1. «Albert Einstein: A Biography» by Albrecht Fölsing / «Альберт Эйнштейн: биография» Альбрехта Фелсинга 1998 На самом деле, второе объяснение более вероятно, поскольку развитие речи Эйнштейна было поразительно медленным, как он сам позже подтвердит: "Это правда, что мои родители беспокоились из-за того, что я начал говорить относительно поздно, настолько, что они обратились к врачу. Я не могу сказать, сколько мне было тогда, определенно не меньше трех ".12 Однако задержка, похоже, была вызвана ранним стремлением говорить только полными предложениями. Если бы кто-то задал ему вопрос, он сначала сформулировал бы ответ в уме, произнес бы его вполголоса — намеренно, с явными движениями губ — и только убедившись, что его формулировка верна, повторил бы предложение вслух. Из-за этого часто создавалось впечатление, что он повторяет все дважды, и поэтому служанка называла его "глупым".13 Он отказался от этой привычки только на седьмом году жизни или, возможно (по некоторым свидетельствам), только на девятом. Создается впечатление не только особой тщательности — объяснение этой особенности позже дала его сестра, — но и кропотливого и самокритичного овладения мальчиком языком, в отличие от естественного, беспроблемного обучения большинства детей. Publication date 1998 Айбрехт Фольсинг родился в Германии в 1940 году и изучал физику в Берлине, Филадельфии и Гамбурге. Он стал научным журналистом и возглавлял отдел науки и природы немецкого общественного телеканала. В дополнение к своему исследованию Эйнштейна он опубликовал биографии Галилея (1983), Вильгельма Конрада Рентгена (1995) и совсем недавно Генриха Герца (1997).

FOREWORD

Even four decades after his death, an exceptional fascination is evoked by the name of Albert Einstein. It far transcends the fact that he was indisputably the greatest physicist of our century, comparable to Isaac Newton—but Einstein is much more than a subject for specialists in the history of science.

Einstein's legendary greatness, which still touches many of us today, is based on a multitude of factors; but it is primarily linked to physics, in several respects. His concepts of space and time, of the "fourth dimension," and of a finite but unbounded universe in which light travels along a curved path, are regarded as revolutionary, comparable, in their effect on human understanding, only to those of Copernicus. However, the results of his profound reflections on nature are also—through his legendary formula E = mc¹—indirectly connected with the atom bomb and all that it has meant in terms of destruction, fear, and terror. If ever a theory born of an innocent search for knowledge became a material force, then it was in the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima.

The creator of this theory lived not in an ivory tower but in a time of wars and conflicts, and he faced this situation with a strong sense of humanitarian responsibility and a need to intervene in politics. His humanism, which assigned greater importance to what was common to all people than to what divided them, gave him a "left-wing" identity. However, he was not tied to any party⁷ doctrine but instead was stamped by the social ethics of Judaism, which include sympathy for the underdog. He put his fame—he was already a legend at the age of

Thus the Einsteins had established themselves in an innovative industry with good prospects of growth. They were what we would now describe as high-tech venture entrepreneurs.

A photograph of Hermann Einstein from this time shows him as a typical patriarch of Germany's early industrial period: his hair is cropped short; he is clean-shaven, except for a precise mustache; he gazes severely through a monocle, demanding respect—in fact, he looks like a Prussian. But those who knew him remembered him differently—as a kind and friendly man, esteemed and loved by all of his family and friends, especially those of the female sex. He certainly was hardworking, but not to an extent that would have interfered with the pleasanter side of life. He made frequent excursions with his family to the surroundings of Munich, and he enjoyed the ancient Bavarian pastime of visiting beer cellars.

He was exceedingly fond of his wife, Pauline, and "the character of the couple harmonized so perfectly that throughout their whole lives the marriage was not only never clouded, but in fact proved the only solid and reliable element at all turns of fate."*" This may also have been due to the fact that their religious views were in harmony. Both of them respected and declared their Jewish origins, and they probably never considered Christian baptism, either for themselves or for their children, as a way of assimilating further. However, the synagogue no longer played a role in their family life: they did not go to a temple, nor did they pray at home. The precepts of kosher cooking were ignored, and pork was eaten as a matter of course. With his freethinker's attitude Hermann even prided himself that Jewish rites and customs were not practiced in his house.⁸ The writings of the Prophets were scarcely read, and the Talmud not at all. Instead, in the circle of his family Hermann Einstein recited Schiller and Heine⁹—Schiller as a Swabian national hero of the enlightened bourgeoisie and Heine as a popular Jewish poet writing in German. Comparing his own life with Heine's may indeed have buttressed his faith in the progress of civilization: Hermann Einstein—unlike Heine—did not have to be baptized to be accepted by his fellow citizens.

This, then, was the environment in which Albert Einstein grew up—at first to the pure joy of his parents and relatives. The earliest characterization of his personality comes from his grandmother Jette Koch, who visited Munich in the summer of 1881 and said of her two-year-old grandson: "Little Albert is so sweet and so good that it pains me already not to be able to see him for such a long time." A week later, she wrote to Munich: "Little Albert is fondly remembered by us; he was so sweet and good, and we have to repeat his amusing ideas again and again."¹⁰ L'nfortunately, the fond grandmother did not record any of those amusing ideas.

Little Albert's reaction to the birth of his sister Maria on November 18, 1881, was certainly amusing. No doubt the boy, then two years and eight months old, had been told of the arrival of a Madele, a little girl, as a future playmate, because he promptly inquired where the Radele, the wheels, of his new toy were.¹¹ This may have been an early hint of his later delight in making up rhymes, or it may have been no more than a little boy's mishearing and being disappointed to find that the screaming bundle was not a plaything. Actually, the second explanation is more probable, since Einstein's speech development was strikingly slow, as he himself would later confirm: "It is true that my parents were worried because I began to speak relatively late, so much so they consulted a doctor. I can't say how old I was then, certainly not less than three."¹² However, the delay seems to have been due to an early ambition to speak only in complete sentences. If someone asked him a question, he would first form the answer in his head, try it out in an undertone—deliberately, with obvious lip movements—and only after assuring himself that his formulation was correct would he repeat the sentence aloud. This often gave the impression that he was saying everything twice, and the maidservant therefore called him "stupid."¹³ He gave up this habit only in his seventh year, or perhaps (according to some testimony) not until his ninth. One has the impression not only of particular thoroughness—the explanation his sister later gave for this peculiarity—but also of a boy's laborious and self-critical acquisition of language, in contrast to most children's natural, unproblematical learning.

Albert's younger sister—nicknamed Maja—recorded in her warmhearted biographical notes that he was fondest of engrossing himself in all kinds of puzzles, making elaborate structures \vith building blocks and constructing houses of cards of breathtaking height. He was less interested in playing in the garden with young relatives who often came visiting, and he was totally averse to the fights of the boys in the street. These boys soon nicknamed him "the bore." If he could not avoid playing with other children, he deliberately sought the job of umpire, which, because of his instinctive sense of justice, was gladly assigned to him.

When Albert was five years old, a woman was engaged as a tutor to prepare him for the rigors of school life. She, however, found herself unequal to another trait in the boy's makeup—one that the family believed he had inherited from his grandfather Julius Koch. Whenever something was not to Albert's liking, he was seized by a sudden temper, his face paled, his nose turned white, and the consequences were terrible. On one occasion, when he did not like a lesson, "he grabbed a chair and with it struck the woman tutor, who was so terrified that she ran away in fear and was never seen again."¹⁴ His little sister, too, had to suffer: "On another occasion he threw a large nine-pin bowl at [her] head, and yet another time he used a child's pickaxe to strike a hole in [her] head."¹⁵ Fortunately, these tantrums receded during his seventh year and disappeared completely during his first years at school.

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One might ask at this point how such a child—with conspicuously delayed speech development, averse to play and social behavior appropriate to his age, and moreover with an occasional total lack of self-control—would fare in the tests and examinations that now precede enrollment in school. Such a child, in a fit of temper, might attack a teacher or a psychologist with a chair, just as occurred a century ago with young Albert Einstein and his tutor. In the accepted view of child psychologists, a child like this should be diagnosed long before starting school and given some form of therapy or other, when, as with little Albert, there are speech problems suggesting defective development. The psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson, who has ventured to make this remote diagnosis on the strength of the records, believes that cases of this kind deserve or even demand careful attention.¹⁶ At the same time, he regards Albert Einstein's example as a warning against the present tendency to fit all children into the same mold; this could inhibit rather than promote the development of talent. In the event, Einstein grew up without the benefit of a therapist and developed his own distinctive character traits: his determination to apply his own yardstick, his intense brooding, and his profound way of wondering about things.

Einstein's receptiveness to "wonders" and "wondering" was of enormous importance to him throughout his life as a motivation for productive thought, especially in scientific matters. This was a trait which he felt he could not explain to himself, but he commended "wondering," and slowness, in a letter to a colleague, the Nobel Prize laureate James Franck:

When I ask myself why it should have been me, rather than anyone else, who discovered the relativity theory, I think that this was due to the following circumstance: An adult does not reflect on space-time problems. Anything that needs reflection on this matter he believes he did in his early childhood. I, on the other hand, developed so slowly that I only began to reflect about space and time when I was grown up. Naturally I then penetrated more deeply into these problems than an ordinary child would.¹⁷

It is clear therefore that Einstein's notion of "wondering" is very different from the common meaning of that term—a noncommittal inability to understand. In his own view:

It seems to occur whenever an experience comes into conflict with a conceptual world sufficiently fixated within us. If such a conflict is experienced strongly and intensively, then it reacts back in a decisive manner upon our mental world. In a certain sense, the development of that mental world is a continual flight from "wonder."—I experienced a wonder of just that kind as a child of 4 or 5, when my father showed me a compass.¹⁸

Thus in what Einstein facetiously called his "Nekrolog," his 'Obituary"—published as Autobiographisches—he recalls an experience which he frequently related and which is recorded in several (basically agreeing) versions. He was sick in bed, when, no doubt to divert him, his father brought him a compass—not suspecting the lasting impres-sion this instrument would make:

The fact that the needle behaved in such a definite manner did not fit at all into the pattern of occurrences which had established itself in my subconscious conceptual world (effects being connected with "contact"). I remember to this day—or think I remember—the deep and lasting impression this experience made on me. There had to be something behind the objects, something that was hidden.¹⁹

Although the subject matter of Einstein's great accomplishment—the essay Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Korper (On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies) of 1905, which contains the special theory of relativity—seems to be foreshadowed here, one should probably not read too much into this experience. A lot of children wonder about a rainbow, and some no doubt will have wondered about a compass needle, which seems to be moved by an invisible hand. A prism diffracting light or an apple dropping from a tree may evoke wonderment and clever questions. Altogether, as Sigmund Freud observed, the intelligence of adults pales against the brilliant intelligence of five-year-olds. Still, among all these children only one became an Isaac Newton and only one an Albert Einstein.

