The Mileva Story has its roots in an oral tradition extending back to relatives and friends of the Marić family. Some of these stories were later collected and published around ninety years later (Marković 1995). The earliest known published claim regarding Marić's role as a contributor to Einstein's work appeared in an interview published on May 23, 1929, with Marić's close friend from her Zurich days Milana Stefanović (née Bota), a former Zurich psychology student from Serbia.
The interview to be examined below has been cited to support the contention that Marić collaborated with Einstein on his 1905 relativity paper. It was conducted by the journalist Miša Sretenović and appeared in a Belgrade publication, but authors differ on which publication.1 Wherever it appeared, the interview and its subsequent uses exemplify the difficulties in analyzing and interpreting such a source: the mix of languages, the translations tailored to preconceptions, and the unreliability of hearsay and memory. None of these, however, hindered subsequent authors from using this interview as an important source for the Mileva Story.
Outside of Serbia, the only available versions of the key passage to support the later Mileva Story come to us as a three-sentence excerpt from the original Serbian, followed by German and English translations offered by three authors. Desanka Trbuhović-Gjurić, who extracted the three sentences in her biography of Marić (T-G 1969), provided the Serbian. A German translation of the sentences, probably by Trbuhović-Gjurić herself, later appeared in the German editions of her book (T-G 1983, 75–76; 1988, 93–94). Trbuhović-Gjurić's Serbian excerpt was also translated into English by Karlo Baranj and published by Michele Zackheim in her book Einstein's Daughter: The Search for Lieserl (Zackheim 2000, 20, 282). The Serbian author Dord Krstić provided a second English translation in his book Mileva & Albert Einstein: Their Love and Scientific Collaboration, in which he cited the original interview article as his source (Krstić 2004, 122). Krstić's English translation (included below) agrees more closely with the German translation.
As reported by Sretenović, Milana Stefanović (to avoid confusion, we refer to her henceforth as Milana) was evidently responding to a question about Einstein's work when she stated:
Mica [variant of Mileva's nickname] would be the most relevant one to give information about the genesis of his [Einstein's relativity] theory, since she was also involved in its creation. Five, six years ago, Mica told me about that, but with pain. Perhaps it was difficult for her to evoke the memories of her most pleasant hours, or maybe she didn't want to “reduce” the great glory of her ex-husband. (Krstić 2004, 122)
In Zackheim's English translation, the last clause reads: “maybe she does not wish to kill the great voice of her former husband” (Zackheim 2000, 19, 282). Trbuhović-Gjurić's German translation is more prosaic: “vielleicht wollte sie auch dem grossen Ansehen ihres einstigen Mannes nichts anhaben” (T-G 1983, 75–76; 1988, 93–94); that is, “perhaps she did not wish to harm the great reputation of her former husband” (my translation).
Sretenović's report, along with quotations from an unscholarly source (see the section on Peter Michelmore below), served in that chapter in Trbuhović-Gjurić's influential book as evidence that Marić was involved in the formulation of Einstein's special relativity theory. But, as typical of hearsay evidence, we cannot know what Marić actually told Milana. Moreover, Milana's vagueness (as reported by the journalist) does not indicate a definite statement on Marić's part. The words “[m]aybe it is hard for her to recollect those most precious moments, maybe she does not wish to kill the great voice of her former husband” (Zackheim 2000, 20) suggest that Milana was inferring more than Marić actually told her.
Marić herself did not support Milana's claims in the interview, if indeed she was fully aware of them. According to Krstić (2004, 122), Marić had gone to her hometown of Novi Sad in southern Hungary in 1929 to care for her ailing mother. She then visited another close friend from her Zurich days, Helene Kaufler Savić, who resided near Belgrade, Serbia. The visit is confirmed by a letter Marić wrote to Kaufler Savić on June 13, 1929, after returning to Zurich (M-KS, 157). This was about three weeks after the publication of the interview in Belgrade. It is not certain if Marić saw the interview or if Milana simply told her about it via letter, but she referred to it in her June 13 letter to Kaufler Savić:
Milana wrote me a very self-assured letter. … Milana could not help confiding our stories to the newspaper reporter, and I thought then that the matter was finished, so I did not talk about it at all. I would avoid being involved with such newspaper publications, but I believe it gave pleasure to Milana, and she probably thought that it would give me pleasure, too, and in a way would help me to acquire certain rights vis-à-vis E. [Einstein] in people's eyes. (M-KS, 158)2
It is evident from this letter to Savić that Marić neither denied nor supported the version of the story that Milana passed on to the journalist—a version Milana claimed Marić told her five or six years earlier regarding her role in the formulation of the special theory of relativity. If, as seems likely, Marić had not seen the actual article in the Belgrade newspaper, but relied instead on what Milana wrote in her letter, it is possible Marić was not fully aware of what her friend had told the journalist.
