The Man Who Stalked Einstein (3 page)

The final insult came during his steamship passage aboard the
Belgenland
back to Europe. Einstein received word that authorities from Potsdam had ransacked
their country cottage. The stated reason for the SA invasion was that Einstein was
suspected of supplying arms to revolutionary elements. The Nazis confiscated his beloved
sailboat—the
Tuemmler
—on the pretext that it could be used to smuggle contraband weapons to socialists.
Less than four years earlier, he and Elsa had built their vacation home in the small
village of Caputh, only a short drive from downtown Berlin. Both of them dearly loved
the rustic beauty and peacefulness so close to the bustle of their daily lives. “For
us, this house was a place of comfort and security,” he later wrote. “A place in which
everyone could find his own happiness and his own content.” For Einstein, the ransacking
of his cottage was an unmistakable signal that returning to Germany would put their
lives at risk. “They’ll drag you through the streets by your hair,” one friend warned
him. When questioned about the Potsdam police searching for hidden weapons in his
home, he responded cryptically, “Everyone measures according to his own shoes.”

The Einsteins disembarked in Antwerp and sought the assistance of personal friends,
King Albert I and his queen, Elizabeth. Elizabeth was a native of Bavaria who had
been raised in the small town of Possenhofen, near Munich. The Queen had met Einstein
for the first time in 1929, when she invited him to dinner to explain relativity to
her. By the end of the evening, Einstein had accompanied her in a duet, playing his
violin. Invited to dinner again a year later, “I was greeted with heartwarming cordiality,”
he wrote Elsa. “These two people are of such a purity and benevolence that it is hardly
found.” A deep friendship developed between the scientist and the royal couple. Now,
Einstein was without a homeland. Albert and Elizabeth took him and Elsa under their
sovereign protection.

As he was not yet ready to make up his mind about where he would next live and work,
Einstein and Elsa bided their time in a cottage in Le Coq sur Mer. Einstein’s residence
along the Belgian coast gave him the psychological space to consider his immediate
options. Everything would have been perfect except for the rumors reaching them that
the Nazi agitator Alfred Leibus had offered a $5,000 reward for Einstein’s assassination.
Concerned for her esteemed guest, the Queen staffed the cottage with two impressively
muscled bodyguards. Whether it was out of fear of these bodyguards or simply that
no one wished to risk mounting an attack, Einstein lived there securely.

What Einstein decided to do next indelibly inscribed his name among the Reich’s enemies.
He resigned his membership in the Prussian Academy. It was an action that he could
not have taken lightly. Even prior to the rise of the Nazis, anti-Semitism was rampant
among Germany’s elite scientists, so his membership in the prestigious society had
been hard won. Planck had to campaign vigorously on Einstein’s behalf. In fact, he’d
even approached Philipp Lenard for his support, unaware of Lenard’s growing resentment
toward Einstein. Sensing some hesitation, Planck guilelessly asked Lenard if it wasn’t
appropriate for such a famous theoretician as Einstein to reside in the company of
his equally celebrated peers. Lenard famously responded, “Just because a goat may
reside in a stable, it does not make him a regal thoroughbred.”

In a letter to the Prussian Academy of March 28, 1933, Einstein acknowledged that
he owed the Academy his thanks for “the opportunity to devote my time to scientific
research, free from all professional obligations. I know how much I am obliged to
her. I withdraw reluctantly from this circle also because of the intellectual stimulation
and the fine human relationships which I have enjoyed throughout this long period.”
He cited the “current state of affairs in Germany” as the reason for his resignation
and doubtlessly considered the matter concluded.

Unfortunately, it was not. The Academy issued an April 1 press release indicating
its members were “shocked to learn from newspaper reports about Albert Einstein’s
participation in the loathsome anti-German campaign in America and France,” scolding
Einstein for his “agitatorial behavior abroad.” The document went on to note that
by withdrawing from the Academy, Einstein also was giving up his Prussian citizenship,
which was conditional upon his Academy membership. Indeed, the German government first
tried to postpone his relinquishing of his citizenship by invoking a rarely applied
tax law requiring Einstein to pay a fine for fleeing the country. Einstein simply
ignored the decree, recognizing it as a thinly veiled ruse to bring him back into
Germany and arrest him.

