The Man Who Stalked Einstein (8 page)

In 1920, Lenard was fifty-eight years old, Einstein a comparatively youthful forty-one.
Lenard put aside his dispute with Einstein in 1918 to address more immediate concerns,
but he didn’t forget about it. Their simmering conflict was about to become a very
public conflagration.

In his office at the Institute of Physics in Heidelberg, Philipp Lenard lifted his
eyes from the August 6, 1920, edition of
Taegliche Rundschau
and smiled. Under the rubric of the Working Society of German Scientists for the
Preservation of Pure Science, he and a group of right-minded colleagues had launched
the first salvo of their efforts to restore sanity to the physical sciences. The headline
jumped from the page: “Einstein’s Theory of Relativity—A Scientific Mass Hysteria.”
The article charged Albert Einstein and his friends in the Berlin press with purposely
pursuing a cynical promotional campaign to delude the public with his fraudulent theory
of relativity. The byline attributed the article to Paul Weyland, the man Lenard had
met with just five days earlier in this very office.

The renowned scientist and acknowledged leader of the movement to debunk relativity
had been impressed by Weyland’s fiery Aryan spirit, as well as his sincerity in wanting
to dispel the public adoration of the “un-German” Einstein. Moreover, his credentials
perfectly suited the broader goals of Lenard’s plans. Weyland was an outspoken member
of the ultranationalist German National People’s Party and the editor of the anti-Semitic
periodical,
Deutsch
-
Voelkische Monatshefte
. Although he claimed to have trained as a chemical engineer, he could produce no
documentation to this effect and had been making his living as a publicist for some
of the shadier elements of Germany’s burgeoning radical, right-wing political groups.
His detractors claimed that he possessed a special talent for speaking in half-truths
and for arousing the baser passions of the common man. Lenard saw in Weyland the perfect
cat’s paw to attack Einstein’s self-promotion and the growing popularity of his theories.
As he reread the newspaper article, Lenard felt reassured that Weyland was the right
man, one whose conscience would not prove a barrier to pursuing their plan.

Weyland was a man perfectly made for his times. Berlin had changed greatly in the
aftermath of World War I from a grim, gray city of humorless Prussian values to one
that was game for almost anything. Liberated from the stultifying mores that had bound
them, the citizenry pursued novelty in science, culture, and the arts. Cafés, cabarets,
and erotic nightclubs stayed open well into the early morning hours.

At the same time, the political atmosphere was tense. Germany had signed a punitive
armistice, the Treaty of Versailles, which demanded the equivalent of $33 billion
in U.S. dollars in reparations. Inflation was rampant, for many citizens destroying
in weeks the savings of a lifetime. Before the war, the German mark had traded at
roughly four to the dollar. By July 1923, the exchange rate was eighteen thousand
marks to buy a dollar, slipping five months later to 4 billion.

The deprivation spawned a rabid tangle of radical, reactionary political groups that
threatened the fragile fiber of the Weimar government. In 1920 alone, nationalistic
activists had already fomented considerable disruption by the time Weyland published
his anti-Einstein tirade. An attempted coup by the right-wing Luettwitz–Kapp faction
nearly succeeded in toppling the government. In Goettingen, delegates of the university’s
student government proposed expelling Jewish students from all German universities.
“The Jewish question” was further addressed in the platform of the German Workers
Party (or DAP, for Deutsche Arbeiterpartei). In February, speaking before a deliriously
supportive crowd of two thousand in the main hall of Munich’s Hofbraeuhaus, Adolf
Hitler detailed the party’s twenty-five-point plan to restore national pride. Among
the proposals were the cancellation of the Treaty of Versailles and the withdrawal
of German citizenship from the country’s Jews, whom he claimed were responsible for
many of Germany’s economic ills.

The DAP was new on the scene, having just been founded in 1919 by a metal worker,
Anton Drexler, and a journalist, Karl Harrer. It initially boasted twenty-four members,
mostly friends of Drexler’s from the Munich railway plant. The meetings of the DAP
took place in the back rooms of small pubs until the party established offices in
another of Munich’s beer halls, the Sterneckerbraue, and then the Gasthaus Cornelius.
Ironically, Adolf Hitler initially joined the DAP as a government spy. The German
army assigned Corporal Hitler, still on active duty following the war, to infiltrate
the DAP and inform them of party activities. Hitler got caught up in the politics
of the organization and soon became DAP chairman.

