Einstein: His Life and Universe

Einstein took Hans Albert off alone, as the boy wished, for what was planned as a ten-day hiking excursion in a mountain resort overlooking Lake Lucerne. There they were caught in a late-season snowstorm that kept them confined to the inn, which initially pleased them both. “We are snowed in at Seelisberg but are enjoying ourselves immensely,” Einstein wrote Elsa. “The boy delights me, especially with his clever questions and his undemanding way. No discord exists between us.” Unfortunately, soon the weather, and perhaps also their enforced togetherness, became oppressive, and they returned to Zurich a few days early.¹¹

Back in Zurich, the tensions revived. One morning, Hans Albert came to visit his father at the physics institute to watch an experiment. It was a pleasant enough activity, but as the boy was leaving for lunch, he urged his father to come by the house and at least pay a courtesy call on Mari.

Einstein refused. Hans Albert, who was just about to turn 12, became angry and said he would not come back for the completion of the experiment that afternoon unless his father relented. Einstein would not. “That’s how it remained,” he reported to Elsa a week later, on the day he left Zurich. “And I have seen neither of the children since.”¹²

Mari subsequently went into an emotional and physical melt-down. She had a series of minor heart incidents in July 1916, accompanied by extreme anxiety, and her doctors told her to remain in bed. The children moved in with the Bessos, and then to Lausanne, where they stayed with Mari’s friend Helene Savi, who was riding out the war there.

Besso and Zangger tried to get Einstein to come down from Berlin to be with his sons. But Einstein demurred. “If I go to Zurich, my wife will demand to see me,” he wrote Besso. “This I would have to refuse, partly on an inalterable resolve partly also to spare her the agitation. Besides, you know that the personal relations between the children and me deteriorated so much during my stay at Easter (after a very promising start) that I doubt very much whether my presence would be reassuring for them.”

Einstein assumed that his wife’s illness was largely psychological and even, perhaps, partly faked. “Isn’t it possible that nerves are behind it all?” he asked Zangger. To Besso, he was more blunt: “I have the suspicion that the woman is leading both of you kind-hearted men down the garden path. She is not afraid to use all means when she wants to achieve something. You have no idea of the natural craftiness of such a woman.”¹³ Einstein’s mother agreed. “Mileva was never as sick as you seem to think,” she told Elsa.¹⁴

Einstein asked Besso to keep him informed of the situation and made a stab at scientific humor by saying that his reports did not need to have logical “continuity” because “this is permissible in the age of quantum theory.” Besso was not sympathetic; he wrote Einstein a sharp letter saying Mari’s condition was not “a deception” but was instead caused by emotional stress. Besso’s wife, Anna, was even harsher, adding a postscript to the letter that addressed Einstein with the formal Sie.¹⁵

Einstein backed down from his charge that Mari was faking illness, but railed that her emotional distress was unwarranted. “She leads a worry-free life, has her two precious boys with her, lives in a fabulous neighborhood, does what she likes with her time, and innocently stands by as the guiltless party,” he wrote Besso.

Einstein was especially stung by the cold postscript, which he mistakenly thought came from Michele rather than Anna Besso. So he added his own postscript: “We have understood each other well for 20 years,” he said. “And now I see you developing a bitterness toward me for the sake of a woman who has nothing to do with you. Resist it!” Later that day he realized he had mistaken Anna’s harsh postscript for something her husband had written, and he quickly sent along another note apologizing to him.¹⁶

On Zangger’s advice, Mari checked into a sanatorium. Einstein still resisted going to Zurich, even though his boys were at home alone with a maid, but he told Zangger he would change his mind “if you think it’s appropriate.” Zangger didn’t. “The tension on both sides is too great,” Zangger explained to Besso, who agreed.¹⁷

Despite his detached attitude, Einstein loved his sons and would always take care of them. Please let them know, he instructed Zangger, that he would take them under his wing if their mother died. “I would raise the two boys myself,” he said. “They would be taught at home, as far as possible by me personally.” In various letters over the next few months, Einstein described his different ideas and fantasies for home-schooling his sons, what he would teach, and even the type of walks they would take. He wrote Hans Albert to assure him that he was “constantly thinking of you both.”¹⁸

But Hans Albert was so angry, or hurt, that he had stopped answering his father’s letters. “I believe that his attitude toward me has fallen below the freezing point,” Einstein lamented to Besso. “Under the given circumstances, I would have reacted in the same way.” After three letters to his son went unanswered in three months, Einstein plaintively wrote him: “Don’t you remember your father anymore? Are we never going to see each other again?”¹⁹

Finally, the boy replied by sending a picture of a boat he was constructing out of wood carvings. He also described his mother’s return from the sanatorium. “When Mama came home, we had a celebration. I had practiced a sonata by Mozart, and Tete had learned a song.”²⁰

Einstein did make one concession to the sad situation: he decided to give up asking Mari for a divorce, at least for the time being. That seemed to aid her recovery. “I’ll take care that she doesn’t get any more disturbance from me,” he told Besso. “I have abandoned proceeding with the divorce. Now on to scientific matters!”²¹

Indeed, whenever personal issues began to weigh on him, he took refuge in his work. It shielded him, allowed him to escape. As he told Helene Savi, likely with the intent that it get back to her friend Mari, he planned to retreat into scientific reflection. “I resemble a farsighted man who is charmed by the vast horizon and whom the foreground bothers only when an opaque object prevents him from taking in the long view.”²²

So even as the personal battle was raging, his science provided solace. In 1916, he began writing again about the quantum. He also wrote a formal exposition of his general theory of relativity, which was far more comprehensive, and slightly more comprehensible, than what had poured forth in the weekly lectures during his race with Hilbert the previous November.²³

In addition, he produced an even more understandable version: a book for the lay reader, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, that remains popular to this day. To make sure that the average person would fathom it, he read every page out loud to Elsa’s daughter Margot, pausing frequently to ask whether she indeed got it. “Yes, Albert,” she invariably replied, even though (as she confided to others) she found the whole thing totally baffling.²⁴

This ability of science to be used as a refuge from painful personal emotions was a theme of a talk he gave at a celebration of Max Planck’s sixtieth birthday. Putatively about Planck, it seemed to convey more about Einstein himself. “One of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness,” Einstein said. “Such men make this cosmos and its construction the pivot of their emotional life, in order to find the peace and security which they cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of