Throughout his life, Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was a pop star of science. He had his “Annus mirabilis” (Latin for “miracle year”) in 1905 when, at the age of 26, he published several groundbreaking works. One of these, the special theory of relativity, made him world famous. Twelve years later, Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. But where did he get the strength, motivation and time to achieve all this?
“Science, love and coffee-making”: this could be Einstein’s motto, says Jørgen Rein, historian of science and professor at the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology in Jena. In 2005, Rain co-published “Am Sonntag küss’ ich dich mündlich” – “I’ll kiss you on the lips on Sunday” – the title of a collection of love letters between 1897 and 1903 between Einstein and his first wife, Mileva Marik. .
This collection of letters is also part of the “Collected Documents Albert Einstein” published in 1987 by Princeton University Press in the United States, which Ren co-edited from 1986 to 1992. “These letters were only discovered at the time, my job was to read them, annotate them and categorize them historically,” Raine told DW. She is still fascinated by the text today: “It was sensational material, because it not only testifies to love, But also contains scientific material from Einstein’s most creative phase, which he discussed intensively with his girlfriend and later wife.”
Science and Love
The letters not only provided an insight into the emotional world of the young Albert Einstein, but – incidentally – testified to the development of his scientific theories. Einstein and Mileva Marić (1875–1948), a young Serbian woman, met at the Polytechnicum in Zurich in 1896, when she was 17 and he was 20.
He completed his A-levels in Switzerland after leaving grammar school in Munich. She came from Vojvodina, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, attended a boys’ grammar school in Zagreb and studied physics in Zurich – the only woman in her year and the first Serbian to do so.
Einstein probably liked the uniqueness of his fellow students. At the time, he devoured the works of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and enjoyed an anti-bourgeois attitude.
A special kind of love grew between Mivela and Albert: “With her, Einstein was able to combine his love life with his scientific life,” says Raine, “They could talk about literally everything!” Mileva was Albert’s equal in mathematical matters – otherwise why would experts speculate about Mileva’s role in the development of the theory of relativity?
It only emerged later that Einstein’s relationship with his first girlfriend, Marie Winteler, was more than just a youthful flirtation. (file photo)
“Dear Duxerl,” Einstein wrote to his Mileva in 1901, “I love you, my sweet girl … how beautiful it was when last time I was allowed to hold your sweet little person close to me, as nature gave me, the most Kiss it. Sincerely, dear soul!” “Doxerl,” by the way, is “butterfly” in the southern German dialect.
The six years of correspondence were decisive years for Albert and Mileva: Mileva fell in love at a young age, became pregnant in 1901 and gave birth to an illegitimate child. Married in 1903. Three children were born from the marriage, which officially lasted only until 1918. In 1914, Einstein clarified in a letter, “You renounce all personal relations with me. Nor condemn me in any way.”
In their divorce, he accepts the prize money from the Nobel Prize – which he had not yet received.
Lighten up by gifting a hair brush
During his Berlin years the career physicist suffered from serious illness. After working in Zurich and Prague, he lived in Spree beginning in 1914 but broke with Nazi Germany in 1933—Einstein was Jewish—and emigrated to the United States.
While in Berlin, his second cousin, Elsa Lowenthal, an actress and reader (née Einstein; 1876–1936), cared for the ailing Einstein. He entered with her. Shortly after his divorce from Mileva, Albert married her.
Things were bad between them. For example, she criticized his lack of personal hygiene – and gave him a hairbrush. “If I am too troublesome for you, find a friend who is more palatable to female taste. But I will preserve my independence.”
This did not seem to diminish his influence over women; Quite the opposite. Wherever he went, women welcomed him. During her frequent lecture tours, she had an affair with Einstein. In addition to his marriage to Elsa, Einstein’s biographer Armin Hermann also had a mistress in Berlin. “The greatest strain in the marriage was the Einstein affair,” Hermann notes in the preface to Einstein’s Love Letters. “Einstein felt strongly attracted to all things feminine.”
Passionate childhood love
It only emerged later that Einstein’s relationship with his first girlfriend, Marie Winteler, was more than just a youthful flirtation. “Reading your letter was like seeing my grave dug,” he wrote pathetically, “what little happiness I had left was destroyed, all that remained was a desolate life of duty.” Einstein did not address these dramatic lines to his first wife Mileva, his second wife, his cousin Elsa, or one of his many mistresses. The addressee was his childhood sweetheart Marie, the daughter of a host family with whom Einstein lived for a year as a teenager to obtain his high school diploma.
But this love affair was short-lived, and soon bore his beloved name Mileva.
However, these letters, which were kept in Switzerland’s Bernisches Historisches Museum for a long time before being published in 2018, show Albert Einstein, the genius of the century, as inclined to reflect as a romantic: “What a feeling of infinite joy. : We are one soul,” he enthused, “Love makes us great and rich and no god can take it away from us.”
Einstein’s love letters show one thing perhaps above all: the physicist loved science, friendship and women. He was not only a universally admired genius. She also had many complicated love stories.
“The Einstein Love Letters,” including many of his correspondence with his first wife Mileva, were auctioned at London auction house Christie’s on Wednesday, fetching 441,000 pounds (€536,000, $562,000).
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