Читать книгу Albert Einstein Speaking - R.J. Gadney - Страница 9
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Ulm, Württemberg, Germany
HERE IS MY FATHER, HERMANN;AND MY MOTHER, PAULINE
‘The head, the head,’ the twenty-one-year-old Pauline Einstein cries. ‘It’s monstrous.’
‘It’s a beautiful head,’ says Hermann Einstein squinting through his pince-nez balanced precariously on his nose above his walrus moustache. ‘Our son, Abraham, has a beautiful head.’
‘It’s deformed.’
‘Abraham is not deformed, Pauline.’
‘The skull, look at it, Hermann.’
‘It’s fine.’
‘It is not fine. It’s at a twisted angle to the rest of him.’
The couple fall silent. Only the sounds from the city break the silence.
Ulm is a noisy Swabian city in southwest Germany on the River Danube famed for the 531-foot spire of its minster, der Fingerzeig Gottes, the Finger of God, the tallest in the world. Mozart played its organ in 1763.
Horses, coal carts and small whistling steam engines fill its narrow winding cobbled streets lined with half-timbered houses. The stench of warm horse dung is overpowering.
The Einstein residence on Bahnhofstrasse is a stone’s throw from the train station. Der Blitzzug, the lightning Paris–Istanbul express, has begun making scheduled stops at Ulm.
Hermann Einstein toys with his moustache. Then he glances at his hair in the mirror, gently patting it in place.
‘I have been thinking about the child’s name. Our family belongs to the Jewish community. I want a name that means noble and intelligent.’
‘Which is what?’
‘Albert. Albert Einstein.’
On 15 March 1879, the day after Albert’s birth, a hackney cab takes mother, father and tiny son through the fog to the office of Ulm’s registrar of births. Hermann, in the fine tailored black suit with a narrow necktie tied in a bow that befits a former partner in the featherbed manufacturers Israel & Levi, stands proudly before the registrar with Pauline, who carries baby Albert. Pauline’s exuberant finery consists of a ribboned bonnet, a boned bodice, and matching skirt in folds, drapes and pleats.
The parents appear a prosperous couple. The featherbed company may have failed two years ago, but now Hermann has decided to go into business with his younger brother, Jakob.
Jakob has a college degree in engineering and realises that electrification is the coming thing. Hermann’s commercial savvy will be of value. More to the point though, Pauline’s father is a wealthy grain dealer and well connected in Württemberg. With any luck Hermann will be able to get substantial funds from his in-laws to establish Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Cie, manufacturing electrical equipment and based in Munich.
The registrar of births reads aloud: ‘No 224. Ulm, March 15, 1879. Today, the merchant Hermann Einstein, residing in Ulm, Bahnhofstrasse 135, of the Israelitic faith, personally known, appeared before the undersigned registrar, and stated that a male child, who has received the name Albert, was born in Ulm, in his residence, to his wife Pauline Koch, of the Israelitic faith, on March 14 of the year 1879, at 11.30 a.m. Read, confirmed, and signed: Hermann Einstein. The Registrar, Hartmann.’
Now it’s official.
The registrar gives the child a look of practised admiration. Pauline at once covers the enormity of the head. She feels guilty and angry for having produced such a strange creature.
Back home the doctor calls later that afternoon.
Pauline whispers. ‘The head, the head. Albert is unnatural.’
‘I wouldn’t go as far as to say that,’ the doctor says. ‘The large cranium could simply be a reflection of a larger-than-average-headed mother or father. It isn’t an indication of a learning disorder or disability. Mind you, a large head can be linked to problems within the skull. We will measure Albert’s head and make sure the circumference has been increasing since birth. I can reassure you of one thing. I see no complications. Albert will be possessed of normal intelligence.’
‘Normal intelligence?’
‘Yes. Normal intelligence.’
Pauline watches Albert grow and, other than to Hermann, keeps her misgivings about him to herself and prays to Almighty God that she hasn’t given birth to eine Laune der Natur: a freak of nature.
AGED TWO, OR THEREABOUTS
‘A new toy for me, a new toy for me,’ Albert exclaims when he first sees his little sister Maria, familiarly known as Maja, on 18 November 1881. ‘Where are the wheels?’
Once settled in Munich, first in a rented house, Müllerstrasse 3, later at Rengerweg 14 with a spacious garden, the Einsteins enjoy a bourgeois existence.
‘Albert is slow to talk like other children,’ Pauline says to Fanny, her visiting older sister. ‘Why does he say everything twice?’
Pauline embroiders a tablecloth with the words Sich regen bringt Segen – Hard work brings its own reward.
‘A new toy for me,’ Albert says again slowly. ‘Where are the wheels?’
‘See what I mean, Fanny?’
‘Maybe he’s just curious.’
‘Curious. Curious. I don’t want a child who’s curious. I want a child who’s normal.’
‘It’ll be a shame if he only hears you being so critical. He’ll retreat inside himself. You won’t know who he is.’
‘I know who he is. If he goes on like this he’ll never amount to anything.’
‘Does anyone else think the same as you?’
‘Of course. Even the housekeeper says that Albert is a schwachkopf [dimwit]. The child mutters to himself.’
Albert stares at his mother then at his aunt and smiles. He moves his lips. Grunts. Salivates. Forms an incomprehensible phrase.
‘What is it you’re trying to say, Albert?’ his mother asks.
Saliva dribbles from Albert’s lips. He stamps his left foot.
‘Don’t dribble!’ his mother snaps. ‘Look, Fanny. He’s quite unlike other children. The housekeeper’s right.’
He clambers to his feet. He thinks before taking each step, holding out his pudgy arms to steady himself. ‘The earth is shaking beneath my feet. Ein Erdbeben. An earthquake. Wunderschön!’
‘Play the piano,’ Fanny says to Pauline. ‘You told me in your letter he likes it when you play the piano.’
Pauline goes to the piano and Albert waddles across the carpet to her side.
Pauline plays Mozart.
Albert watches captivated as Pauline plays Mozart’s Piano Sonata in C minor, K.457. ‘Don’t stop, Mama. Go on, go on.’
‘I can’t spend the rest of my life playing the piano for him,’ Pauline says.
‘Maybe he’ll become a pianist,’ Fanny says.
The same evening, his father embarks upon readings from Schiller.
Albert nestles in his lap listening intently, entranced by the sound of his father’s voice. ‘“There is no such thing as chance; and what seems to us merest accident springs from the deepest source of destiny.” . . . “Only those who have the patience to do simple things perfectly will acquire the skill to do difficult things easily.” . . . “Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays.”’
From Heine: ‘“Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.”’
And: ‘“Every period of time is a sphinx that throws itself into the abyss as soon as its riddle has been solved.”’
And: ‘“The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had been obliged first to learn Latin.”’
Albert gives his father a smile of admiration.
Members of the Einstein and Koch families frequently beat a path to Rengerweg 14 from across Germany and northern Italy.
