This week, Bruce J. Hill­man shares the sto­ry behind his first non-med­ical book, The Man Who Stalked Ein­stein: How Nazi Sci­en­tist Philipp Lenard Changed the Course of His­to­ry as part of the Vis­it­ing Scribe series on The ProsenPeo­ple.

A glance at my pho­to­graph is enough to tell you that I am not your typ­i­cal first-time author. I have enjoyed a 40-year career as an aca­d­e­m­ic physi­cian. Much of that career was devot­ed to writ­ing and edit­ing sci­en­tif­ic and med­ical man­u­scripts. Nonethe­less, I wished for an oppor­tu­ni­ty to express myself more cre­ative­ly than the stric­tures of sci­en­tif­ic writ­ing and pub­li­ca­tion allow. About 10 years ago, a small group of uni­ver­si­ty women invit­ed me into their month­ly writ­ing cri­tique group. Kind­ly but firm­ly, they set me on the path to writ­ing The Man Who Stalked Ein­stein.

I came upon the his­to­ry that under­pins The Man Who Stalked Ein­stein serendip­i­tous­ly. While sift­ing through a list of ref­er­ences on an unre­lat­ed top­ic, my atten­tion was drawn to the cita­tion for a 1946 med­ical jour­nal arti­cle about an Amer­i­can mil­i­tary doctor’s inter­views of a Nazi war crim­i­nal named Philipp Lenard. Research­ing online, I found that Lenard and Ein­stein had, for many years, engaged in a dan­ger­ous­ly antag­o­nis­tic rela­tion­ship that had been ref­er­enced in oth­er works but nev­er exam­ined in detail. 

A chance phone call to a prospec­tive agent (one of eighty or so inquiries I made seek­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tion for a nov­el I had writ­ten; the still unpub­lished man­u­script resides on the hard disk of my com­put­er) led to my reori­ent­ing my writ­ing pri­or­i­ties. I would become a writer of cre­ative non-fic­tion. My new agent, Claire Gerus, instruct­ed me in writ­ing a pro­pos­al, sound­ed out the inter­est of a num­ber of pub­lish­ers, and ulti­mate­ly secured an agree­ment and an advance for Ein­stein with Lyons Press.

I began to con­duct research on the book in earnest. As it turned out, Lenard ini­tial­ly had been grat­i­fied by Einstein’s cred­it­ing him as an impor­tant influ­ence on his ear­ly work. Over time, how­ev­er, Einstein’s the­o­ret­i­cal approach to physics came into con­flict with Lenard’s tra­di­tion­al exper­i­men­tal­ism. In the fall of 1920, at the first meet­ing of Ger­man sci­en­tists fol­low­ing the Great War, the sci­en­tif­ic dis­pute between the Nobel Prize-win­ning Lenard and the sev­en­teen years younger Ein­stein turned ugly. Envi­ous of Einstein’s pop­u­lar­i­ty and angry over the deser­tion of Ger­man physi­cists to Einstein’s camp, Lenard sought to debunk the the­o­ry of rel­a­tiv­i­ty and defame Ein­stein as a char­la­tan. He turned what was sup­posed to be an open debate on the the­o­ry of rel­a­tiv­i­ty into a mano a mano show­down gauged to depict Ein­stein as a cyn­i­cal­ly cal­cu­lat­ed fraud. High noon on a cos­mic scale. 

To this point in time, Lenard had scant­i­ly clad his repug­nance for Ein­stein in the trap­pings of sci­en­tif­ic rig­or. Fol­low­ing die Ein­stein­de­bat­te,’ Lenard dropped all pre­tens­es. His vit­ri­olic anti-Semit­ic rants per­son­i­fied Ein­stein as the Jew” and did more than their fair share to alter the once very pos­i­tive pop­u­lar view of Ein­stein. In 1933, en route back to Ger­many from a sab­bat­i­cal at Cal Tech, Ein­stein got wind of inva­sions of his homes in Berlin and Caputh. Learn­ing that a price had been put on his head, he resigned his Ger­man cit­i­zen­ship and returned to the US. Upon Adolf Hitler’s ascent to pow­er, Lenard and his younger acolyte Johannes Stark spear­head­ed the dis­missal of Jew­ish sci­en­tists from Ger­man uni­ver­si­ties, prompt­ing the sci­en­tif­ic dias­po­ra to Germany’s future ene­mies that con­tin­ues to influ­ence inter­na­tion­al sci­en­tif­ic lead­er­ship to the present day.

How Lenard became rad­i­cal­ized in his anti-Semit­ic beliefs, hound­ed Ein­stein in his writ­ings and speech­es, and became the touch­stone for what was accept­able sci­ence dur­ing the ear­ly years of the Third Reich is a cau­tion­ary tale about the spoiled fruits of envy and prej­u­dice with a sat­is­fy­ing and moral end­ing: Albert Ein­stein was Times Man of the 20th Cen­tu­ry,” while Lenard has been con­signed to the his­tor­i­cal dustbin.

Bruce Hill­man is Pro­fes­sor of Radi­ol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia and Edi­tor-in-Chief of the Jour­nal of the Amer­i­can Col­lege of Radi­ol­o­gy. He has pub­lished eight short sto­ries and the 2010 book for lay read­ers, The Sorcerer’s Appren­tice: How Med­ical Imag­ing is Chang­ing Health Care. The Man Who Stalked Ein­stein is his first non-med­ical book.

Relat­ed Content:

Bruce Hill­man is Pro­fes­sor of Radi­ol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia and Edi­tor-in-Chief of the Jour­nal of the Amer­i­can Col­lege of Radi­ol­o­gy. He has pub­lished eight short sto­ries and the 2010 book for lay read­ers, The Sorcerer’s Appren­tice: How Med­ical Imag­ing is Chang­ing Health Care. The Man Who Stalked Ein­stein is his first non-med­ical book.