einstein

friends. Most of it was about poor Eduard, Einstein’s younger son, who had continued to succumb to his mental illness and was now confined to an
asylum near Zurich. Einstein was pictured so often with his stepdaughters, but never with his sons, Besso noted. Why didn’t he travel with them?
Perhaps he could take Eduard on one of his trips to America and get to know him better.
Einstein loved Eduard. Elsa told a friend, “This sorrow is eating up Albert.” But he felt that Eduard’s schizophrenia was inherited from his
mother’s side, as to some extent it probably was, and there was little that he could do about it. That was also the reason he resisted psychoanalysis
for Eduard. He considered it ineffective, especially in cases of severe mental illness that seemed to have hereditary causes.
Besso, on the other hand, had gone through psychoanalysis, and in his letter he was expansive and disarming, just as he had been back when
they used to walk home from the patent office together more than a quarter-century earlier. He had his own problems in marriage, Besso said,
referring to Anna Winteler, whom Einstein had introduced him to. But by forging a better relationship with his own son, he had made his marriage
work and his life more meaningful.
Einstein replied that he hoped to take Eduard with him to visit Princeton. “Unfortunately, everything indicates that strong heredity manifests itself
very definitely,” he lamented. “I have seen that coming slowly but inexorably since Tete’s youth. Outside influences play only a small part in such
cases, compared to internal secretions, about which nobody can do anything.” 68
The tug was there, and Einstein knew that he had to, and wanted to, see Eduard. He was supposed to visit Oxford in late May, but he decided to
delay the trip for a week so that he could go to Zurich and be with his son. “I could not wait six weeks before going to see him,” he wrote Lindemann,
asking his indulgence. “You are not a father, but I know you will understand.” 69
His relationship with Mari had improved so much that, when she heard he could not go back to Germany, she invited both him and Elsa to come
to Zurich and live in her apartment building. He was pleasantly surprised, and he stayed with her when he came alone that May. But his visit with
Eduard turned out to be more wrenching than he had anticipated.
Einstein had brought with him his violin. Often he and Eduard had played together, expressing emotions with their music in ways they could not
with words. The photograph of them on that visit is particularly poignant. They are sitting awkwardly next to each other, wearing suits, in what seems
to be the visiting room of the asylum. Einstein is holding his violin and bow, looking away. Eduard is staring down intensely at a pile of papers, the
pain seeming to contort his now fleshy face.
When Einstein left Zurich for Oxford, he was still assuming that he would be spending half of each ensuing year in Europe. What he did not know
was that, as things would turn out, this would be the last time he would see his first wife and their younger son.
While at Oxford, Einstein gave his Herbert Spencer Lecture, in which he explained his philosophy of science, and then went to Glasgow, where
he gave an account of his path toward the discovery of general relativity. He enjoyed the trip so much that, soon after his return to Le Coq sur Mer,
he decided to go back to England in late July, this time at the invitation of one of his unlikeliest acquaintances.
British Commander Oliver Locker-Lampson was most things that Einstein was not. The adventurous son of a Victorian poet, he became a World
War I aviator, leader of an armored division in Lapland and Russia, an adviser to Grand Duke Nicholas, and potential plotter in the murder of
Rasputin. Now he was a barrister, journalist, and member of Parliament. He had studied in Germany, knew the language and the people, and had
become, perhaps as a consequence, an early advocate for preparing to fight the Nazis. With an appetite for the interesting, he began writing
Einstein, whom he had met only in passing once at Oxford, asking him to be his guest in England.
When Einstein accepted his offer, the dashing commander made the most of it. He took Einstein to see Winston Churchill, then suffering through
his wilderness years as an opposition member of Parliament. At lunch in the gardens of Churchill’s home, Chartwell, they discussed Germany’s
rearmament. “He is an eminently wise man,” Einstein wrote Elsa that day. “It became clear to me that these people have made preparations and
are determined to act resolutely and soon.” 70 It sounded like an assessment from someone who had just eaten lunch with Churchill.
Locker-Lampson also brought Einstein to Austen Chamberlain, another advocate of rearmament, and former Prime Minister Lloyd George.
When he arrived at the home of the latter, Einstein was given the guest book to sign. When he got to the space for home address, he paused for a
few moments, then wrote ohne, without any.
Locker-Lampson recounted the incident the next day when, with great flourish, he introduced a bill in Parliament, as Einstein watched from the
visitors’ gallery wearing a white linen suit, to “extend opportunities of citizenship for Jews.” Germany was in the process of destroying its culture and
threatening the safety of its greatest thinkers. “She has turned out her most glorious citizen, Albert Einstein,” he said. “When he is asked to put his
address in visitors’ books he has to write, ‘without any.’ How proud this country must be to have offered him shelter at Oxford!” 71
When he returned to his seaside cottage in Belgium, Einstein decided there was one issue he should clear up, or at least try to, before he
embarked for America again. The Woman Patriot Corporation and others were still seeking to bar him as a dangerous subversive or communist,
and he found their allegations to be both offensive and potentially problematic.
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 New York World Telegram. “It is for this reason that I do not go to Russia, although I have received very cordial
invitations. My voyage to Moscow would certainly be exploited by the rulers of the Soviets to profit their own political aims. Now I am an adversary of
Bolshevism just as much as of fascism. I am against all dictatorships.” 72
In another interview, which appeared both in the Times of London and the New York Times, Einstein admitted that occasionally he had been
“fooled” by organizations that pretended to be purely pacifist or humanitarian but “are in truth nothing less than camouflaged propaganda in the
service of Russian despotism.” He emphasized, “I have never favored communism and do not favor it now.” The essence of his political belief was
to oppose any power that “enslaves the individual by terror and force, whether it arises under a Fascist or Communist flag.” 73
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