Einstein (64 page)

In addition, the loss of the war had been humiliating. Germany had lost 6 million men and then was forced into surrendering land containing half of its natural resources, plus all of its overseas colonies. Many proud Germans believed it must have been the result of betrayal. The Weimar Republic that had emerged after the war, though supported by liberals and pacifists and Jews such as Einstein, was disdained by much of the old order and even the middle class.

There was one group that could be easily cast as the alien and dark force most responsible for the humiliation facing a proud culture.“People need a scapegoat and make the Jews responsible,” Einstein noted. “They are a target of instinctive resentment because they are of a different tribe.”
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The explosion of great art and ideas in Germany at the time, as Amos Elon wrote in his book
The Pity of It All,
was largely due to Jewish patrons and pioneers in a variety of fields. This was particularly true in science. As Sigmund Freud pointed out, part of the success of Jewish scientists was their “creative skepticism,” which arose from their essential nature as outsiders.
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What the Jewish assimilationists underestimated was the virulence with which many Germans, whom they considered to be their fellow countrymen, in fact saw them as essentially outsiders or, as Einstein put it, “a different tribe.”

Einstein’s first public collision with this anti-Semitism came in the summer of 1920. A shady German nationalist named Paul Weyland, an engineer by training, had turned himself into a polemicist with political aspirations. He was an active member of a right-wing nationalistic political party that pledged, in its 1920 official program, to “diminish the dominant Jewish influence showing up increasingly in government and in public.”
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Weyland realized that Einstein, as a highly publicized Jew, had engendered resentment and jealousy. Likewise, his relativity theory was easy to turn into a target, because many people, including some scientists, were unnerved by the way it seemed to undermine absolutes and be built on abstract hypotheses rather than grounded in solid experiment. So Weyland published articles denouncing relativity as “a big hoax” and formed a ragtag (but mysteriously well-funded) organization
grandly dubbed the Study Group of German Scientists for the Preservation of a Pure Science.

Joining with Weyland was an experimental physicist of modest reputation named Ernst Gehrcke, who for years had been assailing relativity with more vehemence than comprehension. Their group lobbed a few personal attacks at Einstein and the “Jewish nature” of relativity theory, then called a series of meetings around Germany, including a large rally at Berlin’s Philharmonic Hall on August 24.

Weyland spoke first and, with the orotund rhetoric of a demagogue, accused Einstein of engaging in a “businesslike booming of his theory and his name.” Einstein’s penchant for publicity, wanted or not, was being used against him, as his assimilationist friends had warned. Relativity was a hoax, Weyland said, and plagiarized to boot. Gehrcke said much the same with a more technical gloss, reading from a written text. The meeting, reported the
New York Times,
“had a decidedly antiSemitic complexion.”
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In the middle of Gehrcke’s talk, there arose from the audience a quiet murmur:
Einstein, Einstein.
He had come to see the circus and, averse neither to publicity nor controversy, laugh at the spectacle. As his friend Philipp Frank noted, “He always liked to regard events in the world around him as if he were a spectator in a theater.” Sitting in the audience with his friend the chemist Walther Nernst, he cackled loudly at times and at the end pronounced the entire event “most amusing.”
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But he was not truly amused, and he even briefly considered moving away from Berlin.
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His anger aroused, he made the tactical mistake of responding with a highly charged diatribe that was published three days later on the front page of the
Berliner Tageblatt,
a liberal daily owned by Jewish friends. “I am well aware that the two speakers are unworthy of reply by my pen,” he said, but then proceeded not to be restrained by that awareness. Gehrcke and Weyland had not been explicitly anti-Semitic, nor did they overtly criticize Jews in their speeches. But Einstein alleged that they would not have attacked his theory “if I were a German nationalist, with or without a swastika, instead of a Jew.”
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Einstein spent most of his piece refuting Weyland and Gehrcke.
But he also attacked a more reputable physicist who was not at the meeting but had given support to the antirelativity cause: Philipp Lenard.

Winner of the 1905 Nobel Prize, Lenard had been a pioneer experimenter who described the photoelectric effect. Einstein had once admired him. “I have just read a wonderful paper by Lenard,” Einstein had gushed to Mari
back in 1901. “Under this beautiful piece I am filled with such happiness and joy that I absolutely must share some of it with you.” After Einstein had published his first spate of seminal papers in 1905, citing Lenard by name in the one on light quanta, the two scientists had exchanged flattering letters.
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But as an ardent German nationalist, Lenard had become increasingly bitter about the British and the Jews, contemptuous of the publicity Einstein’s theory was garnering, and vocal in his attacks on the “absurd” aspects of relativity. He had allowed his name to be used on brochures that were distributed at Weyland’s meeting, and as a Nobel laureate he had worked behind the scenes to make sure that Einstein was not awarded the prize.

