{"id":97800,"date":"2016-05-06T10:56:21","date_gmt":"2016-05-06T14:56:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=97800"},"modified":"2016-05-06T12:06:34","modified_gmt":"2016-05-06T16:06:34","slug":"four-episodes-in-the-life-of-einsteins-mother","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/05\/06\/four-episodes-in-the-life-of-einsteins-mother\/","title":{"rendered":"Four Episodes in the Life of Einstein\u2019s Mother"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Einstein1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Simpler, Simpler<\/strong><\/p>\n

On October 22, 1905, two weeks after he\u2019d sent his father (but not his mother!) the issue of the Annalen der Physik<\/em> containing his article \u201cOn the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,\u201d which laid out for the first time the theory of relativity, Albert Einstein received in return a letter not from his father but from his mother, Louise Einstein n\u00e9e Rosenberg, the daughter of a prosperous grain trader from W\u00fcrttemberg, who explained to her son, a little bit bashfully but with a distinct note of reproof, that she, too, was interested in his intellectual life\u2014all the more so because his intellectual life was <\/em>his life. There is simply no partaking in my son\u2019s life if I cannot partake in his intellectual life, she wrote, such is the nature of my brilliant but pensive son, my inward-oriented, eternally brain-dwelling son! And so, she wrote, even though the article had not been sent to her, she\u2019d snatched it up\u2014\u201cPlease do not reproach me for this!\u201d\u2014as soon as his father was finished with it and set about studying it herself. Unfortunately, she hadn\u2019t been able to make heads or tails of it. Despite her deep, her profoundly deep aching to understand, she wrote, the fact remained that she did not speak the physico-mathematical language in which her husband and son were fluent. \u201cPlease, Albert, explain it to me more simply! Put it in terms so simple that even the daughter of a W\u00fcrttemberg corn merchant can understand it!\u201d <\/p>\n

The next letter from Einstein\u2019s mother is dated November 9, 1905. (Einstein\u2019s side of the correspondence has been lost.) Louise thanks her son for rendering certain mathematical terms in plain German, but claims that he has still \u201cvastly overestimated [her]! Maxwell, Hertz, magnetic fields, simultaneity? Please, Albert, please, I beg you, make it simpler, simpler. You cannot imagine how desperately I wish to join you and your father in the realm of ideas! Please, make it simple enough for a corn merchant\u2019s daughter.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a letter dated November 20, 1905, she wrote: \u201cClocks, light beams? Simpler, Albert, simpler\u2014corn merchant\u2019s daughter <\/em>simple.\u201d<\/p>\n

December 11, 1905: \u201cAlbert, I beg of you: give me relativity for corn merchant\u2019s daughters.\u201d<\/p>\n

To the end of her life, Einstein\u2019s mother implored him to put his infamous theory in a form that even she<\/em>\u2014as she always put it\u2014could understand; by one account, her final words, whispered with great difficulty into his ear, were: \u201cSimpler, Albert, simpler.\u201d Strangely, however, evidence has emerged, in the form of a diary kept by Albert\u2019s sister, Lieserl, to suggest that Louise Einstein understood her son\u2019s ideas far better than she let on. Lieserl reports a scene from Christmas 1907 in which she happened upon her mother explaining her brother\u2019s theory of relativity to their aunt \u201cmuch more lucidly, much more cogently than Albert himself had ever explained it.\u201d But Louise cut short her explanation the instant her husband and son walked into the room. \u201cHe<\/em> (pointing at my father) and he <\/em>(pointing at my brother) are frolicking in a Platonic realm of pure ideas,\u201d Louise Einstein told her sister, as Lieserl recorded, \u201cwhile I <\/em>am standing in a W\u00fcrttemberg corn field. I\u2019m up to my ears in corn.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Ferdindand<\/a>

Ferdindand Schmutzer. Louise\u2019s final words, whispered with great difficulty into his ear, were: \u201cSimpler, Albert, simpler.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Unmusical<\/strong><\/p>\n