Einstein himself was unable to explain this powerful experience, because "a person has little insight into what goes on inside him. Seeing a compass for the first time may not produce a similar effect on a young dog, nor indeed on many a child. What then is it that determines a particular reaction from an individual? More or less plausible theories may be constructed about it, but one does not arrive at a deeper insight.¹'²⁰ We will have to content ourselves with the suggestion that a productive result probably depends both on the "wonder" and on the person "wondering."

CHAPTER TWO

School

When Albert Einstein reached the statutory school age, six, his parents were spared the problem of choosing a school. The only Jewish private school in Munich had been closed in 1872 for lack of pupils,¹ a clear indication of the readiness of its Jews to assimilate. (One in fifty of Munich's population was Jewish, and this proportion had remained fairly constant during the city's growth over the last two decades of the nineteenth century. In the city center it was slightly higher, and in suburbs like Sendling it was distinctly lower.) In the absence of any alternatives, therefore, beginning on October 1, 1885, Albert attended the nearest school, the Petersschule on Blumenstrasse, a big Catholic elementary school with more than two thousand students from all strata of the population. At a brisk walking pace down Lindwurmstrasse it could be reached in about twenty minutes. Albert was accepted into the second grade: his private tuition, therefore, despite its disastrous end, cannot have been entirely in vain.

Albert was the only Jew among some seventy classmates. He participated in the Catholic religious studies and was in fact particularly liked by the teacher.² "The teaching staff in the elementary school were liberal and made no difference between denominations."³ Such an attitude was a result of both the humanitarian educational reforms of the time and the progressive views of a large part of the Munich bourgeoisie.

Nevertheless, that same teacher of religious studies made Einstein clearly realize that among all those good Christians he must feel an outsider: "One day that teacher brought a long nail to the lesson and told the students that with just such nails Christ had been nailed to the Cross by the Jews."⁴ This macabre method of teaching the Gospel was an indication that even liberal teachers were, as Christians, not free from an innate, if mild, anti-Semitism. Among the students this led to more outspoken aggression, as Einstein recollected: "Among the children at the elementary school anti-Semitism was prevalent. It was based on racial characteristics of which the children were strangely aware and on impressions from religious teaching. Physical attacks and insults on the way home from school w^rere frequent, but for the most part not too vicious. But they were sufficient to consolidate even in a child a lively sense of being an outsider."⁵ At the same time, though, we have no evidence that Einstein ever suffered from his "sense of being an outsider," either as a child or in later years. Being a "stranger" and "loner" were both probably his most important personality traits from his earliest vears.

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Even in elementary school, therefore, Einstein never stepped out of his characteristic isolation. He rarely played with coevals, not even with the children who had meantime been born to Uncle Jakob or with his boy and girl cousins, who frequently came to visit. In his deliberate but usually reserved manner he got on reasonably well with them, but they gave him the nickname "Goody Goody." What probably helped to earn him that reputation w^ras the fact that he always had to finish his homework before being allowed to play: "No excuse was accepted by our parents for any infringement of that rule."⁶

Success followed, for on August 1, 1886, at the end of Albert's first year at school in second grade, his mother wrote to her sister Fanny Einstein: "Albert got his grades yesterday, he was again top of the class, he brought home a brilliant report .. ."⁷ Admittedly, he had an ingrained dislike of physical training and games, "as he easily got vertigo and got tired quickly."⁸ Yet he did not get tired at all when he was engrossed with his beloved metal construction set, or with involved fretsaw work, or with manipulating a small, hissing steam engine which Uncle Caesar Koch had brought him as a present.

Albert Einstein the schoolboy would thus have appeared to his parents and teachers as a well-behaved child who had learned to submit to the inevitabilities of routine and obedience, as demanded by school and the world of adults. But behind that facade of adjustment there was still a determination to preserve his individuality, though this now manifested itself in a more sublimated, socially acceptable form: a dreamerlike, skeptical distancing from other people and things.

Now and again, however, his dislike of any coercion burst through the facade of the well-adjusted young man. Thus in November 1886 he was moved from class Ilia to Illb, probably because of disciplinary problems in the wake of one of his last outbursts of anger.⁹ Unusual also, for a boy, was the fact that he wanted neither to become a soldier nor to play with toy soldiers. In southern German states like Wtirt-temberg and Bavaria, the army did not quite enjoy the same overriding prestige as in Prussia; nevertheless, even in Munich young boys could see nothing more wonderful than the hope of one day wearing a uniform and serving king, emperor, and fatherland—as Uncle Jakob had served in the war with France—and most children were fascinated by military pomp. Albert Einstein, by contrast, displayed a definite dislike. On one occasion, when he was watching a parade and was told that someday he might march along with those men in uniform, he said to his parents: "When I grow up I don't want to be one of those poor people."¹⁰

Despite many positive features, schooling was pervaded by military drill and the principle of absolute obedience. There was an exaggerated emphasis on order and discipline. It seems that this was felt by the young Albert Einstein. At the age of eight or nine he was not ready to make any explicit criticism; in retrospect, however, he regarded his Munich schooldays with a mixture of anger and contempt: "The teachers at the elementary school seemed to me like drill sergeants, and the teachers at the Gymnasium [the high school] like lieutenants."¹¹ At the age of nine and a half he completed his three years of elementary school and moved over to the "lieutenants."

The Luitpold Gymnasium in Munich, where Albert Einstein was accepted on October 1, 1888, was by no means one of the worst insti-turions. It was not far from his old elementary school, on iMiiller-strasse, the street where he had lived before the family moved to Sendling. Although here, too, Latin and Greek were at the center of education in the humanities, the school—under its principal, Dr. Wolfgang Markwalder—had gained a reputation as an enlightened, liberal institution, where mathematics and the sciences also had their place, however modest. At any rate, it evidently enjoyed great respect among parents: its steadily growing number of students cannot have been due solely to an increasing interest in education. When Einstein arrived, there were 684 students; by 1894, when he severed his (not altogether easy) relations with the school, it had increased to 1,330. Most of the students were Catholics, but five percent were of Jewish origin—two and a half times more than one might have expected on purely statistical grounds. Classes, at least the lower ones, were very crowded: a class photograph of Einstein's first year shows him with fifty classmates. Other than himself, only two were Jews.

The old story that Einstein was a bad pupil, or even failed altogether at school, has been repeated time and again, presumably to console poor students or their parents—though low marks at school are no guarantee of success in later life. In fact, the story is not true: at most it reflects the hope of parents that even the dumbest student might have a brilliant mind. Still, as early as the 1920s, Einstein was cited as a shining example of this thesis. As with so many other fanciful stories about him, he probably let it pass with a smile. Not so, however, a certain Dr. Wieleitner, the principal of the Neues Realgymnasium, the successor of Einstein's school.

When, in 1929, on the occasion of Einstein's fiftieth birthday, articles appeared in various journals, mentioning—if anything, with approval—Einstein's "total weakness in the ancient languages,'⁴² Dr. Wieleitner was evidently worried that the boy's allegedly poor grades might damage the school's reputation more than that of the man who had meanwhile become a famous physicist. He therefore searched the school records and, in a letter to the editor of a Munich paper, saved the honor of the Luitpold Gymnasium by pointing out that Einstein had "always [received] at least a 2 in Latin, and in the sixth grade even a 1. In Greek he always had a 2 in his school reports.... Even in the 'secret reports' there is no complaint anywhere of a poor gift for the languages."¹³ As the school records were destroyed in a bombing raid during the Second World War, the doughty principal's letter to the editor remains the only evidence that Albert Einstein was a good student in high school.

Despite his good reports, Albert Einstein would later remember his time at school as an almost traumatic experience.¹⁴ While still a student he suffered in silence; he never voiced any criticism of the school and, presumably, without any comparable experience, was unaware of its shortcomings at the time. "According to the family, the taciturn child scarcely complained, nor did he seem too unhappy. Only much later did he identify the tone and atmosphere of the high school with those of the barrack-square, which in his eyes were the negation of everything human."¹⁵ Even at the age of forty he told his first biographer that at the Gymnasium, "though he grew fond of some individual teachers, he felt himself harshly touched by the spirit of the institution."¹⁶

However, there exists some rather different testimony about the Luitpold Gymnasium. Thus Abraham Fraenkel, who attended it a short time after Einstein and later became a famous mathematician, has entirely pleasant memories—even though, as a practicing Orthodox Jew, he would have been far more of an outsider than Einstein. Indeed, Fraenkel referred to "nine happy years"¹" spent there. Einstein's experience cannot, therefore, have been the fault of the school alone; there must also have been powerful reasons within Einstein himself which prevented harmonious integration.

A glance at the syllabi¹⁸ shows that they were not exactly to the taste of Albert Einstein's "intellectual stomach."¹⁹ Eight hours of Latin a week—in some grades even ten hours—plus six hours of Greek from the fourth year on, did not leave much room for other subjects. This was not a favorable situation for someone who admitted: "My principal weakness was a bad memory, especially a bad memory tor words and texts."²⁰ There were only three periods for German, as well as, in the upper grades, for French. Mathematics was taught only three or four forty—at the service of social justice, democratic freedoms, pacifism, the welfare of the Jews, and a cosmopolitan internationalism, though rarely with success and frequently setting off controversy.

Einstein's kindness was often praised and his simplicity admired as if he were a saint. There was some justification for that, but he could also be rude and wounding, and below his modest surface there was unfathomable complexity. Although his attitude toward the country of his birth was complicated, his attitude toward Nazi Germany was unequivocal. It led him, despite his passionate pacifism, to write a letter to President Roosevelt suggesting the development of an atom bomb. After Hiroshima, when he warned against a nuclear arms race, many regarded him as wise old man, a personification of the world's conscience.

However, his "excursions into politics," as he called them, were just that—excursions. They were never nearly as important to him as physics. Physics was his passion and his life. No one else has ever enriched a science as Einstein enriched physics during the two decades between 1905 and 1925. If asking who was the greatest physicist of the century produces the answer "Einstein, for his theory of relativity," then asking who was the second-greatest physicist might justifiably produce the answer "Einstein, for all his other achievements." Over the last three decades of his life, he searched for the foundations of physics. His road led to no result, but he never gave up; and right to the end he remained addicted to physics.

In addition, he was a husband (twice), lover, and father (at least three times). He was a Jew. He was a citizen of four nations and was offered the presidency of a fifth, Israel—but he declined this honor even though his deepest loyalty was to those he called his "tribal brethren." He was born in Germany, and German remained his first language, the only language in which he wrote and in which he could adequately express his feelings and ideas. After the Holocaust he called German his "stepmother tongue," displaying a fine feeling for his language even at a distance. He never forgave the Germans.

