einstein

he was not going to divorce her. “I treat my wife as an employee whom I cannot fire. I have my own bedroom and avoid being alone with her.” Elsa
was upset that Einstein did not want to marry her, and she was fearful of how an illicit relationship would affect her daughters, but Einstein insisted it
was for the best. 72
Mari was understandably depressed by the prospect of moving to Berlin. There she would have to deal with Einstein’s mother, who had never
liked her, and his cousin, whom she rightly suspected of being a rival. In addition, Berlin had sometimes been less tolerant to Slavs than it was even
to Jews. “My wife whines to me incessantly about Berlin and her fear of the relatives,” Einstein wrote Elsa. “Well, there is some truth in this.” In
another letter, when he noted that Mari was afraid of her, he added, “Rightly so I hope!” 73
Indeed, by this point all of the women in his life—his mother, sister, wife, and kissing cousin—were at war with one another. As Christmas 1913
neared, Einstein’s struggle to generalize relativity had the added benefit of being a way to avoid family emotions. The effort produced yet another
eloquent restatement of how science could rescue him from the merely personal. “The love of science thrives under these circumstances,” he told
Elsa, “for it lifts me impersonally from the vale of tears into peaceful spheres.” 74
With the approach of the spring of 1914 and their move to Berlin, Eduard came down with an ear infection that made it necessary for Mari to
take him to an Alpine resort to recover. “This has a good side,” Einstein told Elsa. He would initially be traveling to Berlin alone, and “in order to
savor that,” he decided to skip a conference in Paris so that he could arrive earlier.
On one of their last evenings in Zurich, he and Mari went to the Hurwitz house for a farewell musical evening. Once again, the program featured
Schumann, in an attempt to cheer her up. It didn’t. She instead sat by herself in a corner and did not speak to anyone. 75
Berlin, 1914
By April 1914, Einstein had settled into a spacious apartment just west of Berlin’s city center. Mari had picked it out when she visited Berlin over
Christmas vacation, and she arrived in late April, after Eduard’s ear infection had subsided. 76
The tensions in Einstein’s domestic life were exacerbated by overwork and mental strain. He was settling into a new job—actually three new jobs
—and still struggling with his fitful attempts to generalize his theory of relativity and tie it into a theory of gravity. That first April in Berlin, for example,
he engaged in an intense correspondence with Paul Ehrenfest over ways to calculate the forces affecting rotating electrons in a magnetic field. He
started writing a theory for such situations, then realized it was wrong. “The angel had unveiled itself halfway in its magnificence,” he told Ehrenfest,
“then on further unveiling a cloven hoof appeared and I ran away.”
Even more revealing, perhaps more than he meant it to be, was his comment to Ehrenfest about his personal life in Berlin.“I really delight in my
local relatives,” he reported, “especially in a cousin of my age.” 77
When Ehrenfest came for a visit at the end of April, Mari had just arrived, and he found her gloomy and yearning for Zurich. Einstein, on the other
hand, had thrown himself into his work. “He had the impression that the family was taking a bit too much of his time, and that he had the duty to
concentrate completely on his work,” his son Hans Albert later recollected about that fateful spring of 1914. 78
Personal relationships involve nature’s most mysterious forces. Outside judgments are easy to make and hard to verify. Einstein repeatedly and
plaintively stressed to all of their mutual friends—especially the Bessos, Habers, and Zanggers—that they should try to see the breakup of his
marriage from his perspective, despite his own apparent culpability.
It is probably true that he was not solely to blame. The decline of the marriage was a downward spiral. He had become emotionally withdrawn,
Mari had become more depressed and dark, and each action reinforced the other. Einstein tended to avoid painful personal emotions by
immersing himself in his work. Mari , for her part, was bitter about the collapse of her own dreams and increasingly resentful of her husband’s
success. Her jealousy made her hostile toward anyone else who was close to Einstein, including his mother (the feeling was reciprocal) and his
friends. Her mistrustful nature was, understandably, to some extent an effect of Einstein’s detachment, but it was also a cause.
By the time they moved to Berlin, Mari had developed at least one personal involvement of her own, with a mathematics professor in Zagreb
named Vladimir Vari ak, who had challenged Einstein’s interpretations of how special relativity applied to a rotating disk. Einstein was aware of
the situation. “He had a kind of relationship with my wife, which can’t be held against either of them,” he wrote to Zangger in June. “It only made me
feel my sense of isolation doubly painfully.” 79
The end came in July. Amid the turmoil, Mari moved with her two boys into the house of Fritz Haber, the chemist who’d recruited Einstein and
who ran the institute where his office was located. Haber had his own experience with domestic discord. His wife, Clara, would end up committing
suicide the following year after a fight over Haber’s participation in the war. But for the time being, she was Mileva Mari ’s only friend in Berlin, and
Fritz Haber became the intermediary as the Einsteins’ battles broke into the open.
Through the Habers, Einstein delivered to Mari in mid-July a brutal cease-fire ultimatum. It was in the form of a proposed contract, one in which
Einstein’s cold scientific approach combined with his personal hostility and emotional alienation to produce an astonishing document. It read in full:
Conditions.
A. You will make sure
1. that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order;
2. that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room;
3. that my bedroom and study are kept neat, and especially that my desk is left for my use only.
B. You will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons. Specifically, you will forego
1. my sitting at home with you;
2. my going out or traveling with you.
C. You will obey the following points in your relations with me:
1. you will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way;
2. you will stop talking to me if I request it;
3. you will leave my bedroom or study immediately without protest if I request it.
D. You will undertake not to belittle me in front of our children, either through words or behavior. 80