Einstein family
| Einstein Family | |
|---|---|
| Place of origin | Württemberg, Germany |
| Members | Albert Einstein, Maja Einstein, Hermann Einstein, Pauline Koch |
| Connected families | Koch, Moos, Overnauer , Clews |
The Einstein family is the family of the famous scientist Albert Einstein. Einstein's great-great-great-great-grandfather, Jakob Weil, is his oldest recorded relative, born around the turn of the 18th century, and the family continues to this day. Albert Einstein's great-great-grandfather, Löb Moses Sontheimer (1745–1831), was also the grandfather of the prominent tenor Heinrich Sontheim (1820–1912) of Stuttgart.[1]
Albert's three children were from his relationship with his first wife, Mileva Marić, his daughter Lieserl being born a year before they married.
Albert Einstein's second wife was Elsa Einstein, whose mother Fanny Koch was the sister of Albert's mother, and whose father Rudolf Einstein was the son of Raphael Einstein, a brother of Albert's paternal grandfather. Thus Albert and Elsa were first cousins through their mothers and second cousins through their fathers.[2]
Einstein Family table
| Generation | Paternal | Maternal | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| First (known) generation | Jakob Weil from Wallerstein (?) (father of Jüttle Sara)[1] | ||
| Second generation | Juda from Nordstetten (?), Chaja [last name unknown] (?),
Hoyna Moses Sontheimer (1705-?), Gölla [last name unknown] (?) |
Jakob Weil (?), Jüttle Sara Weil (1722–1808),
David Katz |
|
| Third generation | David Veit Einstein (unknown-1763) | Samuel Obernauer (1744–1795), Judith Mayer Hill (1748-?) Löb Samuel Dörzbacher (1757-?) Golies (1761-?) |
Jakob Simon Bernheimer (1756–1790), Leah Hajm (1753–1833) Bernard (Beerle) Weil (1750–1840), Rösle Katz (1760–1826) |
| Fourth generation | Naftali Einstein (1733-?), Hayum Moos, Helene Steppach (1737-?) | ||
| Fifth generation | Rupert Einstein (1759–1834) Veit Hirsch (1763–1820) Rebekka Overnauer (1770–1843) Hayum Moos (1788-?), Fanny Schmal (1792-?) |
Zadok Löb Dörzbacher (1783–1852), Blumle Sontheimer (1786–1856) | |
| Sixth generation | Abraham Einstein (1808–1868). Siblings: Hirsch Einstein [b.1799-?], Judith Einstein [b.1802-?], Samuel Rupert Einstein [b.1804-?], Raphael Einstein [b.1806-?], David Einstein [b.1810-?]),
Helene Moos (1814–1887, Siblings: None) |
Julius Dörzbacher (1816–1895, Siblings: None),
Jette Bernheimer (1825–1886, Siblings: None) |
|
| Seventh generation | Hermann Einstein (1847–1902). Siblings: August Ignaz Einstein (b.1841-?), Jette Einstein (b.1844-?), Heinrich Einstein (b.1845-?), Jakob Einstein (b.1850-?), Friederike Einstein (b.1855-?) | Pauline Koch (1858–1920). Siblings: Fanny Koch (1852–1926), Jacob Koch (?), Caesar Koch (?) | |
| Eighth generation | Albert Einstein (1879–1955), Maja Einstein (1881–1951) | Albert's wives: Mileva Marić (1875–1948), Elsa Einstein (1876–1936) | |
| Ninth generation (Albert's children) | Lieserl Einstein (1902-1903?), Hans Albert Einstein (1904–1973), Eduard Einstein (1910–1965) | ||
| Tenth generation | Bernhard Caesar Einstein (1930–2008), Klaus Martin (1933–1939); and Evelyn (1941–2011) adopted child) | ||
| Eleventh generation | Thomas Martin Einstein (1955-), Paul Michael Einstein (1959-), Eduard Albert (Ted) Einstein (1961-), Mira Einstein-Yehieli (1965-), Charles Quincy Ascher (Charly) Einstein (1971-) |
Pauline Koch
Pauline Einstein (née Koch) | |
|---|---|
 Pauline Einstein (née Koch) | |
| Born | February 8, 1858 |
| Died | February 20, 1920 (aged 62) Berlin, Germany |
| Nationality | German |
| Spouse | Hermann Einstein |
| Children | Albert Einstein and Maja Einstein |
| Parent(s) | Julius Derzbacher and Jette Bernheimer |
Pauline Einstein (née Koch) (February 8, 1858 – February 20, 1920) was the mother of the physicist Albert Einstein. She was born in Cannstatt, Württemberg.[3] She was Jewish and had an older sister, Fanny, and two older brothers, Jacob and Caesar. Her parents were Julius Doerzbacher, who had accepted the family name Koch in 1842, and Jette Bernheimer. They had married in 1847. Pauline’s father was from Jebenhausen, now part of the city of Göppingen, and came from simple circumstances. Later he lived in Cannstatt and together with his brother Heinrich succeeded in making a considerable fortune in the corn trade. They even became “Royal Württemberg Purveyor to the Court”. Their mother was from Cannstatt and was a quiet and caring person.
Early life
At 18 years old, Pauline married the merchant Hermann Einstein who lived in Ulm. They got married in Cannstatt on August 8, 1876. After the marriage the young couple lived in Ulm, where Hermann became joint partner in a bed feathers company. Their son Albert was born on March 14, 1879. On the initiative of Hermann’s brother Jakob the family moved to Munich in the summer of 1880, where the two brothers together founded an electrical engineering company called [4] Einstein & Cie. The second child of Hermann and Pauline, their daughter Maria (called Maja), was born in Munich on November 18, 1881. Pauline Einstein was a very well educated and quiet woman who had an inclination towards the arts. When her duties in the household allowed it she was an assiduous and good piano player. She made Albert begin with violin lessons at the age of five.[5]
Business problems
The factory of Hermann and Jakob was moved to Pavia, Italy in 1894. Hermann, Maria and Pauline moved to Milan in the same year and one year later moved to Pavia. Albert stayed with relatives in Munich to continue his education there. The separation from her son was certainly difficult for Pauline. Due to poor business, the brothers had to abandon their factory in 1896. Though Hermann had lost most of their money, he founded (without his brother) another electrical engineering company in Milan. This time business was better. But Hermann's health had gone downhill, and he died of heart failure in Milan on October 10, 1902.
After Hermann
In 1903 Pauline went to live with her sister Fanny and her husband Rudolf Einstein, a first cousin of Hermann, in Hechingen, Württemberg. Fanny's daughter Elsa was to become the second wife of Albert in 1919. In 1910 Pauline moved with her sister Fanny and her family to Berlin. She took on a job as housekeeper in Heilbronn, Württemberg in 1911. She lived with her brother Jacob Koch and his family in Zurich after 1914.
Death
During World War I, Pauline fell ill with cancer. In 1918, when visiting her daughter Maria and son-in-law Paul Winteler in Luzern, Pauline was taken to the sanatorium Rosenau, due to her illness. At the end of 1919, Albert took his terminally-ill mother out of the sanatorium in Luzern and brought her to Haberlandstrasse 5, Berlin to stay with him and his second wife Elsa, where she later died.
Hermann Einstein
Hermann Einstein | |
|---|---|
 Hermann Einstein | |
| Born | August 30, 1847 |
| Died | October 10, 1902 (aged 55) |
| Citizenship | Germany (1847-1894) Italy (1894-1902) |
| Occupation(s) | Scientific utility salesman, Electrician |
| Spouse | Pauline Koch |
| Children | Albert Einstein and Maja Einstein |
| Parent(s) | Abraham Einstein and Helene Moos |
Hermann Einstein (August 30, 1847 – October 10, 1902) was the father of Albert Einstein.
Early life
Hermann Einstein (also known as Hermann Moos) was born in Buchau, Württemberg to Abraham Einstein and Helene Moos (July 3, 1814–Aug. 20, 1887).
He had six siblings:
Raphael (Dec. 3, 1839-Jan. 15, 1842); male, Jette (Jan. 13, 1844-Jan. 7, 1905); female, Heinrich (Oct. 12, 1845-Nov. 16, 1877); male, August Ignaz (Dec. 23, 1849-Apr. 14, 1911); male, Jakob (Nov. 25, 1850–1912); male, Friederike "Rika" (Mar. 15, 1855-June 17, 1938); female.[6]
At the age of 14, Hermann attended the secondary school in the regional capital Stuttgart and was academically successful. He had a strong affection for mathematics, and would have liked to study in this or a related area, but as the financial situation of the family opposed further education, he decided to become a merchant and began an apprenticeship in Stuttgart.
Marriage to Pauline
Hermann married 18-year-old Pauline Koch in Cannstatt, Württemberg on August 8, 1876.[7] After their wedding, the young couple lived in Ulm, where Hermann became joint partner in the bed feathers shop of his cousins Moses and Hermann Levi. In Ulm, their son Albert was born on March 14, 1879. On the initiative of Hermann's brother Jakob, the family moved to Munich in the summer of 1880. There the two brothers founded the electrical engineering company Einstein & Cie, with Hermann being the merchant and Jakob the technician. The second child of Hermann and Pauline, their daughter Maria (called Maja) was born in Munich on November 18, 1881.