Rowdy children fill the garden at the back of Rengerweg 14, including Albert’s cousins Elsa, Paula and Hermine, the daughters of Fanny. Fanny’s married to Rudolf Einstein, a textile manufacturer from Hechingen. Rudolf is the son of Hermann Einstein’s uncle, Rafael. The families relish the complexity of these byzantine relationships. Young Albert memorises all their names.
Increasingly, he prefers to keep his own company. His body and his mind seem separated. A woman visitor suggests he’s isolated like no other boy. He opens his brown eyes wide. Observers notice they are dark and lustreless, like the eyes of a sightless child.
He stays on the sidelines observing pigeons or manoeuvring his toy sailing boat in a water bucket. He shies away from competitive sport or games of any sort; just mooches about alone, sometimes in a temper, or shuts himself away playing with a steam engine, a gift from his maternal uncle, Caesar Koch, in Brussels, a stationary model mimicking a factory, or a mobile engine such as those used in steam locomotives and boats. It has spring safety valves and whistles. The house is filled with the sound of chuffing, crank noises and the endless steam whistles.
Albert delights in irritating the family with the noise of the steam engine. ‘Choo-choo!’ he shouts. ‘Clackety-clack. Tuff tuff tuff, die Eisenbahn!’
He watches them from the corners of his eyes.
To Albert’s disappointment influenza means that he will have to spend his fifth birthday in bed.
‘Look what I’ve got for you,’ his father announces. ‘Here—’
He hands Albert a small package.
‘May I open it, Papa?’
‘Of course.’
‘Are you going to tell me what it is?’
‘Discover for yourself.’
Albert opens the wrapping paper, then a small box, and takes out a compass.
‘Papa. This is wonderful. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you.’
‘I hope you like it.’
‘I love it, Papa.’
Albert strokes the small glass window of the compass.
‘Good. I’ll see you again later.’
‘I love you, Papa.’
‘I love you too, Albert.’
Once alone, Albert turns and shakes the device, certain he can fool it into pointing its needle in a direction of his own devising. Yet the needle always finds its way back to point in the direction of magnetic north.
In turn enchanted and pleasurably scared by the miracle, his hands shake and his whole body grows cold. The force is invisible: proof that the world is possessed of hidden mysterious powers. There’s something behind things, something deeply hidden.
Maja watches her seven-year-old brother in wonder as he builds a house of playing cards fourteen storeys high.
‘It is a miracle,’ she says. ‘How do you do it?’
‘It is scientific engineering,’ Albert tells her. When he is interested in something or someone he speaks fluently. ‘Watch, Maja. I use old cards. See? First I create the highest point. I put a pair of cards against each other in the shape of a triangle. I make a line of them. Now I build two apexes. I select a card to be the roof piece and place it above the two apexes. I hold it and lower it carefully till it’s just above them. With the roof piece on I adjust the cards gently. I take my roofed apexes and make a third apex, then a fourth and now a fifth and on and on.’
‘Albert, it’s a miracle. Will you perform miracles and lead your life like Jesus in the Bible?’
‘Maja. We are instructed in the Bible and the Talmud. We are Jews. We are Jews.’
‘What d’you think about Jesus? You know so much.’
‘I know nothing.’
‘But you know everything.’
‘No, Maja. The more I learn, the more I realise how much I don’t know.’
His curiosity constantly gets the better of him.
He wanders aimlessly through the neighbourhood, marketplaces and covered passages, careful to avoid the heavy brewers’ drays jolting and rumbling past. Pauline, to Albert’s pleasure, encourages his explorations. She begins to allow him greater freedom. To think, to be alone with his convictions.
He watches students playing Kegel or ninepins in the drizzle.
‘Please may I have a go?’ Albert asks.
‘You may have a go, little man,’ a student laughs. ‘Here.’ He rolls the ball to Albert.
But the ball is too hefty for Albert and he altogether misses the ninepins. Then falls over.
The students laugh at him. Albert tries to hide the pain of being the butt of the students’ humour.
He walks home in tears.
To cheer him up, his father takes him out in a Droschke, the latest hackney cab, a new feature of Munich transport. They rattle through the Isartor, the eastern gate separating the old town from the districts of Isarvorstadt and Lehel, his father pointing out the frescos of the victory procession of Emperor Ludwig of Bavaria.
A woman tutor is called upon to teach Albert, who sees her appointment as a useless interruption to his thinking.
He throws a chair at her. Terrified, she at once clears off never to be seen again. Albert simply wants to be left alone sitting quietly, reading, with no one paying attention to him.
His thirst for knowledge is unquenchable. It takes him on solitary journeys of the mind to places where no one else can follow. Here he is happiest. And he continues his amblings around Munich.
On one walk in the driving sleet an elderly Italian offers the bedraggled Albert shelter in his grand house.
Albert stares at the glass cabinets filled with knick-knacks of glass, china and small models. Standing on a satinwood table is a model of Milan Cathedral built of cream-coloured cardboard. The tracery of the windows, the bas-reliefs, columns, pinnacles and statues are made of bread. The old man is not an architect. He says he’s built his models from his imagination. ‘I spend my life in my head,’ the old man says.
‘So do I,’ says Albert. ‘What is the grave?’
‘The model of my wife’s grave. She died two years ago in bed. Where the model’s standing. The model marks the place of death.’
Albert tells his father about the kindly Italian. Hermann says: ‘The signore is entirely self-educated. He made a small fortune in his twenties and with nothing much to do he lives with his models in his imagination.’
As a special treat Hermann takes Albert to watch the first voyage of the small steamer on Lake Starnberg on the morning of the Frühlingsfestival, the spring festival. At the time steamboats are more common on the Danube, Elbe and Rhine.
It’s a beautiful day. Albert savours the fragrances of white viburnams and narcissi. In the meadows he identifies the lilac flowers of Crocus tommasinianus.
It seems all Munich has turned out on the banks of Lake Starnberg among the beech woods. The white Starnberg houses, St Joseph’s church and the hotel built like a Swiss chalet captivate Albert. Far in the distance he can see the Alps. Blue. Silver. Rose-blue. Jagged peaks. Pale orange.
In the foreground, flags, wreaths and drapery decorate the houses. Albert watches the steamer being decorated with garlands. At the edge of the woods, for his mother and Maja, he assembles bouquets of Alpine gentians and oxlips. No matter that the midday meal is of rubbery boiled beef and a dry potato salad. Albert and his father join in the merrymaking as the boat is launched.
By night, he has difficulty sleeping. Mainly because he’s frightened of the dark. He lies awake waiting until he hears his father and mother go to bed, when it’s safe to tiptoe barefoot out of his room and light the Stubenlampe. The thin wick is wide, providing a comforting circle of white-reddish light. Back in bed he gazes at the light coming through the slit at the bottom of the door. It banishes the idea of a prowling monster born after a suicide or sometimes an accidental death. It heralds sickness, disease, agony and oblivion. Finally, it eats its family members, then devours its own body and funeral shrouds.