The depth and variety of Einstein's thinking about nature, the scope and color of his life, and the complexity of his character have about diem something alarming to a biographer; and in fact this book has turned out more voluminous than I intended. Wherever possible I have based my writing on Einstein's own testimony: his published work, his unpublished manuscripts, his countless letters, and his intermittent diaries, so far as they are at present accessible. In addition, I have used firsthand sources that seemed to me reliable. Some of the stories spread about Einstein are not mentioned in these pages, as there would be no point in discussing freely invented or unattested, fantastic assertions. Instead, I hope to offer much that is new, and in a manner which will cast new light on known facts. The most important aspect to me, always, was Einstein's physics. Physics was at the core of his identity, and only through physics can we get close to him as a seeker after truth, whose like we shall not see again.

rimes a week; geography and science were taught only twice a week. Physics appeared only in the seventh year; but by then this was no longer of any interest to Einstein, because "in mathematics and physics I was, through private study, far above the school requirements, also with regard to philosophy in so far as this has anything to do with the school program."²¹ Thanks to his private study and the self-assurance this had given him, he eventually found it easy, despite good reports, to leave school early.

Conflicts also marked the development of young Albert Einstein's religious sentiments and beliefs. In his elementary school he had participated in the Catholic religious lessons, while at the same time being instructed in the Jewish tradition "at home by a distant relation,"²² w^rho was better versed in these matters than Albert's freethinker father—from whom Albert heard only "ironical and unfriendly remarks about dogmatic rituals."²³ At the Luitpold Gymnasium, unlike the elementary school, there were a few Jewish classmates, for whom a liberal school management provided their own Jewish religious instruction through Oberlehrer (senior teacher) Heinrich Friedmann. Friedmann's exegesis of the Prophets initially found a very receptive and grateful listener in young Albert. Like so many adolescents in search of a meaning to human existence, Albert Einstein

acutely realized the vanity of hoping and striving, that drove most people restlessly through life. Everyone was condemned, by the existence of his stomach, to participate in this race. The stomach might well be satisfied by such participation, but not man as a thinking and sentient being. There the first way out is religion.²⁴

He keenly studied the preacher Solomon, strictly adhered to ritual precepts, and in consequence no longer ate pork.²⁵ He even composed a few short hymns to the greater glory of God, which he sang with great fervor at home and as he was walking in the street.²⁶ Under the direction of Oberlehrer Friedmann and a rabbi he prepared to become a bar mitzvah, to be solemnly accepted into the Jewish community as a full member on the Sabbath following his thirteenth birthday. The reason this never took place was his encounter with the natural sciences.

One of the few Jewish customs still observed in the Einstein home was inviting a poor Talmudic scholar to lunch on the Sabbath. For the Einsteins, admittedly, the Sabbath had become Thursday, and the poor student did not want to become a rabbi: he was a medical student. Still, his last name was Talmud. Max Talmud was twenty-one when his weekly visits to the Einsteins in Sendling began, in 1889. For Albert, eleven years his junior, he seems to have been something like a substitute father in a spiritual or intellectual sense, or at least a substitute uncle. Max Talmud would bring popular science books for his hosts' son. In many respectable families such books would not have been considered suitable reading matter for a youngster—they presented a scientific, materialist picture of the world that reeked suspiciously of atheism and revolutionary attitudes. As no such misgivings existed in the Einstein household, the boy could engross himself, undisturbed, in Biichner's Kraft und Stoff (Force and Matter), which presented the philosophy of the French materialists to the German public in a somewhat diluted form. W ith great zeal he also studied the twenty volumes of Aaron Bernstein's Naturwis-senschaftliche Volksbiicher (Science for the People series); Bernstein was an author of educational works in a spirit of enlightenment, much read among emancipated Reform Jews. In addition, Albert browsed in Alexander von Humboldt's five-volume classic, Kosmos—Entwurf einer physische Weltheschreibung (The Cosmos—Attempt at a Description of the Physical World), and read something by, or at least about, Charles Darwin.

These books soon convinced the boy "that a lot in the Bible stories could not be true. The result was downright fanatical freethinking, combined with the impression that young people were being deliberately lied to by the state: it was a shattering discovery."²"

Albert Einstein therefore did not become a bar mitzvah, and by rabbinical standards was not a proper member of the Jewish community. His parents probably did not mind their son's freethinking any more than they had minded his earlier religious fervor. Religious disenchantment now also released what had been hidden for a few years under the mask of the well-adjusted schoolboy:

From this experience grew a mistrust of any kind of authority, a skeptical approach to the convictions which were current in whatever social environment I found myself—an attitude which never left me, even though, with better insight into causal connections, it subsequendy lost something of its original edge.²⁸

For his expulsion from the "religious paradise of [his] youth"²⁹ Albert Einstein found more than compensation in mathematics. While he was still in elementary school, Uncle Jakob, the engineer, had introduced him to algebra, which was still far beyond the school curriculum and was yet in a sense appropriate to Albert's age, as "the art of lazy calculation. What one does not know one simply calls x and treats it as if the context were known; one writes that context down and determines x afterwards."³⁰ On another occasion Uncle Jakob drew his nephew's attention to Pythagoras' theorem. The boy felt that there was a need to prove it, "spent three weeks in strenuous reflection,"³¹ and without help from anyone found a proof which his sister, fondly overestimating him, even claimed had been accomplished "in an entirely new way." Needless to say, Albert's proof, based on similar right-angle triangles, was new only to him, but he had worked it out for himself. Far more astonishing than even this achievement was surely his independent discovery that this was something that needed proving at all, and that it could be proved.

These mathematical preludes were the right tune-up for other intellectual stimulation, also coming from Max Talmud. Before Albert started his fourth year at the Gymnasium at age twelve, Talmud had brought him a textbook of plane geometry:³² possibly Theodor Spieker's Lehrbuch der ebenen Geometries It would be another two years before he came to this subject at school, and then with a much simpler textbook. Albert began to work his way through the book independently, and each Thursday he would show his mentor, Max Talmud, the problems he had solved during the week. The boy's astonishingly rapid progress left an indelible impression on Talmud: "After a short time, a few months, he had worked through the whole book of Spieker. He thereupon devoted himself to higher mathematics, studying all by himself Liibsen's excellent works on the subject.³⁴ These, too, I had recommended to him if memory serves me right. Soon the flight of his mathematical genius was so high that I could no longer follow."³⁵

While Max Talmud was amazed mainly by the breathless speed with which his young friend absorbed his scientific reading, Einstein's own recollection, especially of his acquaintance with the "sacred little geometry book,"'⁶ had more to do with depth, with the mysterious regions of "wondering" that he had first experienced with the compass needle:

At the age of twelve I experienced a second wonder of a totally different kind: over a little book of Euclidian geometry which came to my hands at the beginning of the school year. There were statements in it, such as for instance the intersection of the three altitudes of a triangle at a single point, which—though by no means self-evident—could be proved with such certainty that any doubt was ruled out. This clarity and certainty made an indescribable impression on me.³"

Albert Einstein shared this awakening of an overwhelming love of geometry with other great intellects. Galileo Galilei at age seventeen made the chance acquaintance of this branch of mathematics, instantly dropped his medical studies, and from then on read nothing but Euclid. Bertrand Russell wrote about his studies of geometry, on which he embarked at age eleven under the guidance of his brother, as "one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love. I had not imagined that there was anything so delicious."³⁸ What impressed all three young enthusiasts was not so much the richness of geometry as the certainty and beauty of the axiomatic-deductive method described in canonical form by Euclid around 300 в.с.

Unlike eleven-year-old Bertrand Russell, twelve-year-old Albert Einstein was not bothered by the fact that Euclidian geometry rests on a foundation which cannot itself be questioned. The basic statements, known as "axioms," are unproven and unprovable and must simply be accepted. These axioms had been regarded as self-evident for more than two thousand years, so that the direct application of that geometry⁷ to real objects was considered the most natural thing in the world. Only in the course of developing his general theory of relativity did Einstein realize that the relationship between geometry and reality can be more complex and far-reaching—and he succeeded in elucidating this only after great effort and within a framework of non-Euclidian geometry. When he first encountered classical geometry, he thought it "sufficiently wonderful that man is able at all to attain such a degree of certainty and purity in thought, as the Greeks first demonstrated in geometry.' ⁵⁹

These grand words—in which Albert Einstein in his old age recalled the "sacred little geometry book"—suggest that to him the encounter with mathematics was far more than a purely intellectual delight. He later interpreted his religious fervor as a boy's first attempt to free himself from "the fetters of the merely personal," from an existence dominated by desires, hopes, and primitive emotions."⁴⁰ After the disappointment of his experiment with traditional religion, he had found in mathematics another road to the same destination, one to which he could surrender himself with the same emotional intensity.

Through private study Einstein thus acquired the principal areas of higher mathematics, from analytical geometry through infinite series to differential and integral calculus. He found this occupation "truly fascinating: it contained high-points whose effect measured up entirely to that of elementary geometry."⁴¹

The fact that most people around him—Uncle Jakob was one of the few exceptions—were poor mathematicians and that most of his classmates and teachers tended to regard ignorance of mathematics as a virtue probably confirmed him in the belief that he had made the right choice for himself.

Although many of the other books given to him by Max Talmud made a deep impression on Einstein—especially by reinforcing his "fanatical freethinking"—their impact could not be compared to that of the "sacred little geometry book." He read Aaron Bernstein's Naturwis-senscbaftliche Volksbiicher "with breathless suspense"⁴² but found fault with it because the "presentation [was] almost entirely confined to the qualitative aspect." No doubt the theory of biological evolution and the wealth of the "description of the physical world," as presented by Alexander von Humboldt in his Kosmos, must have seemed interesting to young Albert, but here, too, the presentation was inevitably restricted to verbal argumentation. The "certainty and purity of thought" was less marked in this wealth of detail than it was in mathematics.

As Max Talmud was soon unable to follow Einstein's soaring mathematical flights, their conversations increasingly turned to philosophical problems. At the age of thirteen, with Talmud's recommendation and guidance, the boy studied Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure ReasonЛ* Talmud is probably correct in characterizing this work in his memoirs as "incomprehensible to ordinary mortals," and his statement that Kant's philosophy was instantly clear to the young Einstein is probably a glorified recollection. It seems likely, however, that Kant's attempt at a strict formulation of the "conditions of the possibility of cognition" generally was perceived by Einstein as the same striving for "certainty and purity" by which he himself was motivated.

