Annotated by Engelbert Schucking and translated by Bertram Schwarzschild (See the article by Schucking and Alex Harvey on page 34.)
I inherited this postcard from my father, Lothar Engelbert Schücking (1873–1943). He was a lawyer in Dortmund, Germany, when Einstein’s elder son, Hans Albert (1904–73), consulted him on a legal matter. Hans Albert was working as an engineer in Dortmund at the time. Because he couldn’t afford to pay for the consultation, he agreed instead to provide my father with his father’s autograph.
On 24 January 1929, my father wrote to prompt him: “May I respectfully remind you that, in return for legal consultation, you promised to give me for my autograph collection something written by your famous father in his own hand.”
Hans Albert replied on 11 March: “From here it was not easy to obtain something from my father, since he is very peculiar in this respect. Also, I was delayed by relocation, influenza, and a death in the family. I ask you, therefore, to excuse the delay, and I hope I can satisfy your request with the attached piece of writing.”
The card was written at the apogee of Einstein’s fame. Three days earlier, the Prussian Academy of Sciences had published a six-page paper by him (Proc. Pruss. Acad. Sci., 1929, p. 2) about unifying gravity and electromagnetism. The paper made headlines worldwide.
Berlin–Charlottenburg, 2 February 1929
Dear Albert:
I’m glad that your profession gives you so much satisfaction. Let me know what expenses you had for the piano so I can reimburse you. I wasn’t able to [cover the moving expenses] from here. I like this piano. These things have become quite expensive. We got it in a small store. It was a unique opportunity. To find something like that, one has to search all the smaller stores, read ads, phone around, negotiate.
My heartfelt condolence to your wife [Frieda] on her great loss. We’re buying a small summer house in Ferch near Berlin, where the sailing is lovely. This will also be good for you both. We want to live there like gypsies from May till September.
You can pass on this postcard as an autograph.
Love,
Your Papa.
Einstein never did buy the summer house in Ferch, a lakeside town 12 km southwest of the Berlin suburb of Potsdam. As far as I know, his plan to buy a house just six weeks before the City of Berlin offered to give him one as a 50th birthday present is not mentioned in the standard Einstein literature. He apparently dropped that plan and accepted the mayor’s offer. But the offer turned into such a bizarre comedy of errors, bureaucratic incompetence, and local politics that Einstein finally turned it down and built a house on his own, in Caputh near Ferch.
