Einstein: His Life and Universe

by Walter Isaacson

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  TURNING FIFTY

  1929–1931

  Einstein’s house in Caputh near Berlin

  Caputh

  Einstein wanted some solitude for his fiftieth birthday, a refuge from publicity. So in March 1929 he fled once again, as he had during the publication of his unified field theory paper of a few months earlier, to the gardener’s cottage of an estate on the Havel River owned by Janos Plesch, a flamboyant and gossipy Hungarian-born celebrity doctor who had added Einstein to his showcase collection of patient-friends.

  For days he lived by himself, cooking his own meals, while journalists and official well-wishers searched for him. His whereabouts became a matter of newspaper speculation. Only his family and assistant knew where he was, and they refused to tell even close friends.

  Early on the morning of his birthday, he walked from this hide-away, which had no phone, to a nearby house to call Elsa. She started to wish him well on reaching the half-century mark, but he interrupted. “Such a fuss about a birthday,” he laughed. He was phoning about a matter involving physics, not the merely personal. He had made a small mistake in some calculations he had given to his assistant Walther Mayer, he told her, and he wanted her to take down the corrections and pass them along.

  Elsa and her daughters came out that afternoon for a small, private celebration. She was dismayed to find him in his oldest suit, which she had hidden. “How did you manage to find it?” she asked.

  “Ah,” he replied, “I know all about those hiding places.”1

  The New York Times, as intrepid as ever, was the only paper that managed to track him down. A family member later recalled that Einstein’s angry look drove the reporter away. That was not true. The reporter was smart and Einstein, despite his feigned fury, was as accommodating as usual. “Einstein Is Found Hiding on His Birthday” was the paper’s headline. He showed the reporter a microscope he had been given as a gift, and the paper reported that he was like a “delighted boy” with a new toy.2

  From around the world came other gifts and greetings. The ones that moved him the most were from ordinary people. A seamstress had sent him a poem, and an unemployed man had saved a few coins to get him a small packet of tobacco. The latter gift brought tears to his eyes and was the first for which he wrote a thank-you letter.3

  Another birthday gift caused more problems. The city of Berlin, at the suggestion of the ever-meddling Dr. Plesch, decided to honor its most famous citizen by giving him lifelong rights to live in a country house that was part of a large lakeside estate that the city had acquired. There he would be able to escape, sail his wooden boat, and scribble his equations in serenity.

  It was a generous and gracious gesture. It was also a welcome one. Einstein loved sailing and solitude and simplicity, but he owned no weekend retreat and had to store his sailboat with friends. He was thrilled to accept.

  The house, in a classical style, was nestled in a park near the village of Cladow on a lake of the Havel River. Pictures of it appeared in the papers, and a relative called it “the ideal residence for a person of creative intellect and a man fond of sailing.” But when Elsa went to inspect it, she found still living there the aristocratic couple who sold the estate to the city. They claimed that they had retained the right to live on the property. A study of the documents proved them right, and they could not be evicted.

  So the city decided to give the Einsteins another part of the estate on which they could build their own home. But that, too, violated the city’s purchase agreement. Pressure and publicity only hardened the resolve of the original family to block the Einsteins from building on the land, and it became an embarrassing front-page fiasco, especially after a third suggested alternative also proved unsuitable.

  Finally it was decided that the Einsteins should simply find their own piece of land, and the city would buy it. So Einstein picked out a parcel, owned by some friends, farther out of town near a village just south of Potsdam called Caputh. It was in a sylvan spot between the Havel and a dense forest, and Einstein loved it. The mayor accordingly asked the assembly of city deputies to approve spending 20,000 marks to buy the property as the fiftieth birthday gift to Einstein.

  A young architect drew up plans, and Einstein bought a small garden plot nearby. Then politics intervened. In the assembly, the right-wing German Nationalists objected, delayed the vote, and insisted that the proposal be put on a future agenda for a full debate. It became clear that Einstein personally would become the focus of that debate.

