The Man Who Stalked Einstein (5 page)

On another occasion, when his longtime driver was taking Einstein to one of his lectures,
the driver said to him, “I’ve heard that lecture so many times, I could deliver it
myself.” Einstein took him up on the bet. The driver did Einstein proud, but afterward,
someone in the audience asked a difficult question. Without missing a beat, the driver
pointed to Einstein, sitting in chauffeur tucker in the back of the room, and said,
“That’s such a simple question, I believe my driver could answer it.” So he did.

In Lenard’s mind, this kind of grandstanding proved his point. Einstein was conducting
a referendum on his science in the court of public opinion. Just because the man could
get a laugh didn’t mean there was anything to his theories. In fact, just the opposite.
What Einstein was doing wasn’t really science at all. His theories were so abstract.
Really, nothing more than mathematical sophistry. An untrustworthy intellectual temple
built from deduction as flimsy as playing cards. A hoax as cynical as a street corner
game of three-card Monty. Einstein was shilling his ideas, prostituting himself for
the sake of fame and money. Having made friends with complicit Jewish newspapers and
others in the German press, he had duped a guileless citizenry. That was bad enough.
Even worse, many of Lenard’s Aryan colleagues were abandoning their traditional views
to line up behind Einstein and relativity. Fueled by a bitter stew of contempt, jealousy,
and anti-Semitism, Lenard’s attacks became less about Einstein’s science than about
Einstein himself.

Lenard came to his anti-Semitism by both birth and experience. Though a subliminal
hatred of Jews existed throughout eastern Europe in the early twentieth century, it
was especially pronounced among the Hungarian nationalists where Lenard spent his
childhood and adolescence. Despite being ethnically German, Lenard counted himself
among them and was influenced by their zeal. In his adulthood, he shifted his allegiance
to Germany, but his chauvinistic fervor never waned. Even so, the young Lenard revealed
none of the anti-Semitic passion that so characterized his writings in later life.

Very likely, it was during his educational pilgrimage that he first had negative interactions
with Jews that helped lay the groundwork for his prejudice. One of Lenard’s professors,
the estimable Heinrich Hertz, was, as Lenard described him in his book
Great Men of Science
, “partly of Jewish blood.” In fact, Hertz’s family had converted to Catholicism,
and he had an Aryan mother to whom Lenard attributed Hertz’s scientific aptitude.
While he and Hertz got along well for the most part, Lenard may have blamed Hertz’s
frugality for Lenard missing out on an important discovery. Hertz hadn’t exactly rejected
Lenard’s request to buy a better cathode ray tube like the one Wilhelm Roentgen may
have been using when he discovered X-rays. Hertz had simply told him to use his best
judgment as to whether the cost would be worth it. If only Hertz had given his enthusiastic
approval for the new tube, Lenard believed, it would have been he who would have been
hailed as the discoverer of X-rays.

Following the armistice of World War I, Lenard incurred a series of financial reversals,
which he attributed to Jewish control of international money markets. Already imbued
with strongly nationalistic political views and confronted daily with prejudicial
Nazi rhetoric, Lenard grew more radical. He fell prey to a popular Nazi shibboleth:
the Jews were responsible for Germany’s ills. Unlike the masses of ordinary Germans
who similarly bought into this lie, many of whom might never have associated with
Jews, Lenard not only knew Jews, but also had worked closely with Jewish professors
in universities. In fact, he had studied the behavior of one Jew very well. For Lenard,
Einstein became “the Jew.” He personalized his anti-Semitic views, focusing his vitriol
on Albert Einstein.

Lenard espoused that Jews were inherently very different from Aryan Germans in how
they thought about science. Science, indeed any endeavor, was subject to unique styles
of thinking that were characteristic of different races. In a series of writings formalizing
his views with respect to the natural sciences, he touted the superiority of experimentally
based German physics and decried theoretical physics as an intentionally fraudulent
construct informed by the unwholesome “Jewish spirit.” “The Jew conspicuously lacks
any understanding of truth beyond a merely superficial agreement with reality, which
is independent of human thought,” he wrote in the introduction to
Deutsche Physik
, wherein he spelled out the principals that would guide Nazi scientific thought for
a generation. “This is in contrast to the Aryan scientist’s drive, which is as obstinate
as it is serious in its quest for truth.”