Because of his feeling that others should share in this experience there emerged, in Einstein, for the first time, an inclination to preach to a small public if he could find one. One classmate recalled conversations of "such forcefulness that even today, after a good thirty years, the actual words come back to me whenever I happen to be in the neighborhood where we then strolled, you instructing, I receiving. At that time you were beginning to study the Critique of Pure Reason, of which I got quite a lot."⁴⁴ With all this seriousness, one is almost relieved to learn that the boy was also capable of behavior in line with his age. Alfred Einstein, who was two years younger than Albert and not related to him, and who became renowned as a musicologist and a reviewer for the Berliner Tageblatt, once reminded the famous scientist of their "old connection from 1894 or 1895, at the Luitpold Gymnasium, where, in our joint singing lessons, you were fond of pulling your younger namesake's hair."⁴⁵

It was at about this time that Albert Einstein discovered his second great love, after mathematics—music. At the Einstein home "there was much & good music-making."⁴⁶ Hermann was not particularly keen on music; but Pauline, an excellent pianist, hoped to find a musical partner in her son. When he was six, she engaged a Herr Schmied as a violin teacher. But the technical practice and the boring etudes seemed to Albert to be merely a continuation of school drill, and no progress was made. Other teachers were engaged and dismissed: Einstein later believed that he had had no luck with them because for them "music did not go beyond the mechanical aspect."⁴⁷

In a way which was beginning to be typical, Einstein's love of music awakened only when he himself became interested in certain pieces and replaced his lessons with self-teaching:

I only began to learn something after I was thirteen, when I had fallen in love mainly with Mozart's sonatas. My wish to reproduce them to some degree in their artistic content and their unique gracefulness forced me to improve my technique; this I acquired with those sonatas, without ever practicing systematically. I believe altogether that love is a better teacher than a sense of duty—at least for me.⁴⁸

Thus Pauline saw her hopes of playing duets with her son fulfilled. Their repertoire consisted primarily of Mozart and Beethoven sonatas for piano and violin: the mother probably preferring Beethoven and the son, quite certainly, Mozart.

Albert Einstein had grown up to be a strikingly handsome young man, with slightly wavy dark hair; full, sensuous lips, modified by the down-turned corners of his mouth into something like skepticism; large dark-brown eyes; and a challengingly self-assured but often dreamy gaze. "In all these years/' Max Talmud recalls, ^MI never saw him reading any light literature. Nor did I ever see him in the company of schoolmates or other boys of his age."⁴⁹ Even at age fourteen Einstein showed the beginning, at least, of those traits which made him describe himself as a "loner, who never belonged with his whole heart to the state, his country, his circle of friends, or even his closer family, but who felt with regard to all those ties a never overcome sense of being a stranger with a need for solitude."⁵⁰

Such a young man would not always be popular, especially with people in authority, such as teachers at a German gymnasium. As mentioned above, he saw them as 'lieutenants/¹ But there were a few exceptions, like Dr. Ferdinand Ruess, who in Albert's fourth and sixth years was his ordinarius, or homeroom teacher. Dr. Ruess taught not only Latin and Greek but also history and German, and he "filled his students with great enthusiasm for the beauty of the classical world.... The boy's fondness [for] this teacher, who alone was able to satisfy his students' intellectual hunger, was so great that even being kept in after school, under his supervision, was a pleasure.' ⁵¹ Einstein had such fond memories of Dr. Ruess that, as a man of thirty and a newly appointed professor, he paid Ruess a visit in Munich— presumably Einstein was en route from Bern to Salzburg, where in September 1909 he participated in his first physicists' conference. However, Ruess did not recognize his former student and was even afraid that this shabbily dressed man might want to borrow money from him. After a painfully long moment of embarrassment, Einstein had no choice but to leave in a hurry.⁵²

It probably never occurred to Einstein to visit any of his other teachers. At sixty, he recollected that he had detested the "mindless and mechanical method of teaching, which, because of my poor memory for words, caused me great difficulties, which it seemed to me pointless to overcome. I would rather let all kinds of punishment descend upon me than learn to rattle something off by heart.'⁴³ This recollection, however, seems hardly compatible with Dr. YVieleitner's report about his good to very good marks in the classics. Of course, all his teachers with the exception of Dr. Ruess might have been monsters—but that does not seem very likely in light of Abraham Fraenkel's testimony.

The conflict between Einstein and his schoolteachers was no doubt partly due to him. In his seventh year it had reached a point where his new ordinarius, Dr. Joseph Degenhart, informed him that "he would never get anywhere in life/'⁵⁴ To Einstein's remark that surely he "had not committed any offence," he replied: "Your mere presence here undermines the class's respect for me."'⁵ Both sides must have wished to terminate this disagreeable relationship. That Albert Einstein was soon able to do so was due to a change in his parents' financial situation.

From its establishment in 1885, Electrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Cie. speedily prospered. Within a year it had gained local renown by illuminating the .Munich Oktoberfest on Theresenwiese by electricity for the first time.⁵⁶ Orders kept coming in for the installation of electric streetlights in Schwabing, a suburb which was then not yet part of Munich; and in the northern Italian cities of Varese and Susa. Favorable reports on Einstein & Cie. appeared in Central-blatt fur Elektrotechnik and in Elettricita.⁵⁷ In retrospect, the Einstein brothers' high-tech firm looks like something that could well have developed into a giant of the electronics industry, or at least into a sound large-scale enterprise, successful both commercially and technologically.

The innovative head of the firm was Jakob Einstein, the engineer. Altogether, he held six patents. Three of them were for arc lamps (which were still in common use); two of these provided for an improved method of advancing the carbon electrode and the third was for an automatic circuit-breaker. The other three patents were for electric meters capable of measuring ampere-hours or watt-hours—a vital prerequisite for an electrified economy.⁵⁸

In addition to lamps and electric meters, the Einstein firm manufactured dynamos of various sizes, from small workshop models to power-plant generators, along with cables and all the equipment needed for urban electrification, as well as electrolysis plants and gauges. The firm was important enough to be noticed at the spectacular International Show in Frankfurt in 1891, as well as at a symposium on urban lighting and power transmission which preceded the show. Twenty-one firms, including one from America, had been invited to present their concepts of an electrified future. Einstein & Cie. and Ingenieurbiiro Oskar von Miller were the only firms from Munich.⁵⁹

At its peak the firm had just under two hundred employees.⁶⁰ Its turnover and profits must have been considerable, and although, mindful of its persistent undercapitalization, the brothers withdrew only modest sums for themselves, these were enough to ensure a comfortable existence for both families.

In 1893, however, the fortunes of the firm changed dramatically. The Einsteins had directed all their efforts toward winning the contract for lighting the Munich city center, which would have kept the factory fully employed for several years.⁶¹ After tough and bitter competition with Germany's three biggest electrical-engineering firms— Siemens and AEG from Berlin, and Schuckert from Nuremberg—the contract went to Schuckert in April 1893.

The modest volume of business left in Germany was not enough to cover the Einsteins' high overhead, and prospects for the future were represented only by a number of lesser projects in Italy. In March 1894 the wo brothers, with their Italian representative as a partner, therefore founded the firm of Einstein, Garrone e C. in Pavia, in northern Italy; in July they liquidated their firm in Munich.

Leaving Munich was painful, especially for the children, who "right up to the moment of moving had to watch from their windows the destruction of their fondest memories."⁶² An architect and a building contractor took possession of the fine properties on Adlzreiterstrasse, cut down the splendid old trees, and began to construct four-story residential blocks.⁶³ In the summer of 1894 the Einsteins moved to Milan, and the following year they went twenty miles farther south, to Pavia, where the new factory was built. Maja, the daughter, went to Italy with her parents. Albert was left in Munich under the care of some distant relations, because he was supposed to finish school there with the Abitur, the German high school graduation examination.

The liquidation of a firm in economic difficulties is always a sad affair, and its effects on the family were inevitable. For Albert, then fifteen, it must have been painful to find that the comfortable security of bourgeois life in Munich was now over for his family. Although he never referred to this upheaval at a formative time of his life, we may assume

PART I

С H I L D H О О D ,

YOUTH, STUDENT _YEARS_

CHAPTER ONE

Family

He was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm in southern Germany, on a cold but sunny Friday, half an hour before the church bells rang out midday. His parents and relatives, anxious to perpetuate the family name, were no doubt pleased that the first child was a boy. But as often happens with young couples who are facing parenthood for the first time, their joy was clouded by concern and even anxiety.

"When he was born"—his younger sister wrote many years later— "Mother was alarmed at the sight of his exceptionally large angular occiput and at first thought he was a monster."¹ The physician reassured the twenty-one-year-old mother, Pauline Einstein, that this peculiarity would soon disappear, and a few weeks later the size of the baby's skull was indeed quite normal, though a rather square occiput remained a lifelong characteristic.

The following morning the father, Hermann Einstein, put on his frock coat and went to the town hall to record the birth of his son. The boy was to be called Albert, only faintly echoing his grandfather's name, Abraham Einstein. Nothing, of course, suggested that the motto of Ulm, dating from its medieval prosperity, Ulmenses stint matbematici—"The people of Ulm are mathematicians"—would be brilliantly confirmed by this Albert Einstein. In the column provided for religion, both parents and child were recorded as "Israelitic."²

In spite of their Jewish origin, Albert Einstein's ancestors could be described as true Swabians. On the paternal side the family had been settled in the region for more than two centuries—not in Ulm, but that his biting remarks on the vanity of restless striving, to which everyone was "condemned to participate by the existence of his stomach,"⁶⁴ had their origin then.

We may also assume that subliminal anti-Semitic sentiment had played a part in the contract for the Munich city center, since it was awarded to an outside firm rather than to a Munich firm—Munich's only major manufacturer of dynamos—which happened to be Jewish. Whatever caused the Einsteins to lose this crucial business, they must have been plagued by a feeling that the city's economic and social leaders regarded them as upstarts who should be cut down to the petty trade appropriate to Jews.

It is possible that in the young Albert Einstein, who had to watch helplessly as his father's firm folded, the conviction was then gaining ground that German society as a whole had robbed his family of its livelihood. His very reserved attitude to his native country, even before 1933, may well have begun to develop then. His negative, distorted recollections of the Luitpold Gymnasium and his own decisions when the firm closed—soon to be followed by his renunciation of German citizenship—may, at least in part, go back to the profound traumas of the year 1894.

No doubt the three years which, according to his parents' plans, he was to spend in Munich on his own must have seemed to him like an eternity. Moreover, he cannot have wanted to finish school—even though he hated it—because the gymnasium would then have been followed by the real barrack square, among people with whom, even as a small boy, he had not wanted to march in step. In this situation, the request by his ordinarius, Dr. Degenhart, to do him the favor of leaving the school must have looked like the benign hand of fate. For once, Einstein was ready to please his teachers. However, he was not to be provoked into a rash decision: instead, he proceeded with circumspection in order to limit the damage as far as possible.

First of all, he got a doctor—an elder brother of Max Talmud's—to give him a medical certificate attesting that he was suffering from 'neurasthenic exhaustion" and demanding a suspension of his schooling. Next he persuaded his mathematics teacher, Joseph Ducrue, to confirm to him in writing that he had mastered mathematics up to Abitur level and that he was altogether quite an excellent mathematician.⁶⁵ Finally, on the strength of the medical certificate, he applied for release from his school. When these formalities were all completed, before the Christmas vacations,⁶⁶ he went straight to Munich's central railway station and the next day faced his startled parents in Milan—a young man of fifteen, his schooling cut short, with no plans or prospects for the future, but happy to have escaped the "lieutenants."

