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Albert Einstein/Mileva Maric: The Love Letters edited by Jurgen Renn
and Robert Schulmann, Princeton Universirt Press, pp 107, £12.50

It goes without saying that Albert Einstein was a remarkable human
being. Beginning in 1905, he rebuilt physics from the ground up, revolutionising
ideas of gravity, space and time. But, though the events of his life are
well chronicled after the ‘miraculous year’ in which he introduced relativity,
and explained Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect (for which he
later got the Nobel prize), there are very few documents which give us a
window into this unique mind during the years it was developing.

The love letters of Albert Einstein and Mileva Maric, not discovered
until 1986, do just this. ‘What we have here,’ say the editors Jurgen Renn
and Robert Schulmann, ‘is a youth in the process of becoming Albert Einstein’.

Maric was an extraordinary young woman, the only female student of physics
in his university class. He called her ‘a creature who is my equal, and
is as strong and independent as I am’. The letters – 54 from Einstein and
only 11 from Maric – span the period from when he met her in 1897 to when
they finally married in 1903.

She called him Johnnie. He called her Dollie. Einstein’s mother was
very much against her, considering her ‘beneath his station’. ‘You are ruining
your future and destroying your opportunities,’ she told him. ‘No decent
family will have her.’

The letters document Einstein’s intellectual development in the midst
of these conflicts of adolescence. ‘His rebelliousness and theatrical attitude
in his personal life are paralleled in his developing self-image as a lonely
revolutionary of science,’ say Renn and Schulmann.

‘If she gets pregnant you’ll really be in a mess,’ Einstein’s mother
said. She did, and the child, called Lieserl, was secretly adopted in 1901.
These letters contain the only coded references to the child the couple
could not keep for fear Einstein would forfeit his career in science. The
only indication of their heartbreak and torment is a letter from Einstein
to Maric in 1903 in which he pours out his fears on learning that Lieserl
has contracted scarlet fever.

Nobody has ever traced Lieserl Einstein, who might still be alive.

But there are light-hearted moments as well in these letters. Who could
have imagined Einstein bristling with pride as he tells his girl: ‘Do you
know that I’ve been shaving myself for quite some time now, and with great
success?’ Then what about the way Einstein’s treated his ‘ex’, Marie Winteler,
whom he had gone out with in his final year of secondary school? ‘After
he had moved to Zurich and met Mileva, he still sent Marie his dirty laundry
and she mailed it back to him,’ say Renn and Schulmann. Einstein was no
new man.

Einstein and Maric eventually parted. In their correspondence he had
declared: ‘I’m so lucky to have found you, a creature who is my equal, and
who is as strong and independent as I am.’ But the tragedy was that she
did not remain his equal. As he climbed steadily into the scientific stratosphere,
she, an extraordinary woman but a woman of her time nonetheless, was left
behind, looking after the children and unable to talk to him about physics.

If I have one major criticism of this book it is that you cannot read
more than a few lines without having to turn to the notes at the end of
the book for an explanation of what you have just read. Clearly, there are
references to people and events in each letter which need further explanation.
But why did the editors not put their numbered explanations at the end of
each letter?