Because Lenard had refrained from showing up at the Philharmonic Hall rally, and because his published critiques of relativity had been academic in tone, Einstein did not need to attack him in his newspaper piece. But he did. “I admire Lenard as a master of experimental physics, but he has not yet produced anything outstanding in theoretical physics, and his objections to the general theory of relativity are of such superficiality that, up until now, I did not think it necessary to answer them,” he wrote. “I intend to make up for this.”
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Einstein’s friends publicly supported him. A group that included von Laue and Nernst published a letter claiming, not altogether accurately, “Whoever is fortunate enough to be close to Einstein knows that he will never be surpassed in his . . . dislike of all publicity.”
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Privately, however, his friends were appalled. He had been provoked into a display of public anger against those who should have remained unworthy of a reply by his pen, thus stirring up even more distasteful publicity. Max Born’s wife, Hedwig, who had freely scolded Einstein about his treatment of his family, now lectured, “[You should] not have allowed yourself to be goaded into that rather unfortunate
reply.” He should show more respect, she said, for “the secluded temple of science.”
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Paul Ehrenfest was even harsher. “My wife and I absolutely cannot believe that you yourself wrote some of the phrases in the article,” he said. “If you really did write them down with your own hand, it proves that these damn pigs have finally succeeded in touching your soul. I urge you as strongly as I can not to throw one more word on this subject to that voracious beast, the public.”
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Einstein was somewhat contrite. “Don’t be too severe with me,” he replied to the Borns. “Everyone must, from time to time, make a sacrifice on the altar of stupidity, to please the deity and mankind. And I did so thoroughly with my article.”
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But he made no apologies for flunking their standards of publicity avoidance. “I had to do this if I wanted to stay in Berlin, where every child recognizes me from photographs,” he told Ehrenfest. “If one believes in democracy, then one must grant the public this much right as well.”
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Not surprisingly, Lenard was outraged by Einstein’s article. He insisted on an apology, as he had not even been part of the antirelativity rally. Arnold Sommerfeld, chairman of the German Physical Society, tried to mediate, and he urged Einstein “to write some conciliatory words to Lenard.”
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It was not to be. Einstein refused to back down, and Lenard ended up edging ever closer to being an outright antiSemite and later a Nazi.

(There was one odd coda to this event. In 1953, according to declassified documents in Einstein’s FBI file, a well-dressed German walked into the FBI field office in Miami and told the receptionist he had information that Einstein had admitted to being a communist in an article in
Berliner Tageblatt
in August 1920. The aspiring informer was none other than Paul Weyland, who had landed in Miami and was trying to emigrate after years of being a con man and swindler all over the world. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was eagerly trying to prove, with no success, that Einstein was a communist, and took up the cause. After three months, the Bureau finally found the article and translated it. There was nothing about being a communist in it. Weyland was, nevertheless, granted American citizenship.)
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The public crossfire coming out of the antirelativity rally heightened
interest in the upcoming annual meeting of German scientists, scheduled for late September in the spa town of Bad Nauheim. Both Einstein and Lenard were to attend, and Einstein had ended his newspaper response by proclaiming that, at his suggestion, a public discussion of relativity would occur there. “Anyone who can dare face a scientific forum can present his objections there,” he said, tossing a gauntlet in Lenard’s direction.

During the weeklong gathering in Bad Nauheim, Einstein stayed with Max Born in Frankfurt, twenty miles away, and the two men commuted to the resort town by train each day. The big showdown over relativity, at which both Einstein and Lenard were expected to participate, was on the afternoon of September 23. Einstein had forgotten to bring anything to write with, so he borrowed the pencil of the person next to him in order to take notes while Lenard talked.

Planck was in the chair, and by both his commanding presence and soothing words he was able to prevent any personal attacks. Lenard’s objections to relativity were similar to those of many nontheorists. The theory was built on equations rather than observations, he said, and it “offends against the simple common sense of a scientist.” Einstein replied that what “seems obvious” changes over time. That was true even of Galileo’s mechanics.

It was the first time that Einstein and Lenard had met, but they did not shake hands or speak to each other. And though the official minutes of the meeting do not record it, Einstein apparently lost his equanimity at one point. “Einstein was provoked into making a caustic reply,” Born recalled. And a few weeks later, Einstein wrote Born to assure him that he would “not allow myself to get excited again as in Nauheim.”
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Finally, Planck was able to end the session, before any blood was drawn, with a limp joke. “Since the theory of relativity unfortunately has not so far been able to extend the absolute time available for this meeting,” he said, “ it must now be adjourned.”The papers the next day were left without headlines, and the antirelativity movement subsided for the time being.
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As for Lenard, he distanced himself from the weird group of original antirelativists. “Unfortunately Weyland turned out to be a crook,”
he later said. But he did not let go of his own antipathy toward Einstein. After the Bad Nauheim meeting he became increasingly vitriolic and anti-Semitic in his attacks on Einstein and “Jewish science.” He became a proponent of creating a “Deutsche Physik” that purged German physics of Jewish influences, which to him was exemplified by Einstein’s relativity theory with its abstract, theoretical, and nonexperimental approach and its odor (at least to him) of a relativism that rejected absolutes, order, and certainties.

A few months later, at the beginning of January 1921, an obscure Munich party functionary picked up the theme. “Science, once our greatest pride, is today being taught by Hebrews,” Adolf Hitler wrote in a newspaper polemic.
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There were even ripples that made it across the Atlantic. That April, the
Dearborn Independent,
a weekly owned by automaker Henry Ford, a strong anti-Semite, blared a banner headline across the top of its front page. “Is Einstein a Plagiarist?” it accusingly asked.
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Albert Einstein’s exploding global fame and budding Zionism came together in the spring of 1921 for an event that was unique in the history of science, and indeed remarkable for any realm: a grand two-month processional through the eastern and midwestern United States that evoked the sort of mass frenzy and press adulation that would thrill a touring rock star. The world had never before seen, and perhaps never will again, such a scientific celebrity superstar, one who also happened to be a gentle icon of humanist values and a living patron saint for Jews.