CHAPTER THREE

A "Child Prodigy^M

Milan at the turn of the year can be every bit as rainy and gloomy as any city north of the Alps. But for Albert Einstein the skies were brighter than they had been for him in Munich for a long time. Perhaps in Dr. Ruess's lessons he had learned of the traditional German longing for the south and now found himself in the land of his dreams, or perhaps he was simply happy to be with his family once more. Certainly he must have been glad to have escaped the restrictions of his high-school life in Munich and to have left behind many things he regarded as typically German. His parents, of course, were horrified at their son's decision: their hopes that he might graduate from school, move on to a university, and thus acquire status and reputation now seemed jeopardized. Young Albert, however, steadfastly declared that he never wanted to return to Munich. It seems probable that, in this situation, the family council was persuaded by Uncle Jakob's suggestion that the fugitive schoolboy be sent to the Eidgenos-sisches Polytechnikum (Federal Swiss Polytechnic) in Zurich, an advanced technological institution which did not insist on high-school graduation as a condition for admission.

Albert helped assuage his parents' misgivings by "assuring them most resolutely that, by the fall of that year, he would have prepared himself by private study for the Polytechnic's entrance examination."¹ His parents may also have been somewhat appeased by the unofficial testimonial he had brought with him from Munich about his exceptional knowledge and ability in mathematics. He even went one step further: in a university bookstore in Milan he purchased the first three volumes of the German edition of Jules Violle's demanding Lehrbiuh der Pbysik.

Einstein's notes and glosses in the extant copies of Violle's physics texts show that he was entirely serious about the promises he was making to his parents. His method of private study, however, caused some astonishment:

His working method was rather strange: even in ... company, when there was quite a lot of noise, he could retire to the sofa, pick up pen and paper, precariously balance the inkwell on the backrest, and engross himself in a problem to such an extent that the many-voiced conversation stimulated rather than disturbed him.²

The sofa on which Albert Einstein balanced his inkwell originally stood in a large apartment on Via Berchet 2 in Milan, which was also the business address of Einstein, Garrone e C. In addition, offices had been established in Pavia and Turin. In view of their reasonable hope that the firm would be commissioned to set up a hydroelectric plant, along with the appropriate transmission lines and electric street lighting in Pavia, the Einsteins in the spring of 1895 moved to Pavia— an old city on the lower Ticino, just before it runs into the Po.

The two families moved into separate apartments; Hermann Einstein and his family occupied a floor with three reception rooms in a magnificent ancient building at Via Foscolo 11, formerly the house of the poet Ugo Foscolo, for whom the street was named.³ A by no means small factory was built on the bank of the Naviglio di Pavia, a canal connecting Pavia with Milan. In addition to the money the Einsteins had saved from the liquidation in Munich and an investment by Signor Garrone, considerable sums on credit came from a cousin, Rudolf Einstein, the husband of Pauline's sister Fanny, whose affluence came from a textile mill at Hechingen in Wiirttemberg. As the firm acquired a reputation in Italy, several of its craftsmen and technicians arrived from Munich to work with the Einsteins again.

For Albert Einstein, who until then had known only Munich and its immediate neighborhood, his flight to Italy—if we may so describe it—was his first major journey. His experience of the southern landscape, of a different culture and lifestyle, made an unforgettable impression on him, as on many Germans before him: ^UI was so surprised"—he would say four decades later—"when I crossed the Alps to Italy to see how the ordinary Italian, the ordinary man and woman, uses words and expressions of a high level of thought and cultural content, so different from the ordinary' German. This is due to their long cultural history.... The people of northern Italy are the most civilized people I have ever met."⁴

This educational experience, however, was confined to northern Italy. Trips to Florence and Rome, or farther south, were not possible, and we do not even know if he would have gready wished to undertake them. His only longer journey, in the early summer of 1895, took him to Genoa, to see his uncle Jakob Koch, a brother of his mother's. He traveled the first twelve miles by local train, via Casteggio to Voghera, and then crossed the Ligurian Alps to Genoa on foot, a hike of some sixty miles, which took several days.⁵ At the height of summer he spent a vacation with his family at Airolo on the St. Gotthard pass.

As for his new hometown of Pavia, he described it in rather rude terms in a letter to a girlfriend in Switzerland: "The city's soul could be defined in mathematical terms as roughly (1) the sum total of the ramrods the various gendemen & ladies have swallowed, (2) the mood created in the observer by the uniformly filthy walls & streets everywhere. The only beautiful aspects are the delightful, graceful little children."⁶

Nevertheless the land and its people, its culture, and its language left an indelible impression on him. When, two decades later, he corresponded with the mathematician Tullio Levi-Civita about the general theory of relativity, he asked Levi-Civita to "write me in Italian next time." Einstein profusely thanked him for the next letter "written in the familiar long-missed Italian. You can hardly imagine the pleasure it gives me to receive such a genuine Italian letter. It revives in me the most beautiful memories of my youth."⁷ He could not rally enough courage to reply to the mathematician in Italian, "because that would come out rather too bumpily." But in his old age he tried his skill in that beautiful language when writing to а "Сага Ernestina," a friend of his sister's in their younger years: "The happy months of my sojourn in Italy are my most beautiful memories.... Days and weeks without anxiety and without worries."⁸

Along with his main occupation—preparing for the Zurich Polytechnic—Einstein seems to have done various jobs in the factory and occasionally even to have helped in Uncle Jakob's design office. "You know, this is quite fantastic about my nephew," Jakob Einstein once said to one of his assistants, "where I and my assistant engineer have racked our brains for days, this young fellow comes along and solves the whole business in a mere quarter-hour. He'll go far one day."⁹ The chronicler unfortunately does not relate the nature of the "business."

As a spin-off of his private study Albert Einstein during the summer months of 1895 also wrote what is somewhat grandly described as his first physical essay, Uber die Untersuchnng des Aetherzu-standes hn magnetiscben Feld (Examination of the State of the Ether in the Magnetic Field).¹⁰ This was probably intended as a self-test and a warm-up for his entrance examination in Zurich, and perhaps also as evidence of his studies for the family. At any rate, he sent this first essay, together with a covering letter, to his favorite uncle, Caesar Koch, in Brussels, though he could hardly expect that grain merchant to understand it: "It deals with a rather specialized subject and moreover, as is natural for a young fellow like me, it is still somewhat naive and imperfect. If you don't read the stuff at all, I won't blame you in the least."¹¹

The "stuff," five pages in the neat gothic handwriting he had learned at the gymnasium, is an examination of the relationships among electricity, magnetism, and the ether—that nonmaterial substance which was then being postulated as filling all space and being the medium in which electromagnetic waves, discovered in 1888 by Heinrich Hertz, were thought to propagate themselves. The author announced his essay as "the first modest utterance of a few simple thoughts on this difficult subject," more of "a program than a dissertation."¹²

Albert Einstein argued entirely on the lines of the ether theory of his day, according to which the propagation of waves was understood as analogous to the mechanical theory of waves—which he had come across in Violle's textbook. He must have heard something about "Hertz's wonderful experiments," and on that basis he now developed his ideas for "measuring the elastic deformations [occurring in the ether] and the acting forces." He certainly, by this rather strange route, derived the phenomenon of "self-induction"—purely qualitatively—without, however, using that term.

Some enthusiasts see this first essay as a "harbinger of what was to come,"¹³ but that is overinterpreting it. In the wake of Heinrich Hertz's epoch-making discover)' a great many popular accounts of electromagnetic theory appeared in Germany, and Einstein would have read at least some of these. In fact, striking parallels have been found between passages in Einstein's text and an article, Die Umival-zungen unserer Anschauungen vom Wesen der elektrischen IVirkungen (The Revolution in Our Concepts of the Nature of Electrical Effects), in a popular-science monthly.¹⁴

As the fine Italian summer was drawing to a close, the entrance exam in Zurich inexorably approached. Meanwhile it had been discovered that this examination stipulated a minimum age of eighteen. A special exemption had therefore to be requested for young Albert, then only sixteen. To this end a friend of the family, Gustav Maier, a resident of Zurich, was approached. Like the Einsteins, Maier came from Ulm, where he had been branch manager of the local Deutsche Reichsbank. A successful career had led him via Frankfurt to Zurich, where he managed a bank and a department store, and where he was part of the liberal, freethinking elite.

Maier must have recommended Albert Einstein to the principal of the Polytechnic as a "child prodigy" deserving of special provisions. But the principal, Professor Albin Herzog, in his (still extant) reply was against "taking even so-called 'child prodigies' away from the institution in which they began their studies before these studies are completed/'^{1 5} Only on condition that his "information on the talents and the mental maturity of the applicant were confirmed in full in writing by the principal of the institution concerned" would he waive the minimum-age rule for Einstein. It appears that Professor Herzog was satisfied with the unofficial testimonial of the mathematics teacher in Munich, who praised Albert Einstein's "mathematical knowledge and abilities,'' describing them as equivalent to graduation level.¹⁶ Anyway, at the beginning of October, Albert traveled by train to Zurich, where the Maier family put him up. "With a sense of well-founded diffidence'^l" he reported for the exam, choosing the engineering department on the strength of his father's and uncle's area of interest.

The examination began on October 8 and probably extended over several days.¹⁸ It covered many subjects, some general and others specific to the candidate's chosen field of study. For Albert Einstein it was a disappointing experience, "for it made me realize painfully the gappy character of my previous schooling, even though the examiners were patient and understanding. That they failed me seemed to me entirely just/'¹⁹ The negative outcome was due mainly to the verbal descriptive subjects; otherwise, the examiners' suspicion that they were dealing with a ^uchild prodigy" was confirmed. Professor Heinrich Friedrich Weber was so impressed by the mathematical and physical knowledge of the young candidate that he invited Einstein—against all regulations—to attend his physics lectures for second-year students, provided he remained in Zurich. Einstein, however, followed the sensible advice of the principal that he should spend a year at the cantonal school in Aarau in order to qualify for study at the Polytechnic.²⁰

The cantonal school in Aarau—about thirty miles west of Zurich—had a great reputation as a liberal, forward-looking institution. While originally a classical gymnasium, it had been enlarged to include modern languages and science. It was famous for its "physical cabinet," which was extended, during Einstein's time there, into a superbly equipped laboratory with a dynamo, an AC motor, batteries, switchboards, and electrical metering instruments.²¹ The principal of this remarkable school, to which Albert Einstein was admitted on October 26, 1895, was the physicist Dr. August Tuchschmid, formerly an assistant to Professor Weber at the Polytechnic.

Though Einstein was placed in the third year, his admission report noted "great gaps" in his knowledge of French, as well as a need to "catch up" on chemistry. A little later, a teachers' conference urged him to "take private coaching in French, natural science, and chemistry."²² On the other hand, he was exempted from singing, from physical training, and—as a foreigner—from military instruction.