Work
The Einstein's electrical firm manufactured dynamos and electrical meters based on direct current. They were instrumental in bringing electricity to Munich, the capital of a very Catholic Bavaria. In 1885, they won the contract that provided DC lights to illuminate the Oktoberfest for the first time. To young, impressionable Albert, this must have been the source of great pride, for at this time Albert was the only Jew in his Catholic Petersschule class.
To their dismay, the Einstein brothers eventually lost a bidding war for the electrification contract of Munich to Siemens, which promoted the modern alternating current. Their fortunes took a decidedly downward turn from there.
The two brothers moved their company to Pavia, Italy in 1894. Hermann, Pauline and Maja moved to Milan in the same year and one year later moved to Pavia. Albert stayed with relatives in Munich to continue his education there. Due to poor business, Hermann and Jakob had to abandon their factory in 1896. Though Hermann had lost most of their money, he founded another electrical engineering company in Milan, this time without his brother. He was supported financially by his relatives in this venture. Though business was better this time, Hermann was preoccupied with “worries due to the vexatious money”. He moved back to Germany in 1902.
Death
Hermann Einstein died of heart failure in Milan,1902. The grave is Civico Mausoleo Palanti inside Cimitero Monumentale di Milano
Maria 'Maja' Einstein
Maria 'Maja' Einstein | |
|---|---|
 Maria 'Maja' Einstein ca.1930 | |
| Born | Maria Einstein November 18, 1881 |
| Died | June 25, 1951 (aged 69) |
| Cause of death | Atherosclerosis |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Doctor |
| Known for | Alberts well known inventions |
| Partner | Paul Winteler |
| Children | None |
| Parent(s) | Hermann Einstein and Pauline Koch |
| Relatives | Albert Einstein |
| Notes | |
"Yes, but where does it have its small wheels?" Question by a young Albert Einstein when he first saw his sister in 1881. | |
Maria "Maja" Einstein and her older brother Albert Einstein were the two children of Hermann Einstein and Pauline Einstein (née Koch), who had moved from Ulm to Munich in June 1880, when Albert was two.[8] There Hermann and his brother Jakob had founded Einstein & Cie., an electrical engineering company.[9]
She was born November 18, 1881 in Munich. When little Albert saw his sister for the first time he thought she was a kind of toy and asked: "Yes, but where does it have its small wheels?"[9] Maja and Albert got along very well all their lives. She was Albert's only friend during his childhood.
She attended elementary school in Munich from 1887 to 1894. She then moved with her parents to Milan, where she attended the German International School; Albert had stayed behind with relatives in Munich to complete his schooling. From 1899 to 1902, she attended a workshop for teachers in Aarau. After she passed her final exams she studied Romance languages and literature in Berlin, Bern and Paris. In 1909, she graduated from University of Bern, her dissertation was entitled "Contribution to the Tradition of the Chevalier au Cygne and the Enfances Godefroi".
In the year following her graduation, she married Paul Winteler, but they were to be childless. The young couple moved to Luzern in 1911, where Maja's husband had found a job. In 1922 they moved to Colonnata near Florence in Italy.[10]
After Italian leader Benito Mussolini introduced anti-Semitic laws in Italy, Albert invited Maja to emigrate to the United States in 1939 and live in his residence in Mercer Street, Princeton, New Jersey. Her husband was denied entry into the United States on health grounds.[9] Maja spent some pleasant years with Albert, until she suffered a stroke in 1946, and became bedridden.[11] She later developed progressive arteriosclerosis, and died in Princeton on June 25, 1951 four years before her brother.[11]
Template:Einstein Family photo
Lieserl Einstein
Lieserl Einstein | |
|---|---|
| Born | January 1902 |
| Died | 1903? |
| Cause of death | possibly scarlet fever |
| Resting place | unknown |
| Parent(s) | Mileva Marić and Albert Einstein |
| Relatives | Marija Marić née Ružić, Miloš Marić, Pauline Einstein née Koch, Hermann Einstein, Hans Albert Einstein and Eduard Einstein. |
Lieserl Einstein (born January, 1902 – last mentioned in 1903; date of death unknown) was the first child of Mileva Marić and Albert Einstein.
According to the correspondence between her parents, "Lieserl" was born in January, 1902, a year before her parents married, in Novi Sad, Vojvodina, present day Republic of Serbia, and was cared for by her mother for a short time while Einstein worked in Switzerland before Marić joined him there without the child.
"Lieserl's" existence was unknown to biographers until 1986, when a batch of letters between Albert and Mileva was discovered by Hans Albert Einstein's daughter Evelyn.
Marić had hoped for a girl, while Einstein would have preferred a boy. In their letters, they called the unborn child "Lieserl", when referring to a girl, or "Hanserl", if a boy. Both "Lieserl" and "Hanserl" are diminutives of the very common German names Liese and Hans.
The first reference to Marić's pregnancy is found in a letter Einstein wrote to her from Winterthur, probably on May 28, 1901 (letter 36), asking twice about "the boy" and "our little son",[12] whereas Marić's first reference is found in her letter of November 13, 1901 (letter 43) from Stein am Rhein, in which she refers to the unborn child as "Lieserl".[13] Einstein goes along with Marić's wish for a daughter, and refers to the unborn child as "Lieserl" as well, but with a sense of humour as in letter 45 of December 12, 1901 "... and be happy about our Lieserl, whom I secretly (so Dollie [14] doesn't notice) prefer to imagine a Hanserl."[15]
The child must have been born shortly before February 4, 1902, when Einstein wrote: "... now you see that it really is a Lieserl, just as you'd wished. Is she healthy and does she cry properly? [...] I love her so much and don't even know her yet!"[16]
The last time "Lieserl" is mentioned in their extant correspondence is in Einstein's letter of September 19, 1903 (letter 54), in which he shows concern for her suffering from scarlet fever. His asking "as what is the child registered? [Adding] we must take precautions that problems don't arise for her later" may indicate the intention to give the child up for adoption.[17]
As neither the full name, nor the fate of the child are known so far several theories about her life and death have been put forward:
- Michele Zackheim, in her book on "Lieserl", Einstein's Daughter, states that "Lieserl" was mentally challenged at birth, and that she lived with her mother's family and probably died of scarlet fever in September 1903.[18]
- Another possibility, favoured by Robert Schulmann of the Einstein Papers Project, is that "Lieserl" was adopted by Marić's close friend, Helene Savić, and was raised by her and lived under the name "Zorka Savić" until the 1990s. Savić did in fact raise a child by the name of Zorka, who was blind from childhood and died in the 1990s. Her grandson Milan Popović rejects the possibility that it was "Lieserl", and also favors the theory that the child died in September 1903.[19]
Essay in 2009 by British writer Tim Symonds:
‘A Vital Detail In The Story Of Albert Einstein’
What Happened to Lieserl: the Fourth Theory
In September 1903 a letter was sent from the Swiss city of Bern to a woman in the Serbian town of Novi Sad. It was one of only three known letters containing references to an infant girl born out of wedlock 21 months earlier. After that, her existence gets expunged from the records.
This might be of minor interest to the outside world except for one reason: the father of this small child was Albert Einstein. The world only knows about his daughter’s existence through these long-lost letters.
So far there are three theories trying to explain why the infant girl vanished. One theory assumes Albert Einstein and the infant’s mother Mileva Marić must have asked a friend in Belgrade to adopt her. Another of the three theories suggests she was left at a home for severely physically or mentally-handicapped children. The last of the three holds she died of Scarlet Fever in the epidemic which killed 400 out of 1000 children in the Novi Sad area at the time.
In the following pages I offer my solution to the extraordinary mystery of the girl known as ‘Lieserl’. I call it the Fourth Theory. Some people reading the Fourth Theory will find the speculative verve deeply shocking, particularly those who resolutely wish to think of Einstein as a secular saint.
Why is the life or death of this infant girl a mystery in the first place? It is for one reason only. A ruthless effort was made by Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić, their friends, admirers and relatives, to destroy every document with Lieserl’s name on it. The mystery is - why?
It is possible someone one day will discover what happened to this half-Serbian half-German girl born in late January or early February 1902 but the difficulties are immense. It would challenge Einstein’s fictional contemporary, the great Sherlock Holmes. For a start there is a problem with the name ‘Lieserl’. While this was the name used in the Albert/Mileva correspondence, no birth certificate has ever been discovered, a search made more difficult because her real name cannot be surmised from this affectionate appellation. It is a diminutive equivalent to ‘Betty’ for ‘Elizabeth’, but it may have been used simply as a nickname for ‘girl’. Searching records for Erzsebeth or the Hungarian Erzsike (Serbia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time) could mean going down the wrong track.
After that last-known reference to her in a letter from Albert Einstein to Mileva Marić, the infant simply disappears. She left behind the greatest remaining mystery surrounding the greatest Physicist of the 20th Century. Frederic Golden wrote in Time Magazine in September 1999, ‘Lieserl's fate shadows the Einstein legend like some unsolved equation’.
