einstein

Einstein’s mother learned about the purported engagement from Mrs. Winteler. “We are resolutely against Albert’s relationship with Fraulein Mari ,
and we don’t ever wish to have anything to do with her,” Pauline Einstein lamented. 58
Einstein’s mother even took the extraordinary step of writing a nasty letter, signed also by her husband, to Mari ’s parents. “This lady,” Mari
lamented to a friend about Einstein’s mother, “seems to have set as her life’s goal to embitter as much as possible not only my life but also that of
her son. I could not have thought it possible that there could exist such heartless and outright wicked people! They felt no compunctions about
writing a letter to my parents in which they reviled me in a manner that was a disgrace.” 59
The official advertisement announcing the patent office opportunity finally appeared in December 1901. The director, Friedrich Haller, apparently
tailored the specifications so that Einstein would get the job. Candidates did not need a doctorate, but they must have mechanical training and also
know physics. “Haller put this in for my sake,” Einstein told Mari .
Haller wrote Einstein a friendly letter making it clear that he was the prime candidate, and Grossmann called to congratulate him. “There’s no
doubt anymore,” Einstein exulted to Mari . “Soon you’ll be my happy little wife, just watch. Now our troubles are over. Only now that this terrible
weight is off my shoulders do I realize how much I love you... Soon I’ll be able to take my Dollie in my arms and call her my own in front of the whole
world.” 60
He made her promise, however, that marriage would not turn them into a comfortable bourgeois couple: “We’ll diligently work on science
together so we don’t become old philistines, right?” Even his sister, he felt, was becoming “so crass” in her approach to creature comforts. “You’d
better not get that way,” he told Mari . “It would be terrible. You must always be my witch and street urchin. Everyone but you seems foreign to me,
as if they were separated from me by an invisible wall.”
In anticipation of getting the patent-office job, Einstein abandoned the student he had been tutoring in Schaffhausen and moved to Bern in late
January 1902. He would be forever grateful to Grossmann, whose aid would continue in different ways over the next few years. “Grossmann is
doing his dissertation on a subject that is related to non-Euclidean geometry,” Einstein noted to Mari . “I don’t know exactly what it is.” 61
A few days after Einstein arrived in Bern, Mileva Mari , staying at her parents’ home in Novi Sad, gave birth to their baby, a girl whom they called
Lieserl. Because the childbirth was so difficult, Mari was unable to write to him. Her father sent Einstein the news.
“Is she healthy, and does she cry properly?” Einstein wrote Mari . “What are her eyes like? Which one of us does she more resemble? Who is
giving her milk? Is she hungry? She must be completely bald. I love her so much and don’t even know her yet!” Yet his love for their new baby
seemed to exist mainly in the abstract, for it was not quite enough to induce him to make the train trip to Novi Sad. 62
Einstein did not tell his mother, sister, or any of his friends about the birth of Lieserl. In fact, there is no indication that he ever told them about her.
Never once did he publicly speak of her or acknowledge that she even existed. No mention of her survives in any correspondence, except for a few
letters between Einstein and Mari , and these were suppressed and hidden until 1986, when scholars and the editors of his papers were
completely surprised to learn of Lieserl’s existence.*
But in his letter to Mari right after Lieserl’s birth, the baby brought out Einstein’s wry side. “She’s certainly able to cry already, but won’t know how
to laugh until much later,” he said. “Therein lies a profound truth.”
Fatherhood also focused him on the need to make some money while he waited to get the patent-office job. So the next day an ad appeared in
the newspaper: “Private lessons in Mathematics and Physics . . . given most thoroughly by Albert Einstein, holder of the federal Polytechnic
teacher’s diploma ... Trial lessons free.”
Lieserl’s birth even caused Einstein to display a domestic, nesting instinct not previously apparent. He found a large room in Bern and drew for
Mari a sketch of it, complete with diagrams showing the bed, six chairs, three cabinets, himself (“Johnnie”), and a couch marked “look at that!” 63
However, Mari was not going to be moving into it with him. They were not married, and an aspiring Swiss civil servant could not be seen
cohabitating in such a way. Instead, after a few months, Mari moved back to Zurich to wait for him to get a job and, as promised, marry her. She
did not bring Lieserl with her.
Einstein and his daughter apparently never laid eyes on each other. She would merit, as we shall see, just one brief mention in their surviving
correspondence less than two years later, in September 1903, and then not be referred to again. In the meantime, she was left back in Novi Sad
with her mother’s relatives or friends so that Einstein could maintain both his unencumbered lifestyle and the bourgeois respectability he needed to
become a Swiss official.
There is a cryptic hint that the person who took custody of Lieserl may have been Mari ’s close friend, Helene Kaufler Savi , whom she had met
in 1899 when they lived in the same rooming house in Zurich. Savi was from a Viennese Jewish family and had married an engineer from Serbia
in 1900. During her pregnancy, Mari had written her a letter pouring out all of her woes, but she tore it up before mailing it. She was glad she had
done so, she explained to Einstein two months before Lieserl’s birth, because “I don’t think we should say anything about Lieserl yet.” Mari added
that Einstein should write Savi a few words now and then. “We must now treat her very nicely. She’ll have to help us in something important, after
all.” 64
The Patent Office
As he was waiting to be offered the job at the patent office, Einstein ran into an acquaintance who was working there. The job was boring, the
person complained, and he noted that the position Einstein was waiting to get was “the lowest rank,” so at least he didn’t have to worry that anyone
else would apply for it. Einstein was unfazed. “Certain people find everything boring,” Einstein told Mari . As for the disdain about being on the
lowest rung, Einstein told her that they should feel just the opposite: “We couldn’t care less about being on top!” 65
The job finally came through on June 16, 1902, when a session of the Swiss Council officially elected him “provisionally as a Technical Expert
Class 3 of the Federal Office for Intellectual Property with an annual salary of 3,500 francs,” which was actually more than what a junior professor
would make. 66