I N T R O D U C T I O N T O V O L U M E 1 3 l i i i garden, which had belonged to relatives of the deposed emperor. As a Jew, he did not wish to provoke the local inhabitants (Doc. 276). Einstein reversed himself a mere four days later, as the initial panic in the wake of the murder had subsided. Upon “calm reflection,” he wrote that he would con- tinue residing in Berlin, noting that there would not be much work for him at the factory in Kiel. As Elsa Einstein saw it, although Einstein had been strongly affect- ed by Rathenau’s murder, “feeling: get away from here to work in tranquility,” by now “he realized that this thing with tranquility is an illusion. Nowhere else can he better duck out of sight than here in Berlin.” Nevertheless, she confirmed that, “[a]fter the trip to Japan, he wants to give up his official offices here” (Doc. 292). The assassination affected Einstein’s willingness to make public appearances. He decided not to deliver his planned address at the centenary celebration confer- ence of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte, to be held in Leipzig in September. To Max Planck, he wrote of the personal threats, having been warned against staying in Berlin, and against “making any kind of public appearances in Germany. For I am supposedly among the group of persons being targeted by na- tionalist assassins.” In a draft of this letter, Einstein had pointed directly at “German-völkisch” elements who “were out to kill” him. He blamed the press for his predicament: “The whole difficulty arises from the fact that newspapers men- tioned my name too often and thereby mobilized the riffraff against me” (Doc. 266). Planck’s response was one of genuine shock. The letter struck him “like a bolt out of the blue. So the rabble really has pushed it so far that you have to be worried about your personal safety!” (Doc. 272). Einstein wrote back: “The English expe- dition of 1919 is ultimately to blame for this whole misery, by which the general masses seized possession of me. Ever since, I have become a kind of flag that var- ious sorts of interests parade about.” He realized that his yearning for “a quiet nook” was illusory (Doc. 279). The multiplying accounts of threats against him in the Jewish press displeased him, too, since they “only magnify the animosity against me and with it the danger. For the time being I make do with keeping away from all things that preoccupy the German public. A change of residence is not nec- essarily a protection because a half-wit and a revolver can be found anywhere” (Doc. 303). His celebrity status was an ongoing concern to Einstein. In June 1922, he admit- ted to the Norwegian physicist Thorstein G. Wereide that he had never read the bi- ography that had caused so much furor in 1921 (Moszkowski 1921), adding: “It is certainly not a small thing for a living person to be served up to the public as close to naked as possible.” In his opinion, one “really ought to be content with present- ing to the public what a person has published about objective ideas. If anything is