Chapter 21
In This Chapter
Meeting Einstein’s mother and sister
Getting to know Einstein’s wives, daughter, and stepdaughters
Noting other influences
A s the rest of this book shows, Einstein obviously had a tremendous influence on the scientific community and the entire world. But unlike Isaac Newton, Einstein didn’t live in isolation; he enjoyed people’s company and learned a great deal from those around him.
In other chapters, I don’t devote a great deal of space to Einstein’s personal life. (Chapter 2 is the exception.) Here, I offer some insight by presenting short biographies of ten women who influenced his life.
Einstein’s Mother, Pauline
Pauline Koch was 17 when she married Hermann Einstein in 1876. She was an educated woman interested in music and literature. She was an excellent pianist and enjoyed playing the piano as often as she could.
Three years after her marriage to Hermann, Pauline gave birth to her only son, Albert. In 1881, when Einstein was 2, she gave birth to a daughter, Maria, who they always called Maja.
Encouraging music
Pauline wanted her children to appreciate music and to play an instrument, so when Einstein was 6, she hired a tutor to teach him the violin. The lessons started out fine but, after a while, the boy grew tired of the rigid instruction. He threw a chair at his tutor and chased her out of the house. Patiently, Pauline simply hired another instructor.
Einstein endured the violin lessons, which his mother wouldn’t let him drop. Pauline’s strong hand in this regard paid off. When Einstein was about 13, he discovered Mozart, and his interest in music turned around. He started playing duets with his mother at the piano, a custom that he continued as long as his mother was alive. Music became an important part of Einstein’s life.
Pauline was always very proud of her son and involved in his affairs. When he was in elementary school, she would write to her mother praising her son’s performance at school. When Einstein wanted to apply to college two years earlier than the approved age of 18, Pauline contacted an old neighbor from Germany, who was then living in Zurich, to see if he could find out if the university might waive the requirement. Apparently, Pauline said that Einstein was a child prodigy (he wasn’t), because that’s what the neighbor told the university administrators. Whatever he said, it worked. The university dropped the age requirement, and Einstein was allowed to take the admission tests.
Discouraging Mileva
Not all was smooth sailing between Einstein and his strong-willed mother. The difficult times came when Pauline noticed that the relationship between Einstein and his college girlfriend, Mileva Maric, had become serious. Pauline never liked Mileva. She didn’t think that she was good enough for her brilliant son. Besides, Mileva was older than him.
Pauline’s strong opposition didn’t go anywhere with Einstein, so she eventually eased up her criticism. However, when Maja told her to let Einstein and Mileva get married, Pauline flew into a rage. The confrontation caused a rift between mother and daughter that caused them to stop speaking to each other for some time.
Pauline never accepted Mileva. In later years, Einstein said that the relationship between Pauline and Mileva “bordered on hostility.”
Despite that fact, Pauline loved her son and followed his success. Einstein, in turn, loved his mother and visited her when he could, sometimes joining her in duets at the piano.
After her husband’s death in 1902, Pauline went to live with her only sister, Fanny, and her husband. When they moved to Berlin in 1911, she started working as a housekeeper in a nearby town.
In 1914, Pauline fell ill with cancer. In 1918, when her cancer was much advanced, Maja took her to a sanatorium. The next year, Einstein, by then married to his second wife, took Pauline out of the sanatorium and brought her to his home, where she died a year later, on February 20, 1920.
Einstein had said once that he wouldn’t worry about his own or anyone else’s death. But after his mother died, according to the wife of astronomer Erwin Freundlich, “Einstein wept, like other men, and I knew that he could really care for someone.”
Einstein’s Sister, Maja
When his sister was born, 2-year-old Albert, probably thinking that the new baby looked like a toy, asked where the wheels were. Maja (whose given name was Maria) was born in 1881.
In Chapter 2, I explain that before entering the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich, Einstein attended school in Aarau, Switzerland, and stayed with the Winteler family. Maja later attended the same school, and she also stayed with the Wintelers. She then went on to the Aarau teacher training college for three years and later studied Romance languages and literature at the universities of Berlin and Bern.
While Maja was attending graduate school at the University of Bern, her brother was teaching his evening physics course as a Privatdozent or instructor at the university, the first step in his academic career. Maja sometimes would sit in his classes.
Maja obtained her PhD in Romance languages from the University of Bern. The following year, she married Einstein’s good friend Paul Winteler. Maja and her husband first lived in Lucerne, Switzerland, but later moved near Florence. They lived there until 1939, when she was driven out of Europe by the Nazi threat. (Health problems prevented her husband from entering the United States.) After the war, Maja wanted to return to Europe and to her husband, but her own health prevented her from traveling. Instead, she went to live with her brother in Princeton.
