EINSTEIN’S GIFT HOUSE

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 673, 27 May 1929, Page 14

EINSTEIN’S GIFT HOUSE

BERLIN’S GENEROSITY COUNCIL’S BAD MISTAKE When Professor Einstein, of Relativity fame, was being congratulated recently on the attainment of his 50th birthday, the Berlin City Fathers decided that it would be a patriotic action if the capital gave him a present that would bo acceptable to him. Their laudable purpose has turned out to be a misadventure, for which they are being good-humouredly criticised. The City Council informed the professor that they placed at his disposal, for the use of himself and his wife during their lifetime, an idealistic onestoreyed house, amid pretty grounds, at Cladow, on the banks of the Wannsee, a great lake some eight miles from Berlin. But when Frau Einstein went one day to see their new possession, she was courteously shown round the house by the man in charge, who informed her that the family who owned it had really sold the estate to the city of Berlin, but had been accorded the right to remain in the house for a further term of five years. It appears that the City Fathers had overlooked this clause in the purchase agreement, and in their embarrassment they made a further awkward mistake. They informed Professor Einstein that he might have a plot of two acres of the land behind the farm buildings attached to the house, and suggested that he might build a villa there for himself, they promising to have the ground properly laid out at the city’s expense. When the professor himself visited his property, with his architect, he found that the land is let as a market garden until the end of the year. Furthermore, the piece ‘of land is surrounded by other property, and also hidden by barns, and not only is there no right of way to it, but it is cut off from the water by the property of a motor-yacht club. Members of the latter have offered to the professor a path to the waterside, but the owners of the other property refuse to have a road made across their land to give the professor access to the high road.