einstein

So they went ahead and bought it with their own money. “We have spent most of our savings,” Elsa complained, “but we have our land.”
The house they built was simple, with polished wood panels inside and unvarnished planks showing to the outside. Through a large picture
window was a serene view of the Havel. Marcel Breuer, the famed Bauhaus furniture designer, had offered to do the interior design, but Einstein
was a man of conservative tastes. “I am not going to sit on furniture that continually reminds me of a machine shop or a hospital operating room,” he
said. Some leftover heavy pieces from the Berlin apartment were used instead.
Einstein’s room on the ground floor had a spartan wooden table, a bed, and a small portrait of Isaac Newton. Elsa’s room was also downstairs,
with a shared bathroom between them. Upstairs were small rooms with sleeping niches for her two daughters and their maid. “I like living in the new
little wooden house enormously, even though I am broke as a result,” he wrote his sister shortly after moving in. “The sailboat, the sweeping view,
the solitary fall walks, the relative quiet—it is a paradise.” 5
There he sailed the new twenty-three-foot boat his friends had given him for his birthday, the Tümmler, or Dolphin, which was built fat and solid to
his specifications. He liked to go out on the water alone, even though he didn’t swim. “He was absurdly happy as soon as he reached the water,”
recalled a visitor. 6 For hours he would let the boat drift and glide aimlessly as he gently toyed with the rudder. “His scientific thinking, which never
leaves him even on the water, takes on the nature of a daydream,” according to one relative. “Theoretical thinking is rich in imagination.” 7
Companions
Throughout Einstein’s life, his relationships with women seemed subject to untamed forces. His magnetic appeal and soulful manner repeatedly
attracted women. And even though he usually shielded himself from entangling commitments, he occasionally found himself caught in the swirl of a
passionate attraction, just as he had been with Mileva Mari and even Elsa.
In 1923, after marrying Elsa, he had fallen in love with his secretary, Betty Neumann. Their romance was serious and passionate, according to
newly revealed letters. That fall, while on a visit to Leiden, he wrote to suggest that he might take a job in New York, and she could come as his
secretary. She would live there with him and Elsa, he fantasized. “I will convince my wife to allow this,” he said. “We could live together forever. We
could get a large house outside New York.”
She replied by ridiculing both him and the idea, which prompted him to concede how much of a “crazy ass” he had been. “You have more respect
for the difficulties of triangular geometry than I, old mathematicus, have.” 8
He finally terminated their romance with the lament that he “must seek in the stars” the true love that was denied to him on earth. “Dear Betty,
laugh at me, the old donkey, and find somebody who is ten years younger than me and loves you just as much as I do.” 9
But the relationship lingered. The following summer, Einstein went to see his sons in southern Germany, and from there he wrote to his wife that
he could not visit her and her daughters, who were at a resort nearby, because that would be “too much of a good thing.” At the same time, he was
writing Betty Neumann saying that he was going secretly to Berlin, but she should not tell anyone because if Elsa found out she “will fly back.” 10
After he built the house in Caputh, a succession of women friends visited him there, with Elsa’s grudging acquiescence. Toni Mendel, a wealthy
widow with an estate on the Wannsee, sometimes came sailing with him in Caputh, or he would pilot his boat up to her villa and stay late into the
night playing the piano. They even went to the theater together in Berlin occasionally. Once when she picked Einstein up in her chauffeured
limousine, Elsa got into a furious fight with him and would not give him any pocket money.
He also had a relationship with a Berlin socialite named Ethel Michanowski. She tagged along on one of his trips to Oxford, in May 1931, and
apparently stayed in a local hotel. He composed a five-line poem for her one day on a Christ Church college notecard. “Long-branched and
delicately strung, Nothing that will escape her gaze,” it began. A few days later she sent him an expensive present, which was not appreciated.“The
small package really angered me,” he wrote.“You have to stop sending me presents incessantly ... And to send something like that to an English
college where we are surrounded by senseless affluence anyway!” 11
When Elsa found out that Michanowski had visited Einstein in Oxford, she was furious, particularly at Michanowski for misleading her about
where she was going. Einstein wrote from Oxford to tell Elsa to calm down. “Your dismay toward Frau M is totally groundless because she behaved
completely according to the best Jewish-Christian morality,” he said. “Here is the proof: 1) What one enjoys and doesn’t harm others, one should
do. 2) What one doesn’t enjoy and only aggravates others, one should not do. Because of #1, she came with me, and because of #2 she didn’t tell
you anything about it. Isn’t that impeccable behavior?” But in a letter to Elsa’s daughter Margot, Einstein claimed that Michanowski’s pursuit was
unwanted. “Her chasing me is getting out of control,” he wrote Margot, who was Michanowski’s friend. “I don’t care what people are saying about
me, but for mother [Elsa] and for Frau M, it is better that not every Tom, Dick and Harry gossip about it.” 12
In his letter to Margot, he insisted that he was not particularly attached to Michanowski nor to most of the other women who flirted with him. “Of all
the women, I am actually attached only to Frau L, who is perfectly harmless and respectable,” he said, not so reassuringly. 13 That was a reference
to a blond Austrian named Margarete Lebach, with whom he had a very public relationship. When Lebach visited Caputh, she brought pastries for
Elsa. But Elsa, understandably, could not abide her, and she took to leaving the village to go shopping in Berlin on the days that Lebach came.
On one visit, Lebach left a piece of clothing in Einstein’s sailboat, which caused a family row and prompted Elsa’s daughter to urge her to force
Einstein to end the relationship. But Elsa was afraid that her husband would refuse. He had let it be known that he believed that men and women
were not naturally monogamous. 14 In the end, she decided that she was better off preserving what she could of their marriage. In other respects, it
suited her aspirations. 15
Elsa liked her husband, and she also revered him. She realized that she must accept him with all of his complexities, especially since her life as
Mrs. Einstein included much that made her happy. “Such a genius should be irreproachable in every respect,” she told the artist and etcher
Hermann Struck, who did Einstein’s portrait around the time of his fiftieth birthday (as he had done a decade earlier). “But nature does not behave
this way. Where she gives extravagantly, she takes away extravagantly.”The good and the bad had to be accepted as a whole. “You have to see
him all of one piece,” she explained. “God has given him so much nobility, and I find him wonderful, although life with him is exhausting and
complicated, and not only in one way but in others.” 16
The most important other woman in Einstein’s life was one who was completely discreet, protective, loyal, and not threatening to Elsa. Helen
Dukas came to work as Einstein’s secretary in 1928, when he was confined to bed with an inflamed heart. Elsa knew her sister, who ran the Jewish
Orphans Organization, of which Elsa was honorary president. Elsa interviewed Dukas before allowing her to meet Einstein, and she felt that Dukas
would be trustworthy and, more to the point, safe in all respects. She offered Dukas the job even before she had met Einstein.
When Dukas, then 32, was ushered into Einstein’s sickroom in April 1928, he stretched out his hand and smiled, “Here lies an old child’s
corpse.” From that moment until his death in 1955—indeed until her own death in 1982—the never-married Dukas was fiercely protective of his
time, his privacy, his reputation, and later his legacy. “Her instincts were as infallible and straightforward as a magnetic compass,” George Dyson