  So he wrote a letter, tinged with amusement, declining the gift. “Life is very short,” he told the mayor, “while the authorities work slowly. My birthday is already past, and I decline the gift.” The headline the next day in the Berliner Tageblatt newspaper read, “Public Disgrace Complete / Einstein Declines.”4

  By this point, the Einsteins had fallen in love with the plot of land in Caputh, negotiated its purchase, and had a design for a house to build upon it. So they went ahead and bought it with their own money. “We have spent most of our savings,” Elsa complained, “but we have our land.”

  The house they built was simple, with polished wood panels inside and unvarnished planks showing to the outside. Through a large picture window was a serene view of the Havel. Marcel Breuer, the famed Bauhaus furniture designer, had offered to do the interior design, but Einstein was a man of conservative tastes. “I am not going to sit on furniture that continually reminds me of a machine shop or a hospital operating room,” he said. Some leftover heavy pieces from the Berlin apartment were used instead.

  Einstein’s room on the ground floor had a spartan wooden table, a bed, and a small portrait of Isaac Newton. Elsa’s room was also downstairs, with a shared bathroom between them. Upstairs were small rooms with sleeping niches for her two daughters and their maid. “I like living in the new little wooden house enormously, even though I am broke as a result,” he wrote his sister shortly after moving in. “The sailboat, the sweeping view, the solitary fall walks, the relative quiet—it is a paradise.”5

  There he sailed the new twenty-three-foot boat his friends had given him for his birthday, the Tümmler, or Dolphin, which was built fat and solid to his specifications. He liked to go out on the water alone, even though he didn’t swim. “He was absurdly happy as soon as he reached the water,” recalled a visitor.6 For hours he would let the boat drift and glide aimlessly as he gently toyed with the rudder. “His scientific thinking, which never leaves him even on the water, takes on the nature of a daydream,” according to one relative. “Theoretical thinking is rich in imagination.”7

  Companions

  Throughout Einstein’s life, his relationships with women seemed subject to untamed forces. His magnetic appeal and soulful manner repeatedly attracted women. And even though he usually shielded himself from entangling commitments, he occasionally found himself caught in the swirl of a passionate attraction, just as he had been with Mileva Mari and even Elsa.

  In 1923, after marrying Elsa, he had fallen in love with his secretary, Betty Neumann. Their romance was serious and passionate, according to newly revealed letters. That fall, while on a visit to Leiden, he wrote to suggest that he might take a job in New York, and she could come as his secretary. She would live there with him and Elsa, he fantasized. “I will convince my wife to allow this,” he said. “We could live together forever. We could get a large house outside New York.”

  She replied by ridiculing both him and the idea, which prompted him to concede how much of a “crazy ass” he had been. “You have more respect for the difficulties of triangular geometry than I, old mathematicus, have.”8

  He finally terminated their romance with the lament that he “must seek in the stars” the true love that was denied to him on earth. “Dear Betty, laugh at me, the old donkey, and find somebody who is ten years younger than me and loves you just as much as I do.”9

  But the relationship lingered. The following summer, Einstein went to see his sons in
southern Germany, and from there he wrote to his wife that he could not visit her and her daughters, who were at a resort nearby, because that would be “too much of a good thing.” At the same time, he was writing Betty Neumann saying that he was going secretly to Berlin, but she should not tell anyone because if Elsa found out she “will fly back.”10

  After he built the house in Caputh, a succession of women friends visited him there, with Elsa’s grudging acquiescence. Toni Mendel, a wealthy widow with an estate on the Wannsee, sometimes came sailing with him in Caputh, or he would pilot his boat up to her villa and stay late into the night playing the piano. They even went to the theater together in Berlin occasionally. Once when she picked Einstein up in her chauffeured limousine, Elsa got into a furious fight with him and would not give him any pocket money.

