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

Einstein’s friend, physicist
     Max Born, shared a letter he had received from Einstein. The letter acknowledged,
     “Everyone needs to offer up his sacrifice at the altar of stupidity . . . and I did
     so in my article.” Sommerfeld asked Einstein to write a letter of apology to Lenard
     and to recant his accusations publicly if Lenard requested it. In return, he promised
     that he would ask Friedrich von Mueller, the chairman of the Bad Nauheim meeting,
     to feature as part of his opening address a warning against the kind of polemics in
     which Weyland had engaged. At the same time, Sommerfeld wrote a letter to Lenard informing
     him of the request he had made of Einstein.
    However, any hope of civility between the two scientists became moot when Lenard wrote
     back,
The thought of an apology by Mr. Einstein to me, moreover the assumption of a suitable
     response to him on my part, to remain satisfactory, I must refuse with indignation.
     The comments by Mr. Einstein represent the characteristics which must belittle me
     in the eyes of the reader. They are a sign of personal contempt for me by Mr. Einstein,
     whose transformation into the required esteem based on some assurance by me would
     be very astonishing.
    In his stilted, overly formal style, Lenard revealed the stress imposed upon him over
     what he doubtlessly viewed as a public humiliation. Despite the fact that he actually
     did conspire with Weyland and others in organizing the evening’s events, he apparently
     felt that Einstein had unfairly singled him out:
Mr. Einstein finds his words shameful and probably incorrect, as he has publicly withdrawn
     his statements. Otherwise he could not make up the wrong done to me to the extent
     that is even possible. The public release of such value judgments about a colleague,
     such as those made by Einstein . . . is, in my feeling, an improper arrogance and
     reveals an all time low of nobleness.
    Despite Lenard’s harsh assessment of his character and the failure of Sommerfeld’s
     efforts to negotiate a détente, Einstein privately celebrated what seemed to him a
     settling down of the uproar surrounding a series of unfortunate events. The embarrassing
     episode had passed, and with it the worry it had caused. The promised twenty lectures
     at the Berlin Philharmonic were aborted after the second installment, a lackluster
     and poorly attended presentation by the engineer, Ludwig Glaser. The other scheduled
     lecturer for the evening failed to appear. Weyland, a potentially dangerous antagonist,
     had lost face with his former allies. Gehrcke wrote to Lenard that Weyland was simply
     “one of the many dubious types that had been generated by the revolutionary, warlike
     city.” Lenard responded, “Weyland, unfortunately, has proven to be a fraud.”
    Reassured by the outpouring of support by his German colleagues and the retrenchment
     of the Working Society, it must have seemed to Einstein that the storm had passed.
     Einstein exulted to friends that perhaps the Working Society did not have the following
     it claimed. As it turned out, Einstein reckoned wrong. There was much more to come.
     What he took for fair weather was actually the eye of the storm.

Chapter 5
A Disagreement
between Gentlemen

    Less than a month after the Working Group lectures at the Berlin Philharmonic, on
     the morning of September 19, 1920, the eighty-sixth meeting of the German Society
     of Natural Scientists and Physicians kicked off an ambitious, weeklong schedule of
     more than three hundred sessions. Held jointly with the meetings of the German Mathematical
     Society, the German Physical Society, and the Society of Technical Physics, a late
     change in venue to Bad Nauheim had presented logistical challenges. Violent political
     unrest, rampant at the time in the original choice of Frankfurt am Main, convinced
     the organizers to distance their conference to a more bucolic setting where unsavory
     elements were less likely to