Even though the interview content is wholly unreliable as hearsay, it is still of interest to consider the objectivity of the source (or her lack of it). In this case, by the end of her student days in Zurich, Milana Bota (then single) had come to dislike Einstein. As Highfield and Carter (1993, 110) observe: “Milana Bota was not a disinterested party; her account reflects her great affection for Mileva, and perhaps also her lingering resentment against Einstein.” Einstein was a frequent visitor to Pension Engelbrecht in Zurich where Marić was lodging along with Milana Bota, Helene Kaufler (then single), and other young women who had come to Zurich for higher education. He often joined them with his violin for musical sessions, and Bota wrote highly of him to her parents in 1898 (M-KS, 4). However, as the romance grew, and as Einstein came to monopolize Marić's time (they also regularly read books by eminent physicists together), Bota's attitude changed radically. In July 1900 she wrote to her mother: “I see little of Mitza [variant nickname] because of the German [Einstein], whom I hate …” (CPAE 1, doc. 64, n.6, her ellipses; T-G 1983, 55; 1988, 64, with ellipses removed). No doubt Einstein's propensity to tease Marić's friends added extra force to Milana's resentment against him, whatever the reason or the nature and depth of her resentment (CPAE 1, doc. 64, n. 6; M-KS 57).
Twenty-nine years later, Milana may have still harbored the feelings expressed in her student days. Whether or not this was the case, as a friend of Marić's not only was she not a disinterested interviewee, but also the isolated three-sentence interview excerpt is plagued by all of the shortcomings of hearsay evidence. Despite these caveats, as a result of the excerpt in question being included in Trbuhović-Gjurić's book, it was regarded by those willing to overlook its obvious difficulties as the earliest piece of written evidence in support of the Mileva Story.
In 1962, the distinguished Australian journalist Peter Michelmore, then working as a foreign correspondent in the United States, published his short biography Einstein: Profile of the Man (Michelmore 1962, British edition 1963; the page numberings differ). In preparation for the work, he traveled to California to visit and interview Einstein and Marić's son Hans Albert Einstein for two days in February 1962. Hans Albert was born in Bern, Switzerland, in May 1904 and was by 1962 an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In the context of Einstein's 1905 relativity paper, in his book Michelmore stated, without citing a source: “Mileva helped him solve certain mathematical problems, but nobody could assist with the creative work, the flow of fresh ideas” (Michelmore 1963, 41).
It might be assumed that the source of this statement was Hans Albert and it is conceivable that Hans Albert said something of that nature. But in the absence of Michelmore's interview notes we have no idea what Hans Albert actually told him fifty-seven years after the event. Since Michelmore did not attribute the statement to anyone, it could just as easily have been the product of his imagination, as were many other items in his book (see below). In any case, as the science historian Alberto Martínez has observed, Hans Albert was only a baby in 1905, so anything he might have said about his mother helping with the mathematics in that year could not have come from his firsthand knowledge (Martínez 2009, 201).
Two of the subsequent founders of the Mileva Story, Trbuhović-Gjurić and Senta Troemel-Ploetz, embellished Michelmore's account by implying a more direct source: Einstein himself. According to Trbuhović-Gjurić:
Peter Michelmore, who had much information from Albert Einstein, said: “Mileva helped him solve certain mathematical problems.” (T-G 1983, 72; 1988, 90)
Troemel-Ploetz, citing Trbuhović-Gjurić's 1983 work, included her Michelmore passage verbatim, but took it further:
Peter Michelmore, who had much information from Albert Einstein, said [ref in original: T-G 1983, 72]: “Mileva helped him solve certain mathematical problems. She was with him in Bern and helped him when he was having such a hard time with the theory of relativity.” (T-P 1990, 419–420)
The two sentences Troemel-Ploetz quotes from Trbuhović-Gjurić's book appear contiguously in her article but in fact come from separate pages (T-G 1983, 72 and 74; 1988, 90 and 92). In both cases, the authors implied that this information came to Michelmore directly from Einstein, which, to unsuspecting readers, was not inconceivable since Einstein had died only seven years earlier. But more importantly, neither of them took the trouble to check the source and find that Michelmore (1963, ix) did not acknowledge Albert Einstein in his “Author's Notes.”