Herself an accomplished pianist, Einstein\u2019s mother notoriously rejected her son\u2019s first wife, Mileva Mari\u0107, a Serbian physicist, on the grounds (supposedly) that Mileva was unmusical<\/em>, but Einstein soon understood this to mean that she was unJewish<\/em>. His mother, despite being an extremely assimilated and practically atheistic Jew, would protest: \u201cShe grew up in an unmusical <\/em>household,\u201d by which she meant of course an unJewish <\/em>(Eastern Orthodox) household. Or she would say: \u201cLook at her face. There is not an ounce of musicality<\/em> in it.\u201d Or: \u201cShe possesses an unmusical <\/em>nose.\u201d Or: \u201cHer father is an unmusical<\/em> person. Her mother is a totally unmusical <\/em>person. Just look at their faces and noses. They do not believe in the piano.<\/em>\u201d Mortified by his mother\u2019s provincialism, Einstein let Mileva continue to believe that the objection truly was to her unfamiliarity with music, so she, desperate for Louise\u2019s approval, embarked in secret on singing lessons from a renowned soprano in Zurich. During their next visit to Einstein\u2019s parents, when Louise sat down at the piano and Einstein picked up his violin and they launched, as always, into Schubert\u2019s \u201cDer Hirt auf dem Felsen,\u201d Mileva leapt to her feet and, to their utter astonishment, sang the entire song with perfect pitch and remarkable passion. When the song ended Einstein\u2019s mother rose from the piano bench and embraced her. \u201cMy child!\u201d she cried, as Einstein\u2019s eyes glistened. But that same evening she yanked her son aside and hissed with a strange new ferocity: \u201cThat singing Christian will destroy your life<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"EinsteinViolin\"<\/a>

Einstein playing the violin. His mother, an accomplished pianist, criticized his first wife for being \u201cunmusical.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Huge Misshapen Head<\/strong><\/p>\n

According to Einstein family lore, Einstein\u2019s mother recoiled in horror from what she described as her newborn son\u2019s \u201chuge misshapen head\u201d the moment Albert was placed in her arms on March 14, 1879, at the family residence in Ulm. A series of neurologists were summoned, first from Ulm, then from Stuttgart, then from Munich, and finally from as far as Berlin. Not one of them, however, saw anything out of the ordinary about the size or shape of little Einstein\u2019s head.<\/p>\n

\u201cMadam,\u201d each told her, \u201cthe cranium of the infant is always proportionally\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAm I going mad?\u201d she would cry, gazing at the heavens. \u201cI must be going mad! May I show you precisely where his head is misshapen, and where it is huge?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course, Madam.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Einstein3\"<\/a>

Einstein at age three. Einstein\u2019s mother recoiled in horror from what she described as her newborn son\u2019s \u201chuge misshapen head.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n

She would indicate the front of Albert\u2019s head, then the back, then the right side, then the left side, and then all around the top, and then all around everywhere. \u201cIt is misshapen here, here, here, here, all around here, and all around here.\u201d Then she would indicate the same places once again, in the same order. \u201cAnd it is huge here, here, here, here, all around here, and all around here.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the evenings, after the latest doctor had left, while she wept over Albert\u2019s crib, her husband would try to comfort her. \u201cYou see it, Hermann, don\u2019t you?\u201d she would say, smothering Albert\u2019s head in kisses. \u201cThe hugeness? The misshapeness?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is perhaps a little big,\u201d he would say, \u201cperhaps a little uneven.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIs it too much to say Hermann that we have generated a being who must now go through life with a horrible problematical gourd for a head?\u201d And then, according to lore, a prediction: \u201cA head that will produce no thoughts<\/em>!\u201d<\/p>\n

This last line is trotted out for comic effect in every single biography churned out by the Einstein Industry\u2014a flourishing homegrown American industry whose current CEO is Walter Isaacson and whose aim, of course, is to mollify and motivate the American worker\u2014the cheerful implication being that the brilliant physicist would go on to prove his mother\u2019s prophecy ludicrously inaccurate. The truth is much sadder. Einstein\u2019s mother remained convinced for the rest of her life that her son\u2019s head, for which she felt a crushing amount of guilt, was self-evidently huge and plainly misshapen, and that it produced no thoughts, only theories<\/em>. To her sister, after the photoelectric effect paper: \u201cPoor Albert has come up with some sort of physical theory. A theory, unfortunately: not a thought.\u201d After the paper on Brownian motion: \u201cAnother theory has fallen out of our poor son\u2019s huge and horribly deformed head. Is it wrong of me to hold out hope that he might one day produce a thought? I cannot even speak to Hermann about this anymore.\u201d After special relativity: \u201cSome days I think I have gone mad with bottomless love and bottomless hope and bottomless guilt, awaiting the day our adorable Albert, whose problems are no fault of his own, communicates a thought to us, or to anyone. Meanwhile another theory has fallen out of his gourd.\u201d A decade later, after general relativity: \u201cIf Hermann were still with us, he would say, Louise, that is<\/em> a thought! That is<\/em> a thought! That is<\/em> a thought! That is <\/em>a thought! Alas, it is a theory.\u201d<\/p>\n