Was the assault on every trace of her existence simply because the parents were not married at the time of Lieserl’s birth? At the time, perhaps, but why the obsessive secrecy across the next 50 years? In ‘Einstein, His Life And Universe’, biographer Walter Isaacson makes much of Einstein’s lifelong willingness to challenge authority, commenting, ‘Einstein’s impudence and contempt for convention, traits that were abetted by Mileva Marić, were evident in his science as well as his personal life in 1901’.
A man of powerful subterranean emotions, Albert Einstein had gargantuan redeeming features but not his deep revulsion of the ‘genetically inferior’, of anyone unlucky enough to be born with a mental or physical handicap.
Tim Symonds January 2010 tim.symonds@shevolution.com
When the great Physicist Albert Einstein died in 1955 he thought the world would never know about Lieserl, the daughter his Serbian mistress Mileva Marić bore him in the second year of the 20th Century. Lieserl was conceived in the early Summer of 1901 during a three-day tryst at a beautiful lake in northern Italy.
A few days before the tryst, Albert Einstein sent Mileva a lover’s summons: ‘You absolutely must come see me in Como, you little witch.’
The little witch accepted. She wrote, ‘Dann wollen wir einen Teil des Sees zu Fuss ablaufen…’, ‘We’ll walk around part of the Lake on foot, practicing our botany, chatting and enjoying each other’s company’.
Ahead of the visit to Italy, Mileva prayed hard to St Peter, the saint-protector of her Serbian Orthodox family. She begged St Peter to make the tryst at Lake Como the most exciting experience of her life. Her wish was granted. But there would be a twist of shattering consequence.
At 5 o’clock on a Sunday morning at the start of May 1901, they met at the Como train station, Einstein with open arms and ‘a pounding heart’. Together they sailed on a white steamer across the Lake to Cadenábbia on the western shore of Lake Como on the border of Italy and Switzerland, the most magnificent of the Italian Alpine lakes. They visited the Villa Carlotta at its most beautiful, with its statue of Cupid and Psyche, the gardens ablaze with azaleas. They crossed the Italian-Swiss border by the snow-covered Splügen Pass on a small horse-drawn sleigh. Mileva wrote to her friend Helene Savić: “I shuddered at this cold white infinity and firmly kept my arm round my sweetheart under the coats and blankets which covered us…I was so happy…”
It is conceivable they had made love before, in Zurich. Certainly this time the walk went a lot further than ‘practicing our botany’. A week or so after they left Lake Como, Albert wrote to Mileva, now back in Serbia, to express ‘how delightful it was when I was allowed to press your dear little person to me in the way nature created it…’.
It was the highest point in an extraordinarily intense affair.
In the Autumn, lyrically in love with Einstein, Mileva wrote to her friend Helene Savić, ‘Oh, Helene, pray to St Peter for me that I might have him completely, that I do not have to be parted from him all the time – I love him so frightfully’.
Towards the end of January or early February 1902, a daughter was born somewhere in Serbia, her mother’s country.
Clinics in Swiss cities such as Geneva and Zurich readily offered terminations and abortifacients were available by mail. Although Mileva and Albert were not to marry for another year, there is no evidence either of them contemplated these options. Quite the opposite. At 22 years of age, out of work and with no immediate prospects, Einstein at once took on his share of responsibility, writing to Mileva, ‘I will look for a position immediately, no matter how humble it is’. Within a week or so after she told Einstein she was pregnant he wrote to her in the most matter of fact way, asking about the child (he anticipated a boy) and Mileva’s studies in one sentence: ‘How are our little son and your doctoral thesis?’
During Mileva’s pregnancy this was a much-wanted child.
Nevertheless, the couple were well aware of the likely effect on family and the public at large. In late July when she was 3 months pregnant she asked Einstein, ‘Write to my Papa just briefly, I shall then gradually break the necessary news,’ including the ‘disagreeable’ news.
In Novi Sad, on being told this disagreeable news, Mileva’s mother Marija promised to thrash the man who had done this to her daughter.
To hide what she referred to as her ‘funny figure’ (the illegitimate pregnancy) from neighbours’ inquisitive eye Mileva may have left her parents’ house in Novi Sad, a town on the Danube, for Sombor in the North West of Vojvodina Province where a family close to the Marić family lived. A letter Einstein addressed to her in late November 1902 when she would have been about seven months pregnant expresses his surprise she doesn’t seem to have received three previous letters from him. Her discreet withdrawal to Sombor could explain this.
So commenced the greatest mystery surrounding one of the greatest scientific couples of the 20th Century.
Albert stayed away from the birth, choosing to remain at his flat in Switzerland. When the daughter was born it was not Mileva but her father Miloš who informed Einstein by letter. The birth had been extremely difficult, possibly from the life-long hip deformity Mileva suffered. She was left exhausted. The father’s handwriting on the envelope gave Einstein a great shock. He immediately feared the worst, that Mileva must have died in child-birth.
To this day no-one knows anything substantive about that daughter except that she lived, like a firefly, briefly.
When exactly was she born? When exactly did she die? Especially, what caused her death?
For over 80 years her very existence was unknown to the public. Then, amazingly, in 1985 a cache of letters was examined. Lieserl’s name came to the world’s attention. Since then, biographers of Albert Einstein have stretched far to explain the mystery.
There are three principal theories for his first child’s disappearance from the record after she reaches 21 months of age. One holds she must have been sent off to friends in Belgrade for adoption. The person most mentioned in this scenario is Helene Savić. Another theory suggests she was sent off to a home for physically or mentally handicapped children, despite the terrible reputation of such institutions in Serbia. In her book ‘Einstein’s Daughter,’ Michele Zackheim is unequivocal: ‘Serbian custom prevented Mileva from placing the child for adoption or sending her to an orphanage. In Vojvodina, there was no greater disgrace than giving up a child to strangers.’ The next theory is one most of Einstein’s biographers seem to prefer, that she died of Scarlet Fever in the major epidemic of late-Summer 1903. This is not an unreasonable theory. Regular epidemics swept the region.
In addition to Scarlet Fever and diphtheria, the region was regularly visited with typhus, haemorrhagic smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, smallpox, cholera, and recurrent fever. Any of these were life-threatening at the time, especially to infants.
However, Einstein’s last-known letter mentioning Lieserl was written in September 1903 when the epidemic may have run its course. In the letter he pointedly asks if Lieserl has been ‘registered’ with the authorities, adding ‘We must take great care, lest difficulties arise for the child in the future’.
This gives the strongest impression she survived the epidemic.
Objectively, neither death from scarlet fever nor the two other theories hold water, not least because of one fact, the complete dearth of evidence which would normally abound if any of them were true. They are, after all, perfectly commonplace explanations. Rather – and especially odd – is the fact the normal human behaviour of a wide number of actors in the piece undergoes a sea change. In a region where rumour-mongering is as much a way of life as any other part of the world, every single voice becomes muzzled. Every document disappears. Nowhere is there mention of monetary payments, nor mention of travel with the infant, no legal documentation, no family papers such as a baptismal certificate, particularly no death certificate nor any other customary civic record. As biographer Albrecht Fölsing put it in his well-researched book ‘Albert Einstein’: ‘Evidence of the first two years of Lieserl’s life is scant enough; beyond that, the fate of Albert Einstein’s first child is totally unknown. The daughter was never again mentioned in a letter, and despite intensive searches no entries have been found in parish registers, registry office documents, or anywhere else.’
After spending more than two years looking into the mystery I have come to a Fourth Theory.
This responds to the facts and suppositions surrounding Lieserl’s short shadowy life. The Fourth Theory contends that while Lieserl was still an infant – less than two years old – she was put to death. It was a mercy-killing, made the more expedient because of extraordinarily challenging circumstances Einstein found himself in at the time, only two years before he explodes on to the world of Physics in the Annus Mirabilis of 1905. The man who nearly a hundred years later would be dubbed Time Magazine’s Person Of The Century simply came to the conclusion it would be best for all concerned if the tiny infant was put out of her misery.
But to return to the beginning: when Albert Einstein heard Mileva was pregnant, with wishful thinking he anticipated a son. He would call him ‘Hanserl’, the diminutive of ‘Hans’ in the dialect of Southern Germany where Einstein was raised. It turned out to be a girl.
On hearing the news Einstein quickly adapted. A few days after Lieserl’s birth in early February 1902, Einstein wrote from Switzerland to Mileva at her parents’ winter home in Novi Sad. He asked, ‘Is she healthy and does she cry properly?’ adding, ‘I love her so much and don't even know her yet!’
It all began five years earlier, in 1896, when the 17 year old German-born Albert Einstein met Serbian fellow student Mileva Marić at the Zurich Polytechnic. It was a meeting which would change our view of the Universe. It was completely to alter humanity’s understanding of space-time itself.