At dawn he wakes, restless. The light beneath the door is now a hindrance to sleeping. Anyway, he doesn’t want his parents to know he turned it on. So he creeps out of his room again and turns it off.
Back in bed the light coming into his room through the gap in the wooden shutters bothers him. He buries his head in the pillow. But of course the light’s still there. It’s entered his room from 93 million miles away. Thank you, Sun.
Quick journey. Travelling at 186,000 miles per second. So that light, coming through the shutters, was in the Sun eight minutes ago. I can slow it down. He moves the glass of water towards the rays. The light rays bend, refract. He screws up his eyes. The light comes through his eyelashes and spreads out in stripes. Tighter, tighter, he screws up his eyes. The light spreads wider. When he completely closes his eyes it vanishes.
Each November, after several days of snowfall, to Albert’s delight, sledging begins.
In the Englischer Garten, Albert marvels at the heavy snow hanging in strange shapes on the dark branches of the fir trees. The purity and silence is broken by the sound of bells from a bright green and gilded sledge drawn by a black horse. The rider is wrapped up in a cloak, with a fur cap over his brows.
Carriages on sledges instead of wheels fill the streets. Everything travels on sledges: tubs of water and buckets, wooden milk pails hooped with brass. Everyone takes a childish pleasure in the sledges. The colours of the winter enthral him. Red leaves, rose-green and silver leaves, the fantastical bowers of clematis festooning branches and the heaps of pure white snow. The light is dazzling. It sparkles and bends and bends.
‘We’ll go to the Aumeister,’ his father announces.
‘What’s the Aumeister?’
‘Best coffee in the city, pretty ladies and cakes. Lots of cakes. Mainly pretty ladies.’
‘Pretty ladies, pretty ladies,’ sings Albert.
He loves his father’s gaiety.
Aged twelve he likes to hold forth on religion and culture at home.
His father delights in introducing Albert.
‘I have the honour to ask Professor Einstein to address the family on a subject of his choice.’
‘Thank you. Today the subject of my lecture is Ashkenazic or Ashkenazim Jews, with some modest proposals.’
The family applaud.
‘As we all know, we are Ashkenazi Jews. The Ashkenazim came together as a distinct community of Jews in the Holy Roman Empire towards the end of the first millennium. According to Halakha, Shabbat is observed from a few minutes before sunset on Friday evening until the appearance of three stars in the sky on Saturday. The lighting of candles and the recitation of a blessing usher Shabbat in. The evening meal typically begins with our blessing, kiddush, proclaimed over two loaves of challah. Shabbat is closed the following evening with a Havdalah. On Shabbat we are free from the regular labours of life. We contemplate life’s spirituality. We spend time with the family.
‘I now turn to diet. My proposal is that we don’t eat pork. Rather, matzo ball soup and pasta filled with chopped meat floating in broth, or corned beef with fried potato latkes, and slices of noodles mixed with dried fruit, fat and sugar.’
He suddenly falls silent.
‘And?’ says his mother.
‘As we all know, we are Ashkenazi Jews. The Ashkenazim came together as a distinct community of Jews in the Holy Roman Empire towards the end of the first millennium.’
‘Albert?’ says his mother.
‘Please don’t interrupt, Mama.’
‘But you’ve already said that.’
‘It’s the truth.’
‘I cannot take this seriously,’ says his mother.
‘Anyone who doesn’t take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either.’
‘I think we’ve heard enough,’ she says.
I will never be understood, he tells himself.
‘Algebra,’ says Uncle Jakob, ‘is the calculus of indolence. If you don’t know a certain quantity, you call it x and treat it as if you do know it, then you put down the relationship given, and determine this x later.’
Uncle Jakob shows him the Pythagorean theorem and Albert hurls himself into solving it. It takes him only twenty-one days to reach the correct proof using his intellect and nothing else.
He sees the similarity of triangles by drawing a perpendicular from one vertex of the right-angled triangle onto the hypotenuse and leads to the proof he desperately seeks.
‘There is no exclusively Jewish school in Munich,’ Hermann tells his son. ‘You will enter the Volksschule Petersschule on Blumenstrasse.’
‘A nearby Catholic elementary school,’ says Pauline.
‘Not Jewish?’ says Albert.
‘Catholic,’ says Pauline.
‘Is this good news?’ says Albert.
‘It isn’t bad news,’ says Pauline.
Hermann keeps his own counsel.
Albert buries his head in Struwwelpeter. And memorises it.
Just look at him! there he stands,
With his nasty hair and hands.
See! his nails are never cut;
They are grimed as black as soot;
And the sloven, I declare,
Never once has combed his hair;
Anything to me is sweeter
Than to see Shock-headed Peter.
At first there’s good news.
Pauline writes to her mother: ‘Yesterday Albert got his school marks. He is at the top of his class and got a brilliant record.’ And this is in spite of the ministrations of his teacher who teaches multiplication tables by beating the children whenever they make mistakes. Albert loathes the strict enforcement of obedience and discipline.
Nothing seems to deter him from mocking his conceited fellow pupils and self-opinionated teachers.
Of all his teachers, Albert gets on best with the instructor of religion. The teacher likes Albert. In this department all goes well until the teacher shows the children a large nail. He solemnly announces: ‘This is the nail the Jews used to nail Jesus to the cross.’
The teacher’s demonstration inflames the pupils’ simmering anti-Semitism, which is at once directed straight at Albert.
They call him Honest John, lover of truth and justice. He counters the taunts with a twist of the mouth, a look of sarcasm, and sticks out his quivering lower lip. He learns, like many bullied schoolchildren then and now: the oxygen of schools, like society, is poisoned by power, perverted authority and fear – above all fear. The antidote is silence. Like his father, he learns to keep his own counsel.
The leader of the Jew-baiters spits at Albert.
‘You are ostracised. You will not be talked to. You no longer exist. You are completely invisible and inaudible. Read Heinrich von Treitschke: “Die Juden sind unser Unglück! The Jews are our misfortune! The Jews are no longer necessary. The international Jew, hidden in the masks of different nationalities, is a disintegrating influence; he can be of no further use to the world.” Neither are you. Schmutzige Internationale Jude. Dirty international Jew.’
Albert turns white. His hands shake. He feels the muscles tighten in his chest. Staring at his fellow pupils he sees all of them have turned their backs to him.
He hears himself say: ‘There’s scarcely a country in the world that doesn’t have a Jewish segment in the population. Wherever Jews reside, they’re a minority of the population, and a small minority at that, so they aren’t powerful enough to defend themselves against attack. It’s easy for governments to divert attention from their own mistakes by blaming Jews for this or that political theory, such as communism or socialism. Throughout history, Jews have been accused of all sorts of treachery, such as poisoning water wells or murdering children as religious sacrifices. Much of this can be attributed to jealousy, because, despite the fact that Jewish people have always been thinly populated in various countries, they have always had a disproportionate number of outstanding public figures.’
The chant rises: ‘Müll. Juden sind Perversen! Müll. Juden sind Perversen!’