In short order, he changed the DAP from a comedic parody of a political fringe party
to one that could seriously contend in local elections. Hitler changed the name of
the organization to the National Socialist German Workers Party (or NSDAP, for Nationalsozialistische
Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), best known as the Nazis. He brought in new young members,
the precursors of the SA paramilitary “brown shirts,” to guard the meeting hall against
the invasion of rival political parties. Order was strictly enforced.

Weyland’s Jeremiad against Einstein was directed at members of the general public,
many of whom had already been radicalized by Germany’s harsh economic conditions.
An avowed Jew-baiter who had publicly chided the DAP for being too soft on the “Jewish
question,” Weyland pandered to the xenophobic paranoia of his audience. He accused
Einstein of plagiarizing others’ work and concluded that the theory of relativity
was nothing more than an “enormous bluff.” Without explicitly invoking anti-Semitic
language, he nonetheless planted seeds of doubt about whether the Jewish Einstein
could be trusted as a true German. He cited in his article a “particular press, a
particular community,” which he charged with engaging in a pro-Einstein promotional
campaign to build public currency for Einstein’s theories and popular celebrity for
their progenitor. Lenard knew—indeed, everyone who had spent the least amount of time
in Berlin understood—that Weyland was referring to the
Berliner Tageblatt
, called by some the
Judenblatt
, or “Jew paper.”

In the minds of the Working Society members, the evidence for Weyland’s accusations
was incontrovertible. There was a widening schism in physics that separated the theorists
from the experimentalists. They were not just academic differences but cultural as
well. Lenard had been incensed by a recent
Berliner
Tageblatt
article that had drawn ridiculous parallels between Einstein’s mathematically deduced
theories—so characteristic of Jewish science—and the work of immortal Aryan experimentalists
like Newton, Copernicus, and Kepler. Waxing eloquent, the author had likened Einstein’s
theories to “an oracular saying from the depths of the skies.” Stirred by this kind
of overblown rhetoric, the public mania over Einstein was reaching ridiculous proportions.
And Einstein himself was at the bottom of it. It was unworthy of a true scientist
to engage in self-promotion.

The day after meeting with Weyland, Lenard wrote his younger colleague, Johannes
Stark, to inform him of what had transpired during their conversation. “Mr. Weyland
is very enthusiastically in agreement with our plans to halt the un-German influences.
He was here with me yesterday. We discussed plans for a Working Society of German
scientists to maintain the purity of science. I particularly suggested that he connect
with you to be certain that there won’t be inefficient duplication of efforts and
that no fragmentation adversely affects our plans for Bad Nauheim” (the site of an
important annual German scientific conference scheduled for the following month).

The convergence of Lenard’s and Weyland’s interests set in motion plans for an extended
anti-relativity campaign. Weyland’s article was only the beginning. The Jew was still
riding high, but he would soon experience the changing tide of fickle public sentiment.
On August 6, Weyland announced the next phase of their plan. The Working Society would
present a series of lectures on relativity. With Lenard’s guidance, Weyland had developed
a program of twenty public lectures by highly respected scientists, true German experimentalists,
who would put the lie to Einstein’s mathematical sophistry and false denial of traditional
scientific thinking.

Unbeknownst to Lenard, Weyland listed him, as well as several others, as having agreed
to deliver a lecture, when, in fact, they had not actually said they would participate.
In fact, Lenard had explicitly declined Weyland’s invitation. As a prominent scientist,
he already was on record as disputing essential elements of Einstein’s theories. The
appearance of too close a relationship between Weyland—nothing more than a propagandist,
really—and himself was not desirable. The risk that the public might associate him
with such an unsavory character was unnecessary. He would stay in the background for
now. He would come forward when the time was ripe.

