The Man Who Stalked Einstein by Bruce J. Hillman, Birgit Ertl-Wagner, Bernd C. Wagner

public of the verity
     of a work of fiction.
    Albert Einstein was in the auditorium that evening, sitting in a box seat alongside
     his stepdaughter, Margot. To those around him, he appeared in a jocular mood, sometimes
     laughing and applauding outrageous indictments. He seemed unruffled even during an
     uncomfortable fifteen-minute intermission during which Weyland halted his diatribe
     to encourage attendees to purchase On the Principle of Relativity, Ether, and Gravitation at the reduced rate of six marks. Einstein also calmly listened to the succeeding
     lecture by Ernst Gehrcke, who charged the theory of relativity and its progenitor
     with having performed “scientific mass hypnosis.”
    Despite his demeanor, however, Einstein was not unaffected. He was well aware of
     the rising tide of anti-Semitism. Although there had been no explicit slurs against
     Jews, he understood that the evening’s real agenda was not scientific, but political.
     The charge that he was “un-German” was code for what was really intended. As perhaps
     the most prominent Jew in all of Germany, a liberal, an internationalist who had once
     famously referred to nationalism as “the measles of humanity,” and an avowed pacifist
     and supporter of the Weimar government, he recognized the inevitability of his being
     targeted by reactionary activists. Nonetheless, the sophistication of planning and
     organizing the evening’s activities, as well as the rancor implicit in Weyland’s accusatory
     tone, must have surprised him.
    On August 27, Einstein fought back by publishing a response in the Berliner Tageblatt with the ironic title “My Answer to the Anti-Relativistic Corporation, Ltd.” First
     targeting Weyland and Gehrcke as the principal participants in the events at the Philharmonic,
     he wrote,
“A motley group has come together to form a company under the pretentious name, the
     Working Society of German Scientists for the Preservation of Pure Science, with the
     single purpose of denigrating the theory of relativity, as well as me, as its originator,
     in the eyes of non-scientists. . . . I am fully aware that both speakers are unworthy
     of a reply from my pen, for I have good reason to believe that motives other than
     striving for the truth are at the bottom of this business. . . . I only respond because
     I have received repeated requests from well-meaning quarters to have my views made
     known. . . .”
    The article further castigated Weyland, “. . . who does not seem to be a specialist
     at all (Is he a doctor? Engineer? Politician? . . .),” before chiding Gehrcke for
     his naiveté and accusing him of selecting statements made by Einstein out of context
     in an effort to make him seem foolish.
    Einstein next defended the accuracy of his theories. He named a number of prominent
     German scientists who he believed fundamentally supported him—the great Max Planck
     and Arnold Sommerfeld among them—before singling out Philipp Lenard as one of the
     evening’s conspirators. “From among physicists of international repute,” he continued,
     “I can name only Lenard as an outspoken critic of relativity theory.”
    Perhaps if Einstein had stopped there, much of the unpleasantness to come could have
     been avoided. However, he could not restrain himself. “Though I admire Lenard as a
     master of experimental physics,” Einstein wrote, “. . . He has yet to accomplish anything
     in theoretical physics, and his objections to the theory of general relativity are
     so superficial that I had not deemed it necessary until now to reply to them in detail.”
    Near the end of his article, he specifically called out Lenard as having been complicit
     in the events of that evening: “The personal attack launched against me by Mssrs.
     Gehrcke and Lenard, based on these circumstances, has been generally regarded as unfair
     by real specialists in the field. I had considered it beneath my dignity to waste
     a word on