  He also had a relationship with a Berlin socialite named Ethel Michanowski. She tagged along on one of his trips to Oxford, in May 1931, and apparently stayed in a local hotel. He composed a five-line poem for her one day on a Christ Church college notecard. “Long-branched and delicately strung, Nothing that will escape her gaze,” it began. A few days later she sent him an expensive present, which was not appreciated.“The small package really angered me,” he wrote.“You have to stop sending me presents incessantly ... And to send something like that to an English college where we are surrounded by senseless affluence anyway!”11

  When Elsa found out that Michanowski had visited Einstein in Oxford, she was furious, particularly at Michanowski for misleading her about where she was going. Einstein wrote from Oxford to tell Elsa to calm down. “Your dismay toward Frau M is totally groundless because she behaved completely according to the best Jewish-Christian morality,” he said. “Here is the proof: 1) What one enjoys and doesn’t harm others, one should do. 2) What one doesn’t enjoy and only aggravates others, one should not do. Because of #1, she came with me, and because of #2 she didn’t tell you anything about it. Isn’t that impeccable behavior?” But in a letter to Elsa’s daughter Margot, Einstein claimed that Michanowski’s pursuit was unwanted. “Her chasing me is getting out of control,” he wrote Margot, who was Michanowski’s friend. “I don’t care what people are saying about me, but for mother [Elsa] and for Frau M, it is better that not every Tom, Dick and Harry gossip about it.”12

  In his letter to Margot, he insisted that he was not particularly attached to Michanowski nor to most of the other women who flirted with him. “Of all the women, I am actually attached only to Frau L, who is perfectly harmless and respectable,” he said, not so reassuringly.13 That was a reference to a blond Austrian named Margarete Lebach, with whom he had a very public relationship. When Lebach visited Caputh, she brought pastries for Elsa. But Elsa, understandably, could not abide her, and she took to leaving the village to go shopping in Berlin on the days that Lebach came.

  On one visit, Lebach left a piece of clothing in Einstein’s sailboat, which caused a family row and prompted Elsa’s daughter to urge her to force Einstein to end the relationship. But Elsa was afraid that her husband would refuse. He had let it be known that he believed that men and women were not naturally monogamous.14 In the end, she decided that she was better off preserving what she could of their marriage. In other respects, it suited her aspirations.15

  Elsa liked her husband, and she also revered him. She realized that she must accept him with all of his complexities, especially since her life as Mrs. Einstein included much that made her happy. “Such a genius should be irreproachable in every respect,” she told the artist and etcher Hermann Struck, who did Einstein’s portrait around the time of his fiftieth birthday (as he had done a decade earlier). “But nature does not behave this way. Where she gives extravagantly, she takes away extravagantly.”The good and the bad had to be accepted as a whole. “You have to see him all of one piece,” she explained. “God has given him so much nobility, and I find him wonderful, although life with him is exhausting and complicated, and not only in one way but in others.”16

  The most important other woman in Einstein’s life was one who was completely discreet, protective, loyal, and not threatening to Elsa. Helen Dukas came to work as Einstein’s secretary in 1928, when he was confined to bed with an inflamed heart. Elsa knew her sister, who ran the Jewish Orphans Organization, of which Elsa was honorary president. Elsa interviewed Dukas before allowing her to meet Einstein, and she felt that Dukas would be trustworthy and, more to the point, safe in all respects. She offered Dukas the job even before she had met Einstein.

  When Dukas, then 32, was ushered into Einstein’s sickroom in April 1928, he stretched out his hand and smiled, “Here lies an old child’s corpse.” From that moment until his death in 1955—indeed until her own death in 1982—the never-married Dukas was fiercely protective of his time, his privacy, his reputation, and later his legacy. “Her instincts were as infallible and straightforward as a magnetic compass,” George Dyson later declared. Although she could display a pleasant smile and lively directness with those she liked, she was generally austere, hard-boiled, and at times quite prickly.17

  More than a secretary, she could appear to intrusive outsiders as Einstein’s pit bull—or, as he referred to her, his Cerberus, the guard dog at the gates of his own little kingdom of Hades. She would keep journalists at bay, shield him from letters she thought a waste of his time, and cover up any matters that she decreed should remain private. After a while, she became like a member of the family.

  Another frequent visitor was a young mathematician from Vienna, Walther Mayer, who became an assistant and, in Einstein’s words, “the calculator.” Einstein collaborated with him on some unified field theory papers, and he called him “a splendid fellow who would have long had a professorship if he were not a Jew.”18

  Even Mileva Mari, who had gone back to using her maiden name after the divorce, started using the name Einstein again and was able to establish a strained but workable relationship with 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 will come.”21

  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.