To Lenard, Einstein was symbolic of a much bigger problem besetting German academics.
His theories were characteristic of how Jews thought about science: all theory, insufficiently
backed by experimentation—the backbone of Germanic scientific thought. Relativity
was nothing more than mathematical trickery, an untrustworthy intellectual temple
as flimsy as the paper on which Einstein scribbled his nonsense. Eventually, Lenard
would elaborate at length on his beliefs about the integrity of “Jewish science” in
his four-volume work,
Deutsche Physik
. For now, Weyland and Lenard had agreed upon their principal indictment. Einstein
had engaged a pandering press to promote his unsupportable theories. It had gotten
to the point that, in the popular mind, they were overtaking the Aryan-led natural
order.

The near-deification of Einstein rankled to such an extent that Lenard felt it his
duty as a true German to rectify the situation. “Then the Jew came and caused an upheaval,”
he wrote at the time, “with his abolition of the concept of ether, and ridiculously
enough, even the oldest authorities followed him. They suddenly felt powerless when
confronted with the Jew. This is how the Jewish spirit started to rule over physics.”

It wasn’t just the general public who had been duped but his scientific colleagues
as well. It was time for those natural scientists possessed of the true Aryan spirit
to come forward and join together to terminate the Jewish influence. Under his leadership,
the Working Society would overthrow this inferior and misanthropic philosophy. The
Working Society would restore Aryan science to its rightful place: the supreme manifestation
of human intellectual accomplishment.

On August 24, a little more than two weeks after Weyland had published his indictment
of Einstein, he stood at the podium on the stage of the 1600-seat auditorium of the
Berlin Philharmonic. He and his minions had provided ample public notice of the event.
Weyland happily surveyed the hall; his eyes swept upward past the three sections of
orchestra seats to the mezzanine, and to the layers of loges. Every seat was filled,
and small crowds stood at every available vantage point. Outside the neoclassical,
white brick building on Bernburger Street and on the broad steps leading to the main
entry, representatives of right-wing organizations plied passersby with booklets emphasizing
the danger of Jewish internationalism. In the building’s foyer, vendors sold swastika
lapel pins and copies of the second edition of a booklet Lenard had written—
On the Principle of
Relativity, Ether, and Gravitation
—disputing the theory of general relativity. Literally and figuratively, the stage
was set for Weyland to press forward his challenge to Einstein and his work.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began. “Hardly ever in science has a scientific system
been set up with such a display of propaganda as the general principal of relativity,
which on closer inspection turns out to be in the greatest need of proof.” In this,
Weyland was being purposely ingenuous. Einstein’s theories were, indeed, based on
mathematical deduction. But by 1920, they were not wholly without supporting empirical
evidence. Indeed, even the least informed observer attending Weyland’s speech would
have been well aware of the observations of the British explorer Arthur Eddington.

Eddington had organized scientific expeditions to Brazil and the west coast of Africa
to take measurements of phenomena occurring as a result of the 1919 solar eclipse.
Foremost among his interests was to assess the correctness of a prediction derived
from Einstein’s theory of general relativity that the gravitational field of the sun
should appear to bend the light emitted by distant stars as it passed close by. Having
extensively photographed the position of visible stars positioned near the sun during
the brief period of complete solar eclipse, Eddington confirmed a slight but undeniable
bending in the range of angulation that Einstein had predicted. Eddington’s November
1919 report of his findings to England’s Royal Society was the vehicle that had rocketed
Einstein to stardom. With Eddington’s confirmation, so the media proclaimed, Einstein
had overthrown classical physics and established the beginnings of a new scientific
world order.

Weyland not only ignored the Eddington findings but also failed to mention general
relativity’s plausible explanation of a small shift from orbit to orbit of Mercury’s
closest position to the sun, its perihelion. This allowed him the freedom to skip
past the scientific debate, which in any event he was ill equipped to handle, and
move on to his true agenda. In a dazzling display of demagoguery, gauged to convince
the uninformed, Weyland denounced Einstein as being the mastermind of a pro-relativity
publicity campaign orchestrated by a cabal of Jewish newspapers. Through their popularization
of Einstein’s theory of relativity, they had convinced a guileless public of the verity
of a work of fiction.