him. When he visited South America, he brought her back baskets of cactuses. Since she loved the plants, it was presumably meant as an amicable gift. On his visits to Zurich, he stayed at her apartment occasionally.
He even invited her to stay with him and Elsa when she came to Berlin, an arrangement that likely would have made every single person involved uncomfortable. But she wisely stayed with the Habers instead. Their relationship had improved so much, he told her, that he was now surprising his friends by recounting how well they were getting along. “Elsa is also happy that you and the boys are not hostile to her anymore,” he added.19
Their two sons, he told Mari, were the best part of his inner life, a legacy that would remain after the clock of his own body had worn down. Despite this, or because of it, his relationship with his sons remained fraught with tensions. This was particularly true when Hans Albert decided to get married.
As if the gods wished to extract their revenge, the situation was similar to the one Einstein had put his own parents through when he decided to marry Mileva Mari. Hans Albert had fallen in love, while studying at the Zurich Polytechnic, with a woman nine years his senior named Frieda Knecht. Less than five feet tall, she was plain and had an abrupt manner but was very smart. Both Mari
and Einstein, reunited by this cause, agreed that she was scheming, unattractive, and would likely produce physically unsuitable offspring. “I tried my best to convince him that marrying her would be crazy,” he wrote Mari
. “But it seems like he is totally dependent on her, so it was in vain.”20
Einstein assumed that his son had been ensnared because he was shy and inexperienced with women. “She was the one to grab you first, and now you consider her to be the embodiment of femininity,” he wrote Hans Albert. “That is the well-known way that women take advantage of unworldly people.” So he suggested that an attractive woman would remedy such problems.
But Hans Albert was as stubborn as his father had been twenty-five years earlier, and he was determined to marry Frieda. Einstein conceded that he couldn’t stop him, but he urged his son to promise not to have children. “And should you ever feel like you have to leave her, you should not be too proud to come talk to me,” Einstein wrote. “After all, that day
Hans Albert and Frieda married in 1927, had children, and remained married until her death thirty-one years later. As Evelyn Einstein, their adopted daughter, recalled years later, “Albert had such a hell of a time with his parents over his own marriage that you would think he would have had the sense not to interfere with his son’s. But no. When my father went to marry my mother, there was explosion after explosion.”22
Einstein expressed his dismay about Hans Albert’s marriage in letters to Eduard. “The deterioration of the race is a serious problem,” Einstein wrote. “That is why I cannot forgive [Hans] Albert his sin. I instinctively avoid meeting him, because I cannot show him a happy face.”23
But within two years, Einstein had begun to accept Frieda. The couple came to visit him in the summer of 1929, and he reported back to Eduard that he had made his peace. “She made a better impression than I had feared,” he wrote. “He is really sweet with her. God bless those rose-colored spectacles.”24
For his part, Eduard was becoming increasingly dreamy in his academic pursuits, and his psychological problems were becoming more apparent. He liked poetry and wrote doggerel and aphorisms that often had an edge to them, especially when the subject was his family. He played the piano, particularly Chopin, with a passion that was initially a welcome contrast to his usual lethargy but eventually became scary.
His letters to his father were equally intense, pouring out his soul about philosophy and the arts. Einstein responded sometimes tenderly, and occasionally with detachment. “I often sent my father rather rapturous letters, and several times got worried afterwards because he was of a cooler disposition,” Eduard later recalled. “I learned only a lot later how much he treasured them.”
Eduard went to Zurich University, where he studied medicine and planned to become a psychiatrist. He became interested in Sigmund Freud, whose picture he hung in his bedroom, and attempted his own self-analysis. His letters to his father during this period are filled with his efforts, often astute, to use Freud’s theories to analyze various realms of life, including movies and music.
Not surprisingly, Eduard was especially interested in relationships between fathers and sons. Some of his comments were simple and poignant. “It’s at times difficult to have such an important father, because one feels so unimportant,” he wrote at one point. A few months later, he poured out more insecurities: “People who fill their time with intellectual work bring into the world sickly, nervous at times even completely idiotic children (for example, you me).”25
Later his comments became more complex, such as when he analyzed his father’s famous lament that fate had punished him for his contempt for authority by making him an authority himself. Eduard wrote, “This means psychoanalytically that, because you didn’t want to bend in front of your own father and instead fought with him, you had to become an authority in order to step into his place.”26
Einstein met Freud when he came from Vienna to Berlin for New Year 1927. Freud, then 70, had cancer of the mouth and was deaf in one ear, but the two men had a pleasant talk, partly because they focused on politics rather than on their respective fields of study. “Einstein understands as much about psychology as I do about physics,” Freud wrote to a friend.27
Einstein never asked Freud to meet or treat his son, nor did he seem impressed by the idea of psychoanalysis. “It may not always be helpful to delve into the subconscious,” he once said. “Our legs are controlled by a hundred different muscles. Do you think it would help us to walk if we analyzed our legs and knew the exact purpose of each muscle and the order in which they work?” He certainly never expressed any interest in undergoing therapy himself. “I should like very much to remain in the darkness of not having been analyzed,” he declared.28
Eventually, however, he did concede to Eduard, perhaps to make him happy, that there might be some merit to Freud’s work. “I must admit that, through various little personal experiences, I am convinced at least of his main theses.”29
While at the university, Eduard fell in love with an older woman, a trait that apparently ran in the family and might have amused Freud. When the relationship came to a painful conclusion, he fell into a listless depression. His father suggested he find a dalliance with a younger “plaything.” He also suggested that he find a job. “Even a genius like Schopenhauer was crushed by unemployment,” he wrote. “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.”30
Eduard was unable to keep his balance. He began cutting classes and staying in his room. As he grew more troubled, Einstein’s care and affection for him seemed to increase. There was a painful sweetness in his letters to his troubled son as he engaged with his ideas about psychology and wrestled with his enigmatic aphorisms.
“There is no meaning to life outside of life itself,” Eduard declared in one of these aphorisms.
Einstein replied politely that he could accept this, “but that clarifies very little.” Life for its own sake, Einstein went on, was hollow. “People who live in a society, enjoy looking into each other’s eyes, who share their troubles,