The other pupils beat their desks. ‘Müll. Juden sind Perversen! Müll. Juden sind Perversen!’
The schoolroom door opens.
‘Was ist hier los?’ [What’s going on here?] the teacher yells above the din.
Albert pushes past him out of the Volksschule Petersschule.
He vows to be decisive. To take strength from the family. He hurries home, his dark felt hat covering his dark hair, walking fast as if in flight, with darting brown eyes and watchful, flickering stare. Singing Struwwelpeter to a tune of his own composition
HERE ARE MY FELLOW PUPILS AT THE LUITPOLDGYMNASIUM
I AM THIRD FROM THE RIGHT IN THE FRONT ROW
The year 1888 sees the founding of the National Geographic Society in the United States and the publication of Conan Doyle’s Valley of Fear in the United Kingdom. In Braunau, 124 kilometres from Munich, Klara Hitler falls pregnant with her more notorious son. Likewise, Hannah Chaplin with Charlie in East Street, Walworth, south London. Meanwhile, Albert Einstein enters Munich’s interdenominational Luitpold Gymnasium.
He enjoys the classes given by Heinrich Friedmann, shared with his Jewish classmates. Friedmann teaches the Ten Commandments and the Jewish holy-day rituals. Albert makes no bones about the school’s disciplined study of Latin and Greek. He hates it.
‘Books!’ shouts the teacher. ‘Pick up your books. Struwwelpeter. First page.’
Albert drops his on the floor.
‘Leave it, Einstein!’
‘What if I don’t leave it?’
‘Your knuckles will be thrashed.’
‘Really, by whom?’
‘By me.’
‘I don’t need the book.’
‘You do need the book.’
‘What happens if I know the first page?’
‘You don’t know it.’
‘I do know it.’
‘You are lying.’
‘Do you know it?’
‘You don’t.’
The teacher is fast losing control of himself.
The other pupils begin to giggle.
‘Quiet!’ the teacher bawls. ‘Einstein?’
Albert gives a theatrical sigh. ‘If you insist.’
Albert recites Struwwelpeter in Latin:
The professor tells him: ‘You’re a fat little runt. You’ll be no good for anything. You’re a pathetic failure.’
‘Perhaps I will achieve your remarkable status in a field of my own discovery,’ Albert says with a smile.
‘Get out! Go home. Raus! Raus!’
Shortly afterwards Albert begins work on theorems in earnest, at home, proving them for himself.
Max Talmud, an impoverished Polish student of medicine at the university in Munich, is a regular Thursday night dinner guest. Albert intrigues Max. Max gives him books. Albert devours Aaron Bernstein’s Naturwissenschaftlichen Volksbücher (Popular Books on Natural Science) and Ludwig Büchner’s Kraft und Stoff (Force and Matter). Bernstein and Büchner’s works capture Albert’s imagination, and Bernstein’s books in particular vastly increase Albert’s interest in physics.
Life in Munich changes abruptly when once more the Einstein business fails.
In 1894, when Albert is fifteen, the family elects to move to Milan because the Kochs feel they want a more direct influence on Hermann’s business activity. Hermann and Pauline take Maja with them, depositing Albert in a boarding house.
‘The plan,’ Hermann says, ‘is that you’ll gain your diploma at the Luitpold Gymnasium and enter university and then pursue the profession of electrical engineer.’ This, at any rate, is his father’s plan. Albert has other ideas.
He sends a paper to his uncle Caesar in Stuttgart.
‘I’m taking up the challenge of a highly disputed scientific subject,’ he tells his uncle. ‘This is the relationship between electricity, magnetism and the ether, the latter being the hypothetical entity that is non-material and believed to fill all of space and transmits electromagnetic waves.’
He writes out his thoughts in his thin Gothic script on five pages of lined paper. He entitles his study: ‘Über die Untersuchung des Ätherzustandes im magnetischen Felde’: ‘On the Investigation of the State of Ether in Magnetic Fields’.
‘Little is presently known about the relationship of magnetic fields with the ether,’ the fifteen-year-old points out. ‘But if the potential states of the ether in magnetic fields were to be examined in thorough experimental studies then the absolute magnitude of the ether, of its elastic force and density, might be begun.’
The boy has discovered an extraordinary paradox.
‘What might happen if you follow a light beam at the same speed as light travels? The result is a spatially oscillatory electromagnetic field at rest.’
He adds that ‘it is still rather naive and imperfect, as is to be expected from a young fellow like myself. I shall not mind if you don’t bother to read the stuff; but you must recognise it at least as a modest attempt to overcome the laziness in writing which I have inherited from both my dear parents.’
Albert has three more years to complete his studies at the Gymnasium before university.
He’s left behind to lodge with a relative and sinks into a depression. He turns to the family doctor and confesses he’s suffering from a serious nervous malaise.
Matters take a strange twist. Albert’s professor of Greek, Degenhart, tells him to leave the Gymnasium. Simple as that.
‘What’ve I done wrong?’ Albert pleads.
‘You’re a disruptive influence,’ the professor says.
‘Of course I’m disruptive. I don’t approve of your educational methods.’
‘Then leave.’
‘You don’t want to hear my arguments?’
‘I do not.’
‘Your reluctance makes my point.’
He packs his things and follows the rest of the family to Milan.
The lack of a really settled formal education secretly suits Albert. Simply, it leaves him to his own devices, immersed in thought. He is someone apart: single-minded. In one essay, ‘Mes Projets d’Avenir’ (‘My Plans for the Future’), he confesses he has no ‘practical talent’. Yet, ‘There is a certain independence in the profession of science that greatly appeals to me.’
He can’t accept the German soul, as it seems to be embodied by the likes of Degenhart. Of course I’m disruptive.
Worse still, Germans are required to undertake military service. There’s one way out. Get out of the country well before my seventeenth birthday and renounce my citizenship. Otherwise I’ll be arrested for desertion.
He takes the train to Pavia, thirty-five kilometres south of Milan, where his parents will have no alternative but to welcome him.
He loves travelling on the Schnellzug: the express train. He listens to the sound of the slamming doors heralding departure. He savours the smell of coal-generated steam, the engines panting, screaming whistles. The clackety-clack, diddley-dum, diddley-dum of the wheels on the wrought-iron rails. The dancing sparks of burning grit. The driven rain coursing down the windows. The sight of the enormous Munich marshalling yards and Hagans Bn2t locomotives. Slag heaps. In winter: blackened snow, barns and old lime trees. In spring: orchards in bloom. In high summer: cornfields like silver, Alpine pastures, trees of pine, golden harvest hay. Over the points. His journeys alone afford him time to think without interruption. He shuts his ears to the gabble of fellow passengers, lost in the ideas swirling around in his brain to the rhythm of the train.
Meine Gedankenexperimente. My thought experiments.
On the journey to Pavia he reads Mozart’s letter to his father: ‘A fellow of mediocre talent will remain a mediocrity, whether he travels or not; but one of superior talent (which without impiety I cannot deny that I possess) will go to seed if he always remains in the same place.’
