Walter Isaacson Quote
Close to forty thousand Germans gathered in front of Berlin’s opera house on May 10, 1933, as a parade of swastika-wearing students and beer-hall thugs carrying torches tossed books into a huge bonfire. Ordinary citizens poured forth carrying volumes looted from libraries and private homes. Jewish intellectualism is dead, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, his face fiery, yelled from the podium. The German soul can again express itself. What happened in Germany in 1933 was not just a brutality perpetrated by thuggish leaders and abetted by ignorant mobs. It was also, as Einstein described, the utter failure of the so-called intellectual aristocracy. Einstein and other Jews were ousted from what had been among the world’s greatest citadels of open-minded inquiry, and those who remained did little to resist. It represented the triumph of the ilk of Philipp Lenard, Einstein’s longtime anti-Semitic baiter, who was named by Hitler to be the new chief of Aryan science. We must recognize that it is unworthy of a German to be the intellectual follower of a Jew, Lenard exulted that May. Heil Hitler! It would be a dozen years before Allied troops would fight their way in and oust him from that role.41 Le
Close to forty thousand Germans gathered in front of Berlin’s opera house on May 10, 1933, as a parade of swastika-wearing students and beer-hall thugs carrying torches tossed books into a huge bonfire. Ordinary citizens poured forth carrying volumes looted from libraries and private homes. Jewish intellectualism is dead, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, his face fiery, yelled from the podium. The German soul can again express itself. What happened in Germany in 1933 was not just a brutality perpetrated by thuggish leaders and abetted by ignorant mobs. It was also, as Einstein described, the utter failure of the so-called intellectual aristocracy. Einstein and other Jews were ousted from what had been among the world’s greatest citadels of open-minded inquiry, and those who remained did little to resist. It represented the triumph of the ilk of Philipp Lenard, Einstein’s longtime anti-Semitic baiter, who was named by Hitler to be the new chief of Aryan science. We must recognize that it is unworthy of a German to be the intellectual follower of a Jew, Lenard exulted that May. Heil Hitler! It would be a dozen years before Allied troops would fight their way in and oust him from that role.41 Le
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About Walter Isaacson
He has been the president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan policy studies organization based in Washington, D.C., the chair and CEO of CNN, and the editor of Time.
Isaacson attended Harvard University and Pembroke College, Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He is the co-author with Evan Thomas of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986) and the author of Pro and Con (1983), Kissinger: A Biography (1992), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), American Sketches (2009), Steve Jobs (2011), The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014), Leonardo da Vinci (2017), The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race (2021) and Elon Musk (2023).
Isaacson is an advisory partner at Perella Weinberg Partners, a New York City-based financial services firm. He was vice chair of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which oversaw the rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina, chaired the government board that runs Voice of America, and was a member of the Defense Innovation Board.