Einstein\u2019s second wife, Elsa L\u00f6wenthal, recalls in her memoirs that a moment before he went on stage in Stockholm to receive the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics, his by then very frail mother approached him holding a comb in her by then extremely arthritic hands. \u201cThere is nothing we can do about your head, Albert,\u201d she said, kissing that head. \u201cThere is nothing I or anyone with the exception perhaps of God can do about your great big darling deformed head. But there is something we can do about your hair.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Hermann<\/a>

Hermann Struck, 1923. \u201cThere is nothing I … can do about your great big darling deformed head. But there is something we can do about your hair.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

If and Only If<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Pauline<\/a>

Einstein\u2019s mother.<\/p><\/div>\n

A few years later, while withering away from abdominal cancer in the Sanatorium Rosenau, Einstein\u2019s mother sent word to her son\u2014who was then in Berlin attempting not very successfully to determine, through the most intense possible contemplation of his ten general relativity equations, whether the cosmos was temporally infinite and spatially finite, temporally finite and spatially infinite, temporally and spatially finite, or temporally and spatially infinite, contemplation that required, as L\u00f6wenthal later recalled in her memoirs, and as his children would later recall as well, vast quantities of utter household silence\u2014that she wished to be beside him in her final days, to die near him, in his house at Haberlandstrasse 5, perhaps on the trundle bed in his study, but if and only <\/em>if it wouldn\u2019t interfere with his scientific work. She wouldn\u2019t dream of interfering with his exceptionally important work, she said, that is absolutely the last thing she wanted to do! If it would interfere with his work whatsoever then she\u2019d much prefer to die alone in her strangely spartan room at the Sanatorium Rosenau in the care of these gruff yet probably ultimately well-intentioned nurses. But if\u2014and only <\/em>if!\u2014her presence wouldn\u2019t interfere with his work, then she had to admit her slight preference would be to be with him in Berlin, perhaps on the trundle bed in his study, in which she would lie extremely quietly, without making a peep, just as Albert after nightmares had once been able to lie between her and Hermann without making a peep, no-peeps being Hermann\u2019s strict condition for his joining them in what was, after all, not his own bed. She had always assured her husband that Albert would not make a peep, and she had always been so proud of Albert when, in fact, he had not<\/em> made a peep. Now it was her turn to lie in the trundle bed in his study without making a single peep\u2014if, and only<\/em> if, such an arrangement wouldn\u2019t be detrimental to her son\u2019s intellectual labor. Please be honest, after all I am perfectly comfortable here! She had to admit, she added in a postscript, that she had become afraid of death, and of what, if anything, came after death, and of what it would mean for nothing at all to come after death. She was, she wrote, frightened.<\/p>\n

Einstein\u2019s response has, once again, been lost. But Louise Einstein died on May 22, 1924, in Einstein\u2019s house at Haberlandstrasse 5, shortly before he published a major paper concluding that the cosmos was temporally infinite but spatially finite. In later years he would call this paper the greatest scientific blunder of his career.<\/p>\n

Adam Ehrlich Sachs\u2019s first book, <\/i>Inherited Disorders: Stories, Parables & Problems, is out this month. His fiction has appeared in <\/i>The New Yorker and <\/i>n+1, among other places. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Simpler, Simpler On October 22, 1905, two weeks after he\u2019d sent his father (but not his mother!) the issue of the Annalen der Physik containing his article \u201cOn the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,\u201d which laid out for the first time the theory of relativity, Albert Einstein received in return a letter not from his father […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":977,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13633],"tags":[9471,22226,22227,2257,22228,22229,16237,13634],"class_list":["post-97800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-department-of-tomfoolery","tag-albert-einstein","tag-albert-einstein-mother","tag-albert-einsteins-head","tag-mothers-day","tag-pauline-einstein","tag-pauline-koch","tag-physics","tag-tomfoolery"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFour Episodes in the Life of Einstein\u2019s 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