This week, the University of Salamanca gave news of the discovery of a unique document in the documentary archive guarded by the Unamuno House Museum. It is about a telegram sent by the German physicist Albert Einstein and other “German friends” to the thinker and writer Miguel de Umanuno. The curious thing is that it was not the first time that the person responsible for the theory of relativity wrote something like this.

The telegram to the Bilbao author, written in German and dated around the year 1930contained a message of support on the occasion of the exile imposed by the Miguel Primo de Rivera regime on Unamuno. The author had been critical of the regimegoing so far as to refer to the dictator as “king goose”.

This confrontation also left one of the thinker’s most popular quotes, the “Spain hurts me so much”. The quarrel ended with the exile of the thinkerwhich began on the island of Fuerteventura and ended in the city of Hendaye, after a stay in Paris.

The letter congratulates Unamuno on his return from this exile “endured with noble pride.” The authors refer to the author as “brave fighter, great poet and philosopher” and celebrate him “on the occasion of his glorious return from honorable exile,” they explain from the University of Salamanca.

The signing group of “German friends” of Unamuno included, in addition to Einstein, artists and authors such as Käthe Kollwitz, Alfred Döeblin and Ernst Toller, according to the University. The discovery “demonstrates an extraordinary connection between the father of the Theory of Relativity,” they add from the Salamanca institution.

The University explains that reports of the existence of the letter were known from other authors such as Francisco Madrid or Emilio Salcedo, but only now have we learned that the document was still in the archives of the museum.

The identification of the document “corroborates the news that there was about the attendance of a “manifesto” of the most select and advanced of the German intellectuality, congratulating the return of Miguel de Unamuno to Spain after his exile in the Canary Islands and exile in Paris and Hendaye”, explained in a press release Ana Chaguaceda, director of the Unamuno House-Museum, who also highlighted the identification of all the signatories of the telegram sent to the writer.

Different cards

Perhaps it suggests something about Albert Einstein’s character to know that this It was not the first time in which the German physicist expressed his solidarity with intellectuals of the time who were being subjected to some type of discrimination. Almost 20 years earlier, in November 1911, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to Maria Skłodowska-Curie.

The year in which the Polish scientist received her second Nobel Prize had its ups and downs. Skłodowska-Curie was rejected that same year from the French Academy of Sciences, but the great controversy had little to do with her work.

The reason was her romantic relationship with her laboratory partner Paul Langevin. Curie she had been widowed in 1906after the death of her husband Pierre and, according to the gossip of the timewas in a relationship with Langevin, a married man. The scientist’s wife made public letters between the two, which generated the scandal.

Einstein did not seem interested in this mess of skirts: “don’t even read that nonsense,” he then wrote to the Polish physicist. In the letterwhich can be consulted in English, the German confessed himself “furious at the poor way in which the public dares to be interested in you”, pure “fever for sensationalism”.

The physicist expressed in writing his admiration for the scientisthis intellect, resolution and honesty, before recommending that he turn a deaf ear to criticism. The physicist closed with a post data in which he claimed to have determined the statistical law of the motion of the diatomic molecule in the Planck radiation field, adding that his hope that the law would be valid in the real world was “very small.”

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Image | University of Salamanca / Ferdinand Schmutzer