Trove of letters shows Einstein's human side Letters from 1915 show the physicist as a man under stress and on the brink of achievement, struggling with love and life in a war-torn world.
By John Johnson Jr. Times Staff Writer January 29, 2007
THE year was 1915. War and privation had come to Germany.
Meanwhile, in Berlin, a solitary man struggled with the equations for a new theory of gravity.
"I have been laboring inhumanly," Albert Einstein, then 36, wrote to a friend in his native German. "I am quite overworked."
His fellow scientists, he complained in a letter contained in a newly published collection of his personal correspondence, were behaving abominably, either "trying to poke holes" in his theory or competing with him to finish it first.
At the same time, he was estranged from his two young sons, who were living in Switzerland with their mother, from whom Einstein had separated the year before. He was romancing his cousin Elsa Lowenthal, whom he would later marry, and was stressed about money. His stomach was acting up.
"Come, dear old friend, Lady Resignation, and sing me your familiar old song so that I can continue to spin quietly in my corner," he lamented in one self-pitying note.
In 1915, as Western civilization teetered on the brink, Albert Einstein stood at the threshold of a scientific achievement so bold that it would forever change him and the world.
His general theory of relativity, which described how large bodies warped space and time, would revolutionize people's ideas about the physical world and guarantee that the rest of his life would be lived in the glare of a celebrity that made heads of state and Hollywood stars go tongue-tied in his presence.
The gem of this new collection, published by Caltech and Princeton University, is a treasure trove of personal letters that have been locked away for almost a century and are now shedding fresh light on the man and his work at this moment of transformation.
Einstein's stepdaughter Margot donated 130 letters, written in German, from and to his closest friends and family members. Margot, who died in July 1986, had specified that they not be released to the public for 20 years after her death.
These letters portray the greatest thinker of the 20th century at the height of his powers not as a triumphant genius but as a working man struggling to make ends meet while the world around him threatened to devolve into chaos.
This image of a man who could be as insecure as he was accomplished, as spiteful as he was open-hearted, runs counter to two popular notions of Einstein.
One image is the gentle antiwar symbol whose fright-wigged visage smiled down from a thousand dorm rooms. The other is of Einstein the distracted genius too occupied with great thoughts to match his socks.
In fact, according to Walter Isaacson, former managing editor of Time magazine and author of a forthcoming biography, Einstein in 1915 was "awesomely human."
He would never again be so poor, nor so vulnerable, as he was in the spring, summer and fall of 1915.
ALBERT Einstein met Mileva Maric at the Zurich Federal Institute of Technology in 1896, when he was just 17. He was the bright young student who cut class and didn't much care for the antiquated ideas of his professors.
Mileva was three years older, walked with a limp, was too brainy and wasn't Jewish. They fell in love, but his parents didn't like her. The couple were independent-minded and willfully modern.
Mileva gave birth in 1902 to a girl the couple named Lieserl, but she was sent away, some scholars say, out of concern that the out-of-wedlock baby might harm Einstein's career. Lieserl is believed to have died the next year.
Einstein moved to Bern to take a job at the Swiss patent office, and married Mileva in 1903 after his father consented to the match on his deathbed. The couple had a second child the next year, a boy they named Hans Albert.
Mileva gushed with happiness in those early years. "I am even closer to my sweetheart, if it is at all possible, than I was in our Zurich days," she wrote to a friend, Helene Kaufler.
She was especially thrilled with the publication in 1905 of his first important work, which she accurately predicted to friends would make him famous.
He presented three papers that scientists still rank among the greatest bursts of creative genius in history. A paper on Brownian motion would explain the apparently random motion of particles in liquid. The second paper, on the photoelectric effect, described light not as a wave but as possessing the characteristics of a stream of particles. Lastly, his paper on special relativity gave the world the equation E=mc2.
But their love eventually began to fade and by the summer of 1914, when Einstein moved to Berlin to become director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics, their relationship had deteriorated. Mileva rightly suspected him of carrying on an affair with Elsa, and he began contemplating divorce.
Einstein dictated a set of conditions to his wife: She would have to forgo intimacy, serve his meals in his room, "desist immediately from addressing me if I request it . leave my bedroom or office immediately without protest if I so request."
Humiliated, Mileva retreated to Zurich with their two sons, leaving Einstein in the care of Elsa, who nursed him through his various stomach ailments.
Though he appreciated the intellectual stimulation of Berlin, he was put off by its culture, calling it "nerve-wracking." He was appalled by the war fever in Germany. "A craving to dominate and a thirst for power have poisoned the minds of the upper class everywhere," he wrote in one letter. "I am convinced that the gospel that brute armed force is the basis of all existence finds its main support in Germany."
He stayed in Berlin because he could earn a better living. In the midst of war and food shortages, he supported two households, as well as the extra costs of the frequent hospitalizations for Mileva and youngest son for ailments that Einstein suspected were trumped up.
When Hans Albert purchased a pair of skis, saying he considered them a Christmas present, his father grumped: "I'll send you the Christmas present in cash as you wish. But I do think a luxury gift of 70 [francs] does not match our modest circumstances."
Diana Kormos Buchwald, the general editor of Einstein's collected papers, said: "This was a working scientist, living on a salary. This is a salaried person's travails."