Einstein’s second wife, Elsa, had died in 1936, and when Maja came to Princeton, she joined Margot Einstein (Elsa’s daughter) and Einstein’s lifelong secretary, Helen Dukas. The three women ran the house and helped Einstein with his correspondence; shielded him from unwanted visitors; and offered companionship, advice, and affection. Einstein was very close to all of them, especially Margot and Maja.
Maja wrote a biographical essay about her brother, which was completed in Florence in 1924. This essay, which she titled “Albert Einstein: A Biographical Sketch,” is the main source of family recollections about Einstein’s early years. Maja’s essay, which remained in manuscript form until recently, tracks Einstein’s life only up to 1905 and is most likely an abandoned project. Her manuscript was published in 1987 as part of the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein.
Maja died in Princeton in 1951, four years before her famous brother. Einstein took it very hard. He had lovingly cared for her during her last months, reading to her every evening “from the best books of the old and new literature.” Her intelligence was as keen as ever, but toward the end, she couldn’t talk. “Now I miss her more than can be imagined,” he wrote in a letter shortly after she died.
Einstein’s First Wife, Mileva Maric
Mileva Maric was the only female physics major at the Polytechnic in Zurich, where Einstein went to college. During their second semester, Einstein and Mileva began to take interest in each other. Their relationship developed into a romance that eventually led to marriage, in spite of strong opposition from Einstein’s family (especially his mother).
Einstein and Mileva’s romance is well-documented in letters they wrote to each other between 1897 and 1903, which were discovered only in 1987. Not much was known about Mileva before the appearance of these letters.
In her early letters, Mileva wrote with enthusiasm about the physics she was learning in class. As time went on, the focus on physics disappeared, and her letters became love letters, showing her feelings for Einstein and her preoccupation with their relationship. Einstein wrote to her about his love for her, about his family’s reaction to their affair, and about physics.
The letters are an invaluable and direct record of Einstein’s early intellectual development. He proudly told Mileva about his ideas on relativity and about his discoveries of inconsistencies in some of the physics papers that he read. Mileva, with her understanding of physics, seemed to be his sounding board.
Starting a family
In Chapter 2, I explain how the relationship between Mileva and Einstein progressed during their college years. After graduating from the Polytechnic and before starting his job at the Bern patent office, Einstein took a temporary job away from Zurich, while Mileva stayed at the Polytechnic. (She had failed final exams and was preparing to try them again.) During those few months, Einstein came to see Mileva in Zurich every Sunday. During one of those visits, Mileva told Einstein that she was pregnant.
The pregnancy didn’t help Mileva in her studies, which had been a struggle for years. She took her finals again and failed. She was devastated, and she quit school. Depressed, she went home to her parents in Hungary, who weren’t happy with either piece of news. Initially, her father angrily prohibited Mileva from marrying Einstein.
During the winter of 1902, Mileva gave birth to a girl, Lieserl. The birth was difficult, and Einstein wasn’t present. He learned about it in a letter from Mileva’s father.
No one knows what happened to Einstein’s only daughter. Soon after her birth, she disappeared, and no record of her has ever been found. Mileva may have given her up for adoption.
About a year later, on January 6, 1903, Einstein and Mileva got married in a civil ceremony at the courthouse in Bern. Einstein was working at the patent office, making an adequate salary as a civil servant. Life was relatively good for them.
A little more than a year after their marriage, Mileva gave birth to their first son, Hans Albert. Although he initially tried to help Mileva with the baby, overall Einstein wasn’t a good husband. He was interested in his work and paid little attention to Mileva or to his son. It became worse during the burst of creativity of his miracle year (see Chapter 3). Their relationship began to suffer.
Struggling with depression
Einstein took refuge in his work. Mileva became depressed. According to one visitor, their house was a mess. Einstein tried to help, but his heart wasn’t in it. He would carry the baby while trying to write his equations on a pad.
On July 28, 1910, Einstein and Mileva’s second son, Eduard, was born. For a while, things improved between them, but that didn’t last. Mileva continued to be depressed and was becoming jealous of the women Einstein flirted with.
In 1911, Einstein and his family moved to Prague, where he’d accepted a nice offer from the university. Mileva hated the city. A year later, Einstein accepted an offer from his alma mater and moved back to Zurich. Mileva was delighted. That lasted only a couple of years. In 1914, Einstein accepted an offer from the University of Berlin and moved his family there.
Mileva was extremely unhappy about moving to Berlin. Einstein’s cousin, Elsa, lived there, and Mileva was jealous of her. Besides, Germans looked down on people of Serbian origin, like Mileva.
Heading toward divorce
Mileva was right about Elsa. Einstein started seeing her often, and that was the beginning of the end for Einstein’s marriage. After a fight, Einstein moved out, and some time later, he wrote a contract for their separation that detailed the support he would provide. Mileva and the boys moved back to Zurich.