Each was at the Zurich Poly studying for a teaching diploma in Mathematics. Letters show how their first formal exchanges – Fräulein Marić, Herr Einstein - gradually but surely turned to fervent love. Mileva was four years older than Albert. Like many or most Slavs she had a thorough distaste for all things German, or at least northern German. Once she met Einstein she seems quickly to have taken a great interest in his country of origin. In 1897 she enrolled as a guest student in a physics course at a university in Heidelberg where, she informed Einstein, she walked ‘under German oaks in the charming Neckar Valley’. In return she wanted Einstein to take an interest in Serbia. From Heidelberg, she wrote, ‘Papa has given me some tobacco and I am to give it to you myself, he wanted to make your mouth water for our little bandit country’.
All too soon the couple ran into difficulties. The clandestine visit to Lake Como in May 1901 was arranged to avoid the eye of Einstein’s mother Pauline. Right from the start she despised, even hated Mileva. Germans as a whole looked down on Slavs and Pauline was no exception. By contrast, the Marić family had no antipathy towards the Jews. The family’s Patron Saint was St Stefan the Martyr. St Stefan had been born Jewish. And there was a kind of solidarity. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire everyone looked down on Serbs and Jews equally.
Einstein’s mother Pauline was a truly serious obstacle. In February 1902 she wrote to her friend Professor Pauline Winteler, crying ‘This Miss Marić is causing me the bitterest hours of my life, if it were in my power I would make every possible effort to banish her from my horizon. I have a veritable antipathy toward her’.
When she penned those words, Pauline Einstein had just become a grandmother through the very woman she had a ‘veritable antipathy’ towards. It is not certain she ever learnt of this new status. There is no convincing evidence Einstein’s mother, sister or any of their friends in Germany, Austria, Italy or Switzerland ever knew about Lieserl.
The visit to Lake Como and the consequent birth of Einstein’s first child began one of the most mysterious passages in the life of one of the greatest theoretical physicists in all human history, inventor of Relativity, inventor of the most famous equation in science, E=MC², the equation which presaged the development of the Atomic Bomb.
The facts about Lieserl are few and stark. Few further clues would be made available from the vast store of papers Einstein left behind when he died. In ‘The Private Lives of Albert Einstein’ authors Roger Highfield and Paul Carter state, ‘Biographers and researchers who attempted to investigate Einstein’s life, or to make use of his writings, found their efforts constantly thwarted. Crucial sources of information were either suppressed or censored’.
The timing of Mileva’s pregnancy could not have been worse. She and Albert were not married and this was 1901. Albert was desperately seeking a position in the Physics Department of the conservative-minded Zurich Polytechnic. Although Zurich was considered one of the more liberal, even revolutionary Swiss cities, having a child out of wedlock was no commendation.
At some point in the Summer, Mileva took the lengthy train journey to her parents’ home in Novi Sad, leaving Albert in Bern. In November, desperate to see him again, Mileva took the train back to Switzerland. By now she was 7 months pregnant. Einstein had taken a job as tutor at a private academy in Schaffhausen, 30 kilometres north of Zurich. To avoid any chance of her ‘funny figure’ being observed, she spent most of November at a small hotel in an adjacent village. Two months later, when Mileva was back in Serbia, Lieserl was born.
Over the next known period of Lieserl’s short life her mother Mileva travelled back and forth from Serbia several times to visit Albert in Switzerland but nothing shows she ever took Lieserl with her. And Albert never visited Novi Sad while Lieserl was alive. One of many possible occasions Einstein could have visited Lieserl in Serbia was in July 1903 when she would have been about a year and a half. His Summer holiday was due. Tentative plans were made to visit their old friend and former fellow student Helene Savić in Belgrade. The plan fell though when Helene decided to visit her parents in Vienna. Einstein resolutely chose not to take the opportunity to pay a visit to Lieserl instead. Two months later his baby daughter disappears from the face of the Earth.
Whether Mileva ever told her friend Helene Savić about Lieserl is unclear even though Mileva was pregnant (but as yet unmarried) at almost the same as Helene was bearing a child, also a daughter. The two first met in the Spring of 1899 when both were students at the Zurich Polytechnic living in the boarding-house Engelbrecht. Correspondence between them began in the Summer of the same year when Mileva returned to her family’s Summer home in Kać, near Novi Sad.
Early obfuscation about Lieserl’s existence – in the known letters at least - may have lasted throughout the long Mileva/Helene friendship. In one later letter, posted in Zurich, Mileva writes, ‘Dearest Helene! My hearty greetings to your two children! … I have such a pleasant memory of this bunch of girls that I would be extremely happy if I could get to know one of them better…You know about my unfulfilled desire for a daughter, etc. I would like such a one.’
The rest of the letter, after that sentence, has disappeared. When would you suppose this letter was written – before Lieserl’s birth in 1902? No. Mileva wrote it more than 20 years later, in 1924.
Within days, perhaps hours, of Lieserl’s birth, the cover up seems to have gone into high gear. A plausible explanation for the sheer intensity of the cover-up may lie in rumours of a tragic discovery when the midwife delivered the baby. In the 1990s Michele Zackheim spent five years researching material for her book ‘Einstein’s Daughter’. She concludes from many conversations on the spot in Serbia that Lieserl was born severely mentally-handicapped.
Lieserl’s life and death are the black hole at the centre of a story as intriguing as Einstein’s description of the workings of the Universe. It is a story of a hard-up young man’s desperate search for work after leaving the Zurich Polytechnic. The diploma in his pocket was suitable only for teaching at secondary school level. The ‘wife-in-waiting’ was despised by Einstein’s mother as ‘deformed’ and ‘unhealthy’ because of a hip problem, possibly brought on by childhood tuberculosis, perhaps by heredity. She wore an orthopaedic shoe on one foot all her life. In 1903, Einstein must have felt the prospects of a career in Physics let alone the chance to become a great professor were threatened beyond measure by the very existence of this daughter, not only illegitimate but possibly seriously brain-damaged.
So what definitely do we know about the players in this Marlowe-esque drama? We know Lieserl’s mother was born Mileva Marić in Titel, a village then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Albert Einstein was born in the ancient German city of Ulm, on the Danube, into a ‘Meadow’ (as against ‘Shtetl’) Jewish family.
Einstein and Mileva met physically and culturally almost midway, at the Polytechnic in Zurich, because both wanted to become famous scientists and the Polytechnic had gained Europe-wide fame for Physics and Mathematics – and permitted women to get degrees. The two students began to fall desperately, and fatally, in love.
Albert Einstein has been called a Jewish saint, with sarcasm by the Nazis, with reverence by many others.
But was there a dark side lurking behind the smiling iconic face of the famous scientist, the ‘poster-boy’ whose photo for 50 years was so prevalent on T-shirts and covers of Time Magazine - a side as cold and dark as the planets of outer space? Surely not!
But after months of research I conclude Albert Einstein, less than two years after Lieserl’s birth, consented to, even instigated her murder. Such a killing, however merciful in intent, would be utterly against the tenets of the Jewish religion. However, Albert Einstein, though culturally a Jew, was not religious in the Orthodox meaning of the word. He did not believe in traditional notions of a personal God.
To return to Lieserl. The years passed. One by one the principal players died. Her mother Mileva Marić died in 1948. In 1955 her father Albert Einstein died. As though covered by a mantle of driven snow, the human landscape surrounding Lieserl’s life became more and more indistinct.
Eventually nothing of her would have remained to history if it had not been for a dutiful act carried out by the Einsteins’ daughter-in-law Frieda, first wife of their eldest son Hans Albert. On Mileva Marić’s death, Frieda went to Zurich to clear out the apartment, accompanied by Heinrich Meili representing Zurich City. She returned to the marital home in California taking with her a large pile of papers and documents. Among them was a treasure trove, a small bundle of letters exchanged between the young Einstein and Marić between 1897 when they were students at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic and 1903, the year they married, the year Lieserl disappears. In California, two years after his father’s death, Hans Albert looked through the pile and found a number of these yellowed, wrinkled letters. Reading his parents’ long-lost words, he was astounded to come across guarded references to an unknown sister. Lieserl had been rediscovered.
Immediately Hans Albert wrote to a Serbian cousin Sofija Galić Golubović. ‘We have recently read some old letters of my parents and found there to our astonishment that my mother had a daughter before me and that this girl was in Novi Sad or somewhere nearby. Do you know who that is and if she still lives?’
Brusquely and mendaciously, the female cousin replied. ‘In regard to the sister that you mentioned, take that completely out of your mind because you never had one. You have been misinformed.’
The denial was a complete lie, proffered to hide the family shame.
The letters remained with the other papers in Hans Albert’s house in Berkeley until after his death. All the papers were then moved to a Bank of America safe deposit. No attempt was made to archive the material. Among the documents lay a grey shoebox tied with a faded ribbon containing the 54 previously unknown love letters. Two decades went by. In 1986, Hans Albert’s and Frieda’s adopted daughter Evelyn Einstein found photocopies of the letters ‘folded and scrunched-up’ in a file belonging to Frieda. It was from that moment the mystery of Lieserl took its grip on biographers’ imagination. The letters were published for the first time the following year in ‘The Collected Papers Of Albert Einstein’.
