “gas officer,” meaning he was responsible for detecting gas attacks and ensuring that the division was prepared. The role of “gas officer” was typically assigned to anyone with even a modicum of knowledge of chemistry. The other men in his regiment might not have appreciated that Warburg may have been more skilled at measuring gas than any human alive.10
WHILE WARBURG WAS discovering the possibility of life without science on the Eastern Front, the world he had left behind was crumbling. The scientists at the new Kaiser Wilhelm Society put their research interests aside to make Germany’s own chemical weapons. The Italian government seized the Naples Zoological Station. The steamboat so many scientists had used to gather sea creatures from the pristine waters of the gulf was converted into a warship.
As the fighting dragged on and German casualties mounted, the euphoria of 1914 turned to despair. Boveri, deteriorating from a mysterious medical condition, pondered whether “violent emotions” in the face of so many unexpected deaths might be causing “latent processes to erupt” inside of him. “Dying of a broken heart,” he wrote, “seems to me to belong in this category.” Five months later, he was dead at 53.11
Ehrlich, too, was devastated by Germany’s descent into war. Though he maintained that Germany had a clean conscience in its choice to fight, he saw from the start that there would be no happy ending. He died of a stroke in August of 1915, but not before he witnessed the chemical compounds in his dyes reassembled into explosives and poisonous gases.
After two years of war, German Jews saw that the kaiser’s call for unity was a false hope. In response to anti-Semitic claims about Jews “shirking” their military duties, the Prussian war minister ordered a “Jew count” to tally the number of Jews serving on the front lines. The results of the humiliating exercise were never made public, but Germany’s Jews felt betrayed. Some 80,000 of the 100,000 Jews who served in the kaiser’s army did so at the front. By the time the war was over, 2 percent of all German Jews had died defending the fatherland.12
As the war dragged on, Warburg’s mother, Elisabeth, was among the many Germans who had come to think of it as “a sin against humanity” and as “mass murder.” She had already lost a brother in the fighting and was “consumed with worry and fear” that she would lose her only son. Emil Warburg shared her anxiety. In an effort to secure his son’s release from the army, he wrote a series of letters to the Ministry of the Interior, arguing that Otto was important to German science and that his photosynthesis work might one day help Germany feed its population.13 Likely after being prodded by Emil, the prominent German botanist Carl Correns also sent a letter to the Ministry of the Interior calling for Warburg’s release. If Warburg’s experiments prove successful, Correns wrote, it will be “of extraordinary importance for people’s nutrition” and “open up a truly rich source of nutrients.”14
The letter-writing campaign succeeded, but convincing the German military to allow Warburg to return to Berlin was only half of the challenge facing Warburg’s parents. They also had to convince Warburg that leaving his regiment behind on the Eastern Front and returning to Berlin was the right decision. In 1918, they reached out to the one person they thought might be able to persuade their son to come home: Albert Einstein.
While Emil likely spoke to Einstein first, it was Elisabeth who sent a letter to Einstein on March 21, 1918:
My husband has always been so utterly delighted with his son. He once told me in confidence that he thought he was going to be one of the greats. Are our hopes for him to all be for naught? Is he to just throw away his destiny? . . .Why does it have to be his division that is put right up in front?15
Einstein, who had left Germany for Switzerland as a teenager, in part to avoid being conscripted into the German army, needed no convincing that the war was a great and avoidable tragedy. “All our lauded technological progress—our very civilization—is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal,” he wrote to a friend in 1917.16
Einstein composed a letter to Otto Warburg on March 23, 1918, two days after Elisabeth Warburg had written him. He began by acknowledging that he did not know Warburg well—but he knew him well enough to flatter him. “I gather that you are one of the most able and most promising younger physiologists in Germany and that the representation of your special subject here is rather mediocre.” With that, Einstein then made an emotional plea:
I also gather that you are on active service in a very dangerous position so that your life continuously hangs on a thread: now for a moment please slip out of your skin and into that of another clear-eyed being and ask yourself: Is this not madness? Can your place out there not be taken by any average man; is it not important to prevent the loss of valuable men in that bloody struggle? You know this well and must agree with me.17
While Warburg’s response hasn’t survived, Einstein’s letter appears to have been enough to convince Warburg to leave his regiment.
Warburg returned to Berlin several months before the armistice. It is possible that Albert Einstein saved his life and in so doing played his own small role in Warburg’s cancer breakthrough that would come less than a decade later.
