By Tamara Traubmann
Haaretz Correspondent and AP
July 12, 2006
SourceItems from a collection of about 1,400 letters that Albert Einstein wrote to his wives and children were made public yesterday for the first time by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
According to Barbara Wolff, an archivist at the university's Einstein Archives, who read all 3,500 pages of correspondence, and Prof. Hanoch Gutfreund, who manages all matters relating to Einstein at the university, the collection sheds new light on the personal life - as husband, father and lover - of the person who is widely considered the greatest scientist of the twentieth century.
Einstein willed his entire archive to the Hebrew University. His stepdaughter, Margot Einstein, gave the personal correspondence to the university and stipulated the letters remain sealed for 20 years after her death to protect the privacy of the individuals mentioned therein; she died on July 8, 1986.
Gutfreund was careful to emphasize that the material released yesterday shed no new light on Einstein's science, but he said that it "added colors to the image we had of Einstein before."
The release of the material comes at a time of renewed interest in Einstein, including recent biographies, piqued by the marking in 2005 of the hundredth anniversary of his "Annus Mirabilis," in which he wrote the four papers that changed the way we think about the material world.
Gutfreund said he expected the new material would encourage people to write new biographies, emphasizing different facets of Einstein's life.
Einstein and his first wife, Mileva, had two sons together. After their divorce he married Elsa, a cousin. Wolff and Gutfreund note that previous biographies have portrayed him as an indifferent father who was cruel to his first wife. The latest collection of letters show him to have been more involved and warmer with respect to his first family. And in one of his letters to Elsa, his second wife, Einstein described how much he enjoyed a vacation with his son.
Indirect displays of affection
Nevertheless, he did not display his love to his children directly. About Margot, Elsa's daughter from a previous marriage, he wrote: "I love her as if she was my own daughter, perhaps even more, who knows what sort of wild thing she might have been [had I been her father]."
According to previously-released letters, Einstein apparently had extramarital relationships with at least half a dozen women. He never hid the affairs. The new letters show that he openly discussed his affairs not only with Elsa but also with Margot. In one letter he complains that "Mrs. M" [Ethel Michanowski, a Berlin socialite who was involved with Einstein in the late 1920s and early 1930s] "followed me [to England], and her chasing me is getting out of control. But first of all I could scarcely have prevented this; and second, when I see her again I will tell her to get lost immediately... of all the women my only real connection is with Miss L., who is completely harmless and respectable."
The disagreements and mutual recriminations between Einstein and Mileva, some of which were over money, were already known. The new letters reveal that under the terms of Einstein's divorce from Mileva, the entire sum that he would receive when he won the Nobel prize in physics ["when," not "if" - T.T.] was to be deposited in a Swiss bank account, and Mileva was to draw on the interest for her and the couple's two sons, Hans Albert and Eduard.
It has been known for some time that there was a problem with Einstein's fulfillment of the agreement, but the details were not clear. The new correspondence shows he invested most of it in the U.S., where much of it was lost in the Great Depression.
This caused great friction with Mileva, who felt betrayed because he did not deposit the entire sum as agreed, and repeatedly had to ask him for money, Wolff said.
The marriage to Elsa, his first cousin, was known to be a marriage of convenience, with little passion. Nevertheless he wrote her frequently and in great detail during his travels, describing anecdotes laconically.
The man who became best known for his Emc2 equation apparently did not want to be bound up with it eternally. In a 1921 letter to Elsa, Einstein confided, "Soon I'll be fed up with the relativity. Even such a thing fades away when one is too involved in it."