Lenard doubtlessly believed in the ethos of Aryan supremacy, but to some extent,
his rhetoric was calculated to advance his career. As Einstein wrote in 1935, when
it came to Hitler’s sycophants, “[Hitler’s] disjointed personality makes it impossible
to know to what degree he might actually have believed in the nonsense which he kept
on dispensing [but] those, however, who rallied around him or who came to the surface
through the Nazi wave were, for the most part, hardened cynics fully aware of the
falsehood of their unscrupulous methods.”

Lenard makes a curious assertion at the outset of his autobiography: “My times are
not here. . . . The people, as they are around today, probably would not choose to
reinvent someone like me.” In one sense, this is true. Lenard was a typical outsider
throughout his life. He wrote in his
Faelschungs-Buch
, a handwritten account of ideas he believed had been stolen from him,

I was reminded often by my sensation of not having acquired any friend by my work,
which was completely unselfish and which was in fact of benefit to many, of which
they all have made use with joy. Some, as the sordid [U.S. physicist Robert] Millikan,
have acted systematically as robber-knights with Jewish support. Some even have been
Jews. . . . I could not possibly be interested in their frankly impossible friendship
(which I did not know at the time, but began to sense gradually).

However, in other ways, Philipp Lenard was a man curiously well designed to succeed
in his place and time. He was a canny opportunist who capitalized on a political gamble
he’d placed on the National Socialists and won. He joined the party well before there
was a clear political advantage and was a VIP participant at their 1927 annual convention.
He was a true believer who pledged himself to the Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler well
before the times demanded it. His demonization of Einstein established his
bona fides
as a man who Hitler could count on to promote his agenda. Lenard’s political star
rose in concert with Nazi power.

Before all the tumult, Einstein and Lenard’s relationship had a respectful, even friendly,
beginning. In fact, Einstein’s first impression of Philipp Lenard was a very positive
one. In 1896, at age seventeen, Einstein passed the entry examination for Zurich Polytechnic
and began matriculating in the school’s four-year course of study for a diploma in
teaching math and physics. It was a small program with only six students. One of them
was Mileva Marić. Four years Einstein’s senior, she was the only woman in the class,
among the first to study mathematics and science in Central Europe. Despite the fact
that Mileva walked with a pronounced limp and was often in pain, a natural attraction
developed between the two students, first as study partners, then as lovers.

During the fall and winter of 1897–1898, perhaps because of her parents’ concern
that their Serbian daughter was growing too close to the Jewish Einstein, Mileva spent
a semester studying physics at the University of Heidelberg. A letter she wrote to
Einstein described a lecture she had recently attended:

It really was too enjoyable in the lecture of Prof. Lenard, yesterday; now he speaks
about the kinetic theory of gases. It seems that the molecules of oxygen move with
a speed of 400 m/sec., and after calculating and calculating, the good professor set
up equations, differentiated, integrated, substituted and finally showed that the
molecules in fact actually do move with this speed but that they only travel the distance
of 1/100
^th
of a hair’s breadth.

It was months before Einstein responded. When he finally wrote, he used the formal
German “Sie” in addressing Mileva, rather than the familiar “du” reserved for close
friends. He implores Mileva to return, citing a concern for her academic progress
rather than any personal interest:

The desire to write you has finally conquered the guilty conscience I’ve had about
not responding to your letter for such a long time and which has allowed me to avoid
your critical eye. But now, even though you are understandably angry with me, you
must at least give me credit for not adding to my offense by hiding behind feeble
excuses, and for asking you simply and directly for forgiveness and—for an answer
as soon as possible.

At the time of Mileva’s study abroad, Lenard was serving a temporary associate professorship
in Heidelberg, one of a number of itinerant appointments he held while seeking permanent
employment. It was during that year at Heidelberg that Lenard decided he had sufficiently
advanced in his career and had acquired the financial and social standing he believed
necessary for him to take a wife. With all the romance of a banking transaction, he
noted in his autobiography that “[I] quickly set up my laboratory and got my experiments
going . . . There was an abundance of daughters of professors who were waiting to
be married, but it soon became clear how I had to choose.” He chose Katharina Schlehner,
known as Katty, the stepdaughter of the Egyptologist August Elsenlohr. The marriage
would bear two children, Ruth in 1898 and Werner in 1900.