I must not remain in the same place.
THE WORKSHOP OF ELEKTROTECHNISCHE FABRIK J.EINSTEIN & CO., PAVIA, 1894
The Einsteins exhibit dynamos, lamps, and even a telephone system at the first international electro-technical exhibition in Frankfurt. The Einstein firm is issued with several patents.
Now called the Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Co., the firm employs 200 people and starts installing lighting and power networks and is awarded the contract to install the electric lighting for the Oktoberfest. Then the firm wires Schwabing in northern Munich. Jakob’s dynamos are shown at the International Electrical Exhibition in Frankfurt, generating 100 horsepower, 75,000 watts. A million people, along with the Kaiser, marvel at the lights. They gain contracts to instal power in the northern Italian towns of Varese and Susa.
Unfortunately, upwards of a million marks is needed to compete in the burgeoning market for power plants. The Einsteins face massive competition from Deutsche Edison-Gesellschaft and Siemens.
In desperation they mortgage their home. The capital is insufficient. Schuckert of Nuremberg gains the contract. Within twelve months Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Co. is broke.
‘The misfortune of my poor parents,’ Albert confides in Maja, ‘who for so many years have not had a happy moment, weighs most heavily on me. It also hurts me deeply that at sixteen I must be a passive witness without being able to do even the smallest thing about it. I am nothing but a burden to my relatives. It would surely be better if I did not live at all. Only the thought that year after year I do not allow myself a pleasure, a diversion, keeps me going and must protect me often from despair.’
The brothers Einstein turn to northern Italy. They sell the house in Munich and look to constructing a hydroelectric power system for Pavia. Once there they make a new home in a grand house that had belonged to the poet Ugo Foscolo.
Albert falls in love with Italy. He assists his father and uncle with designs, reads, thinks, hikes alone across the Ligurian Alps to Genoa, where he stays with his uncle Jakob Koch.
He spends the summer of 1895 in Airolo writing essays and philosophical notes inspired by Leibniz: ‘It is wrong to infer from the imperfection of our thinking that objects are imperfect.’
‘You’ll have to earn a living,’ his father tells him. ‘Take up electrical engineering in preparation to take on the Einstein business.’
‘No, Father. I’ll take the entrance exams for the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zürich.’
‘It’s only a teacher-training college. Not a university like Heidelberg, Berlin or Göttingen.’
‘It’ll do.’
Hermann makes an official application for Albert to be relieved of his citizenship in the state of Württemberg, which is accepted, costing three marks. It excuses him from military service. No more a German citizen, he’ll be a stateless student at the ETH.
Not quite. The director of the ETH is unenthusiastic about Albert’s application. He hasn’t got entirely the right qualifications and has only achieved the Matura, the high-school diploma. The director announces: ‘According to my experience it is not advisable to withdraw a student from the institution in which he had begun his studies even if he is a so-called child prodigy.’ Albert should finish his general studies. Even so, if the Einsteins insist, the director will make an exception in so far as the age rule is concerned and allow Albert to sit the entrance exam, which Albert does.
Alas, he does so badly in languages and history that he is sent back for another year in secondary school, thirty minutes from Zürich in Aarau, in the canton of Aargau. The Aarau Kantonsschule has a fairly liberal reputation and specialises in science.
AARAU
At the start of the autumn term Albert goes to Aarau, forty-five kilometres from Zürich, where arrangements are made for him to be housed with the Winteler family. Jost Winteler teaches philology and history at the Kantonsschule.
The sixteen-year-old Albert feels at ease in the Winteler house, thinking of them as his second family. Jost Winteler, a native of Switzerland’s Toggenburg region, is a former journalist and an ornithologist. A handsome, free-thinking liberal, he loathes power politics, and he and Albert share a profound disapproval of German militarism. The Wintelers have four sons and three daughters. The house is filled with books, music, parties and spirited discussion. Winteler arranges kite-flying excursions. He has a habit of chatting with his birds. For the country treks Albert sports his grey felt hat.
The family treats the young smiling philosopher as one of its own. Albert calls Jost Winteler ‘Papa’ and his wife, Pauline, ‘Mamerl’ or ‘Mummy No. 2’. He treats Mamerl as his confessor.
He spends hours hanging around in his blue nightshirt drinking coffee with one of the sons of the house, Paul, who becomes his close friend. Albert relishes his reputation as a subversive student. He entrances the women of the household, captivating them with his bright eyes, bedraggled hair and insolent expressions. He plays Bach and Mozart for them on his violin. His playing is powerful and graceful. Eighteen-year-old Marie, who accompanies him on the piano, is a pupil at the Aargau teachers’ college. In her long full skirt and blouse with flared sleeves, she is the most beautiful of the three daughters. Albert feels powerfully attracted to her. Playfully, he quotes Goethe’s ‘The Ratcatcher’ to her: ‘I bid the chords sweet music make, And all must follow in my wake.’
No matter that Marie is far from his intellectual equal, the couple fall in love. They laugh and are rarely out of each other’s sight. They meet with friends at one or other Kaffeehaus.
The families have no objection; indeed, they treat the pair as unofficially engaged. When Albert returns to Pavia on a spring holiday, Marie’s letters, he admits to his mother, allow him to understand homesickness. He writes to Marie: ‘Dear little sunshine, You mean more to my soul than the whole world did before.’
MARIE’S FAVOURITE PHOTOGRAPH
She calls him Geliebter Schatz: Beloved Treasure.
In his letters to her from Pavia, Albert’s realistic about the love affair. She admits she can’t keep up with his thinking. Albert is obsessed with the nature of electromagnetism. He fantasises about what he might see riding along on a light wave. Marie finds it unromantic.
He has Berlin in his sights, where he’s heard that Wilhelm Röntgen has made advanced studies into cathode radiation. The radiation occurs when an electrical charge is applied to two metal plates inside a glass tube filled with low-density gas. Röntgen sees a faint glow on light-sensitive screens: a penetrating, previously unknown type of radiation causes it, X-ray radiation.
The obstacle to Albert going there is his antagonism towards Germany and German culture. Germany is riddled with all sorts of anti-Semitism. The Germans are resentful towards the Jews who are so successful. They fear the Jews will gain yet more power. Albert finds it hard to fathom why there’s so strange a contrast between the Germans’ hospitality and their hostility.
He also wants to be free of conventional nationalism. He wants Swiss citizenship.
He attempts to reassure Marie: ‘If you were here at the moment, I would defy all reason and would give you a kiss for punishment and would have a good laugh at you, as you deserve, sweet little angel! And as to whether I will be patient? What other choice do I have with my beloved, naughty little angel?’
The tangled familial relationships produce unexpected outcomes during Albert’s stay in Aarau. Maja is romantically attached to Marie’s brother Paul. Anna Winteler becomes attached to Albert’s new best friend, the engineer Michele Angelo Besso.