In 1916, during one of his visits to see the boys, Einstein asked Mileva for a divorce, which led her to have nervous breakdown. She recovered slowly, but their son Eduard then became a cause for concern. Eduard was extremely gifted. He read Goethe and Friedrich Schiller in first grade and had a photographic memory. He learned anything that he set out to learn with breathtaking speed. But he was troubled. (Eduard had to be placed in a psychiatric hospital in 1933 after he showed signs of mental instability. He died at the hospital in 1965.)
Mileva and Einstein divorced on February 14, 1919. After the divorce, Mileva spent a great deal of her life taking care of Eduard. In 1947, her health began to deteriorate. The next year, she suffered a stroke that left her paralyzed on one side of the body. On August 4, 1948, Mileva died.
Mileva had started out as Einstein’s intellectual equal; they read, studied, and discussed physics together. By 1902, their partnership had changed, because Einstein’s thinking had developed to a different level. But until then, her presence helped him shape his thoughts by providing him with the loving ears of another physicist.
Einstein’s Daughter, Lieserl
Einstein’s only daughter was born in 1902 in Novi Sad, then part of Hungary, where Mileva’s parents lived. Einstein and Mileva weren’t married at the time, and Mileva’s pregnancy was kept secret from everyone but Mileva’s family.
When the baby was born, Einstein was in Switzerland, waiting to hear from his patent office job application. When he heard the news about the birth, he wrote to Mileva wanting to know if the baby was healthy, what her eyes were like, and who she looked like. He had a thousand questions. “I love her so much and don’t even know her yet!”
Mileva replied, but her letter didn’t survive, so we don’t know what she said. Einstein wrote again a week later, thanking her for her “dear little letter” but not mentioning Lieserl. Gone were the thousand questions he had only a week earlier. He wrote instead about his job application at the patent office.
In another letter, dated September 1903, when Mileva was pregnant with their first son, Einstein told Mileva that he was not angry that she was expecting a new baby. In fact, he said that he’d been thinking about a new Lieserl, because Mileva “shouldn’t be denied that which is the right of all women.” Then he said that he was “very sorry about what has befallen Lieserl.” Apparently she had developed scarlet fever. “As what is the child registered?” he wrote. “We must take precautions that problems don’t arise for her later.”
Registered where? At a hospital while she was ill? What kind of problems? Health problems or name problems? No one knows. Lieserl simply disappeared. In surviving letters, neither Einstein nor Mileva ever mentioned their daughter again. Their son Hans never knew he had a sister.
There are no birth records in Novi Sad or any nearby areas that give any clues about Lieserl. It’s likely that she was given up for adoption very early and that she was registered under her new family’s name.
Einstein’s Second Wife, Elsa
Elsa was Einstein’s cousin, the daughter of his “rich uncle” Rudolf Einstein and his aunt Fanny (Pauline’s sister). Elsa was first married to Max Loewenthal, a textile trader from Berlin with whom she had two daughters, Ilse and Margot, and a son who died shortly after birth.
Einstein and Elsa met often while they were growing up but lost contact as adults. During one of Einstein’s visits to Berlin while he was still married to Mileva, he met his cousin again. She was divorced and living with her two daughters in an apartment right above her parents. Einstein felt comfortable with Elsa in this family environment. When he moved to the University of Berlin, he continued seeing her with some frequency.
After his separation from Mileva, Einstein saw Elsa often, and he moved in with her in September of 1917. Elsa was clearly interested in Einstein and kept the pressure on him to divorce Mileva.
After the divorce took place in 1919, Einstein felt free to marry Elsa. His main attraction to her was her cooking. He also felt grateful to her because she had taken care of him when he was ill with stomach problems. There was no passion between them. Nevertheless, they were married on June 2, 1919, three and a half months after his divorce from Mileva. Einstein was 40 and Elsa was 43. Their marriage seems to have been platonic.
Although some of Einstein’s friends criticized Elsa’s eagerness for fame, she was receptive of her husband’s importance and was able to create a nice environment for Einstein to work in. Her efficiency in running the household made Einstein’s life much easier.
As happened during his marriage to Mileva, problems developed because of Einstein’s flirting with other women. He was very famous, and women all over the world were attracted to him.
In 1935, after Einstein and Elsa had moved to the United States, she fell ill with heart and kidney problems. She died on December 20, 1936.
Einstein had been very attentive and caring during Elsa’s last months of her life. After she died, he adjusted quickly. “I have got used extremely well to life here,” he wrote. “I live like a bear in my den . . . This bearishness has been further enhanced by the death of my woman comrade, who was better with other people than I am.”
