Einstein the anti-German
"Antisemitism is strong here and political reaction is violent," Albert Einstein wrote Paul Ehrenfest from Berlin in December 1919. The letter coincides with Einstein's discovery by the popular press, the beginning of his years of internatinal celebrity. "A new figure in world history," the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung described him under a cover photograph on December 14, "…whose investigations signify a complete revision of our concepts of nature, and are on a par with the insights of a Copernicus, a Kepler, a Newton." Immediately the anti-Semites and fascists set to work on him. [p. 169]
[…]
He [Einstein] was challenged more seriously the following August by an organization assembled under obscure leadership and extravagant but clandestine financing that called itself the Committee of German Scientists for the Preservation of Pure Scholarship. The 1905 Nobel laureate Philipp Lenard, seeing relativity hailed and Einstein come to fame, retreated into a vindictive anti-Semitism and lent his respectability to the Committee, which attacked relativity theory as a Jewish corruption and Einstein as a tasteless self-promoter. The organization held a well-attended public meeting in Belin's Philharmonic Hall on August 20. Einstein went to listen — one speaker, as Leopold Infeld recalled, "said that uproar about the theory of relativity was hostile to the German spirit" — and stayed to scorn the crackpot talk with laughter and satiric applause.
The criticism nevertheless stung. Einstein mistakenly thought the majority of his German colleagues subscribed to it. [p. 170]
[Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1986).]