The Other Einstein

by Marie Benedict

Berlin came calling for Albert. The directorship of the soon-to-be formed Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. A professorship at the University of Berlin with no teaching duties. Membership in the Prussian Academy of Sciences, the greatest scientific honor aside from the Nobel Prize. The package, the prestige, and the money—all with no requirement that he do anything but think—were so overwhelming that they made Albert forget how much he’d hated the Berlin of his youth. His loathing of the city and its people had been so strident that he renounced his German citizenship to become Swiss in his early twenties.

Berlin was notoriously hostile toward Slavic eastern Europeans,

As soon as we arrived in Kać, he began inciting arguments with me about Berlin, and the reason for his complaisance dawned on me. He had hoped to anger me enough that I’d insist on staying in Kać with my parents. That way, he could abandon me with a clear conscience.

It was an impersonation of his somewhat impish, eccentric student self, a persona he’d begun to cultivate.

Albert had been gone for six days, his longest unexplained absence since we arrived in Berlin. Six

Affair w hos clidin

“It is a list of the conditions upon which I will stay in this apartment with you and the boys. This is only so I can maintain a relationship with the boys. As for you and me, I want our relationship to become a business one, with the personal aspects reduced to almost nothing.” “Are you serious?” I asked. Did he think I was chattel for which he could enter a contract?

The document enumerated the household duties I must perform for Albert: his laundry; the preparation of his meals, to be served in his room; and the cleaning of his bedroom and study, with the requirement that I never touch his desk. Even more incredible was his list of his requirements that I must “obey” in my personal dealings with him. He demanded that I renounce all interaction with him at home; he would control where and when I spoke and what sorts of statements I could make to him and in front of the children. In particular, he mandated that I forgo all physical intimacy with him.

Is thi true? She leVes hom Fter this

terms of separation we had painfully agreed upon. Custody with me. A yearly sum for the boys’ care. Vacations with Albert, but never in Elsa’s company. Household furnishing sent to me in Zürich. Proceeds of any future Nobel Prize to me, an honor that seemed likely, given that he’d been nominated four of the past five years.

my beautiful sons—my brilliant Hans Albert, who went on to become an engineer, and my poor Tete, who succumbed to mental illness—I have reclaimed my intellect and my scientific passion by tutoring promising young female scientists.

The part she might have played in the formation of Albert’s groundbreaking theories in 1905 was hotly contested, particularly once a cache of letters between the couple from the years 1897 to 1903—when Mileva and Albert were university students together and first married—was discovered in the 1980s. In those letters, Albert and Mileva discussed projects they undertook together, and the letters caused ripples throughout the physics world. Was Mileva simply a sounding board for his brainstorms, as some scientists insisted? Did she only assist him with the complicated mathematical calculations, as others claimed? Or did she play a much more critical role, as a few physicists believed?

Was Lieserl given up for adoption? It seems to me quite probable that Lieserl died from the scarlet fever that prompted Mileva to race from Zürich to Serbia.