Although he was obliged to take additional instruction and was no longer receiving good grades in all his subjects, Albert Einstein's recollections of the cantonal school are very different from his memories of the Luitpold Gymnasium:

By its liberal spirit and by the simple seriousness of its teachers, unsupported as they were by any outward authority, this school has left unforgettable impressions on me. Comparison with six years' schooling at a German authoritarian Gymnasium, made me clearly realize how much superior an education towards free action and personal responsibility is to one relying on outward authority and ambition. True democracy is no empty illusion.²⁵

Of equal importance were Einstein's domestic circumstances in Aarau. Gustav Maier had arranged for him to be a paying guest in the home of Jost Winteler. What he found there was far more than bed and board—he found a second home, one which probably molded him more than his own family had. All his life Einstein remained close to the Wintelers.

Winteler taught Greek and Latin at the cantonal school, so Einstein was not one of his students. He had studied first in Zurich and then in Jena, Germany, where he obtained his doctorate with a linguistic study of the Kerenz dialect, the speech of his native Toggen-burg region.²⁴ In Jena he had met his future wife, Pauline Eckart, who was later always called Rosa. With their seven children—three daughters and four sons—plus one or two paying guests, they must have seemed to Albert Einstein like a family idyll straight out of Swiss literature. Before long the two Wintelers were "Mama" and "Papa" to him.

Albert's cousin Robert Koch from Hechingen was living in the house next door. The same age as Albert, Robert was still in the second class at the gymnasium. Gustav Maier, who had arranged for both boys to be placed in Jost Winteler s care, had informed him that Albert

Einstein "is much more mature than his cousin and therefore less in need of supervision."²⁵

Anna, the eldest of the Wintelers' daughters, recalls that Einstein was a "pleasant, very respectable member of the household, and never a spoilsport. He was fond of conducting scientific conversations, yet he had a great sense of humor and at times could laugh heartily. In the evenings he very rarely went out, he often worked, but more often he would sit with the family around the table, where something was being read aloud or discussed."²⁶

One classmate claims to have realized even then that Albert Einstein did not fit "into any mold even as a young man,"²⁷ but that the "sharp wind of skepticism" at the cantonal school suited him. "The cheeky Swabian fitted quite well into that atmosphere, his original self-assurance setting him apart from the rest." This classmate painted a romantically exaggerated portrait of Einstein:

The grey felt hat pushed back over the silky mass of dark hair, he strode along with vigor and assurance, at the rapid—I am tempted to say sweeping—tempo of the restless mind that carried a world within it. Nothing escaped the acute gaze of the large sun-bright eyes. Whoever approached him was captivated by his superior personality. A mocking trait around the fleshy mouth with its protruding lower lip did not encourage the Philistine to tangle with him. Unconfined by conventional restrictions, he confronted the world spirit as a laughing philosopher, and his witty sarcasm mercilessly castigated all vanity and artificiality.

That may sound like dubious, overliterary idealization; yet if one studies a group photograph of ten graduates taken in Aarau, one easily spots the cheeky, exotic type to whom the description would apply.

Albert Einstein's discovery of his own identity first of all entailed the surrender of two identities almost universally regarded as matters of course: citizenship and, albeit to a lesser degree, religious denomination. It is no longer possible to discover exactly when he decided that he no longer wished to be a German. Perhaps this happened in Munich, when he realized that it was the only way of avoiding military some forty miles to the south, in Buchau, a small township on Lake Feder in the foothills of the Alps. Under the patronage of an aristocratic abbey a small Jewish community had been in existence there from the sixteenth century; in 1665 it was joined by Baruch Moises Ainstein, who was originally from the area of Lake Constance, the large lake separating Germany from Austria and Switzerland. Ain-stein's descendants later changed the first letter of their last name, producing the spelling familiar to us.

In the Jewish cemetery of Buchau, dozens of tombstones, now covered with overgrowth, are silent witnesses to the family history of the Einsteins over many generations. The last Jewish inhabitant of Buchau was Siegbert Einstein, a great-nephew of the physicist. He survived the Theresienstadt concentration camp and for a while after the Second World War was the mayor of Buchau, looking after the cemetery and opening its gates for its few occasional visitors. In 1968 he too was buried there—not only the last Jew in Buchau but also Albert Einstein's last relative in Germany.

An entry in the council records of the then Reich Town of Buchau, dated March 16, 1665, records the restrictions and conditions imposed on Jews settling in the town. Against payment of an annual "sitting charge" of twelve guilders, they were granted freedom to practice their religion and their trade—in Aloises Ainstein's case, dealing in horses and cloth. Buying and selling were the only sources of livelihood permitted to Jews until the nineteenth century. In 1806, Buchau was assigned to the southern German kingdom of Wurttemberg, created under Napoleon's patronage. There, in 1828, a law was eventually enacted allowing Jews freedom in their choice of trade. This marked the first step in their emancipation as citizens, even though in Wurttemberg this was not fully attained until 1862.

Some of the Einsteins seized the new opportunities and became craftsmen—for instance, furriers and bookbinders. They lived in the old town in modest respectability, but its limitations and poverty were still reminiscent of the centuries following the Thirty Years' War, and conditions much too restrictive to allow any of them to excel in any way.

The tombstones in the Jewish cemetery also testify to the assimilation of the Buchau Jews and the Einstein family in the nineteenth century. The Hebrew inscriptions become less frequent and soon disappear altogether; and venerable biblical names, such as Samuel, David, and Abraham, come to be replaced by German names, such as August, Adolf, and Hermann. South German liberalism facilitated a gradual loosening of the formerly strong ties to the synagogue, the more so as the Buchau Jews—like other Jewish communities in southern Germany—were less strongly rooted in tradition than the Jews of Eastern Europe, with their shtetl culture. Moreover, the prosperity which the industrial revolution brought to the bigger cities tempted many to escape from the confines of the provincial towns.

The nearest such center was Ulm on the Danube, an ancient citv

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whose walls were just then being pulled down to make room for a rapidly expanding "new city." The first member of the Einstein family to move to Ulm, in 1864, was Jette Dreyfus, nee Einstein, with her husband Kosman Dreyfus, who also came from Buchau. She was followed after 1869 by several male Einsteins who were hoping to make their fortunes in Ulm. According to a census in 1875, the city then had thirty thousand inhabitants, including 692 Jews, who without much ado were accepted as fellow citizens.

In 1877, when the city festively observed the five-hundredth anniversary of the laying of the foundation stone of the cathedral—and the completion, at long last, of its southern tower—the Jewish community demonstrated its solidarity with the city and with its Protestant fellow citizens by a generous gift: a sculpture of the prophet Jeremiah by a local artist. Among the donors, the name Einstein appears six times; it seems likely that, including the Dreyfus and Moos families related to them by marriage, at least twelve Einsteins had by then moved from Buchau to Ulm. One of these was Hermann, Albert's father.

Hermann Einstein was born in Buchau, in 1847, the son of a merchant, Abraham Einstein. He was sent to Stuttgart, the capital of Wiirttemberg, to attend its Realschule, a type of high school. Despite service, or perhaps it did not happen until later, in Aarau, under the influence of "Papa" Winteler.

The records²⁸ show that a "petition by the merchant Hermann Einstein in Pavia for the release of his son Albert Einstein from Wiirt-temberg citizenship" was granted on January 28, 1896. The reason for the application was given as "for the purpose of his emigration to Italv." The actual date on which Hermann Einstein had taken this

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step—as the legal representative of his son Albert, then still a minor— is unknown, but the motive is fairly certain: avoidance of military service. Conscription in the German Reich began only at age twenty; however, under the law then in force, a male applicant over seventeen would not be released from citizenship, to make sure he would be there when the army wanted him. Albert Einstein must therefore have been happy when the hoped-for document releasing him arrived at his parents* house in Pavia six weeks before his seventeenth birthday. In the register of persons released from Wiirttemberg citizenship Albert Einstein's name appears in the column headed "trade and business assistants and factory workers."²⁹ In another column we find, for the first time, the entry "no religious denomination."

Initially, Albert Einstein's decision to renounce German nationality may have been emotional, but "Papa" Winteler must have supplied him with rational arguments. While still a student in Jena, W inteler had watched the rise of German nationalism, especially after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. In his native Switzerland he missed no opportunity to warn against pan-German expansionism.

Winteler drew Einstein so intensively into his own political thought that in later years Einstein frequently recalled his mentor's amazing political farsightedness. In a letter to his sister Maja, written in 1936 during a summer vacation in Old Lyme, Connecticut, he said: "I am often reminded of Papa Winteler and of the prophetic correctness of his political views. I have always felt this, but not with this purity and intensity."³⁰ Jost Winteler died in 1929 and thus did not see the Nazis' seizure of power in Germany. But from Einstein's remark about the "prophetic correctness" of his views it is clear that to Winteler, a Swiss republican, the gathering clouds of the Nazi dictatorship were less an incomprehensible disaster than an almost inevitable consequence of German political pathology. At any rate, in 1936 Einstein wrote from Princeton to his friend iMichele Besso, a son-in-law of Jost Winteler's: "human affairs in our age are less than agreeable, not to mention the clowns in Germany. Now it is obvious what a prophetic mind Prof. Winteler had when he perceived this grave danger so early in its full magnitude."³¹

Einstein's decision, after having renounced German nationality, to apply for Swiss citizenship was surely due largely to the example of this upright Swiss. The prescribed five-year waiting period was no particular problem. Before World War I people were not yet tied to their passports. With a confirmation from the authorities in Pavia or the Zurich "residents' control," Einstein was allowed to travel wherever he wished and as often as he wished.

In addition to renouncing his old nationality, Einstein also stripped off his religious identity. This step had been foreshadowed ever since his brief phase of religious fervor in adolescence:

The religion of the fathers, as I encountered it in Munich during religious instruction and in the synagogue, repelled rather than attracted me. Nor did I feel anything like national community or community of destiny. The Jewish bourgeois circles, which 1 came to know in my younger years, with their affluence and lack of a sense of community, offered me nothing that seemed to be of value. Loneliness, at first painful, then productive and strengthening, was the result.¹

A visible result was that, in the application for release from Wiirttem-berg citizenship, his father—certainly with Albert's agreement if not at his request—had entered ^uno religious denomination." In the records of the cantonal school, he was listed as "Israelitic," but this is no doubt because the school believed that every student had to be assigned to some religion or other. In a questionnaire for ^uright-of-residence applicants" in Zurich,² which Einstein had to complete in October 1900, he entered ^uno religious denomination," and he would keep this status for more than two decades.

In view of persistent assertions that at about age sixteen Albert Einstein had left the Jewish community³⁴—assertions which seem to be borne out by the records—it is worth quoting Einstein's correction of this account, made a year before his death:

At that time I would not even have understood what leaving Judaism could possibly mean. Traditional religion had no place at all in my consciousness. But I was fully aware of my Jewish origin, even though the full significance of belonging to Jewry⁷ was not realized by me until later.³⁵

The youthful skeptic and freethinker thus distanced himself from the religion of his forebears, but not from his forebears themselves.