ANNA AND MICHELE
Six years older than Albert, Besso, born in Riesbach in Switzerland into a rambling family of Sephardic-Jewish-Italian descent, has an immediate appeal for Albert and vice versa. Albert first encounters him at a music evening at the house of Selina Caprotti. An ETH graduate with dark curly hair and nervous staring eyes, Besso has a philosophical passion for physics the equal of Albert’s. He also shares a record of insubordination, having been expelled from high school for complaining about the inadequacies of his mathematics teacher.
He’s enchanted by Besso who has just earned the displeasure of his superior; when asked to report on a power station, he misses the train, and on arrival finds he is unable to remember what he’s supposed to do. When head office receives a card from Besso asking to be reminded, his superior says that Besso is ‘completely useless and almost unbalanced’.
‘Michele,’ says Albert, ‘is an awful schlemiel.’
He’s Albert’s kind of man, and Albert is devoted to him: ‘Nobody else is so close to me, nobody knows me so well, nobody is so kindly disposed to me as you are.’
At one of Selina Caprotti’s soirées, Albert introduces Besso to Anna Winteler and they fall in love.
The passage of light unseen, imagined is almost – as it were – visible.
Zürich instead of Berlin beckons.
Not before Albert and his friends embark upon a three-day June trek in the northeast of Switzerland along Säntis – at over 2,500 metres, the highest mountain in the Alpstein region. The ridge trail is precipitous. Albert is hopelessly ill-equipped to make the expedition. He ties his overcoat around him with his scarf. His shoes are cracked and split. Squinting into the drizzle, he leans heavily on his walking sticks.
The small group of classmates clamber uphill to Fälalp, an upper basin, then through patches of snow to an even steeper incline among loose rocks beneath a solitary needle of rock on the Rossmad peak. They head in a westerly direction to the bare, rocky ridge above the glacier. Albert gazes, captivated, at the nearby summits of the Churfirsten mountains to the north of Lake Walen, to the east the mountain peaks of the Vorarlberg and to the north the Bodensee near Konstanz. The two-hour return hike to the Schwägalp is extremely steep in some places and requires considerable sure-footedness. He struggles to keep his balance on the razor edge and slips. He slides and rolls towards a sheer precipice.
He screams.
His nearest classmate, Adolf Frisch, stretches out his alpenstock.
Albert grabs hold of it for dear life and Frisch begins to pull him upwards to safety.
Frisch holds Albert in his arms. Albert is shaking, his face drenched in sweat.
‘Put your head down between your knees,’ Frisch tells him. ‘Now sit still. Breathe slowly out. Breathe in.’
‘Thanks, Adolf.’
‘It’s nothing.’
‘Nothing? You saved my life.’
‘Anyone would’ve done the same.’
‘I’m sorry to be such a nuisance.’
‘You’re not a nuisance. To be honest you aren’t cut out to be a mountaineer.’
In September 1896, aged seventeen, he passes the Swiss Matura with the highest grades in physics and mathematics. At last he can enrol at the polytechnic. Zürich becomes a reality.
The determination of his will and the intensity of his solitary mind studies will lead to him becoming arguably the greatest scientist who ever lived, with an intelligence that is far from normal.
ZÜRICH
There’s a melancholic inevitability about the separation from Marie. She’s accepted a teaching post in Olsberg, an isolated town in the Hochsauerland district of Westphalia, 570 kilometres distant.
Sensing one of life’s new beginnings, the seventeen-year-old Albert disembarks at the Hauptbahnhof in Zürich with a spring in his step. He carries his battered violin case in one hand, his suitcase in the other, and walks out to the Bahnhofstrasse.
Beyond the River Limmat he can see the neoclassical buildings of the polytechnic and the University of Zürich. The mountains embrace old Zürich, its churches, hotels, restaurants and banks, and its Roman ruins and the lake, the Zürichsee, in the southeast. Trolley cars trundle and clank up the hills of the Zürichberg and the Uetliberg. Zürich prides itself on its Calvinistic heritage.
With a monthly allowance of 100 francs provided by Aunt Julie Koch, Albert can afford a room to rent in the student quarter with Frau Kägi at Unionstrasse 4, off Baschligplatz.
Albert relishes the intellectual and artistic ferment of fin de siècle Europe. Freud thinks of dreams and sexual hysteria in Vienna and publishes The Interpretation of Dreams. Stéphane Mallarmé experiments with silence and the random in a Paris dominated by the novelty of the Eiffel Tower. The Dreyfus Affair shakes France. On 13 January 1898, Émile Zola publishes an open letter in L’Aurore addressed to the president, Félix Faure, accusing the government of anti-Semitism and the unlawful jailing of Alfred Dreyfus, sentenced to penal servitude for life for espionage. Zola points out the judicial errors and the lack of evidence, and is himself prosecuted and found guilty of libel on 23 February 1898. He flees to England, returning to France the following year. The Paris Universal Exhibition of 1900 attracts 51 million visitors. In 1901, the first Nobel prizes are awarded. In the same year Kandinsky is a founding member of the art group Phalanx in Munich.
Stability and freedom is what Zürich offers. Jung, who comes to Zürich from Basel in 1900, finds the city ‘relates to the world not by the intellect, but by commerce. Yet here the air was free and I had always valued that. Here you were not weighed down by the brown fog of the centuries, even though one missed the rich background of culture.’ Rosa Luxemburg, Marxist and eventual founder of the Communist Party of Germany, and her cohorts were already living in the city among the students, free-thinkers and social outcasts. Thomas Mann publishes his first novel, Buddenbrooks, in 1901. Art nouveau is all the rage. In 1905 Henri Matisse exhibits Le bonheur de vivre. Two years later Picasso reinvents painting with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
The ETH (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), stands next to the university on Rämistrasse. Set back from the street is a small courtyard. Its open oak doors reveal arches, balconies, dimly lit by skylights and high windows.
Theoretical physics is just coming into its own as an academic discipline. Its pioneers, Max Planck in Berlin, Hendrik Lorentz in Holland, and Ludwig Boltzmann in Vienna combine physics with mathematics to suggest territories that experimentalists have yet to explore. Mathematics is supposed to be a major part of Albert’s compulsory studies at the polytechnic.
As for Marie, Albert has grown weary of their relationship.
When Albert gives a disingenuous hint that he plans to visit her in Aarau, Marie is thrilled. She vows that she will love him for eternity. Albert finds this cloying. She sends him a gift of a teapot.
He realises the one-sided relationship can’t go on. He tells her bluntly that they should refrain from writing to each other.
Marie says she can’t believe he really means this.
Albert finds it hard to disguise his irritation. The gift of a teapot goes down badly. He doesn’t want a teapot.
She retaliates: ‘The matter of my sending you the stupid little teapot does not have to please you at all as long as you are going to brew some good tea in it. Stop making that angry face which looked at me from all the sides and corners of the writing paper.’
He stops writing to her.
Marie writes to his mother for advice.
‘The rascal has become frightfully lazy,’ Pauline Einstein tells her. ‘I have been waiting in vain for news for these last three days; I will have to give him a thorough talking-to once he’s here.’
