Einstein (43 page)

The façade of familial harmony, however, masked the deterioration of the marriage. After his visit to Serbia and a stop in Vienna for his annual appearance at the conference of German-speaking physicists, Einstein continued on to Berlin, alone. There he was reunited with Elsa. “I now have someone I can think about with pure delight and I can live for,” he told her.
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Elsa’s home cooking, a hearty pleasure she lavished on him like a mother, became a theme in their letters. Their correspondence, like their relationship, was a stark contrast to that between Einstein and Mari
a dozen years earlier. He and Elsa tended to write to each other about domestic comforts—food, tranquillity, hygiene, fondness—rather than about romantic bliss and planted kisses, or intimacies of the soul and insights of the intellect.

Despite such conventional concerns, Einstein still fancied their relationship could avoid sinking into a mundane pattern. “How nice it would be if one of these days we could share in managing a small bohemian household,” he wrote. “You have no idea how charming such a life with very small needs and without grandeur can be!”
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When Elsa gave him a hairbrush, he initially prided himself on his progress in personal grooming, but then he reverted to more slovenly ways and told her, only half jokingly, that it was to guard against the philistines and the bourgeoisie. Those were words he had used with Mari
as well, but more earnestly.

Elsa wanted not only to domesticate Einstein but to marry him. Even before he moved to Berlin, she wrote to urge him to divorce Mari
. It would become a running battle for years, until she finally won
her way. But for the moment, Einstein was resistant. “Do you think,” he asked her, “it is so easy to get a divorce if one does not have any proof of the other party’s guilt?” She should accept that he had virtually separated from Mari
even if he was not going to divorce her. “I treat my wife as an employee whom I cannot fire. I have my own bedroom and avoid being alone with her.” Elsa was upset that Einstein did not want to marry her, and she was fearful of how an illicit relationship would affect her daughters, but Einstein insisted it was for the best.
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Mari
was understandably depressed by the prospect of moving to Berlin. There she would have to deal with Einstein’s mother, who had never liked her, and his cousin, whom she rightly suspected of being a rival. In addition, Berlin had sometimes been less tolerant to Slavs than it was even to Jews. “My wife whines to me incessantly about Berlin and her fear of the relatives,” Einstein wrote Elsa. “Well, there is some truth in this.” In another letter, when he noted that Mari
was afraid of her, he added, “Rightly so I hope!”
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Indeed, by this point all of the women in his life—his mother, sister, wife, and kissing cousin—were at war with one another. As Christmas 1913 neared, Einstein’s struggle to generalize relativity had the added benefit of being a way to avoid family emotions. The effort produced yet another eloquent restatement of how science could rescue him from the merely personal. “The love of science thrives under these circumstances,” he told Elsa, “for it lifts me impersonally from the vale of tears into peaceful spheres.”
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With the approach of the spring of 1914 and their move to Berlin, Eduard came down with an ear infection that made it necessary for Mari
to take him to an Alpine resort to recover. “This has a good side,” Einstein told Elsa. He would initially be traveling to Berlin alone, and “in order to savor that,” he decided to skip a conference in Paris so that he could arrive earlier.

On one of their last evenings in Zurich, he and Mari
went to the Hurwitz house for a farewell musical evening. Once again, the program featured Schumann, in an attempt to cheer her up. It didn’t. She instead sat by herself in a corner and did not speak to anyone.
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By April 1914, Einstein had settled into a spacious apartment just west of Berlin’s city center. Mari
had picked it out when she visited Berlin over Christmas vacation, and she arrived in late April, after Eduard’s ear infection had subsided.
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The tensions in Einstein’s domestic life were exacerbated by overwork and mental strain. He was settling into a new job—actually three new jobs—and still struggling with his fitful attempts to generalize his theory of relativity and tie it into a theory of gravity. That first April in Berlin, for example, he engaged in an intense correspondence with Paul Ehrenfest over ways to calculate the forces affecting rotating electrons in a magnetic field. He started writing a theory for such situations, then realized it was wrong. “The angel had unveiled itself halfway in its magnificence,” he told Ehrenfest, “then on further unveiling a cloven hoof appeared and I ran away.”

Even more revealing, perhaps more than he meant it to be, was his comment to Ehrenfest about his personal life in Berlin.“I really delight in my local relatives,” he reported, “especially in a cousin of my age.”
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When Ehrenfest came for a visit at the end of April, Mari
had just arrived, and he found her gloomy and yearning for Zurich. Einstein, on the other hand, had thrown himself into his work. “He had the impression that the family was taking a bit too much of his time, and that he had the duty to concentrate completely on his work,” his son Hans Albert later recollected about that fateful spring of 1914.
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