Sitting on a bench, legs crossed, Albert Einstein enjoys the tranquility of a public park in Le Coq. This bronze statue attracts tourists to the resort on the Belgian coast where the famous Nobel Prize in Physics stayed 90 years ago.
It is a relatively unknown episode in the life of the American physicist of German Jewish origin (1879-1955).
When Hitler came to power in early 1933, the native of Ulm, in southern Germany, Nobel laureate in 1921, was already teaching his theory of relativity in the United States.
The hunt for Jews is organized in Germany, Einstein’s residence near Berlin is targeted, and his property confiscated.
It was on his return from a stay across the Atlantic that he landed in Belgium in March 1933 with Elsa, his second wife, convinced that a return to the country would prove too dangerous.
The physicist will spend almost six months at Le Coq (De Haan, in Flemish) under the surveillance of the Belgian police who fear for his life.
“My mother knew Einstein well when she was young. Every morning he walked on the dike or on the beach,” says Brigitte Hochs, a 78-year-old Belgian, guiding an AFP team in the footsteps of the scientist.
For decades, the Hochs family ran the “Bellevue” hotel, in the Belle Epoque style, in the middle of the Anglo-Norman villas of Le Coq whose architecture recalls that of Le Touquet or Deauville in France.
The Einstein couple rented one of them, the Villa Savoyarde.
He used to have coffee on the hotel terrace after his walk in the fresh air. “It was her routine,” Ms. Hochs continues.
She also remembers that another well-known Albert, the King of the Belgians at the time Albert I – whose wife, Elisabeth, was a Bavarian duchess -, played an important role in this short Belgian exile of the Prize Nobel.
“The king strongly advised Einstein not to return to Germany,” says Brigitte Hochs.
Einstein knew the royal couple from his participation in congresses in Brussels. And besides the German language, he shared with Queen Elisabeth the love of the violin. “They even played together.”
Professor Einstein’s “Flemish” slice of life inspired a comic strip last year for Belgian screenwriter Rudi Miel, for whom this story “looks like a thriller”. He recalls that Einstein’s surveillance by order of the king was justified by “death threats”.
In this comic strip “Le Coq-sur-Mer, 1933” (Anspach editions), of which Baudouin Deville signs the drawings, the physicist, gray hair and thick mustache, appears as a hunted man.
The author imagined that a blonde spy in a trench coat, pistol in hand, was sent by the Nazis to abduct him, as part of the Third Reich’s research on the atomic bomb.
In fact, Einstein’s discoveries on mass and energy from his famous equation E=mc2 laid the foundations for future nuclear fission, although the physicist had been a pacifist all his life.
The kidnapping attempts are fictitious.
But the file devoted to him in the Belgian State Archives shows the extent to which Albert Einstein was threatened during his escapades on the shores of the North Sea.
“The file is a real jackpot. Through these surveillance reports, we discover the personality of Professor Einstein,” enthuses archivist Filip Strubbe.
“One of the reports says he liked to walk around the seawall at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning without notifying the police. This made it difficult for him to protect himself.”
Two officials from the State Security (Belgian civil intelligence) had to follow the scientist’s slightest actions and gestures because a Nazi secret society had put a price on his head.
When a Jewish researcher friend was shot dead in the Czech Republic at the end of August 1933 on orders from the Reich, Einstein realized that he was no longer safe in Belgium.
Via the Belgian port of Ostend, he reached London, from where he emigrated to the United States.
Einstein, who will no longer return to Europe, might have appreciated the many stories about his life.
The sculpture that represents him at the Rooster immortalized one of his most famous quotes: “Imagination is more important than knowledge”.
25/04/2023 19:15:04 – Le Coq (Belgium) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP