Einstein's Betrayal

At the beginning of the Second World War, on the shore of a lake in New Jersey, two eccentrics meet and take to one another. A friendship grows between them. Albert Einstein, the German scientist of Jewish origin, has emigrated to America and teaches at Princeton; the tramp is a father who lost his son in the war. To this confidant thrown up by chance, Einstein lays out his dilemma. Can one do science without doing politics? Can one stop being German, for oneself and for everyone else? Can one not feel Jewish, even as an atheist, while Hitler is slaughtering the Jews? Can one want peace and at the same time become responsible for the Manhattan Project and then for Hiroshima? Can one be the world's greatest admirer and explorer and still its greatest destroyer? In Einstein's Betrayal, Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt sets out the moral conflict of a man of genius who invented, against his own will, the machinery for destroying the world. The playwright brings to the footlights the whole scientific and political history of the terrible twentieth century, taking up questions that are still very much ours: pacifism, militarism, the United Nations, national identity and betrayal.