Though he left his unit prematurely, Warburg formed lasting friendships with a number of the other officers. “You can really only hold a proper conversation when in the company of officers from the Prussian Guard,” he once told a scientific colleague, in what might have been his most obnoxious comment of all.18
Near the end of his life, Warburg would speak proudly of having worn “one of the finest uniforms of the old Prussian Army” and come to view his war years as formative. “I got to know the realities of life which had escaped me in the laboratory,” as he put it. In addition to learning to “handle people” and to “obey” and “command,” Warburg said, he learned that “one must be more than one appears to be.”19
GERMAN JEWS WERE far from alone in their patriotic fervor in the lead-up to World War I. After his mother’s death in 1907, Hitler again applied to Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts and again was rejected. In the aftermath of this second rejection, his friend and roommate, August Kubizek, noticed that he was growing increasingly “unbalanced.” Hitler, Kubizek wrote, would “fly into a temper at the slightest thing.”20
By late autumn of 1909, Hitler had reached bottom. He was sleeping on park benches or in Vienna’s homeless shelters, several of which were supported by Jewish philanthropists. To earn spare change, he shoveled snow and carried people’s luggage at the train station.
Hitler’s only real income came from the hastily drawn postcards he peddled. By 1910, he had made enough money selling painted postcards to move into a men’s home. He spent much of his time during his Vienna years in cafes, where he was exposed to the fanatical German nationalism and biological racism of the era. Though already a fervent German nationalist prior to the war, Hitler had not been overtly anti-Semitic. He was on friendly terms with a number of the Jewish residents at the men’s home where he slept. One of those Jews, a one-eyed locksmith’s assistant, periodically shared his disability allowance money with Hitler. What little money Hitler made himself often came from selling his paintings to Jewish merchants.
Upon turning 24 in April 1913, Hitler was able to claim his inheritance from his father, who had died when Hitler was 13. By then, Hitler was a Pan-German nationalist who longed to see the German part of Austria united with Imperial Germany. His inheritance made it possible for him to move to Munich and thus avoid being conscripted into the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire he despised. Hitler later wrote that his plan had been to become an architectural draftsman. Instead, once in Munich, he returned to his prior line of work: selling hastily painted pictures around town, sometimes by approaching people in beer gardens relaxing after work.
If Hitler expected to find kinship with his fellow German speakers, the reality of his life in Munich probably came as bitter disappointment. He failed to make any close friends. His landlady at the time described him as a “hermit.” Even Hitler’s roommate moved away, possibly because he could no longer stand Hitler’s diatribes.21
And so when the kaiser called for unity among Germans in August of 1914, it would lead to a darkly ironic moment in history: Hitler appears to have been excited by the kaiser’s words in much the same way as Germany’s Jews. The promise of war, both for German Jews and Hitler, came with the promise of a new beginning. In Mein Kampf, Hitler remembers his fanatical enthusiasm for the war as “a release from the painful feelings” of his youth. The day after the kaiser’s call for unity, Hitler was among the thousands celebrating in the streets of Munich. Several weeks later, he enlisted in a Bavarian infantry regiment and soon found himself in northern France.22
On October 29, 1914, as Hitler’s regiment engaged in heavy fighting, a British soldier raised his gun and fired in Hitler’s direction. If Hitler’s account can be trusted, the bullet tore through the sleeve of his shirt but failed to pierce his skin. “Miraculously,” Hitler wrote in a letter to an acquaintance, “I remained without a scratch.”23
Only three weeks later, a shell hit a regimental commander’s hut and killed several of the staff inside. Hitler had been inside the tent only 5 minutes before. By that point, Hitler had already become a dispatch runner, responsible for delivering messages. Most historical accounts indicate that Hitler risked his life again and again. But documents recently discovered by the historian Thomas Weber show that Hitler spent almost the entire war out of harm’s way. While some runners were required to travel to the front lines, Hitler, as a regimental dispatch runner, merely carried messages from one battalion headquarters to another. Other soldiers, resentful of the privileges of such runners, referred to them as “rear-area pigs.”
“The front experience of Private Hitler consisted more in the consumption of artificial honey and tea than of the participation in any combat,” a member of Hitler’s regiment wrote in 1932. “Thousands of family fathers would have filled Hitler’s little post behind the front just as well as him.”24
In 1918, having already received an Iron Cross, Second Class, Hitler was awarded an Iron Cross, First Class. Such medals, ostensibly given out for bravery, were largely a reflection of a given soldier’s connections at regimental headquarters. (Warburg probably earned his own Iron Cross for similar reasons.) Hitler received the honor on the recommendation of Hugo Gutmann, a lieutenant and the highest-ranking Jewish soldier in his regiment. (Gutmann would flee Nazi Germany in 1940.)
By war’s end, Hitler, having seen thousands of soldiers die around him, had learned that “life is a cruel struggle.” He was no longer the fragile young man who had tenderly cared for his cancer-stricken mother, nor the hapless, failed artist sleeping on public benches. Though far from a daring soldier, he had managed to carry out his duties and earn a modicum of respect. As Hitler biographer Volker Ullrich wrote, the “25-year-old loner finally thought he had found a way out of his disoriented, useless existence.” Hitler, like Warburg, had learned to be more than he appeared.25
Adolf Hitler, date unknown.
