einstein

As Einstein wandered around Europe giving speeches and basking in his rising renown, his wife stayed behind in Prague, a city she hated, and
brooded about not being part of the scientific circles that she once struggled to join. “I would like to have been there and listened a little, and seen
all these fine people,” she wrote him after one of his talks in October 1911. “It is so long since we saw each other that I wonder if you will recognize
me.” She signed herself, “Deine alte D,” your old D, as if she were still his Dollie, albeit a bit older. 36
Her circumstances, perhaps combined with an innate disposition, caused her to become gloomy, even depressed. When Philipp Frank met her
in Prague for the first time, he thought that she might be schizophrenic. Einstein concurred, and he later told a colleague that her gloominess “is
doubtless traceable to a schizophrenic genetic disposition coming from her mother’s family.” 37
Thus it was that Einstein’s marriage was once again in an unstable state when he traveled alone to Berlin during the Easter holidays in 1912.
There he became reacquainted with a cousin, three years older, whom he had known as a child.
Elsa Einstein* was the daughter of Rudolf (“the rich”) Einstein and Fanny Koch Einstein. She was Einstein’s cousin on both sides. Her father was
the first cousin of Einstein’s father, Hermann, and had helped fund his business. Her mother was the sister of Einstein’s mother, Pauline (making
Elsa and Albert first cousins). After Hermann’s death, Pauline had moved in with Rudolf and Fanny Einstein for a few years, helping them keep
house.
As children, Albert and Elsa had played together at the home of Albert’s parents in Munich and on one occasion had shared a first artistic
experience at the opera. 38 Since then, Elsa had been married, divorced, and now, at age 36, was living with her two daughters, Margot and Ilse, in
the same apartment building as her parents.
The contrast with Einstein’s wife was stark. Mileva Mari was exotic, intellectual, and complex. Elsa wasn’t. Instead, she was conventionally
handsome and domestically nurturing. She loved heavy German comfort foods and chocolate, which tended to give her a rather ample, matronly
look. Her face was similar to her cousin’s, and it would become strikingly more so as they aged. 39
Einstein was looking for new companionship, and he first flirted with Elsa’s sister. But by the end of his Easter visit, he had settled on Elsa as
offering the comfort and nurturing that he now craved. The love he was seeking, it seems, was not wild romance but uncomplicated support and
affection.
And Elsa, who revered her cousin, was eager to give it. When he returned to Prague, she wrote him right away—sending the letter to his office,
not his home, and proposing a way they could correspond in secret. “How dear of you not to be too proud to communicate with me in such a way!”
he responded. “I can’t even begin to tell you how fond I have become of you during these few days.” She asked him to destroy her letters, which he
did. She, on the other hand, kept his responses for the rest of her life in a folder that she tied and later labeled “Especially beautiful letters from
better days.” 40
Einstein apologized for his flirtation with her sister Paula.“It is hard for me to understand how I could have taken a fancy to her,” he declared. “But
it is in fact simple. She was young, a girl, and complaisant.”
A decade earlier, when he was writing his love letters to Mari that celebrated their own rarefied and bohemian approach to life, Einstein would
likely have lumped relatives such as Elsa into the category of “bourgeois philistines.” But now, in letters that were almost as effusive as the ones he
had written to Mari , he professed his new passion for Elsa. “I have to have someone to love, otherwise life is miserable,” he wrote. “And this
someone is you.”
She knew how to make him defensive: she teased him for being under Mari ’s thumb and asserted that he was “henpecked.” As she may have
hoped, Einstein responded by protesting that he would show her otherwise. “Do not think about me in such a way!” he said. “I categorically assure
you that I consider myself a full-fledged male. Perhaps I will sometime have the opportunity to prove it to you.”
Spurred by this new affection and by the prospect of working in the world’s capital of theoretical physics, Einstein developed a desire to move to
Berlin. “The chances of getting a call to Berlin are, unfortunately, slight,” he admitted to Elsa. But on his visit, he did what he could to increase his
chances of someday getting a position there. In his notebook he listed appointments he had been able to get with important academic leaders,
including the scientists Fritz Haber, Walther Nernst, and Emil Warburg. 41
Einstein’s son Hans Albert later recalled that it was just after his eighth birthday, in the spring of 1912, when he noticed that his parents’ marriage
was falling apart. But after returning to Prague from Berlin, Einstein seemed to develop qualms about his affair with his cousin. He tried, in two
letters, to put an end to it. “There would only be confusion and misfortune if we were to give into our mutual attraction,” he wrote Elsa.
Later that month, he tried to be even more definitive. “It will not be good for the two of us, as well as for the others, if we form a closer attachment.
So, I am writing to you today for the last time and am submitting again to the inevitable, and you must do the same. You know that it is not hardness
of heart or lack of feeling that makes me talk like this, because you know that, like you, I bear my cross without hope.” 42
Einstein and Mari shared one thing: a feeling that living among the middle-class German community in Prague had become wearisome. “These
are not people with natural sentiments,” he told Besso. They displayed “a peculiar mixture of snobbery and servility, without any kind of goodwill
toward their fellow men.” The water was un-drinkable, the air was full of soot, and an ostentatious luxury was juxtaposed with misery on the streets.
But what offended Einstein most were the artificial class structures. “When I come to the institute,” he complained, “a servile man who smells of
alcohol bows and says, ‘your most humble servant.’ ” 43
Mari worried that the bad water, milk, and air were hurting the health of their younger son, Eduard. He had lost his appetite and was not sleeping
well. It was also now clear that her husband cared more about his science than his family. “He is tirelessly working on his problems; one can say
that he lives only for them,” she told her friend Helene Savi . “I must confess with a bit of shame that we are unimportant to him and take second
place.” 44
So Einstein and his wife decided to return to the one place they thought could restore their relationship.
Zurich, 1912
The Zurich Polytechnic, where Einstein and Mari had blissfully shared their books and their souls, had been upgraded in June 1911 to a full
university, now named the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH), or the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, with the right to grant
graduate degrees. At 32 and by now quite famous in the world of theoretical physics, Einstein should have been an easy and obvious choice for
one of the new professorships available there.
That possibility had been discussed a year earlier. Before he left for Prague, Einstein had made a deal with officials in Zurich. “I promised in
private that I would advise them before accepting another offer from somewhere else, so that the administration of the Polytechnic could also make
me an offer if they find it fit to do so,” he told a Dutch professor who was trying to recruit him to Utrecht. 45
By November 1911, Einstein had received such an offer from Zurich, or at least so he thought, and as a result he declined the offer to go to