Only 11 of the letters were from Mileva, the rest from Albert. Although by the end of the 1890s he was writing more and more in Latin script, some letters were written in his small tight handwriting in Gothic script known as ‘deutsche Schrift’ (a possible good reason why no-one in California except Hans Albert had looked at them). In one letter the ambitious Einstein is promising to ‘get ahead’ so they ‘don’t have to starve’. Among the bundle were the two or three letters containing a few jolting references to a previously unknown child, their pre-marital daughter Lieserl.
From the moment of her birth to the day she died, Lieserl seems to have stayed in Serbia. We know from letters exchanged between Albert and Mileva quite late in 1903 Lieserl contracted Scarlet Fever during an epidemic which swept through Vojvodina Province where Novi Sad is situated.
When the illness struck, Mileva was living far away, in Bern, with Albert, by now her husband, but we know she too a train back to Serbia.
The persistent rumour reported by Michele Zackheim following her many conversations with surviving Marić family members and former friends in Serbia holds that Lieserl was born mentally-retarded. Could the anguish this would have struck in Mileva’s heart be the reason no photos were taken right from the start? Was this why, except for the few references in three contemporary letters, neither parent ever mentioned her name again? Maintaining silence over the arrival of an illegitimate child would be expected but the silence was maintained over decades, long after the infant disappears from the record. Was there a consequent event everyone wanted to hide, something that arose as a result of the mental retardation? Not to do with the fact of her birth but with the manner of her death?
If Lieserl died in an epidemic, why would this have been so utterly shameful it could never be revealed?
One thing is definite: at about the age of 21 months, Lieserl disappears from history.
Despite Einstein’s cautionary ‘We must take great care’ to have the daughter registered, no records referring to Lieserl have ever been discovered.
Why, for the rest of the Einsteins’ lives, did none of their friends, even the very closest ones, know a daughter had existed? Why, over the following hundred years has prolonged effort at finding further clues about her short life failed?
In ‘Einstein, His Life And Universe’, published in 2007, author Walter Isaacson writes ‘All evidence about Einstein’s daughter was carefully erased. Almost every one of the letters between Einstein and Marić in the summer and fall of 1902, many of which presumably dealt with Lieserl, were destroyed. Those between Marić and her friend Helene Savić during that period were intentionally burned by Savić’s family. For the rest of their lives, even after they divorced, Einstein and his wife did all they could, with surprising success, to cover up not only the fate of their first child but her very existence.’
Throughout his life Einstein proved how capable he and his more perfervid friends were of weaving a very tangled web of deceit and obfuscation. This was shown in 1912 when he started on a bigamous journey with his cousin Elsa, an affair which would lead to their marriage seven years later.
In ‘The Private Lives Of Albert Einstein’ the authors write, ‘The secrecy that has surrounded Einstein’s liaison with his cousin is a tribute both to his skill at covering his tracks and to the devotion he inspired in the people around him. Those who knew the truth ensured that it stayed hidden for decades.’
Why has no birth-certificate for Lieserl ever been found? How can the lack of a death-certificate be explained? Especially, why are there no authenticated photos? When the couple’s son Hans Albert was born in May 1904, less than a year after Lieserl’s disappearance from the record, the customary studio photos of him being dandled on Mileva’s lap with the proud father at their side soon followed. Photos on a park bench or in a perambulator materialised within weeks. In a letter Mileva wrote in March 1903 to congratulate Helene Savić on the birth of a daughter, she asked, ‘Have you taken a photograph with her? I would very much like to see you as a mother, even in a photograph only’. In this letter Mileva enclosed a photo of herself and Albert taken a few days before their wedding in January 1903. But of Lieserl, photos or sketches recording her at birth or at any time in her known 21 months of life? None, even though Einstein’s first reaction in early February 1902 was to write from Switzerland begging for a photo of her (‘Könnt man es denn nicht photografieren…?’) or at the very least, knowing Mileva’s considerable artistic talent, ‘When you feel a little better, you must make a drawing of her’.
Was there something about the tiny infant’s appearance – a very serious physical handicap perhaps, or outward sign of some chromosomal defect which alarmed Mileva and her family and blocked the father’s request?
The next letter from Einstein came about 4 days later, probably after receipt of a second letter from the Marić family. This time, by contrast with his excited letter a few days before where right from the start he solicits information about his daughter, Einstein does not ask after her at all, or at least not in the first paragraphs which still exist. Nor does he ask about her in the first paragraphs of a following letter posted from Bern about 9 days later. Only these first paragraphs of each of these letters still exist. A complete letter does exist from 4 months later. He looks forward with anticipation to seeing Mileva in Switzerland in a week or so. There is no mention of Lieserl.
What caused Albert Einstein to shy away from going to Novi Sad to see his daughter during her known life-time? He was far from famous at this period, indeed he seemed to be heading in the fast lane to professional failure. No-one would have noted it if he got on or off a train to visit Mileva and the child in Serbia. His refusal to visit Mileva and Lieserl in Novi Sad contrasts vividly with the almost triumphal tour with their next child Albert and Mileva took less than two years after Lieserl’s disappearance. In the late Summer of 1905, Einstein submitted a thesis for his Doctorate. He and Mileva then set off for Belgrade and Novi Sad taking Hans Albert, now around 15 months of age, to introduce him to his maternal grandparents. 1905 was the year which saw Einstein’s invention of the mass-energy equation in its original form L=mV² (Einstein rewrote it as E=MC² in 1907). 1905 was to become known in Physics as the Annus Mirabilis, like Isaac Newton’s Annus Mirabilis of 1666. But launching Special Relativity on a startled world did not bring the 26-year-old Einstein instant fame and certainly not wealth – almost the opposite. The remarkable papers Einstein rolled out during the year, especially the two concerning Special Theory, roused remarkable and long-lived opposition, even hostility, among many of the Elders of the European scientific Establishment. Einstein’s Special Theory, becoming known as Special Relativity, would not be confirmed until well into the 1930s.
The final known reference to Lieserl came in the letter Albert wrote to Mileva in September 1903. He uses a favourite nickname for Mileva – ‘Dollie’. After a first paragraph where he expressed his happiness Mileva is again pregnant (with first son Hans Albert) he writes, ‘I’m very sorry about what has befallen Lieserl. It is so easy to suffer lasting effects from scarlet fever.’ He added, ‘If only this will pass.’
Some researchers have wondered whether it was at this point Lieserl suffered brain-damage. It can certainly be a consequence of scarlet fever. However this does not explain Einstein’s adamant refusal, for that was what it must have been, to come face to face with his daughter in the earlier 20 months or so, back to her birth.
On Einstein’s family side, it was not only his mother Pauline who had had near-insuperable reservations about Albert’s plans to marry Mileva. Pauline made sure her husband Hermann did not go for the idea of a marriage either. When she wrote a despicable letter to Mileva’s parents, Hermann was a co-signatory with her.
In 1902 Albert received the disturbing news from his parents’ home in Milan that Hermann was dying from a heart condition probably brought on by decades of financial stress. Einstein rushed to Milan to get to his father’s side, begging his consent to a marriage to Mileva. It would be the very first time anyone in the Einstein family had married outside the Jewish faith. Terminally ill, under such heavy-handed pressure, Hermann Einstein gave way. A few days later he died.
Three months after Hermann Einstein’s death, Mileva and Albert were married in a Swiss Registry Office. No-one from either the Einstein or Marić families came to the wedding. The newly-weds moved into a small attic apartment on Tillierstrasse in Bern with a wonderful view of the Bernese Alps. They registered at their new home as ‘Mr. and Mrs. Albert Einstein, no children’. Lieserl, by now about a year old, was left in Serbia. It has been suggested keeping their daughter well away from Bern could simply have been playing it safe – Albert was only provisionally ‘elected’ at the Patents Office – but in legal terms she had now been legitimised under Swiss Law by her parents’ marriage. The same complete blank existed many years later when Philipp Frank published ‘Einstein, His Life And Times’ in 1948, seven years before Einstein’s death. This appeared first in German and was virtually an authorised biography. Frank had known Einstein since 1910, for nearly 40 years, but he seems never to have heard of Lieserl. Instead, he records, ‘Soon after his arrival in Bern, Einstein married Mileva Maritsch, his fellow student at the Polytechnic….two sons were born in rapid succession, and the elder was named Albert after his father.’ By this time, famous beyond measure, with Mileva now dead, had Lieserl’s fate been relatively mundane, Einstein could easily have instructed Frank to write, ‘His first child, a daughter, was born out of wedlock in 1902 but soon legitimised by marriage,’ possibly adding ‘In 1903 she died of Scarlet Fever/was adopted/was passed to the care of a home for handicapped children.’
In 1962 Peter Michelmore published ‘Einstein: Profile of the Man’, a book partly based on conversations he held with the Einsteins’ first son Hans Albert in California. Indirectly Michelmore provides evidence for the Fourth Theory, that Einstein sanctioned the killing of his daughter. Referring to 1903, the year Mileva and Albert married – the year Lieserl disappears in the September – Michelmore reports from his conversations with Hans Albert that ‘Something had happened between the two, but Mileva would say only that it was ‘intensely personal’. Whatever it was, she brooded about it, and Albert seemed to be in some way responsible. Friends encouraged Mileva to talk about her problem and get it out in the open. (Because) she insisted it was too personal and kept it a secret all her life.’
