As 24-cent copies of Albert Einstein's abstruse "Coherent Field Theory" reached the U. S. last week, the man himself, his wife and a daughter plodded about Wannsee, simply hunting rooms at that lake colony twelve miles from Berlin.
The Man's face was yellowish. He looked haggard, nervous, irritable. He sounded querulous. An internal disease, which last summer he feared would kill him before he could complete his newest theory, has made him so. That disease—plus the harrying visitors who buzzed and scraped about him the past fortnight, and years of indoor, sedentary work. Dr. Einstein, like so many other Jews and scholars, takes no physical exercise at all.
He works in the attic of five-story apartment house at Haberlandstrasse, 5, a quiet thoroughfare near Berlin's zoological garden. A large iron door, which clangs as it shuts, keeps him in solitude and silence. The room smells of tobacco. He smokes a long-stem briar pipe, into which he tamps tobacco with his thumb. His working tools are paper and pencils on a good-sized table and his books (cheaply bound in paper for the most part) on shelves around the wall. Ornaments are a four-foot telescope and a large terrestrial globe. The grand piano in the room is his diversion.
He taught himself to play the piano. In music he prefers Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart, Mozart most of all. He also plays the violin well. A concert is one of the few evening attractions that will entice him out of his flat below his study. He goes to bed early and rises early. Another lure is any opportunity to play his fiddle to the inmates of a Jewish home for the aged. Dr. Einstein is a conservative Jew, a Zionist and, politically, a Socialist. So is his wife, Frau Elsa Einstein.
Dr. and Mrs. Einstein are cousins. March 14 he will be 50 years old. She is almost that age. Ten years ago they married, after previous marriages and divorces. She is a levelheaded, practical woman who finds her philosophizing husband no nuisance. Said she of him some time ago: "Professor Einstein is not eccentric. He wears stiff collars when the occasion demands it without protest. He hardly ever mislays things. At least, not more than most men. He knows when it's time for lunch and dinner."
A fortnight ago, when his "Coherent Field Theory" was finally printed (in a six-page pamphlet), he wrote a 5,000-word explanatory article for the New York Times. That article brought him several thousand dollars. The money was useful, for the Einsteins are, like most scientific families, comparatively poor. Not much income ensues from his professorship at the Academy of Sciences or from his directorship at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. Yet the Einsteins, if they were really in need, might look with confidence to their very rich relatives, the Kochs and Dreyfuses of Germany and France. They are related to that Robert Koch (1843-1910) who discovered tuberculin and, after Louis Pasteur (1822-95), founded modern medicine. Alfred Dreyfus (1859-), of France's famed "Dreyfus case," is Dr. Einstein's cousin.