Albert tells Marie’s mother that the relationship is over. He won’t be coming to Aarau in springtime.
It would be more than unworthy of me to buy a few days of bliss at the cost of new pain, of which I have already caused too much to the dear child through my fault. It fills me with a peculiar kind of satisfaction that now I myself have to taste some of the pain that I brought upon the dear girl through my thoughtlessness and ignorance of her delicate nature. Strenuous intellectual work and looking at God’s nature are the reconciling, fortifying yet relentlessly strict angels that shall lead me through all of life’s troubles. If only I were able to give some of this to the good child. And yet, what a peculiar way this is to weather the storms of life – in many a lucid moment I appear to myself as an ostrich who buries his head in the desert sand so as not to perceive the danger.
Marie suffers an acute depression, whereas Albert’s eyes focus on someone else.
HERE IS MILEVA
Five male students join the mathematics and physics class, and one woman, Mileva Maric, a twenty-year-old, slim Hungarian-Serb. Albert admires her seriousness. She seems almost as much of an outsider as he does. He notices the orthopaedic boots she wears. One leg is shorter than the other causing her to limp. He admires the lack of fuss with which she deals with her disability.
Mileva becomes friends with another student, Hélène Slavic from Vienna. Hélène is studying history. They have rooms with two Serb and two Croat women in a pension run by Fraulein Engelbrecht at Plattenstrasse 50, not far from Albert.
In one or other of the many cafés on Zürich’s Baschligplatz, he holds forth to his friend Marcel Grossmann, from an old aristocratic Thalwil family.
Albert puffs at his long pipe: ‘Listen to me. Atoms and mechanics are the concepts that will reduce natural phenomena to fundamental principles in the way geometry could be found in a few axioms or propositions.’
They rail against the pointless lives of the bourgeoisie, swearing never to be trapped by the petty and the provincial.
The friends consume vast amounts of coffee, bratwurst and tobacco; so much that they stain Albert’s teeth brown. In the evenings he plays the violin for his friends. The Mozart Violin Sonata in E minor, and Sonata No. 6, K.301. Afterwards they use the telescope at the Eidgenössische Sternwarte, built by Gottfried Semper to look at the night sky. No sign of Mileva.
He pontificates in the physics labs in the hope that Mileva might be impressed. She stares at him and usually directs her stare sharply back to the task in hand. Work comes first. Albert recognises a fellow traveller. He glimpses her in the library and admires her wide and sensuous mouth. He catches sight of her with friends at a concert given by Theodor Billroth performing Brahms. Albert finds the very sight of her radiates powerful sensuality. Perhaps fearful of rejection, he is a passive suitor, waiting for her to make the first move, which she doesn’t.
HEINRICH FRIEDRICH WEBER
At the same time Albert makes enemies. He bridles at the head of the physics department, Professor Heinrich Friedrich Weber, who’s inordinately proud of the new building he’s persuaded Siemens to build. Weber’s predeliction is for the history of physics. Albert’s passion is for the present and future of physics. Weber even makes no mention of Albert’s hero, the mathematical physicist James Clerk Maxwell, whose pioneering equations accurately described the theory of electromagnetism.
Albert treats Weber with a cheeky informality, calling him ‘Herr Weber’, not ‘Professor’. Weber forms a simmering dislike for Albert’s cheek.
Albert is no slouch. Among other courses, he takes Weber’s in Physics, Oscillations, Electromechanics, Theory of Alternating Current and Absolute Electrical Measurements.
Albert also studies alone. He’s captivated by the series of brilliant experiments by Heinrich Hertz, who has discovered radio waves and established that James Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism is correct. Hertz has also discovered the photoelectric effect, providing one of the initial clues to the quantum world’s existence.
Weber takes him to one side. ‘You’re a very clever boy, Einstein.’
‘Thank you, Herr Weber.’
‘Professor Weber. But you have one great fault. You’ll never let yourself be told anything.’
Albert treats it as a compliment.
Then he causes offence to the other ETH professor, Jean Pernet, by playing truant from his course: Physical Experiments for Beginners. The small, plump Pernet demands Albert receive a Verweis: a strong official reprimand from the director.
Pernet calls Albert to his office. ‘Your work has a measure of goodwill about it. You’re eager enough. But you have a lack of capability. Why not give up physics. Study medicine, philology or law?’
Albert is silent.
‘Well?’ says Pernet.
‘Because I feel I have a talent,’ says Albert. ‘Why can’t I pursue physics?’
‘Do what you want, Einstein. Do what you want. I am warning you. In your own interests.’
When Albert turns up at Pernet’s next lecture he’s given an instruction paper, which he ceremoniously dumps in the wastepaper basket.
Then he causes a sensation in Pernet’s lab. A woman student struggles to seal a test tube with a cork. Pernet tells her the test tube will disintegrate.
‘The man’s insane,’ Albert tells her. ‘His rage made him faint the other day. Passed clean out in class.’
The test tube explodes. The blast damages Albert’s right hand. He can’t play the violin for several weeks.
Though he likes the mathematics professor, Hermann Minkowski, a thirty-year-old Russian Jew, he even plays truant from his lectures. Minkowski calls Albert ‘a lazy dog’.
MARCEL GROSSMANN
His closest friend, Marcel Grossmann, is from an old Swiss family in Zürich. Albert admires Grossmann. He’s a quick learner. The pair hang out at the Café Metropole by the River Limmat. Marcel tells his parents: ‘One day this Einstein will be a great man.’
Music is a diversion from the inadequacies of the ETH. Bach. Schubert. Mozart. So is sailing alone on Lake Zürich.
Albert joins in the musical evenings at Fraulein Engelbrecht’s pension at Plattenstrasse 50, where he turns up with his violin and physics books. Mileva plays the tamburitza and piano.
Albert also attends meetings of the Swiss branch of the Society for Ethical Culture.
He finds a political mentor, Gustav Maier, director of the Brann department store, a popular figure on the scientific and cultural scene.
Now he summons up courage to issue an invitation to Mileva. He proposes she accompany him on a hiking expedition. Eine Wanderung. To look at the world from Zürich’s Uetliberg mountain.
The day-trippers take the train from Zürich’s Hauptbahnhof, riding up the Uezgi, entranced by the mountain blooms and blossoms.
‘Look,’ says Albert. ‘Allium ursinum.’
‘What?’
‘Wild garlic.’
At 2,850 feet, the Uetliberg towers over the rooftops of Zürich and the vivid blue lakes.
Albert puts his arm around her shoulders. ‘There’s the Reppisch Valley,’ he tells her. ‘Over there, the Bernese Alps, the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau.’ He takes her hand. They gaze into each other’s eyes.
He stoops down, picks a flower and holds it out to Mileva. ‘For you.’
‘For me?’
‘For you.’
‘What is it?’
‘Myosotis alpestris. It’s a forget-me-not. Promise me?’
‘Anything.’
‘Forget me not.’