Peter Michelmore calls it ‘a vital detail in the story of Albert Einstein (which) has been shrouded in mystery’.
Other biographers are intrigued and baffled in equal quantities. In ‘Albert Einstein, A Biography’, authors Alice Calaprice and Trevor Lipscombe write, ‘One thing is certain: Einstein, at least at first, had wanted and intended to keep Lieserl with them… Later, however, it seems he made no effort to convince Mileva to bring the child home to them…In any case, around this time, according to her friends, Mileva became visibly distraught and moody, and they sensed something of major consequence must have taken place between her and Albert’.
In similar cogitation, in their biography ‘The Private Lives Of Albert Einstein’, Roger Highfield and Paul Carter speculate, ‘The implication seems to be that Mileva had opposed the decision to give away their daughter, and blamed Einstein for pushing her to acquiesce in it. Another possibility is that she agreed to the decision more readily, but then was overwhelmed by feelings of guilt.’
A remarkable find by Michele Zackheim could indicate Mileva herself consented to infanticide, or at least later justified it to herself. On one of Zackheim’s several visits to Serbia in the 1990s, a Mrs Mira Gajin handed her a book once owned by Mileva titled ‘The Sexual Question’. It was first published in 1906 by August Forel, Director of the Insane Asylum in Zurich.
‘The Sexual Question’ was published in German. The copy was extensively underlined and annotated by Mileva in her first language, Serbo-Croat, for example Forel’s admission that ‘in an asylum which I superintend, I have castrated a veritable monster afflicted with constitutional mental disorders…. with the chief object of preventing the production of unfortunate children tainted with his hereditary complaint.’
In a chapter titled ‘The Right to Live of Monsters, Idiots, or the Deformed’, Forel wrote, ‘Large asylums are built for idiots…’, followed by two sentences which Mileva also underlined: ‘Honestly spoken, the self-sacrificing caretakers and teachers of these idiots would do better by letting them die. They would do more good for themselves by giving birth to their own healthy and capable children’.
Stuck in the pages of Forel’s heavyweight tome Zackheim found a pamphlet on alcoholism. Mileva had heavily underlined a sentence twice, in black ink: ‘It will not take very much education until people will understand that giving birth to a sick and handicapped child will be the worst crime that human beings are capable of doing’.
One Marić family member told Michele Zackheim that Lieserl had been christened in the 18th Century Kovilj Monastery between Novi Sad and Titel. Despite spending hours with a monk at the Monastery searching through every record in the archives, she found nothing. But quite apart from a christening, why the lack of a birth certificate? Lieserl’s mother was a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, one of the most bureaucratic empires in history. Given Mileva’s deformed hip and the danger it imposed in childbirth it is certain a midwife would have been present. Every midwife had the legal obligation to report all births to the record office.
What were Lieserl’s other given names? After all, no-one in either family had just the one given name. Was Lieserl’s birth and even more mysteriously her death deliberately concealed from local administrators’ eyes, including the family priest and the town hall? Or subsequently comprehensively destroyed? If so, by whom – her grandfather Miloš Marić? It is particularly perplexing there is no record of a burial. Or the fact, amazing for a child of a Serbian Orthodox mother, no grave-site has ever been found.
One or two puzzled researchers propose the theory an adoption must have been arranged after Mileva left Lieserl behind in Serbia to return to Einstein’s side in Bern. Even very early on it’s quite possible this may have been in both parents’ thoughts. In November 1901 when she would have been nearly seven months pregnant, Mileva wrote to Einstein from her hiding place at Stein Am Rhein and referred to their friend, the former fellow Zurich Polytechnic student Helene Kaufler, now married with the surname Savić and living in Belgrade. She wrote, ‘I don’t think we should say anything about Lieserl yet; but you too should write her a few words now and then, we must now treat her very nicely, she’ll have to help us in something important, after all…’.
What Mileva meant by ‘something important’ is not easy to interpret but it certainly could mean they intended to ask Helene Savić to take on responsibility for Lieserl. Helene herself gave birth to a daughter of her own just before this letter, in late October 1901. However, there are no records relating to an adoption, nor any record of financial transfers to a third party to take on the young child. Not even the slightest coded reference in any correspondence between Mileva and Helene for the remainder of their lives. To the contrary, there is insider evidence no adoption by the Savić family ever took place. It came in a work published in 2003 titled ‘In Albert's Shadow: The Life and Letters of Mileva Marić, Einstein's First Wife’ by Helene Savić’s grandson, Professor Milan Popović.
Professor Popović rejected outright the possibility that Lieserl was adopted and raised in his family by his grandmother. Ironically, there was a point in 1909 when Helene, troubled by an ectopic pregnancy, asked Mileva to take on her own two girls if she should die. Mileva said it would give her the greatest pleasure. In a letter Einstein wrote to Helene Savić from Berlin in September 1916 he expressed his view of Mileva, ‘…she is and will remain always for me a severed limb… I shall finish my days far away from her…’
The woman he now intends to abandon with growing acrimony and open contempt, the mother of his two sons and a daughter, has become an annoying ‘opaque object’ obscuring his vision. With British-style understatement, Popović writes, ‘The letter’s revelations about Einstein’s attitudes towards his wife and children and about his sense of himself will be troubling for those who see Einstein only as a saint.’
But whatever happened to Lieserl, one thing is certain. By the end of 1903 anything to do with her brief life was deliberately – systematically - buried.
I believe Lieserl was ‘put out of her misery’ – probably suffocated – by someone in Novi Sad in late 1903, and her small body laid surreptitiously to rest somewhere in Serbia, perhaps by the Danube, or possibly near the old Marić home in Kać, 15 kilometres from Novi Sad.
I believe it was Albert Einstein who, at a distance, instigated the moves which led to Lieserl’s killing, invoking her mental-retardation as the justification. And I think I know who carried out this act. Because of the consequent cover-up, that person had to have close relations with the Town Hall and the Serbian Orthodox Church. I point to Mileva’s father Miloš Marić as the person who oversaw or even carried out the sentence of death. Lieserl’s death would have come as a particular relief to this proud, social-climbing former Military officer and Civil Servant.
And he would have had a very personal reason for agreeing to the killing.
For the prevailing context it is useful to examine the grip Eugenics had on Europe as the 19th turned into the 20th Century. Discussion was widespread and largely reputable on mercy-killing the mentally-retarded, especially in Germany. In many countries of Central and South-East Europe the murder of a baby or small child with a congenital or chromosomal defect would often lead to nothing more than a suspended sentence. In 1903, if this young child was killed deliberately, Einstein would have seen it as mercy-killing.
Nevertheless it is extremely unlikely that Lieserl was killed by her father Albert Einstein in person. There was the very short flurry of interest at the time of her birth but then and afterwards he kept himself entirely distant from her. There is no evidence he ever saw her or held her in his arms.
To my mind the clue to which person could have performed this act can be found in a letter Einstein wrote to Mileva in December 1901. To Einstein’s great relief, his friend Marcelius had just informed him a job at the Patents Office in Bern would soon be offered to Einstein. Einstein was overjoyed. His future which seemed bleak only days before now looked more secure. His hopes of becoming a great Physicist were back on track. He wrote at once to Mileva, telling her the job was coming up and then added, ‘The only problem that would remain to be solved would be how to have our Lieserl with us; I wouldn’t like for us to have to part with her. Ask your father, he is an experienced man (‘ein erfahrener Mann’) and knows the world better than your impractical bookworm.’
I consider this letter distinctly disingenuous. I am suspicious about that sentence ‘I wouldn’t like for us to have to part with her’. Einstein may have wanted to look concerned about Lieserl but in nearly two years of her existence he never once asked Mileva to bring her up from Novi Sad to Bern, even for a short visit where Mileva could have boarded nearby anonymously. Nor, after the wedding in January 1903, was the infant united with its parents despite the fact under Swiss Law, a premarital child, perhaps as an inducement, was legitimised once the parents married. There is no evidence Einstein ever took the train down to Serbia to see a child born of the parents’ genuine and at the time deep love for each other. His concern simply doesn’t ring true.
What does ring true is a hint in the sentence referring to Miloš Marić, ‘Ask your father, he is an experienced man and knows the world better than your impractical bookworm.’
If Lieserl at the age of 21 months was killed and buried secretly, who-ever carried out the death-sentence, it could not have been either of her parents. Albert and Mileva were in Bern. It would have been Miloš Marić, Mileva’s protective father, who committed the infanticide, probably at the family Summer house in Kać. Miloš Marić may have wanted to take the terrible burden of an illegitimate, mentally-handicapped infant off his family’s shoulders, particularly Mileva’s, and Einstein’s too.
Barbara Wolff at the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is a world expert on Einstein’s life. In December 2009 she wrote to me saying, ‘I read your Fourth Theory with much interest and suspense… First, I was not shocked by the idea or conclusion that the child may have been put to death voluntarily – the circumstances (the eugenic philosophy) are known to me as are Albert Einstein’s statements regarding Wassik, Eduard, and other let’s say ‘sick’ persons…’.
