Family and Relationships

An honest account of Einstein has to include this page. He could be generous and loyal to friends and devoted to humanity in general, while being cold, and at times cruel, to the people nearest him.

Mileva Marić

Mileva Marić was a physics student from Serbia, the only woman in Einstein's class at the Zurich Polytechnic and one of very few women studying physics anywhere in Europe. They fell in love as students. His family, especially his mother, opposed the match.

In early 1902, before they married, Mileva gave birth to a daughter at her parents' home. The child was called Lieserl. Einstein, by then in Switzerland, probably never saw her. She is last mentioned in a letter of September 1903, when she had scarlet fever. Whether she died or was given up for adoption is not known. Her existence was unknown to the world until the couple's early letters were published in the 1980s.

They married in January 1903 and had two sons, Hans Albert in 1904 and Eduard in 1910.

The End of the Marriage

The marriage soured as Einstein's career rose. Before the marriage ended he had begun a relationship with his cousin Elsa in Berlin. When the family moved to Berlin in 1914, he presented Mileva with a written list of conditions for continuing to live together: she was to keep his rooms and laundry in order and bring his meals, expect no affection, and stop speaking to him when he asked. She took the boys back to Zurich within months.

They divorced in 1919. Under the settlement, Einstein promised that the money from the Nobel Prize, which he had not yet won but confidently expected, would be placed in trust for her and the boys, with Mileva drawing the interest. When it came, the money did go to support them, though the arrangement led to further disputes.

Whether Mileva contributed to the science of 1905 is debated. See Myths and Misconceptions.

Elsa

Einstein married his cousin Elsa Löwenthal in 1919, a few months after the divorce. She was three years older, twice his cousin, and had two daughters, Ilse and Margot, whom he treated as his own. Elsa managed his household and protected his time, and accepted, not happily, that he had affairs with other women. She emigrated with him in 1933 and died in Princeton in 1936.

The Sons

Hans Albert resented his father's treatment of his mother, and they quarreled over his choice of career and of wife. He became a distinguished professor of hydraulic engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Father and son were partly reconciled in later years, and Hans Albert came to Princeton to be with him in his final days.

Eduard, known as Tete, was a gifted and sensitive boy who loved music and literature and planned to become a psychiatrist. At about twenty he developed schizophrenia. He spent much of the rest of his life in the Burghölzli clinic in Zurich and died there in 1965. Einstein contributed to the cost of his care, but after leaving Europe in 1933 he never saw him again, and contact between them dwindled.

Other Uncomfortable Facts

The private travel diaries Einstein kept on his 1922–23 journey to the Far East, Palestine, and Spain, published in an English edition in 2018, contain crude and demeaning generalizations about the Chinese and other peoples he encountered. They are hard to square with the man who, twenty years later, spoke out against racism in America more plainly than almost any white public figure of his time. Both are part of the record. See Convictions.

What to Make of It

Admiring his work does not require pretending otherwise.