The Academy’s charge that Einstein had participated in anti-German activities had
some basis in fact. Einstein had made a number of statements to U.S. pacifist groups
over the previous few months, condemning Nazi antagonism toward Germany’s Jews.

Nonetheless, he denied the charges in an indignant letter to the Academy dated April
5, 1933. Although Einstein acknowledged that he had described the German citizenry
as suffering from a “psychiatric disease” and that he had urged a “threatened civilization
to do their utmost to prevent the further spread of this mass psychosis, which is
expressing itself in Germany in such a terrible way,” he denied that he had ever been
a part of any “loathsome campaign.” He stood behind every word he had ever published
and asked that, in fairness, his defense of his actions be disseminated to the members
of the Academy and the public at large.

The Academy’s wrongful accusations had slandered him. He had resigned his Academy
membership and his Prussian citizenship because “I do not wish to live in a state
in which individuals are not granted equal rights before the law, as well as freedom
of speech and instruction.”

Having concluded his dispute with the Prussian Academy, Einstein deposited his passport
at the German consulate in Brussels and returned his attention to deciding where he
would work in the future. Paul Ehrenfest, a Dutch friend, tried to prevail on Einstein
to join him in Leiden. Similarly, scientists at Christ Church College in England,
where he had spent a number of happy times, argued that Oxford would provide the best
environment for continuing his work on what increasingly had been attracting his professional
attention: a general field theory that would incorporate all known building blocks
of the universe into a coherent whole. While Einstein surely considered these options,
he was most taken with the possibility of moving to the United States. During his
three trips to the United States, Einstein had been favorably impressed by the freedoms
that Americans enjoyed. He also appreciated the absence of a formal class system that
in Europe denied advancement to those born into lesser circumstances.

Physicist Robert Milliken had seen the possibility of recruiting Einstein to Pasadena
early in their relationship, so the door was open to him at Cal Tech. Einstein might
well have chosen this option except for the mistake Milliken made in introducing Einstein
to the renowned American educational reformer and secretary of the Rockefeller Foundation,
Abraham Flexner. Flexner, who was Jewish, had incited a revolution in American medical
education. He had closed down sham medical schools and helped to develop a more rigorous
medical curriculum. In the spring of 1932, while visiting Los Angeles, he asked Milliken’s
permission to meet the vaunted German physicist then serving his second professorship
in residence. The two hit it off. They were seen walking together, in deep conversation,
late into the evening, well beyond the time Elsa had set aside for her husband and
Flexner to meet.

Flexner spoke to Einstein about his plan to start a small, very exclusive research
university or think tank. Having secured a $5 million pledge from department store
magnate Louis Bamberger, Flexner envisioned a highly vetted, prestigious faculty.
It would have visiting scholars but would not present degrees. Although Flexner had
decided his institute would be located in Princeton, New Jersey, it would have no
formal affiliation with Princeton University.

Einstein had lectured at Princeton University several times and enjoyed the experience.
The college’s leafy walkways and gothic, fitted-stone architecture were more appealing
to Einstein, and especially to Elsa, than the foreign, materialistic feel of Southern
California. Sensing triumph, with only one more hurdle to surpass, Flexner timorously
asked Einstein what sort of salary he had in mind. The Rockefeller Foundation had
given him a generous budget, but perhaps not enough to command the attention of such
a great man. Einstein naïvely suggested $3,000 annually, quite a low figure by American
standards. Smiling, Flexner told him that he would work out his salary with Elsa.
Einstein readily agreed. They settled at $16,000.

