When the army returned after four years, not defeated in combat, they found a spiritually decimated patrimony. . . . The pseudo-blossoming that was to be observed soon at center stage of the relativity theory and the sudden increase in scientific journals could not have been comprehended if not even uninitiated people had increasingly understood who the real victors of the great war had been: the Jews in their now free unfolding of their own spirit.
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.
Chapter 4
An Interesting Evening Out
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 o
nly 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.
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 c
hiding 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 it.”
Responses to the events of August 1920 were heated on both sides. A letter from Gehrcke, folded around the Einstein rebuttal, welcomed Lenard home to Heidelberg from a holiday in the Black Forest. In the same day’s packet had come a letter from Stark revealing what had transpired: “Surely you will have read about the Einstein scandal, which has been replayed recently in Berlin and in the local press. Einstein has thrown out every theoretical achievement of yours and adjudicated in favor of superficiality.”
The Man Who Stalked Einstein Page 6