Because of his socialist sentiments, history of pacifism, and opposition to fascism, it was thought then—and throughout his life—that Einstein might be sympathetic to the Russian communists. Nor did it help that he had an earnest willingness to lend his name to almost any worthy-sounding manifesto or masthead that arrived in his mail, without always determining whether the groups involved might be fronts for other agendas.
Fortunately, his willingness to lend his name to sundry organizations was accompanied by an aversion to actually showing up for any meetings or spending time in comradely planning sessions. So there were not many political groups, and certainly no communist ones, in which he actually participated. And he made it a point never to visit Russia, because he knew that he could be used for propaganda purposes.
As his departure date neared, Einstein gave two interviews to make these points clear. “I am a convinced democrat,” he told fellow German refugee Leo Lania for the
In another interview, which appeared both in the
These statements were made, no doubt, to tamp down any controversy in America about his alleged political leanings. But they had the added virtue of being true. He had occasionally been duped by groups whose agendas were not what they seemed, but he had, since childhood, kept as his guiding principle an aversion to authoritarianism, whether of the left or the right.
At the end of the summer, Einstein received some devastating news. Having recently separated from his wife and collaborator, his friend Paul Ehrenfest had gone to visit his 16-year-old son, who was in an Amsterdam institution with Down syndrome. He pulled out a gun, shot the boy in the face, taking out his eye but not killing him. Then he turned the gun on himself and committed suicide.
More than twenty years earlier, Ehrenfest, a wandering young Jewish physicist, had shown up in Prague, where Einstein was working, and asked for help finding a job. After visiting the cafes and talking physics for hours that day, the two men became deeply devoted friends. Ehrenfest’s mind was very different from Einstein’s in many ways. He had “an almost morbid lack of self-confidence,” Einstein said, and was better at critically poking holes in existing theories than at building new ones. That made him a good teacher, “the best I have ever known,” but his “sense of inadequacy, objectively unjustified, plagued him incessantly.”
But there was one important way in which he was like Einstein. He could never make his peace with quantum mechanics. “To learn and teach things that one cannot fully accept in one’s heart is always a difficult matter,” Einstein wrote of Ehrenfest, “doubly difficult for a man of fanatical honesty.”
Einstein, who knew what it was like to turn 50, followed this with a description that said as much about his own approach to quantum mechanics as it did about Ehrenfest’s: “Added to this was the increasing difficulty of adapting to new thoughts which always confronts the man past fifty. I do not know how many readers of these lines will be capable of fully grasping that tragedy.”74 Einstein was.
Ehrenfest’s suicide deeply unnerved Einstein, as did the increased intensity of the threats against his own life. His name had been falsely associated with a book attacking Hitler’s terror; as was often the case, he had let his name be used as the honorary chair of a committee, which then published the book, but he had not read any of it. German papers headlined “Einstein’s infamy” in red letters. One magazine pictured him on a list of enemies of the German regime, listed his “crimes,” and concluded with the phrase “not yet hanged.”
So Einstein decided to take Locker-Lampson up on his English hospitality yet again for the final month before his scheduled departure for America in October. Elsa, who wanted to stay behind in Belgium to pack, asked a reporter from the
In a drama worthy of a James Bond movie, Locker-Lampson had two young female “assistants” take Einstein up to a secluded cottage he owned that was nestled on a coastal moor northeast of London. There he was swept into a slapstick whirl of secrecy and publicity. The two young women posed next to him holding hunting shotguns for a picture that was given to the press agencies, and Locker-Lampson declared, “If any unauthorized person comes near they will get a charge of buckshot.” Einstein’s own assessment of his security was less intimidating. “The beauty of my bodyguards would disarm a conspirator sooner than their shotguns,” he told a visitor.
Among those who penetrated this modest security perimeter were a former foreign minister, who wanted to discuss the crisis in Europe; Einstein’s stepson-in-law, Dimitri Marianoff, who had come to interview him for an article he had sold to a French publication; Walther Mayer, who helped continue the Sisyphean task of finding unified field theory equations; and the noted sculptor Jacob Epstein, who spent three days making a beautiful bust of Einstein.
The only one who ran afoul of the female guards was Epstein, who asked if they would take one of the doors off its hinges so he could get a better angle for his sculpting. “They facetiously asked whether I would like the roof off next,” he recalled. “I thought I should have liked that too, but I did not demand it as the attendant angels seemed to resent a little my intrusion into the retreat of their professor.” After three days, however, the guardians warmed to Epstein, and everyone began drinking beer together at the end of his sittings.75
Einstein’s humor stayed intact through it all. Among the letters he received in England was one from a man who had a theory that gravity meant that as the earth rotated people were sometimes upside down or horizontal. Perhaps that led people to do foolish things, he speculated, like falling in love. “Falling in love is not the most stupid thing that people do,” Einstein scribbled on the letter, “but gravitation cannot be held responsible for it.”76
Einstein’s main appearance on this trip was a speech on October 3 in London’s Royal Albert Hall, which was designed to raise money for displaced German scholars. Some suspected, no doubt with reason, that Locker- Lampson had hyped the security threat and publicity about Einstein’s hideaway in order to promote ticket sales. If so, he was successful. All nine thousand seats were filled, and others jammed the aisles and lobbies. A thousand students acted as guides and guards against any pro-Nazi demonstration that might materialize (none did).
Einstein spoke, in English, about the current menace to freedom, but he was careful not to attack the German regime specifically. “If we want to resist the powers that threaten to suppress intellectual and individual freedom, we must be clear what is at stake,” he said. “Without such freedom there would have been no Shakespeare, no Goethe, no Newton, no Faraday, no Pasteur, no Lister.” Freedom was a foundation for creativity.
He also spoke of the need for solitude. “The monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind,” he said, and he repeated a suggestion he had made when younger that scientists might be employed as lighthouse keepers so