She draws his mouth to hers. Her lips are full. Her tongue playful. He strokes her cheeks. Inhales her fragrance, cologne. He rubs his hand slowly up and down her back. She moans softly. They stand in silence, smiling.
On holiday in Milan his mother finds him transformed. The family laugh, play the piano and violin, and joke.
Albert immerses himself in the history of the Jewish community of Milan, which is fairly recent, starting in the early nineteenth century. Before then, under the Sforza and Visconti, the Jews were permitted to stay for just a few days at a time in the city. Then, in the early 1800s, the restrictions were lifted. In 1892, the Central Synagogue was inaugurated.
He relishes the idea that Milan is also the only city in the world with a vineyard at its heart. He finds it in the courtyard of the House of Atellani on the Corso Magenta. Best of all, the owner of the vineyard had once been none other than Leonardo da Vinci. Albert is transported right back to 1490 when Leonardo planted it.
He plunges into reading da Vinci, sometimes writing out Leonardo’s observations and thoughts that seem to confirm many of his own. He annotates Leonardo’s remarks: I know this to be true.
When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return. He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.
Poor is the pupil that does not surpass his master.
The perspective of light is my perspective.
If the Lord – who is the light of all things – vouchsafe to enlighten me, I will treat of Light; wherefore I will divide the present work into 3 Parts . . . Linear Perspective, The Perspective of Colour, The Perspective of Disappearance.
Who will offer me a wage to exist? It vexes me greatly that having to earn my living has forced me to interrupt the work and to attend to small matters.
He thinks of Mileva. I love you. I love you, Mileva Maric.
‘Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love,’ he mutters to himself.
Leonardo says: ‘The act of procreation and anything that has any relation to it is so disgusting that human beings would soon die out if there were no pretty faces and sensuous dispositions.’
Ich liebe dich, Mileva. Ich liebe und verehre dich.
I love you, Mileva. I love and adore you.
He returns to Zürich in high spirits and makes straight for Plattenstrasse, only to be greeted by a thunderbolt. Mileva’s landlady, Johanna Bachtöld, answers the door.
‘Here to see Mileva?’ she says.
‘Yes.’
‘She’s left,’ Fraulein Bachtöld says.
‘She’s what?’
‘She’s left. She’s given up her studies.’
‘Where’s she gone?’
‘Back to Hungary,’ says Fraulein Bachtöld.
‘How long for.’
‘I don’t know. For ever, I suppose.’
For four weeks Mileva keeps a baffling silence.
Albert assumes, rightly, that she must have gone home to Kac in Hungary, almost a thousand kilometres east of Zürich, to the family villa, the Spire, where Mileva was born.
As a bright, temperamental child, she does her best to disguise the hip dislocated at birth. She learns the piano and tries to dance.
Her father says her dancing reminds him of a wounded bird. The pattern of her education is as spidery as Albert’s. Her father’s postings as a civil servant mean that she attends Volksschule in Ruma; the Serbian Higher Girls’ School in Novi Sad; the Kleine Real Schule in Sremska Mitrovica, and other establishments in Sabac and Zagreb. She develops a passion for mathematics, which leads her to Zürich and to the ETH and Albert. And now? She’s back home.
What drives her to go home is a mystery; perhaps even to herself. She doesn’t communicate with Albert. Albert doesn’t, or rather can’t, communicate with her.
She once more begins travelling, west to Heidelberg, where she takes a room in the Hotel Ritter.
She introduces herself to Philipp Lenard, recently appointed professor of theoretical physics at the University of Heidelberg and a pioneer in the development of the cathode-ray tube, in which cathode rays produce a luminous image on a fluorescent screen.
Back in Zürich, after some nifty detective work among her friends, Albert discovers her whereabouts.
He writes to her asking her to get in touch. Her reply is long in coming. When it does Albert opens the envelope in a fever of excitement. His loved one writes:
I would have answered immediately to thank you for your sacrifice in writing, this repaying a bit of the enjoyment you had of me during our hike together – but you said I shouldn’t write until I was bored – and I am very obedient (just ask Fraulein Bachtöld). I waited and waited for boredom to set in, but until today my waiting has been in vain, and I’m not sure what to do about it. On the one hand, I could wait until the end of time, but then you would think me a barbarian – on the other I still can’t write to you with a clear conscience.
As you’ve already heard, I’ve been walking around under German oaks in the lovely Neckar valley, whose allure is unfortunately now bashfully cloaked in a thick fog. No matter how much I strain my eyes, that’s all I see; it’s as desolate and grey as infinity.
Papa gave me some tobacco that I’m to give you personally. He’s eager to whet your appetite for our little land of outlaws. I told him all about you – you absolutely must come back with me someday – the two of you would really have a lot to talk about! But I’ll have to play the role of interpreter. I can’t send the tobacco, because should you have to pay duty on it, you would curse me and my present.
It really was too enjoyable in Prof. Lenard’s lecture yesterday; now he’s talking about the kinetic theory of gases. It seems that oxygen molecules travel at a speed of over 400m per second, and after calculating and calculating, the good professor set up equations, differentiated, integrated, substituted, and finally shows that the molecules in question actually do move at such a velocity, but that they only travel the distance of 1⁄100 of a hair’s breadth.
Best wishes, your Mileva
Mileva considers returning to Zürich.
The one misgiving her father has about her decision concerns the eighteen-year-old Albert. ‘I know it amuses you that he has no interest in his clothes or grooming. That he’s always losing his keys, leaves his suitcase on trains. You’re four years older than he is. That’s quite a gap.’
‘Maybe,’ she says. ‘But he’s my peer. He’s someone I can talk to. He feels the same about me.’
‘What are his job prospects?’
‘He’ll find work as a teacher somewhere, Papa. And his family has some money.’
‘Do you love him, Mileva?’
‘Yes, Papa. I do.’
‘It shows, it shows.’
Albert writes to her as if she’s a friend: ‘Liebes Fräulein.’ Then he playfully calls her ‘Liebes Doxerl’, ‘Dear Dollie’. She addresses him as Johanzel, Johnnie.
‘Without you I lack self-confidence,’ Albert writes, ‘passion for work, and enjoyment of life, in short, without you, my life is no life. If only you could be here with me for a while! We understand one another’s dark souls so well.’
Then comes news from Mileva that she has a goiter, an abnormal enlargement of her thyroid gland producing a large lump at the front of her neck.
The news appals Albert’s parents. Mileva is obviously a disabled freak. Their insults mortify him.
Mileva spends her time on solitary walks along the river banks and in the forests. She is highly amused by the copy of Mark Twain’s A Tramp Abroad that Albert sends her. He underlines:
In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print – I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:
Gretchen: ‘Wilhelm, where is the turnip?’
Wilhelm: ‘She has gone to the kitchen.’
Gretchen: ‘Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?’
Wilhelm: ‘It has gone to the opera.’
Alone, she attends lectures, reads in the library or visits the Kurpfälzisches Museum of art and archaeology in the Palais Morass.
Her solitude proves too much, the distance from Albert too far. She pines for him. So she goes back to Zürich.