However she added, ‘I don’t believe Albert Einstein either initiated or authorized his daughter’s killing, but he may have accepted such a suggestion once his father-in-law made it. (In fact) I do not believe anyone asked Einstein; rather he was confronted by a fait accompli.’
I differ from this view, certainly the idea Einstein could have been completely unaware a mercy-killing might take place. Not from the earliest age was he artless. I believe the idea occurred first to the angst-riddled Einstein. When an opportune moment arrived – perhaps the scarlet fever epidemic - he found a more than willing accomplice in the grandfather, Miloš Marić. Miloš Marić needs much further research. In the Einstein saga he has always remained a peripheral figure. There is a lot we don’t know. He was born into an impecunious peasant family in Kać in 1846. He was a product of rural Serbian culture with its patrimonial society and strong family loyalties. He attended military school at Novi Sad and his 13-year army career brought him to Titel, a town on the Tisa River. It was in Titel he met and married Marija Ružić. She was from a wealthy, well-regarded and devout land-owning family. Socially, for Miloš it was a definite leap upwards. After his army discharge, Miloš Marić became an official at district courts in the Serbian towns Ruma and Vukovar. Soon he would also become an official in Novi Sad’s Serbian Reading Room. In 1895, after a period in Zagreb, he settled his wife and children back in Novi Sad, purchasing a substantial Winter residence. Now his principal goal was to gain entry into High Society. He had come a long way from his peasant birth. He had fought hard and long for higher status. In social terms, if news got out a daughter had given birth out of wedlock, it would be a living death for the Marić name and for him personally. He was not going to be thwarted now, certainly not because of an illegitimate grand-daughter. If Lieserl was mentally-handicapped, this would have added further to the family shame and provided further justification. However, he could not possibly have acted solely on his own volition. If Lieserl was to be put to death in Serbia by or through Miloš Marić it could not have been carried out without one other person’s full agreement, the father’s. Albert Einstein’s. In 1916, at the height of his growing hatred for Mileva for refusing to grant him a quick divorce, Einstein heard from Michele Besso that Mileva was seriously ill. It sprang to Einstein’s mind his estranged wife must be suffering from a potentially fatal infection of the brain. He wrote to Besso unconvincingly, ‘It pleases me that my wife is slowly getting better’, and added, ‘But certainly if it is brain tuberculosis, as is apparently likely, a quick end would be better than long suffering’.
If this was wishful thinking, it was thwarted by Mileva’s partial recovery. Eventually she retrieved the two sons from her friend Helene Savić’s care and continued her life intermittently with them in Zurich while from Berlin Einstein revealed to the world the greatest scientific achievement of his life, mating gravity with the Special Theory of 1905 to produce the staggering General Theory of Relativity.
Twenty years later, when Einstein’s second wife Elsa died prematurely from kidney failure in 1936 after 17 years of married life, Max Born, a close friend of many decades, was astonished at a demonstration of cool self-obsession. The day she died Einstein is reported to have said tersely, ‘Bury her’. He soon wrote to Born to say he was enjoying the increased isolation now Elsa was dead. Identifying himself with the hibernating bear, he said: ‘I am settling down splendidly here. I hibernate like a bear in its cave and really feel more at home than ever before…This bearishness has been accentuated still further by the death of my mate, who was more attached to human beings than I.”
All his life Einstein cultivated a sage-like nonchalance in the face of life’s slings and arrows.
In an extraordinary development in July 2006 Time Magazine published three letters from Einstein to Heinrich Zangger. One of them posted in February 1917 refers to early signs of mental disturbance in the younger of his two sons, Eduard. Eduard was by then 7 years old. Einstein appears desperate to absolve his own genes in his medical friend’s eyes from the problems he prefers to believe Eduard inherited from Mileva. ‘Dear friend Zangger, Your letter about the condition of my youngest scares me less than you might think. Well-deserved punishment for my having taken the most important step in life so rashly. I begot children with a physically and morally inferior person and cannot complain if they turn out accordingly. Only they will accuse me one day when they are old enough; they will be only too right, unfortunately.’
Soon there was deeper trouble with Eduard. By the Autumn of 1932 Eduard was 22 years old, the age at which what is commonly termed schizophrenia often manifests itself. His mental condition became critical.
Professor Zangger, Dean of the Medical Faculty at Zurich University, told Einstein that Eduard should enter a sanatorium attached to the University.
Reluctantly Einstein agreed, cost being foremost in his mind. Clearly he believed Eduard’s condition was incurable. He wrote to Professor Zangger, ‘It’s impossible Eduard will ever be wholly fit’ and added the extraordinary words, ‘who knows whether it wouldn’t be better for him if he could depart from us before he really came to know life! I am to blame for his being and reproach myself…’
In the context of the news that Eduard was mentally ill, Einstein’s words could easily be a plea to the specialist in forensic medicine to find a way to put the young man out of his (and Einstein’s) misery. Eduard’s treatment involved heavy doses of insulin to induce comas lasting several hours. A deliberate overdose could lower the blood sugar levels to a point incompatible with life, the more so as there is no evidence Eduard was diabetic. If that was Einstein’s intent, the bait was not taken. Zangger still thought Eduard could make a full recovery. He urged Einstein to look after his son personally, saying “That would be best for both”. Einstein coldly refuted the optimism, “Everything unfortunately indicates that the grave heredity will have its decisive effect on him.”
Far from staying close to his youngest son, Einstein almost immediately left on a visit to England, taking care never to visit Eduard again.
30 years later, just after Mileva’s death in 1948, Einstein sent a letter to a kindly mentor to Eduard who was still ensconced at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital. He wrote, ‘Eduard represents the virtually only human problem that remains unsolved. The rest have been solved, not by me but by the hand of death’.
In 1932, Einstein, in his last months in Berlin, received an urgent note from a scientist friend Paul Ehrenfest in Leiden. Ehrenfest’s youngest son Wassik (Vassily) had been diagnosed at birth with Down Syndrome. Ehrenfest was beside himself with guilt over this handicapped son. He asked Einstein - should he give up his scientific work to look after Wassik full-time? Einstein’s response to Ehrenfest’s agonised request was a swift and firm ‘No!’. He wrote, ‘Valuable individuals must not be sacrificed to hopeless things, not even in this instance’.
One thing is unequivocal: the early disappearance of Lieserl from the lives of Albert and Mileva cleared the path to some of the greatest theories in Physics ever constructed by the human mind. Describing Einstein at the time he was about to take up the post at the Swiss Patents Office, Biographer Albrecht Fölsing wrote, ‘There probably never was a young man about to enter a modest post with, at the same time, such high-flying plans as Albert Einstein, when he arrived in Bern in February 1902.’ Fölsing added, ‘And the most astonishing thing is that his hopes came true.’
At the most critical cross-road in his life, after leaving the Zurich Polytechnic with those hopes for a great career in Physics, the unquantifiable danger which could have stopped Einstein dead in his tracks was Lieserl.
Could it be said Albert Einstein made a Faustian pact to gain the chance for fame – fame beyond measure? Did the young Einstein – in 1903 still hardly 23 years old – decide he could make no headway weighed down by the heavy moral, financial and physical burden of a brain-damaged, illegitimate child? Did he need Mileva back in Switzerland freed from her heavy burden to continue researching together the scientific papers they were to produce only two years later, in the Annus Mirabilis of 1905, scientific break-throughs which astonished the entire world?
Did Miloš Marić decide his daughter’s ambition to become a famous mathematician could never develop while this child lived? Did this assiduous and determined social-climber have his own separate, compelling motive? In interviews in Serbia with surviving members of Mileva’s generation Michele Zackheim was told the shame of an illegitimate child ‘would cripple the family’s honour for generations’. A female member of a Serbian family extremely close to the Marić family told Zackheim, “Whatever Miloš planned, he realised.” (i.e. achieved). She added, “So, there is only very little opportunity that the destiny of the daughter (Lieserl) could be discovered”.
It is possible more material awaits the researcher. Conclusive evidence may lie not in Albert Einstein’s and Mileva Marić’s inner circles – sources already examined in some depth - but in the outer orbits, in the papers and diaries of the players who stood and watched and recorded and orbited around Mileva and Einstein at the aphelion in the first years after Lieserl’s disappearance. And how much did Einstein tell his close confidante Heinrich Zangger, or Michele Besso? Or Janos Plesch? Are there undiscovered diaries out there still?
Unless another discovery of the order of the 54 love letters turns up, no speculation on Lieserl’s life and death can be proved or disproved, though there is one tantalising matter still outstanding. When the Nazis over-ran Serbia in 1940 they were determined to exculpate German guilt over who caused the first World War. They scoured every nook and cranny seeking ‘proof’ that Serbia had deliberately provoked a war for their own geo-political ends. The Nazis took away train-car loads of documents seized willy-nilly from Serbian repositories. Astonishingly, millions of those papers still lie in abandoned salt-mines in what was then Czechoslovakia, preserved in the dry air. Could there be documentation on Lieserl among them?
