A target of the German right wing during the interwar Weimar period, Einstein left Germany for France in 1928, a half-decade ahead of the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, later taking part in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Republican forces during the 1930s.

Trapped in southern France following Nazi Germany's defeat of the French Third Republic, Einstein killed himself by jumping from a bridge[2] on 5 July 1940.

In Berlin he attended the lectures of Georg Simmel and Heinrich Wölfflin but lacking a high school diploma (Abitur) he could not gain a doctorate.

He was actively involved in the short-lived Revolutionary Brussels Soldiers' Council and to a lesser extent in the failed Spartacist Uprising in Berlin and later in the defeated anarchist Durruti Column during the Spanish Civil War.

However, a Dutch military intelligence report was submitted to the Minister of Education Johannes Theodoor de Visser, which gave an account of Carl Einstein's activities in the 1918 Brussels Soldiers' Council.

Jahrhunderts (Art of the 20th Century), which may have gained him an invitation to teach at the Bauhaus (he declined), to the notorious play Die Schlimme Botschaft.

His passion play Die Schlimme Botschaft (The Sad Tidings, or The Bad News) was met with attacks as blasphemous; its 1921 publication resulted in a legal process and a conviction for blasphemy in 1922, and Einstein was forced to atone for the revolutionary ideas placed into the mouth of his Jesus Christ with a 15,000-mark fine.

Although able to escape the German occupation of Paris during the Fall of France and flee to the south, he was left trapped on the French border with Francoist Spain.