Albert Einstein's maturing personality also underwent the experience of first love in Aarau. He did not have far to look: it was Marie, the eighteen-year-old daughter of the house. She had just graduated from the local teacher-training college and was still living with her parents before accepting her first post in a small village in the canton of Aarau. From Pavia, where he spent the Easter vacation, Albert Einstein wrote to his "Beloved darling" in the fullness of his emotional experience: "I have now, my angel, had to learn the full meaning of nostalgia and longing. But love gives much more happiness than longing gives pain. I only now realize how indispensable my dear little sunshine has become to my happiness."⁵⁶ The two did not have to hide their feelings from either the Einsteins or the Wintelers. Greetings were exchanged between Pavia and Aarau, and everything seemed to indicate something like an unofficial engagement.

But when Albert Einstein embarked on his studies in Zurich, he changed his mind. True, the two young people continued to meet at the Wintelers' house whenever he visited Aarau and she was able to come home from her teaching job. But six months later, in May 1897, he communicated his determination to break off the relationship, not to Marie herself but to her mother:

own fault. It fills me with a strange kind of satisfaction to have to savor myself some of the pain that my frivolousness & my ignorance of such a delicate nature has caused the dear girl. Strenuous intellectual work & observation of God's nature are the angels that will guide me, reconciling, strengthening, & yet implacably severe, through all the troubles of this life.³⁷

"Mama" Winteler did not blame Albert. Maybe she was even relieved to find that his youthful wisdom was sparing her daughter the risk of a premature liaison. The end of the romance certainly did not affect Einstein's relations with the Wintelers. Indeed, he soon became related to them. His sister Maja attended the Aarau teacher-training college from 1899 to 1902 and eventually married the Wintelers' son, Paul. And Michele Besso, Einstein's friend from the Zurich Polytechnic, married Anna, the eldest daughter. Marie, who later married a watchmaker, wrote about her relationship with Einstein: "We loved each other sincerely, but it was an entirely ideal love."³⁸

When he was not personally involved, the forward young man could talk about love very differently. Consoling a woman friend who was unhappily in love with an older man, the twenty-one-year-old gave her this rather presumptuous advice:

Do you really believe you can find lasting happiness in life through others, even through the only man you love? Oh, I know that animal personally, from personal acquaintance, being one myself. There is not all that much to be expected from them, that I know for sure. Today we are grouchy, tomorrow frivolous, the next day cold, and then again irritable & half-tired of life.... So it continues, but I nearly forgot to mention infidelity and ingratitude—matters in which we do a lot better than the good girls.³⁹

Young Albert Einstein's repertoire for dealing with women was not without refinement. From the enriching love of one "angel" one could escape by invoking other angels—"strenuous intellectual work & observation of God's nature." And rejecting the illusion of finding "lasting happiness in life through others" looks like a reference to himself. Yet he always felt comfortable, and even happy, in female company, the more so as this feeling was often reciprocated. Many a young or elderly woman was enchanted not only by his violin playing, but also by his appearance, which suggested a passionate Latin virtuoso rather than a stolid student of the sciences. "He had the kind of male beauty that, especially at the beginning of the century, caused such havoc"⁴⁰ is how a friend of his second wife's described Albert Einstein's effect.

School, as far as his grades were concerned, remained on an even keel. The "reproof"⁴¹ about his unsatisfactory performance in French recurred throughout all the intermediate reports: despite his private lessons he was unable to catch up with his Swiss classmates. His father bore this blemish on his report of Christmas 1895 with equanimity: "I have always been used to Albert bringing home, alongside some very good grades, also some poorer ones, & I am not disconsolate."⁴² Einstein made a bad start also in his other modern language, Italian, but by graduation had improved, earning the second-best grade.⁴³ His best was a 6, in algebra and geometry. In physics he had a 5-6, and the rest were 5s or 4s. Only in French did he get a 3.

With this school report, dated September 5, 1895, confirming his successful completion of the "fourth technical class," Einstein was now able to take the Maturitatsprufung., the final exam.⁴⁴ This lasted several days, with a written and an oral part. For the latter it was customary for some professors of the Zurich Polytechnic to come over to Aarau to take a look at their future students. This time Professor Albin Herzog—the man who a year earlier had recommended the cantonal school to Einstein—was present.

On September 18 at seven o'clock Albert Einstein got down to his first task—outlining the plot of Goethe's play Gotz von Berlichingen. This he managed in two and a half hours, unenthusiastically and uno-riginally. His German teacher, Adolf Frey, out of the goodness of his heart, marked the outline "mostly 5." Next—handled in a masterly way, completed rapidly, and earning high grades—came geometry, algebra, and physics, though his work here revealed a certain carelessness. Thus one mathematical term was called "irrational* when it should have been "imaginary," and "Wheatstone bridge" appeared as "Watston bridge." No doubt his teachers had long realized that this student did not waste time over such trifles.Thev were marked as mistakes but evidently not allowed to affect his grades.

As he had also done well in chemistry and nature study, Einstein achieved an average of 5^!A—the best grade among the nine examinees, and a commendable result for the student who was by far the youngest of them. It should be pointed out, however, that this examination was relatively easy. A German—and no doubt a Swiss—traditional gymnasium would have expected more, not only in the German essay but certainly also in mathematics.

Einstein's French paper, the worst of the lot and marked 3-4, is also the most interesting—not because of the mistakes in every⁷ other line, but because of the subject of the essay, Mes Projets iVavenir (My Plans for the Future). Despite its execrable French, it shows that Einstein had found his objectives:

A happy person is too content with the present to think much about the future. On the other hand, young people in particular are fond of making bold plans. Besides, it is natural for a serious young man to form as precise an idea of the goal of his strivings as possible.

If I am lucky enough to pass my examinations, I will attend the Polytechnic in Zurich. I will stay there four years to study mathematics and physics. My idea is to become a teacher in these fields of natural science and I will choose the theoretical part of these sciences.

These are the reasons which have led me to this plan. It is primarily a personal gift for abstract and mathematical thought and a lack of fantasy and practical talent. Moreover, my hopes lead me to the same resolution. This is quite natural: one always wishes to do the things one has the most talent for. Moreover, there is a certain independence in the profession of science that greatly appeals to me.⁴⁵

Quite apart from the form of these hopes and dreams, they also contain something like a third renunciation of identity, a breaking away from a life pattern linked to his family. Originally he had been sent to

Zurich to study electrical engineering in order to be useful to his father's and uncle's firm and eventually to take it over and carry it on. But as he explained to a friend two decades later, Aarau had marked his decisive renunciation of the profession of a technologist:

... because the thoughts of applying my inventiveness to things that would make everyday life even more sophisticated, with the aim of piling up capital, was unbearable to me. Thought for its own sake, like music!⁴⁶

This kind of thought had already found its subjects during his year in Aarau. The propagation of electromagnetic waves in the ether continued to occupy him productively, as he confirmed in a letter three years later: "In Aarau I had a good idea for investigating the way in which a body's relative motion with respect to the luminiferous ether affects the velocity of the propagation of light in transparent bodies.'⁴⁷ This "good idea" appears to have been a variant of Fizeau's famous experiment of 1853 for determining the velocity of light in moving matter. In fact, this experiment is one of the two results from optics mentioned by Einstein six years after this letter in his special theory of relativity.

Far more important was another question, also from the range of problems of electromagnetic waves—a question which seemed to Einstein "worth asking" that year in Aarau. At the time it cannot have been much more than a puzzle, and from a distance of sixty years Einstein recalled it with forbearance: "If one were to run behind a light-wave with the velocity of light, one would have before one a time-independent wave-field. But it does not seem that something like that can exist! This was the first childish mental experiment to do with the special theory of relativity."⁴⁸

However, the cantonal schoolboy Albert Einstein was no longer all that childish, and the problem he recognized at age sixteen or seventeen was then not perceived as a problem by even the greatest scientists. Einstein's mental experiment was precisely what Goethe had defined as the key to scientific knowledge: "Everything in science depends on what is called an aperpi, a realization of what lies behind the phenomena. And such a realization is infinitely fruitful."⁴⁹ This applies even more to Einstein's theory of relativity: it is not so much a case of understanding "what lies behind the phenomena" as an analysis of what should be understood by the concept ''phenomenon." It would take ten years for the "infinitely fruitful" character of that aper^u to emerge.

CHAPTER FOUR

"Vagabond and Loner": Student Days in Zurich

In the second week of October 1896 Albert Einstein enrolled in Department VI, the "School for Specialized Teachers in the Mathematical and Science Subjects" of the Polytechnic in Zurich. He was still six months short of the official minimum age—eighteen—and must therefore have been one of the youngest students ever to have entered that venerable institution.

The impressive main building at the foot of the Ziirichberg was designed by the Polytechnic's first professor of architecture, Gottfried Semper.¹ One of the most striking edifices in the city, it offers from its terrace a splendid view of the historic city center in the valley of the Limmat. The Polytechnic, founded in 1855, was the first university-type school of the Swiss Confederation (created in 1848). Unlike the universities of Basel, Zurich, and Geneva, which were financed and supervised by the cantons, the Polytechnic was subject directly to the Swiss government in Bern. Compared with these universities, the Polytechnic was of slighdy inferior status, but only in that it could not award doctoral degrees. This was changed in 1911, when it was upgraded to Swiss Technical University with all academic privileges. But the people of Zurich to this day refer to it as the "Poly."

At the turn of the century the institution had just under a thousand students,² the great majority of them in the engineering fields. Science came under Department VI, the "School for Specialized Teachers"; in addition to providing basic mathematical and scientific training for engineers, the department was also concerned with fundamental research. Mathematical Section VIA, which comprised mathematics, physics, and astronomy, was the one Albert Einstein attended in 1896, along with ten other freshmen, including Mileva Marie, the only woman student in the Mathematical Section, which then, with the freshmen, numbered only twenty-three students.

When in 1855 the first forty professorial appointments were made to the new Polytechnic, a journalist with a sense of history wrote: "Since the foundation of the University of Berlin no scholarly institution has

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set out on its activity with such a wealth of talent."³ This applied not only to architecture, but also to mathematics, in which the renowned Rudolf Dedekind was the first professor. In Adolf Hurwitz and Hermann Minkowski, Einstein had two outstanding mathematicians as his professors, men from whom he might have received first-rate training, but he let this opportunity slip by more or less unused: T saw that mathematics was split into many specialized areas, each of which could take up the short lifetime that is granted us. I thus found myself in the position of Buridan's ass, which could not make up its mind between one bundle of hay and another."⁴ Added to this was a certain subject-specific arrogance: Albert Einstein, in his innocence, believed that

it is sufficient for a physicist to have clearly understood the elementary mathematical concepts and to have them ready for application, while the rest consists of subtleties unprofitable to the physicist—a mistake I realized only later, with regret. My mathematical talent was evidently not sufficient to enable me to distinguish the central and fundamental from the peripheral, from what was not fundamentally important.'

