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

There was no sign of Lenard.
    Who knows what Einstein might have intended to say to Lenard following their intense
     public exchange? Had Lenard been willing to listen, what outcomes, if any, might have
     changed for both of them? Perhaps, none at all. Scientifically speaking, both Lenard
     and Einstein were set in their beliefs. But perhaps the bad personal feelings between
     the two could have been assuaged to some extent, and the distant repercussions might
     not have been so severe.
    The confrontation imparted to Einstein a new resolve never again to allow his opponents
     to upset him so thoroughly. “I absolutely cannot understand,” he wrote, “that because
     of bad company I could lose myself in such deep humorlessness.” A few weeks later,
     Einstein made light of the Bad Nauheim episode in a letter to Paul Ehrenfest: “At
     Bad Nauheim, there was a cockfight, of sorts, about relativity. Lenard, in particular,
     figured as my opponent. To my knowledge, it didn’t come to any kind of manifestations
     of the sort you expected.”
    By the phrase “any kind of manifestations of the sort you expected,” Einstein was
     specifically referencing anti-Semitism. However, that neither Einstein nor the lay
     press nor the Physikalische Zeitschrift , which covered the proceedings, made any reference to racist remarks does not mean
     that Lenard was free of prejudicial thinking. Lenard’s involvement in right-wing,
     nationalistic organizations, where such rhetoric was common, was already far advanced.
     Much later, in 1938, Lenard recalled his considerations during the Einsteindebatte:
I treated and judged the Jew as a proper Aryan person in this discussion according
     to the view of the time, and that was wrong. . . . It would not have been of use at
     the meeting of professors [to point out the flaws in Jewish thinking about science]
     because the men are also today still blind. Planck had presided over the discussion,
     which was preceded by three tedious presentations in favor of Einstein.
    Lenard retreated to lick his wounds. He wrote of his sense of hurt and isolation in
     his perception that the majority of scientists in attendance had sided with Einstein.
     “The abolition of the ether is again proclaimed as a result of Nauheim. . . . Not
     one has laughed at this. I don’t know whether it would have been different had the
     abolition of air been proclaimed.” Among Lenard’s keepsakes commemorating the event
     was a clipping from the weekly newspaper Die Umschau , which focused on science and technology. An article attributed to a Mr. W. Weyl,
     by whose name Lenard had written the word “Jew,” reads, “One simply has to state,
     that Lenard has not understood the very meaning of the Einsteinian doctrine. Consequently,
     the adversaries did not find each other. The fight remained a fake fight without result.”
    Despite what Lenard saw as an abandonment by many of his Aryan colleagues, the encounter
     with Einstein bolstered his resolve to persevere in his efforts to expose the fallacious
     nature of Einstein’s ideas. Lenard wrote, “My letters of this summer have brought
     together twelve gentlemen who are German enough to tackle the project to turn the
     miserable Berlin Institute of Physics [meaning Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of
     Physics where Einstein was the director] into a German Institute of Physics.” Lenard’s
     meaning was clear. The academic facility that employed, housed, and protected the
     hated Einstein had adopted an un-German attitude. That would have to change. Among
     the twelve scientists listed by Lenard were Johannes Stark, to whom Lenard would eventually
     pass the mantle of Deutsche Physik ; Wilhelm Wien; and the spectroscopist Gehrcke, who had followed Weyland on stage
     at the Philharmonic.
    The “twelve gentlemen” had met during the conference and agreed that Einstein must
     be forced to revoke the statements he had made in the Berliner Tageblatt , which had