What can anyone who has looked in depth into Mileva Marić’s life say about her husband? Einstein’s often merciless behaviour towards her commenced not long after the publication of the astounding scientific papers in 1905. He continued to launch unforgivable attacks on her, such as she is ‘uncommonly ugly’, she ‘undermines others’ joy of living through her mere presence’, she is ‘my cross’, and vulgarly she is ‘an odious smell stuck up my nose’. These gratuitous insults must have crushed the soul of someone who to the very bitter end admired and loved him deeply.
From the Annus Mirabilis, Einstein went up and up in the world’s esteem to unimaginable heights. Only in his mid-twenties he had become the Sherlock Holmes of theoretical Physics. Simultaneously, like the other end of a see-saw, Mileva went down and down and down to unimaginable depths. She died worn out and in deep despair 43 years later. No-one can read about the life of Mileva Marić without tears.
Mileva’s doting father Miloš Marić, the former Military officer who later worked as an official at the courts in Ruma and Zagreb, had died long before, unhappy and reclusive, from a stroke in 1922 at the age of 76. A few days after burying him, Mileva had gone to the Court in Novi Sad to have her sister Zorka declared mentally ill.
In April 1955, at Princeton, Albert Einstein was admitted to hospital with chest pains. He knew the end could not be far off. Calmly and with admirable resignation he told friends “Death is just an old debt waiting to be collected. While we more elderly debtors may do everything possible to postpone repayment, it is one debt every one of us will pay back eventually.”
Dignified to the end, he told the doctors he did not want any heroic effort made to keep him alive.
In the very early morning Einstein said a few words in German which the American night-nurse couldn’t understand. A few minutes later a large aneurysm on the main artery from the heart burst. The great scientist, the great showman, died in seconds. He left behind a valued gift given to him on his 75th birthday, Bibo, a parrot.
Understandably, Einstein’s many many admirers will find it intolerable a theory could come along, such as the Fourth Theory, which on the face of it is a calumny. Almost everyone who lived in the 20th Century has been overwhelmed by the sheer power of the image created for us by his admirers, willingly abetted by the world’s press and Media and a largely complicit Einstein himself.
Within hours of his death, in a slightly macabre echo of Galileo whose finger was detached from his body by Anton Francesco Gori, Einstein’s brain was removed and embedded in celoidin by Dr. Thomas Harvey, a pathologist at the hospital, who hoped to discover the seat of Einstein’s genius.
In the fullness of time Albert Einstein’s papers were laboriously sorted and, as he had willed, handed to the Hebrew University in Israel.
In ‘Albert Einstein, A Biography’, shaken as so many observers were and still are by Einstein’s harsh and destructive behaviour towards Mileva during the years he sought a divorce, the authors quote the French essayist Montaigne, ‘There is no man so good that, if he placed all his actions and thoughts under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life – yes, even the kind of man whom it would be a great scandal to punish and a great injustice to execute.’
Further material – letters particularly - may well surface, perhaps in Serbia, or in those salt-mines in the Czech or Slovak republics, perhaps in Austria or Italy or Germany or Switzerland, the countries Einstein lived in or visited in the years around Lieserl’s birth in 1902. No-one with forensic skills has looked for the remains of a tiny infant under the threshold of the Marić family’s Winter home in Novi Sad or in the large garden backing on to it, or on their former land-holdings in Kać.
There could be undiscovered treasure-troves lying in a dusty draw or another faded grey shoe-box, first, the letters with Austrian and Hungarian stamps on the envelopes written by Helene Savić to Mileva between 1899 and the 1930s. Where are they? Mileva would not have destroyed them. She would have treasured them to the end. Finding them could be especially important for events in Mileva’s life around 1903 when Lieserl disappears. The second would be the medical notes circa September 1903 of Dr. Laza Marković, recently returned from Budapest with a medical degree, friend of Mileva and her brother Miloš, who may well have been called upon to treat Lieserl.
For historians and researchers Lieserl’s fate so far remains as unknown and mysterious as that of the Neandertals.
Abraham Einstein
Abraham Einstein (Apr 8 1808-Nov 21 1868) is the father of Hermann Einstein and grandfather of his son, Albert. Abraham was the son of Ruppert Einstein and Rebekha Overnauer. Abraham married Helene Moos in April 1839 in Buchau. They were both German Jews.
Abraham and Helene had children;
Raphael (Dec. 3, 1839-Jan. 15, 1842); male, Jette (Jan. 13, 1844-Jan. 7, 1905); female, Heinrich (Oct. 12, 1845-Nov. 16, 1877); male, Hermann (Aug. 30 1847-Oct. 10 1902); male August Ignaz (Dec. 23, 1849-Apr. 14, 1911); male, Jakob (Nov. 25, 1850–1912); male, Friederike "Rika" (Mar. 15, 1855-June 17, 1938); female
Ancestors and Relatives
Einsteins and Ainsteins
According to Geni.com First known is Baruch E/Ainstein (b. 1665 in Wangen, Germany, d. after 1689), got married two times with unknown women, from one marriage he had Moyses Probabla E/Ainstein (b. 1689, d. 1732). Moyses got married two times, second marriage was with Judith Hayman, Judith got 2 stepson from this marriage: David Einstein (b. 1713 in Buchau, Germany, d. 1763, but there is also chance he is son of unknown son of Judith and Moyses) and Abraham Einstein, Moyses also had daughter from first marriage. Judith had 2 biological sons: Daniel Einstein (b. 1690 in Fellheim, Germany, d. after 1720) and Leopold Einstein (b. 1700, d. after 1718).
Daniel´s children
Daniel had 4 wives, but despite this he had only one child, either a son or stepson called Leopold (b. 1720 in Ulm, Germany, d. November 6, 1796 in Lupheim, Germany) -Descendent families: Einsteins, Bernheins, Bukas, Steiners, Nathans, Noerdlingers, Straussses, Saengers
Leopold´s children
Leopold had one wife called Karoline (b. 1700 in Buchau, Germany) and had: Abraham (b. January 12, 1718 in Buchau, Germany, d. June 16, 1787) -Descendent families: Guggenheims and Einsteins
Abraham´s children
Abraham had one unknown wife: Joseph (b. 1726 in Sontheim, Germany, d. April 29, 1795 in Jebenhausen, Germany) -Descendent families: Lindauer, Rohrbacher, weils, Einsteins, Lindauers, Kohns, Levis, Fellheimers, Franks, Lindauers, Heumanns Sulzbergs, Katzs and Wormsers
David´s children
From marriage with Karoline Ehrlich he had: Moyses Naphatali (b. 1733 in Buchau, Germany, d. 1799)(Einstein´s GreatGreatGrandfather), his is grandfather of Abraham above.
Further reading
- Albert Einstein, Mileva Marić: The Love Letters. Edited by Jürgen Renn & Robert Schulmann. Translated by Shawn Smith. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. 1992, ISBN 0-691-08760-1
- Michele Zackheim, Einstein's Daughter: the Search for Lieserl, Riverhead 1999, ISBN 1-57322-127-9.
References
- Highfield, Roger (1993). The Private Lives of Albert Einstein. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-17170-2.
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External links
- Lieserl Einstein's Biography from einstein-website.de
- Pauline Koch's fact file from einstein-website.de
Notes
- ^ a b Aron Tanzer (1988). Die Geschichte der Juden in Jebenhausen und Göppingen (The History of Jews in Jebenhausen and Göppingen). Weissenhorn, Germany: Anton H. Konrad Verlag. pp. 220, 301, 334, 378, 383. Cite error: The named reference "tanzer" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
- ^ Short life history: Elsa Einstein.
- ^ Short life history: Pauline Einstein
- ^ Schwartz, Joseph. Introducing Einstein. ISBN 1-84046-667-7.
- ^ Botstein, Leon; Galison, Peter; Holton, Gerald James; Schweber, Silvan S. Einstein for the 21st Century: His Legacy in Science, Art, and Modern Culture, Princeton Univ. Press (2008) pp. 161-164
- ^ http://www.einstein-website.de/biographies/print/p_hermann.html http://www.einstein-website.de/biographies/print/p_hermann.html
- ^ Pauline Koch, Wikipedia page
- ^ www.einstein-website.de
- ^ a b c Short life history: Maria Winteler-Einstein
- ^ Highfield 1993, p. 203
- ^ a b Highfield 1993, p. 248
- ^ Albert Einstein, Mileva Marić: The Love Letters, Princeton, N.J. 1992, p. 54
- ^ Albert Einstein, Mileva Marić: The Love Letters, Princeton, N.J. 1992, p. 63
- ^ the english translation of the german "Doxerl", one of the names Einstein used for Marić
- ^ Albert Einstein, Mileva Marić: The Love Letters, Princeton, N.J. 1992, p. 66
- ^ Albert Einstein, Mileva Marić: The Love Letters, Princeton, N.J. 1992, p. 73
- ^ Albert Einstein, Mileva Marić: The Love Letters, Princeton, N.J. 1992, p. 78
- ^ Lieserl Einstein's biography
- ^ Milan Popović: In Alberts Shadow. The life and letters of Mileva Marić, Einstein’s first wife, Johns Hopkins University Press, London 2003, p.11, ISBN 978-0-8018-7856-5