At any rate he remembered Professor Carl Friedrich Geiser's lectures on infinitesimal geometry in his second year as "veritable masterpieces of the pedagogic art"⁶—possibly because he was able to make use of what he had learnt from Geiser while working on his own general theory of relativity.

Every beginner in Department VI had a study plan worked out for him by his professors. This consisted of core subjects, in which grades were given, and of useful optional subjects which were not assessed.

Hermann's lively intelligence and some sign of mathematical talent, there could, given the family's financial position, be no thought of his going to a university. He therefore left school with a "medium matu-rity" certificate, which at any rate provided an entree to the better classes of society and carried the privilege of having to serve only one year, instead of the usual three, of military service, and of serving as an officer cadet, with the prospect of a commission as a lieutenant of the reserve. However, Hermann evidently saw no point in participating in the wo field exercises which were a condition of being commissioned, and thus spared the royal Wiirttembergian army the problem of having to accept a Jew as a lieutenant of the reserve.

Albert Einstein's maternal ancestors also came from the Swabian Jewry. They lived in Jebenhausen, near Goppingen, on the northern spurs of the Swabian Alb. There Julius Dorzbacher, Albert's grandfather, supported his family with a small bakery. In 1842 the family name was changed to Koch, and in 1852 Julius Koch moved to Cannstatt, near Stuttgart. Together with his brother Heinrich he ran a profitable grain business, acquiring within a few years a considerable fortune and even becoming a "Supplier to the Royal Wiirttembergian Court." Clearly, the business activities of the Koch family were in an entirely different class from the small trade of the Einsteins—not only more profitable, but also more extensive and worldly. When he married, Heinrich Einstein not only became the husband of a pretty young woman (she was eleven years younger than himself) who was regarded as efficient, well educated, and, because of her piano playing, musical; he also made what was called a "good match."

In Einstein's case, perhaps more than with anybody else, one is tempted to engage in the popular game of asking what he might have inherited from whom. One obvious answer would be that with his mathematical gifts he took after his father and with his love of music he took after his mother. There have, of course, been attempts to find the first indications of Albert Einstein's exceptional talents somewhere in his family tree. But he himself refused to go along with such speculations:

First of all, I know virtually nothing about them, nor are there any people alive who could say a lot about them. If talents existed, then they could not emerge under their restricted living conditions. Besides, I know perfectly well that I myself have no special talents. It was curiosity, obsession, and sheer perseverance that brought me to my ideas. But as for any especially powerful thinking power ("cerebral muscles")—nothing like that is present, or only on a modest scale. Exploration of my ancestors therefore leads nowhere.³

More significant, without any doubt, is the fact that both on his father's and on his mother's side, Albert Einstein was born into a large, widely ramified family, whose members were soon settled in many cities and several countries of Europe. We will meet some of these relatives later. They include an aunt in Italy, who financed his studies; and his favorite uncle, Caesar Koch, a brother of his mother, whom the grain business had taken as far afield as St. Petersburg and Argentina, and who settled in Antwerp—where Albert, at age sixteen, sent him his first scientific essay.

These family connections were not only stimulating for young Einstein; they also helped him cope with many difficult phases in his life. And if in a city like Zurich there may have been no uncle, there would at least be a close friend of the family who looked after the young man. Much later, it was Professor Einstein, by then in America, who would try to help many of his relatives during the Nazis' persecution of the Jews.

After their marriage in 1876, Hermann Einstein and his young wife at first lived on Miinsterplatz, the cathedral square, in the old part of Ulm. After two years, at the beginning of Pauline's first pregnancy, they moved into a bigger apartment. Early in 1879, with Pauline six months pregnant, they moved to the livelier Bahnhofstrasse 135B, to a comfortable apartment in a three-story building. We have already seen—thanks to his sister's notes—that Albert's birth was not without some alarm. From the same source, we learn that Grandmother Helene, on first seeing her grandson, exclaimed, "Much too fat! xMuch too fat!"⁴ Little Albert seems to have been a quiet baby, causing no trouble to those charged with looking after him.

Albert Einstein did not develop any particular feeling for his birthplace, because a year later the family moved to Munich. When, on his fiftieth birthday, the owner of the building presented him with a photograph, he responded, not without some sarcasm: "For a place to be born in, the house is pleasant enough, because on that occasion one makes no great aesthetic demands yet; instead one first of all screams at one's dear ones, without bothering too much about reasons and circumstances."⁵

Still, even though Einstein spent only the first year of his life in U!m—growing up in Bavaria, and later in Italy and Switzerland— something Swabian clung to him all his life. For one thing, there was the soft Swabian dialect, which the family never dropped after leaving Wiirttemberg and which Einstein, if less markedly, kept to his old age. He himself became an object of its peculiar tendency toward diminutives: even as a grown man, he always remained, to his family and his second wife (his cousin Elsa), "der Albertl"—"Little Albert." Even during his final years in America, his English, which for him always remained a foreign language, seemed to have Swabian undertones.

In other respects, too, the Swabians would always have recognized him as one of their own: in his speculative brooding, in his often roguish and occasionally coarse humor, and in his pronounced, individualistic obstinacy. It was probably not just flattery when, as Ulm's most famous son, he was asked by the editor of the local paper for a comment, he readily came up with a compliment: "One's place of birth attaches to one's life as something just as unique as one's origin from one's mother.... I therefore think of Ulm with gratitude, because it combines artistic tradition with a simple and sound character."⁶

That Hermann Einstein planned another move so soon after the birth of his first child was due to the initiative of his youngest brother, Jakob. Jakob was the only one of the five brothers to have higher education. After leaving his Realscbule he had attended the Polytechnic in Stuttgart, had qualified as an engineer, and as an engineer had served in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. In 1876 he had settled in Munich, where he ran a small firm that did water and gas installations.

No doubt Jakob convinced Hermann that there was little future in Hermann's business—dealing in goose feathers for bedding—and that the new industrial age held out greater promise in more appropriate fields.

At any rate, Hermann Einstein moved to Munich with his wife and one-year-old son in the summer of 1880 and became a partner in the firm Jakob Einstein & Cie. The family took an apartment at Miiller-strasse 3, close to the Sendlinger Tor, in the same building where Jakob, still a bachelor, was living and which was also the address of the firm. The division of labor was determined by the interests and abilities of the two brothers: Jakob dealt with technical matters whereas Hermann concerned himself with the commercial side. Two years later the brothers enlarged their business by acquiring two-thirds of the assets of Kiessling & Cie., a "mechanical-technical workshop and boilermaking firm" which had earned a name for itself making gas boilers. In this way, Hermann Einstein productively and profitably invested the major portion of his wife's dowry.

Jakob also saw to it that the activities of Einstein & Cie. were extended to the relatively new field of electrical engineering. In 1882, almost at the same time as they acquired their share of Kiessling & Cie., the two Einsteins took part in the International Electro-Technical Show organized in Munich by Oskar von Miller. They exhibited dynamos, arc lamps, and lightbulbs, as well as a complete telephone system. This side of the business developed so well that the brothers soon abandoned gas and water installations and boilermaking.

In 1885, they sold their shares in Kiessling & Cie. and invested their capital, along with loans from relatives, in a newly founded "Electrical engineering factory J. Einstein & Cie." To this end they had acquired a major piece of land in the suburb of Sendling, "prop-erty No. 14" on what was then Rengerweg but in 1887 would be given the unpronounceable name Adlzreiterstrasse. Facing the street was a residential building, which was immediately enlarged by a spacious addition, and behind which was a rather neglected but large garden with ancient trees. The factory was set up in buildings on a nearby property, Lindwurmstrasse 125, purchased for that purpose.

1 be unworthy of me to buy a few days' pleasure with new pain—

2 already I have inflicted too much on the dear child through my

Меня зовут Валера и я хочу запустить 2 вирусных идеи, которые искал уже давно, ЧТОБЫ ИЗМЕНИТЬ ЧТО-ТО В ЭТОМ МИРЕ. Во-первых это символ +2800 значение которого совершенно противоположно +100500: И он для того, чтобы рассказать о еврейском фашизме, 2800 рабах каждому еврею, а главное о каббалистическом языке и каббалистических методах и электронном концлагере который нам готовят и как его избежать. Я думаю многие из вас слышат об этом первый раз и не понимают о чем это я:-) Но это интересно, важно знать каждому и каждому важно рассказывать об этом другим. Подробнее об этом на сайте plus2800.ru. А во-вторых волшебный третий нос на лбу:-) Это как у пастофарианцев друшлак на голове. Тоже религиозный символ, но тройного назначения. Во 1-ых это тоже религиозный символ придуманный для того, чтобы рассказать о +2800 и его значениях. Во 2-ых наделяет сверхспособностью о которой мечтал один английский комик. В 3-их он может спасти тому кто его носит жизнь! А в 4-ых его можно использовать как антистресс который всегда под рукой. И в отличии от друшлака его можно носить хоть постоянно - хоть дома, хоть в офисе, хоть на улице даже не замечая этого. В любую погоду и он подходит под любую одежду. У учительницы их Химок были проблемы из-за того, что она пришла в школу с друшлаком на голове и вела в таком виде урок. Из-за этого у неё были проблемы и это была разовая акция. А ношение третьего носа можно обосновать и практическими соображениями перечисленными выше. Но при этом все равно все будут знать откуда взялась такая мода, для чего и какие смыслы несет. И подробней об этом на сайте plus2800.ru. А самое главное, что когда я начинал этот проект, то думал что люди верят в религиозную чушь, потому что не знают о лжи и преступлениях церквей и если им рассказать, то они перестанут верить. Но на самом деле ни х.... И многие готовы верить в это, поддерживать это или по крайней мере относиться нейтрально, потому что думают что хоть это и ложь, но ложь полезная и выгодная, поэтому пусть будет. Хм... Возможно поможет если объяснить, что это вредная ложь и они то как раз и создают проблемы, которые решают. Но как ни странно это тоже малоэффективно. А знаете в чем причина? Людей зазомбировали и научили так, что им кажется. что они думают сами, а на самом деле думают чужими мыслями и никакие аргументы и факты ничего не изменят. Вот если телевизор скажет и в то, что будут говорить люди вокруг они поверят скорее чем логике и здравому смыслу. Поэтому чтобы они "услышали" логику и здравый смысл, нужно чтобы миллионы людей говорили об этом. И для этого и был придуман волшебный третий нос на лбу. И вот если миллионы, десятки миллионов, сотни миллионов будут носить волшебный третий нос и рассказывать о том, что зашифровано в символе +2800, то они вдруг услышат здравый смысл и логике и вдруг они "поймут"... Хотя на самом деле нет, а просто опять поверят авторитету. Но в принципе это на данном этапе и не важно - главное результат. Но в общем идея такая и подробнее об этом на сайте plus2800.ru

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