The German Genius

the Hungarian (but German-speaking), Edward Teller, took a diametrically opposing view, and became a celebrated “hawk.”
    Bethe and Teller were close friends when they arrived in America, going mountain climbing together with their wives and jointly renting a home. 86 But the bomb came between them, as it divided émigré physicists in general: John (“Jancsi”) von Neumann, whose ideas had been crucial to the speed with which the atomic bomb had been produced at Los Alamos, took Teller’s side, and Victor Weisskopf took Bethe’s. 87 The crunch came in 1953 over the Oppenheimer affair when J. Robert Oppenheimer, once the director of America’s atomic research program, was charged with dis-loyalty, as shown by his opposition to A-bomb research (a charge that was dismissed), and with attempting to shield a left-wing friend. 88 Teller gave evidence against Oppenheimer. In response, Bethe wrote a paper—not declassified until 1982—which argued that the delays in the Los Alamos H-bomb project resulted more from miscalculations by Teller than from Oppenheimer’s political doubts.
    Bethe was taken on to the President’s Science Advisory Committee and well into the sixties had a voice in tempering Teller’s more belligerent approach (Peter Goodchild subtitled his 2004 biography of Teller The Real Dr. Strangelove ). 89 In America the arguments for and against the atomic and nuclear bombs have been unusually closely associated with émigré physicists.
    “D AS R EICH DER Z WEI”
     
    Fortunately, that is not all the émigré scientists have been noted for. In the postwar years a friendship formed between Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel, both of whom were fellows at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. 90 Einstein was, of course, by far the better known of the two men, but it was Gödel who, at that stage, was doing the more significant work. (Einstein used to tell visitors to the IAS that he went into the institute simply to “have the privilege of walking home” with Gödel.) The younger man had never enjoyed good health and he would, soon enough, suffer a breakdown. But for a while their walks together endured and they laughingly described their time at Princeton as “Das Reich der Zwei,” the Reich of two. 91
    Gödel’s new thinking about relativity imagined a breaking out of our notions of time, as if certain limits we accept in common sense are no longer true. Einstein had introduced the concept of space-time, that it was all one entity, and that it could be curved or twisted. Gödel now imagined (or rather, worked out mathematically) that if the universe were rotating, as he calculated it was (this is now called a “Gödel universe”), then space-time could become so greatly warped or curved by the distribution of matter that were a spaceship to travel through it at a certain minimum speed (which he calculated), time travel would be possible. 92
    The idea of time travel naturally catches the eye. But Gödel was not a frivolous man—far from it—and his aim was deeply philosophical, an attempt to understand time in a post-Einstein world, his fundamental point being that the world was/is a space, not a time. 93 This is clearly not an easy concept to grapple with, and for many years Gödel and his new theory were ignored. But there were signs of increasing interest at the turn of the twenty-first century (he died in 1978) as his ideas show some overlaps with string theory.
    T HE R ETURN—AND A MERICANIZATION—OF Bildung
     
    Looking back to the beginning of this chapter, Allan Bloom’s comments about the German influence in American cultural life sounded more than a little reminiscent of a plea for a return to Bildung, a rounded, humanistic education, harking back to the Greek and Latin classics, as the best (and first) that have been thought, written, painted…and so on. This is not so surprising, since Bloom was himself taught by the German exile Leo Strauss. Bloom argued that Americans were now looking for fulfillment by Freudian means rather than the more traditional educational route, and this was a cause of his pessimism, for he didn’t see how it could succeed.
    His views, and the book based on them, created a great furor, especially in the universities, where opinion was sharply divided as to whether he had a point: that, as he said, the big issues facing mankind have not changed and that many of the “new” ideas “discovered” by the social sciences were in fact