There is no way of knowing how much of what Michelmore wrote in his book came from Hans Albert, but—surprisingly for such a distinguished journalist—some of it clearly came from Michelmore's own imagination, as well as, on occasion, from inaccurate information provided by Hans Albert. That imagination is on full display in numerous fictional scenarios in his book with invented dialogue, presumably to make his narrative more novelistic (e.g., Michelmore 1963, 6, 10, 21–22, 28–29, 31–32, 33–34, 35, 36, 37, 39–40, 42–43, 46, 49). To take just one example:
After a year in Zürich, Einstein was offered a full professorship in experimental physics at the German University in Prague. It was tempting. The salary was nearly double the twenty-four pounds a month he was being paid in Zürich.
“But it's not your field,” argued Mileva. “You're no good at experiments.”
“No, you're right. I'll turn it down.”
“It's a big break, Albert,” a colleague told him. “You can't afford to pass up a full professorship.”
Einstein, as usual, was too involved with his private theoretical work to form an opinion on whether or not to uproot his family and move to Prague. But the decision was important to Mileva. She demanded that he make up his mind. Finally, he decided to give Prague a try. (Michelmore 1963, 49)
Einstein's reputation was based entirely on his work in theoretical physics. He was not offered a professorship in experimental physics but in theoretical physics, and he became the director of a new institute in that field (Frank 1947, 98).3 That alone, aside from the obvious doubt that such a conversation between Mileva and Albert actually took place, undermines any notion that the Michelmore biography of Einstein is a serious work of scholarship. Nevertheless Trbuhović-Gjurić quotes much of the scenario from Michelmore (1963, 49), translated from the English with heavy editing, as if it were historical fact, and without any acknowledgment (T-G 1983, 89–90; 1988, 107–108). At least two other such instances from Michelmore (1963, 31–32, 42) appear in her book (T-G 1983, 66, 72; 1988, 84, 90).
After correctly noting that in his later years as a Zurich Polytechnic student Einstein felt he knew enough basic mathematics for his purposes, and thus sometimes skipped mathematics lectures, Michelmore states:
It was a fortunate accident that Einstein's closest friends at the institute were both studying mathematics. One was Marcel Grossmann who was genuinely awed by the range of Einstein's mind. … Generously, Grossmann took detailed notes on all lectures and drummed them into Einstein at the week-ends. … His other close friend was Mileva Marić … She was as good at mathematics as Marcel, and she, too, helped in the week-end coaching sessions. (Michelmore 1963, 31)
Other than the fact that Einstein made use of Grossmann's meticulous lecture notes, this scenario is complete fiction. Einstein borrowed Grossmann's notes when he was preparing for the intermediate and final diploma examinations in 1898 and 1900, respectively (Einstein 1956a, 11; Pais 1982, 44; Fölsing 1997, 56, 68). The absurd story (and picture) of drumming his notes into Einstein's head, and of Marić assisting in the effort, is found only in Michelmore's book.
Likewise, the notion that Marić was “as good at mathematics as Marcel” is at variance with the grade reports now available. Grossmann achieved higher grades in all four mathematics subjects for which they were tested on the intermediate and final diploma examinations (CPAE 1, docs. 42, 67; and T-G 1988, 63, see appendix D). He became professor of geometry at the Polytechnic in 1907, and in 1911 he succeeded to the directorship of the mathematics-physics section, Section VI A (CPAE 1, 381). In contrast, Marić twice failed the Zurich Polytechnic final diploma exams largely as result of her poor grades in the mathematics component (see appendix D). She left no known mathematical achievement beyond her Polytechnic work.
Evidently Michelmore had no knowledge of Marić's rather mediocre mathematical performance at the Polytechnic, which may indicate that he was unaware of Einstein's performance as well. Yet in the popular literature his unsubstantiated assertion that Marić was as good at mathematics as Grossmann was so readily accepted as historical fact that a chain of citations developed, starting with Dord Krstić's citation of Michelmore in 1991:
It is unlikely that her [Mileva's] contribution to Albert Einstein's work will ever be determined precisely. However, if we keep in mind that “she was as good at mathematics as Marcel (Grossmann),” we may suppose that her part was not small [ref in original: Michelmore 1962, 35]. (Krstić 1991, 98)
In 1995, Andrea Gabor wrote, citing Krstić (1991, 98) but misspelling Grossmann's name:
[Around 1913] Einstein began collaborating with Marcel Grossman on the general theory of relativity; the collaboration is particularly noteworthy since, according to Einstein's biographer Peter Michelmore, Marić was “as good at mathematics as Marcel [Grossman].” (Gabor 1995, 25)
More than a decade later Edith Borchardt (2008, 6) repeated the quotation directly from Gabor, with the same misspelling of Grossmann's name. Likewise, after stating that “Michelmore was the first of Einstein's biographers to acknowledge … that she played a significant role in Einstein's achievements of 1905,” Radmila Milentijević (2015, 121) repeated the same quotation (citing Trbuhović-Gjurić) as if it constituted historical fact.