einstein

The visitors made their case during a long visit to Einstein’s sunny office at the Polytechnic. He said he needed a few hours to think it over,
though it is likely he knew he would accept. So Planck and Nernst took their wives on an excursion by funicular railway up one of the nearby
mountains. With puckish amusement, Einstein told them he would be awaiting their return to the station with a signal. If he had decided to decline,
he would be carrying a white rose, and if he was going to accept, a red rose (some accounts have the signal being a white handkerchief). When
they stepped off the train, they happily discovered that he had accepted. 58
That meant that Einstein would become, at 34, the youngest member of the Prussian Academy. But first Planck had to get him elected. The letter
he wrote, which was also signed by Nernst and others, had the memorable but incorrect concession, quoted earlier, that “he might sometimes have
overshot the target in his speculations, as for example in his light quantum hypothesis.” But the rest of the letter was suffused with extravagant
praise for each of his many scientific contributions. “Among the great problems abundant in modern physics, there is hardly one to which Einstein
has not made a remarkable contribution.” 59
The Berliners were taking a risk, Einstein realized. He was being recruited not for his teaching skills (as he would not be teaching), nor for his
administrative ones. And even though he had been publishing outlines and papers describing his ongoing efforts to generalize relativity, it was
unclear whether he would succeed in that quest. “The Germans are gambling on me as they would on a prize-winning hen,” he told a friend as they
were leaving a party, “but I don’t know if I can still lay eggs.” 60
Einstein, likewise, was taking a risk. He had a secure and lucrative post in a city and society that he, his wife, and his family loved. The Swiss
personality agreed with him. His wife had a Slav’s revulsion for all things Teutonic, and he had a similar distaste that had been in-grained in
childhood. As a boy he had run away from Prussian-accented parades and Germanic rigidity. Only the opportunity to be gloriously coddled in the
world capital of science could have compelled him to make such a move.
Einstein found the prospect thrilling and a bit amusing. “I am going to Berlin as an Academy-man without any obligations, rather like a living
mummy,” he wrote fellow physicist Jakob Laub. “I’m already looking forward to this difficult career!” 61 To Ehrenfest he admitted, “I accepted this
odd sinecure because giving lectures gets on my nerves.” 62 However, to the venerable Hendrik Lorentz in Holland Einstein displayed more
gravitas: “I could not resist the temptation to accept a position in which I am relieved of all responsibilities so that I can give myself over completely
to rumination.” 63
There was, of course, another factor that made the new job enticing: the chance to be with his cousin and new love, Elsa. As he would later admit
to his friend Zangger, “She was the main reason for my going to Berlin, you know.” 64
The same evening that Planck and Nernst left Zurich, Einstein wrote Elsa an excited letter describing the “colossal honor” they had offered. “Next
spring at the latest, I’ll come to Berlin for good,” he exulted. “I already rejoice at the wonderful times we will spend together!”
During the ensuing week, he sent two more such notes. “I rejoice at the thought that I will soon be coming to you,” he wrote in the first. And a few
days later: “Now we will be together and rejoice in each other!” It is impossible to know for sure what relative weight to assign to each of the factors
enticing him to Berlin: the unsurpassed scientific community there, the glories and perks of the post he was offered, or the chance to be with Elsa.
But at least to her he claimed it was primarily the latter. “I look forward keenly to Berlin, mainly because I look forward to you.” 65
Elsa had actually tried to help him get the offer. Earlier in the year, on her own initiative, she had dropped in on Fritz Haber, who ran the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute of Chemistry in Berlin, and let him know that her cousin might be open to a position that would bring him to Berlin. When he learned
of Elsa’s intervention, Einstein was amused. “Haber knows who he is dealing with. He knows how to appreciate the influence of a friendly female
cousin . . . The nonchalance with which you dropped in on Haber is pure Elsa. Did you tell anyone about it, or did you consult only with your wicked
heart? If only I could have looked on!” 66
Even before Einstein moved to Berlin, he and Elsa began to correspond as if they were a couple. She worried about his exhaustion and sent him
a long letter prescribing more exercise, rest, and a healthier diet. He responded by saying that he planned to “smoke like a chimney, work like a
horse, eat without thinking, go for a walk only in really pleasant company.”
He made clear, however, that she should not expect him to abandon his wife: “You and I can very well be happy with each other without her having
to be hurt.” 67
Indeed, even amid his flurry of love letters with Elsa, Einstein was still trying to be a suitable family man. For his August 1913 vacation, he
decided to take his wife and two sons hiking with Marie Curie and her two daughters. The plan was to go through the mountains of southeastern
Switzerland down to Lake Como, where he and Mari had spent their most passionate and romantic moments twelve years earlier.
As it turned out, the sickly Eduard was unable to make the trip, and Mari stayed behind for a few days to get him settled with friends. Then she
joined them as they neared Lake Como. During the hikes, Curie challenged Einstein to name all the peaks. They also talked science, especially
when the children ran ahead. At one point Einstein stopped suddenly and grabbed Curie’s arm. “You understand, what I need to know is exactly
what happens to the passengers in an elevator when it falls into emptiness,” he said, referring to his ideas about the equivalence of gravity and
acceleration. As Curie’s daughter noted later, “Such a touching preoccupation made the younger generation roar with laughter.” 68
Einstein then accompanied Mari and their children to visit her family in Novi Sad and at their summer house in Ka . On their final Sunday in
Serbia, Mari took the children, without her husband, to be baptized. Hans Albert remembered later the beautiful singing; his brother, Eduard, only
3, was disruptive. As for their father, he seemed sanguine and bemused afterward. “Do you know what the result is?” he told Hurwitz.“They’ve
turned Catholic. Well, it’s all the same to me.” 69
The façade of familial harmony, however, masked the deterioration of the marriage. After his visit to Serbia and a stop in Vienna for his annual
appearance at the conference of German-speaking physicists, Einstein continued on to Berlin, alone. There he was reunited with Elsa. “I now have
someone I can think about with pure delight and I can live for,” he told her. 70
Elsa’s home cooking, a hearty pleasure she lavished on him like a mother, became a theme in their letters. Their correspondence, like their
relationship, was a stark contrast to that between Einstein and Mari a dozen years earlier. He and Elsa tended to write to each other about
domestic comforts—food, tranquillity, hygiene, fondness—rather than about romantic bliss and planted kisses, or intimacies of the soul and insights
of the intellect.
Despite such conventional concerns, Einstein still fancied their relationship could avoid sinking into a mundane pattern. “How nice it would be if
one of these days we could share in managing a small bohemian household,” he wrote. “You have no idea how charming such a life with very small
needs and without grandeur can be!” 71 When Elsa gave him a hairbrush, he initially prided himself on his progress in personal grooming, but then
he reverted to more slovenly ways and told her, only half jokingly, that it was to guard against the philistines and the bourgeoisie. Those were words
he had used with Mari as well, but more earnestly.
Elsa wanted not only to domesticate Einstein but to marry him. Even before he moved to Berlin, she wrote to urge him to divorce Mari . It would
become a running battle for years, until she finally won her way. But for the moment, Einstein was resistant. “Do you think,” he asked her, “it is so
easy to get a divorce if one does not have any proof of the other party’s guilt?” She should accept that he had virtually separated from Mari even if