The contributions collected in this work, published with the support of the Centro Einstein di Studi Internazionali and the Centro Studi sul Federalismo in Turin, provide a better understanding of the evolution of Albert Einstein’s thought during the first half of the 20th century, marked by two world wars. They describe Einstein’s often epistolary relationships with other intellectuals, starting with those he seems to have admired most, Mohandas Gandhi and Albert Schweitzer. But in what was at the time similar to the birth of an “international of intellectuals”, the physicist maintained a dialogue on peace and war with many other personalities, such as Max Planck, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Romain Rolland and George Bernard Shaw.
As early as 1914, Einstein co-signed with Friedrich Georg Nikolai, professor of physiology at the University of Berlin, an ‘Appeal to Europeans’, which stresses that war can only lead to disaster both for civilization and for “the national survival of individual states”. “It is the duty of educated and well-intentioned Europeans to try to prevent Europe (...) from having to suffer the same tragic fate that was that of ancient Greece”, they write before adding: “Must Europe too gradually exhaust itself and perish in a fratricidal war?” “We are convinced that the time has come when Europe must act in concert to protect its soil, its inhabitants and its culture”, we can still read in the manifesto which, along with other texts (including the Russel-Einstein Manifesto of July 1955 against the H-bomb), appears in the appendix to this book.
Einstein also regularly denounces nationalism and observes, in a letter dated August 1915: “It seems that men always need some silly fiction in the name of which they can hate each other. It used to be religion. Today it is the State”. Without giving up his fight against war, Einstein will gradually develop the idea of a better organization of the world, with a supranational authority capable of regulating conflicts between states. However, as the Appeal to Europeans already underlined, “the Europeans must first come together, and if - as we hope - there are enough Europeans in Europe, that is to say people for whom Europe is not just a geographical concept, but in the first place something they cherish in their hearts, then we can try to call for a (…) union of Europeans”.
Beyond their historical interest, the documents analyzed in this work retain an element of topicality. As Giampiero Bordino underlines in his preface: “In a world increasingly characterized by opportunistic, and humanely and culturally inappropriate political leaderships, Einstein’s thought on peace and war, and in particular on nuclear war, should be disseminated more broadly (…) not only to intellectuals, but also among the political class (…) and in the direction of the citizens in Europe and in the world”.