Einstein’s Stepdaughter Ilse
Ilse was one of Elsa’s daughters. When Einstein was considering marrying Elsa, Einstein felt attracted to Ilse, who was 22 and pretty. Ilse liked and respected Einstein. Einstein seriously and openly considered choosing between the two of them.
“Yesterday, the question was suddenly raised about whether Albert should marry Mama or me,” Ilse wrote to a friend, asking him to destroy the letter immediately. (Obviously, he didn’t listen.) “This question, initially posed half in jest, became within a few minutes a serious matter which must be considered and discussed.” Einstein, she told her friend, was ready to marry either one of them. But she didn’t have “physical feelings for him.” She respected him and loved him very much, but more like a father.
Ilse went on to marry Rudolf Kayser, a journalist and scholar who later wrote a biography of Einstein, which was carefully edited by Einstein. Kayser published his book, Albert Einstein, A Biographical Portrait, in 1930 under the pseudonym of Anton Reiser. The English edition was published in New York the same year.
After the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933, Kayser rescued Einstein’s papers from Berlin and took them out of the country with the help of the French embassy. The papers were later brought to Einstein’s home in Princeton and kept there until after he died.
When Ilse was 37 and living in Paris with her husband, she fell seriously ill with tuberculosis. She and her sister Margot had moved to Paris when they heard that the Nazis were going to kidnap them to get to Einstein. Elsa had to go alone to Paris to be with her daughter; Einstein couldn’t set foot in Europe because of the Nazi threat. Ilse died shortly after Elsa got there.
Einstein’s Stepdaughter Margot
Margot was also Elsa’s daughter. She was married to Dimitri Marianoff who, like her sister’s husband, was a journalist. He wanted to write a biography of Einstein and started dating Margot to gain access to Einstein.
Marianoff’s plan succeeded, but unlike the biography written by his other son-in-law, this one wasn’t edited by Einstein. As a result, personal details that Einstein wasn’t interested in divulging appeared in the book, and Einstein was very unhappy with it.
The book, entitled Einstein: An Intimate Study of a Great Man, offered Marianoff’s detailed view of Einstein’s private life and his opinion of women. (The English version of this book appeared in 1944 and is out of print.)
The marriage between Marianoff and Margot didn’t last. After the divorce, Margot lived in Paris until her sister, Ilse, died. She then accompanied her mother on her return trip to the United States and lived with her and Einstein. After Elsa died, Margot stayed with Einstein and took care of him.
Einstein’s Secretary, Helen Dukas
Helen Dukas was Einstein’s secretary from 1928 until his death in 1955. She emigrated to the United States in 1933 with Einstein and his wife, Elsa. In Princeton, Dukas lived in Einstein’s house along with Elsa and her daughters. After Elsa died, she was one of the three women (Maja and Margot being the other two) who took care of all of Einstein’s affairs.
After Einstein died, Dukas became a trustee of his literary estate and the archivist of his papers. She collaborated with Professor Banesh Hoffmann — who had worked with Einstein on his general theory of relativity — on two books, Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel and Albert Einstein, the Human Side.
Einstein’s First Love, Marie Winteler
Marie Winteler was Einstein’s first love. She was the daughter of Jost and Pauline Winteler, Einstein’s wonderful host family in Aarau (see Chapter 2). She was 18 when Einstein first met her, and he quickly fell in love with her. Their romance contributed to Einstein’s successful year at the Aarau Cantonal School, perhaps the happiest year of his life.
But their teenage love didn’t last. When Einstein left the Wintelers to attend the Polytechnic, he stopped writing to Marie.
Years later, in 1940, Marie wrote a letter to Einstein from Europe asking him for a loan of 100 francs because she was in a dire situation due to the hardship of the war. Einstein was known for helping many Europeans that were suffering because of the war. However, Helen Dukas, not knowing who Marie was, never passed the letter along to Einstein.
Marie Curie
The famous scientist Marie Curie was Einstein’s contemporary. As two of the top scientists in the world, they crossed paths several times. One such occasion occurred in 1909, when both were given honorary doctorates at the celebration of the 350th anniversary of the foundation of the University of Geneva.
Marie Curie’s discovery of radioactivity (with her husband, Pierre, and their colleague Henri Becquerel) played a role in Einstein’s development of his E = mc2 equation. In his paper presenting his famous formula, Einstein showed that applying his special relativity equations to an atom emitting light in a radioactive decay implied that energy carries mass with it. It would’ve been hard for him to think of the spontaneous emission of light from a body if the phenomenon hadn’t been observed.
In 1913, when Einstein and Mileva traveled to Paris, they stayed with the Curies. The two families got along very well and became close friends. After that, the families visited each other several times to go hiking in the Alps.
Later, Einstein and Curie both served on the League of Nations commission, where they had the occasion to meet several times.