The freedom to think and write and the flexibility of the arrangement that Flexner
promised so appealed to Einstein that he quickly agreed in principle to become the
second faculty member of the institute, after the mathematician Hermann Weyl. This
is not to say that Einstein hadn’t any qualms about moving to such a strange place
as America. He had expressed how he felt about the United States in a 1925 letter
to his friend Michael Besso, who had worked with him on the theory of special relativity:
“To find Europe delightful, you have to visit the United States. While people have
fewer prejudices there, they nevertheless are hollow and uninteresting, much more
so than in Europe.” In a similarly dismissive vein, he noted, “American men are nothing
but the pet dogs of their wives. People seem to be endlessly bored.”

The threat to his and his wife’s lives demanded that Einstein reconsider those views.
In the end, Einstein agreed to spend four or five months annually in Princeton at
what would become the Institute for Advanced Studies. In the worst case, he thought,
he would make up for U.S. intellectual deficiencies by spending the rest of his time
at Oxford or Leiden or Madrid, where he also had accepted a yet-to-be-defined appointment.
It was not to be. Despite living another twenty-two years, Einstein never again touched
foot on European soil.

Einstein grew restless with domestic life in Le Coq sur Mer while waiting for some
signal from Flexner that things were settled with U.S. Immigration and ready for him
in Princeton. An unusual opportunity presented itself in the form of an invitation
from a wealthy member of the British Parliament, a former army commander and pilot
named Oliver Locker-Lampson, whom Einstein had once met at Oxford. Einstein traveled
to England without Elsa, who preferred her quiet existence along the Belgian shore.

Locker-Lampson was an admirer of Einstein and was greatly pleased by Einstein’s acceptance
of his invitation. During the few short weeks of his visit, the two men became good
friends. At Einstein’s request, Locker-Lampson introduced a bill in Parliament to
increase opportunities for Jews to emigrate from Germany to Great Britain. In proposing
the law, Locker-Lampson nodded to Einstein, who was standing in the gallery of the
House of Commons that day, and said, “Germany has turned out its most glorious citizen.
. . . The Huns have stolen his savings, plundered his place of residence, and even
taken his violin. . . . How proud this country must be to have offered him shelter.”

The shelter Locker-Lampson provided was a cottage on the Norfolk moors. While Elsa
prepared in Le Coq sur Mer for their voyage to America, her husband contemplated the
universe—or so he said—guarded by two attractive young women who had been introduced
to him as Locker-Lampson’s “assistants.” Einstein happily spent his final days in
England drinking beer with his well-proportioned protectors and greeting visitors
wishing to meet the famous scientist. The press delighted in photographing Einstein
with his shotgun-toting “bodyguards.” When asked whether he felt secure with his protectors’
sharpshooting talents, he speculated, “The beauty of my bodyguards would disarm a
conspirator sooner than their shotguns.”

Elsa could not have been pleased with the news of her husband’s English idyll, but
it is unlikely she was surprised. Married fourteen years, she and Einstein had begun
their affair in 1912, when he was still married to his first wife, Mileva Marić. When
Marić separated from Einstein in 1914, after he had accepted a professorship in Berlin,
he noted, “I am extremely happy with the separation, even though I rarely hear from
my boys. The peace and quiet feel enormously good, as does the really nice affair
with my cousin.”

Three years Einstein’s elder, Elsa was his cousin on both sides of his family. The
daughter of his mother’s sister and of his father’s brother, she had been born an
Einstein, became a Loewenthal when she married her first husband, and took back the
surname Einstein once again when she married Albert in 1919. She and little “Albertle”
had played together as children. She was well aware of his wry wit and the devastating
effect his intelligence and fame had upon women.

“Marriage is the unsuccessful attempt to make something lasting out of an incident,”
Einstein once said. Although Elsa usually traveled with her husband and kept a stern
eye on him, she soon experienced the same heartache as Mileva had. In 1923, four years
into their marriage, Einstein fell in love with his twenty-three-year-old secretary,
Betty Neumann. Elsa knew about it, but it was nearly two years before she convinced
her husband to break it off. Even so, she could not banish the feelings Einstein had
for Neumann. Einstein wrote Neumann, “I will have to look to the stars for what is
denied me on earth.” Elsa didn’t doubt that there had been others. Locker-Lampson’s
assistants were only a distraction. She would say nothing and focus on her preparations
for their imminent departure.