einstein

Summer Vacation, 1900
CHAPTER FOUR
THE LOVERS
1900–1904
With Mileva and Hans Albert Einstein, 1904
Newly graduated, carrying his Kirchhoff and other physics books, Einstein arrived at the end of July 1900 for his family’s summer vacation in
Melchtal, a village nestled in the Swiss Alps between Lake Lucerne and the border with northern Italy. In tow was his “dreadful aunt,” Julia Koch.
They were met at the train station by his mother and sister, who smothered him with kisses, and then all piled into a carriage for the ride up the
mountain.
As they neared the hotel, Einstein and his sister got off to walk. Maja confided that she had not dared to discuss with their mother his relationship
with Mileva Mari , known in the family as “the Dollie affair” after his nickname for her, and she asked him to “go easy on Mama.” It was not in
Einstein’s nature, however, “to keep my big mouth shut,” as he later put it in his letter to Mari about the scene, nor was it in his nature to protect
Mari ’s feelings by sparing her all the dramatic details about what ensued. 1
He went to his mother’s room and, after hearing about his exams, she asked him, “So, what will become of your Dollie now?”
“My wife,” Einstein answered, trying to affect the same nonchalance that his mother had used in her question.
His mother, Einstein recalled, “threw herself on the bed, buried her head in the pillow, and wept like a child.” She was finally able to regain her
composure and proceeded to go on the attack. “You are ruining your future and destroying your opportunities,” she said. “No decent family will have
her. If she gets pregnant you’ll really be in a mess.”
At that point, it was Einstein’s turn to lose his composure. “I vehemently denied we had been living in sin,” he reported to Mari , “and scolded her
roundly.”
Just as he was about to storm out, a friend of his mother’s came in, “a small, vivacious lady, an old hen of the most pleasant variety.” They
promptly segued into the requisite small talk: about the weather, the new guests at the spa, the ill-mannered children. Then they went off to eat and
play music.
Such periods of storm and calm alternated throughout the vacation. Every now and then, just when Einstein thought that the crisis had receded,
his mother would revisit the topic.“Like you, she’s a book, but you ought to have a wife,” she scolded at one point. Another time she brought up the
fact that Mari was 24 and he was then only 21. “By the time you’re 30, she’ll be an old witch.”
Einstein’s father, still working back in Milan, weighed in with “a moralistic letter.” The thrust of his parents’ views—at least when applied to the
situation of Mileva Mari rather than Marie Winteler—was that a wife was “a luxury” affordable only when a man was making a comfortable living. “I
have a low opinion of that view of a relationship between a man and wife,” he told Mari ,“because it makes the wife and the prostitute
distinguishable only insofar as the former is able to secure a lifelong contract.” 2
Over the ensuing months, there would be times when it seemed as if his parents had decided to accept their relationship. “Mama is slowly
resigning herself,” Einstein wrote Mari in August. Likewise in September: “They seem to have reconciled themselves to the inevitable. I think they
will both come to like you very much once they get to know you.” And once again in October: “My parents have retreated, grudgingly and with
hesitation, from the battle of Dollie—now that they have seen that they’ll lose it.” 3
But repeatedly, after each period of acceptance, their resistance would flare up anew, randomly leaping into a higher state of frenzy. “Mama often
cries bitterly and I don’t have a single moment of peace,” he wrote at the end of August. “My parents weep for me almost as if I had died. Again and
again they complain that I have brought misfortune upon myself by my devotion to you. They think you are not healthy.” 4
His parents’ dismay had little to do with the fact that Mari was not Jewish, for neither was Marie Winteler, nor that she was Serbian, although that
certainly didn’t help her cause. Primarily, it seems, they considered her an unsuitable wife for many of the reasons that some of Einstein’s friends
did: she was older, somewhat sickly, had a limp, was plain looking, and was an intense but not a star intellectual.
All of this emotional pressure stoked Einstein’s rebellious instincts and his passion for his “wild street urchin,” as he called her. “Only now do I see
how madly in love with you I am!”The relationship, as expressed in their letters, remained equal parts intellectual and emotional, but the emotional
part was now filled with a fire unexpected from a self-proclaimed loner. “I just realized that I haven’t been able to kiss you for an entire month, and I
long for you so terribly much,” he wrote at one point.
During a quick trip to Zurich in August to check on his job prospects, he found himself walking around in a daze. “Without you, I lack selfconfidence,
pleasure in my work, pleasure in life—in short, without you my life is not life.” He even tried his hand at a poem for her, which began: