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
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
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 facade 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 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