Einstein was a distant yet demanding father and husband. He once confessed his doubts that he could have produced such proletarian progeny.
"There is something indefinably four-footed about them," he groused to Elsa.
But the new letters also show him as deeply engaged, sometimes overly so, in spite of his absence.
"These letters show the profound difficulties that every family encounters over a long period of time," Kormos Buchwald said. "Difficulties related to separation and divorce."
Letters to and from Einstein's boys, Hans Albert, who was 11 in 1915, and Eduard, 5, his sickly younger brother who was nicknamed Tete, are particularly moving, said Kormos-Buchwald.
Around April, Hans Albert, nicknamed Adu, wrote two letters asking his father to visit. "Last Easter we were alone; do we have to spend this Easter alone as well? If you were to write us that you were coming, that would be the finest Easter Bunny for us," he wrote. "Imagine, Tete can already multiply and divide, and I am doing geometry."
Einstein replied with delight, saying the letters "pleased me very much. Did you write them nicely by yourself?"
He couldn't come for Easter, he said. But in summer he'd take Hans Albert on a hike. "Then I'll also tell you many fine and interesting things about science and much else," Einstein wrote. "Today I'm sending off a package with some toys for you and Tete.. Don't neglect your piano, my Adu."
Relations soured after Einstein sent a note chastising Mileva for her spending, promising that until she changed her ways, "I will not send you anything more."
The note backfired. In June, Hans Albert scolded his father for planning a trip without checking with Mileva first. "You should contact mama about such things, because I'm not the only one to decide here. But if you're so unfriendly with her, I don't want to go with you either."
He signed it, A. Einstein, instead of the familiar Adu.
The stung father wrote to his friend Heinrich Zangger, a medical professor, blaming his son's rebuke on his wife, "who has a vengeful, ordinary disposition, but also is so sly that outsiders and particularly men are always deceived by her."
Einstein was angry at his son and decided to put off seeing him in favor of spending more time with Elsa and her two daughters. "I see . from the unfriendliness of your letter that my visit would bring you little joy," Einstein wrote after a second curt note from Hans Albert.
He would seem to forget his sons were just boys and lash out at them as equals. Then he would regret his temper tantrum. "It was a big mistake of mine to be annoyed about his postcard," Einstein wrote later to Zangger, who frequently served as a go-between with his family in Zurich. "Such a thing shouldn't happen to a reasonable man of my age."
BY the fall of 1915, Einstein's problems with money and his family began to move to the background.
His anxieties were at fever pitch as he struggled with the equations for his new theory of relativity, which would redefine gravity not as some mysterious attractive force between two large objects but a curvature of space and time.
Einstein's idea was that objects fall toward planets and stars because those large objects literally warp the space around them, like the indentation created by a bowling ball sitting on a bed.
In October, Einstein threw himself into what Isaacson called a "monthlong frenzy" to complete the work in time to give a series of lectures to Berlin's Prussian Academy of Sciences.
As he worked, he paused to write a revealing letter to Hans Albert. "I will try to be with you for a month every year so that you will have a father who is close to you and can love you. You can learn a lot of good things from me that no one else can offer you. The things I have gained from so much strenuous work should be of value not only to strangers but especially to my own boys. In the last few days I have completed one of the finest papers of my life. When you are older I will tell you about it."
The main reason for his haste was that he was feeling heat from renowned German mathematician David Hilbert, who had not only bought into Einstein's ideas but was racing to come up with the equations first. That fall, Hilbert wrote that he had come up with a "solution to your great problem."
After reading Hilbert's paper, Einstein replied that the "system you furnish agrees - as far as I can see - exactly with what I found in the last few weeks."
Eager to show his primacy, Einstein said he had already presented his solutions "to the Academy."
Hilbert offered "cordial congratulations."
This led, on Nov. 25, to Einstein's dramatic fourth lecture, titled "The Field Equations of Gravitation," which outlined the complex math behind his breakthrough.
A later note to Zangger found Einstein at last able to celebrate. "I am quite overworked from the extraordinary exertions of the last few months. But the success is glorious," he said.
After taking Hans Albert on a hike the next spring, he wrote a note filled with joy to Elsa. "He is kind-hearted, trusting, and surprisingly eager to learn.. My relationship with him is becoming very warm."
Hans Albert studied engineering in Zurich and then became a professor of hydraulic engineering at UC Berkeley.
Eduard was more frail. Like his mother, he was sickly and emotionally fragile. Falling victim to mental illness, he was hospitalized much of his life.
Isaacson believes Eduard's mental instability was inherited rather than a response to growing up with an absent, sometimes difficult, father. "Mileva was moody and depressive at the very least," Isaacson said.
Worn down by Einstein's persistence, Mileva agreed to a divorce in 1919. As an inducement, Einstein offered to give her the money from the Nobel Prize, should he win it. Of course, he did, in 1921. She used the money, about $28,000, to buy real estate in Zurich.
But even then, her life was plagued by financial reverses. When she died in 1948, her obituary didn't mention her connection to the by-then world-famous physicist.
For Albert Einstein, 1915 was the year that marked his ascent into the pantheon of the world's great scientific minds. Nobel laureate Paul Dirac called Einstein's achievement "probably the greatest scientific discovery ever made."
>From then on, genius would never be far from the lips of those who invoked
his name.