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alike. He was besieged by requests for appearances, statements, appeals, signatures, speeches, and interviews. But he avoided making political statements and reserved his energy for Jewish causes.
    Generally, he kept his distance from Princeton's colony of German and European exiles. He was always in the public eye, yet he remained apart, even from the nexus of intellectual life: “I live like a bear in my den.” 14 From 1938 to 1941, the great German novelist Thomas Mann taught at Princeton and lived only a few blocks away. But the two men saw little of each other. Mann's wife, Katia, thought Einstein an “enormously specialized talent” but “not particularly stimulating” and “not a very impressive person.” 15 A certain cultural snobbery seemed to have migrated to the American shores. Then again, the Manns’ grand style of living—in a mansion with a staff of servants—did not appeal to Einstein, who lived simply, without fuss. One can scarcely imagine the dandyish Thomas Mann in Einstein's trademark sweatshirt. Einstein's few close friends in Princeton were outsiders and mavericks, like Gödel and Pauli.
    Of the four men who met in Einstein's living room, Gödel, Pauli, and Einstein held appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study. Established by Abraham Flexner in 1930, the Institute offered fellowships (without teaching requirements) to eminent scholars in the natural and social sciences and in physics and mathematics. Einstein was Flexner's first recruit—and his fame fortified the Institute's prestige. Gödel joined in 1933, though only as an assistant; Pauli, after a visit in the mid-1930s, arrived in 1940 to take up residence until the end of the war.
    Gödel and Pauli were not only Einstein's intellectual peers, but also, thankfully, spoke German. Einstein's spoken English was never strong; he was really at home only in German. In Princeton, his old friendship with Pauli deepened, and a new one with Gödel flowered. Pauli was superbly knowledgeable about relativity theory, and, when they were not arguing about quantum theory, he and Einstein collaborated on a paper. Gödel and Einstein saw each other daily for years; their walks to the Institute gave Einstein an intellectual equal with whom to discuss his unfashionable unified theory, though Gödel remained skeptical. Russell, whom Einstein had met years before, showed up in Princeton at the end of 1943, at loose ends, scheduled for periodic lectures in New York, desperate for a ship to take him back to wartime England.
    Four more varied—and difficult—people would be hard to find.

PART 4
BEYOND PATHOS:
OPPENHEIMER,
HEISENBERG, AND
THE WAR

    As Einstein and his friends in Princeton spoke quietly of philosophy and science, many of their colleagues were busy pushing physics toward brute power. In Los Alamos and in Germany, physicists raced to build the first atom bomb. Whoever succeeded would gain certain victory: The heart of London or Berlin could be destroyed in a moment. Neither Einstein nor his fellow physicist Pauli worked on the atom bomb, but both knew what their colleagues were doing. It was a small, tight-knit world. Oppenheimer, who directed the Los Alamos effort, had been Pauli's student. Werner Heisenberg, who led the German bomb project, was Pauli's closest collaborator. They had been friends since their college days in Munich. When it came down to the atom, everyone knew everyone else.
WARTIME BERLIN, WINTER 1943–44
    I N DECEMBER 1943, WERNER HEISENBERG paid a visit to Krakow at the invitation of Hans Frank, then the Nazi governor general of occupied Poland. 1 Frank, a schoolmate of Heisenberg's brother, had extended the invitation in May 1943, having invented a “CopernicusPrize” for Heisenberg as an enticement. Delayed for various reasons, Heisenberg finally accepted, with the promise, too, of a lecture for Frank's newly minted Institut fur Deutsche Ostarbeit