Lenard finally achieved a permanent appointment in 1896 as professor of physics at
the University of Kiel, and he became director of its Institute of Physics. By that
time, he already had a number of scientific accomplishments to his credit, including
his work with cathode ray tubes that six years later would earn him a Nobel Prize.
Despite his long academic pilgrimage, Lenard’s success was assured. In 1907, his achievements
would lead him back to Heidelberg as a professor and director of the Institute of
Physics.

There was nothing during his initial one-year appointment at Heidelberg, nor upon
his return, that would signal his later animosity toward Einstein. Similarly, he did
not betray any overt anti-Semitism. In fact, in his autobiography, Lenard credits
the Jewish mathematician Leo Koenigsberger with helping him to cut through the red
tape that at first hindered his permanent Heidelberg appointment. “This pure-blooded
Jew has always demonstrated more wit and intelligence than most of the Aryan members
of the faculty,” he wrote, “and since he was smart enough not to want to seem to be
of too Jewish a mind, he often was a blessing for me in his cause against the narrow-mindedness
and bigotry of the faculty.”

At the same time that Lenard was making headway in academia, the much younger Einstein
was a complete unknown. He graduated with his teaching diploma in 1900, but Mileva
failed her first attempt to pass her final examinations. She failed again in 1901
with a poor score in math. By then, Mileva was three months’ pregnant with Einstein’s
child. She returned to her parents’ home in Novi Sad to deliver a girl she named Lieserl.
The birth of the child was kept a secret and only became known when a letter written
by Einstein at the time was discovered long after his and Mileva’s deaths. What became
of Lieserl? Had she died as an infant, or was she put up for adoption? Mileva returned
to Zurich without her in 1903. She and Einstein married soon after, but despite their
having two subsequent children together—Hans Albert in 1904 and Eduard in 1910—the
episode with Lieserl, whatever became of her, sowed a seed of permanent discord in
their relationship.

In addition to Einstein’s marital difficulties, an even more significant problem
confronted him. He needed a job to support himself and his wife. Two years following
his graduation, the father of a friend helped him get hired into a civil service position
after he had unsuccessfully searched for a teaching job. He was appointed a third-class
technical expert in the Office for Intellectual Property in Bern, a patent officer
charged with judging the originality of electrical and magnetic devices. The position
became permanent about the time of his wedding.

Einstein might well have spent a fulfilling life as a patent officer. He enjoyed
what he did and was paid nearly twice the amount he could have expected to earn as
a newly appointed assistant professor. Moreover, the work was not particularly challenging,
so he had time to work on his own thoughts.

And, as it turned out, he was having many thoughts. Indeed, his brain was fairly
bursting at the seams waiting for some outlet of expression. While waiting for the
patent office job to come through, Einstein organized a small philosophical club he
grandiosely named the Olympic Academy. As an undergraduate, he had become bored with
the prosaic teaching curriculum and branched off with Mileva into reading science
and philosophy. At this time, he returned to those interests along with two like-minded
Polytechnic students, Maurice Solovine and Conrad Habicht. The Olympic Academy met
regularly, often in Einstein’s apartment, to drink schnapps and read Plato, John Stuart
Mill, David Hume, and others.

Einstein also scoured physics journals to keep
au courant
and familiarize himself with emerging theoretical concepts in science. Among the
publications Einstein read in 1902 and 1903 were Philipp Lenard’s investigations of
the photoelectric effect. Einstein referenced Lenard when, in 1905, he broached the
same subject from the perspective of Max Planck’s quantum hypothesis. Einstein derived
new insights into the nature of energy emitted when light strikes a metal object.
Most gratifying to Lenard, Einstein’s publication referenced Lenard’s work with the
respect the elder man felt befitted his station as an accomplished scientist. Having
read the part of Einstein’s article that described his experiments as “groundbreaking,”
Lenard was sufficiently flattered as to have a very positive impression of Einstein.