The Einstein Vendetta

The Einstein Vendetta

By Thomas Harding

Michael Joseph 2025

Writers, on the days they aren’t furthering socialism and flooring themselves with elicit toxins, have many crucial balances to strike when their nibs are licked. One of which is to ensure a cordiality between voice and subject matter. It is of no import to a history’s success how ravenously genocidal are its dictators, how boisterous is its tank warfare or how sainted its peace conferences if the author at the helm cannot bring them to life with a delicate and profound narrative. Thomas Harding’s new book The Einstein Vendetta equips itself with a would-be poignant tale, but only dabbles perfunctorily with that tale’s seriousness, and defuses a potentially explosive book with anodyne prose.

Harding begins his non-fiction by hitting novelistic notes, jagging back and forth between the early twentieth century, the pistol-popping madness in Nazi-occupied Italy, and modern attempts to regather threads trodden down by time. The action focuses on Albert Einstein’s cousin (the conscientious and caring Robert) alongside his wife, daughters and rural employees who feel the heat of the Nazi poker redden their lives as the Third Reich begins its continental defeat in 1944. Harding does well to emphasise the halcyon tranquility betokened by the Florentine Villa il Focardo owned by Robert, before a jackboot has been stamped - “For now, at least, the Villa il Focardo provided an oasis for Robert, Nina and the girls. Away from the politics of hate broiling in Rome and Berlin, and away from the growing drumbeat of war.”

There is a galloping tension imposed upon readers when the truckload of goons enter the Einsteins’ sanctuary on August 4th 1944. Even the clumsiest hands could not fail to give some power to the tragedies shown by morning’s dawn. Harding spends the rest of his time contextualising the raid on this defenceless family, and seeking to identify the malicious perpetrators. He does his inexpressive yet dutiful best when he writes “In the early 1930s, with the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany, Albert [Einstein] was increasingly targeted in the press by the Nazis and their supporters. They wanted to destroy him. Not only was he the country’s most famous Jew, he was also an outspoken pacifist, which was anathema to the so-called Third Reich.”

Because Albert voiced concerns about the putative progress of a Nazi nuclear programme, Harding contends the senior leadership authorised lethal campaigns against the famed physicist or anyone numbering amongst his family. “[Newspaper stories] said that, in return for the murder of Albert Einstein, the German government was offering around £1,000 or around £430,000 in today’s money.” This critic has read his quota of sweeping WW2 sagas in whose footnotes this imbroglio may have won only a passing mention, so it is pleasing to see this clash between the Einsteins and the Nazi’s top brass informatively fleshed out.

Counter-intuitive though it may sound, this book is actually too informative for its own good. Harding’s imagined reader is not a historically fluent generalist or even a keenly curious human adult. His imagined reader is instead a toddler just set loose from an infant swim gala; a handsomely nappied youngster who downs the The Tiger Who Came To Tea (a ripping thriller) and picks up The Einstein Vendetta. What else would lead to these laughably self-evident sections being plattered up as if they serve some instructive purpose? “There had been Jews living in Italy since Roman times, nevertheless hatred of Jews was buried deep within the nation’s psyche. Over the centuries, various popes, bishops, priests and others in power blamed the Jews for the killing of Jesus Christ…leading to waves of pogroms, segregation and persecution.”

These two following epistemic beauties definitely take the cake - “Now that [random Nazi suspect A] was dead, it was impossible to prosecute him for his alleged role” is placed just before “fingerprints are impressions left on a physical object by a human finger’s friction ridges.” Sooner or later, we expect Harding to tell us all about the lurid light-giving gaseous orb smirking in the sky (known more colloquially as the sun) or the mystifying figure of six reached by mathematicians when three is humbly added to three. His writing is Wikipedia-esque in its factual chumminess; too avuncular, and too redolent of a museum’s explanatory plaques.

It’s great to have these events broached in the mainstream. In Robert, Nina, Luce and Cici Einstein’s vicissitudes, we can draw likenesses to those tyrannised more famously under Hitler’s regime. If only Harding had given more splendour to his sentences and given more umph to his explorations, we might’ve been witnesses to a remarkable book on the incommensurability of Nazism and science, the vanity of hope in fascistic countries, or the temporal erosion of human empathy. ‘All the gear and no idea’ is a phrase used in the cycling community when a couch-happy punter rocks up with gleaming carbon wheels and a custom manufactured frame. The gap between the practitioner’s materials and ability isn’t perfectly analogous here, but Harding might just want to do a few more hill reps before he next saddles up on a snazzy historical steed.

Joe Spivey is a book critic currently residing in Kingston Upon Hull