8
Collaboration During Their Marriage
Of the six foundations listed by Trbuhović-Gjurić to support her conclusion that Marić's contribution to Einstein's creative work was large and significant, the fourth is her claim that Marić collaborated with Einstein during the period when they were studying together and during their marriage. I examined the first part of this contention in chapter 7 by scrutinizing the claims of collaboration made in relation to the early Einstein-Marić letters that were first published in 1987. I now turn to the second part of Trbuhović-Gjurić's contention, collaboration during their marriage.
Einstein and Marić were married in Bern, Switzerland, on January 6, 1903. On July 29, 1914, soon after the family moved to Berlin, they separated, and Marić and their two boys returned to Zurich for good. They were divorced in 1919. Their more than eleven years living together encompassed Einstein's “miracle year” of 1905, during which he completed his second and successful dissertation, along with his famous papers on atomic theory (Brownian motion), quantum theory, the special theory of relativity, and his famous equation E = mc2. The period also encompassed a considerable proportion of the many years during which he was extending special relativity to what became his greatest achievement: the general theory of relativity, which included gravitation, published in 1915. I begin with the “Joffe Story” involving the alleged co-authorship of Einstein's famous papers of 1905.
The Joffe Story
One of the most frequently cited arguments that Mileva Einstein-Marić collaborated with Einstein in the creation of his theories during their marriage is the claim that the eminent Soviet physicist Abram Joffe saw the original manuscripts of Einstein's three most famous papers of 1905, and that the names of both Einstein and Marić were on them as co-authors.
The three papers, all published in a single volume (vol. 17) of the German journal Annalen der Physik (Annals of Physics), concerned his work on the quantum theory (including the photoelectric effect), Brownian motion (atoms), and the special theory of relativity. All appeared with Albert Einstein as the sole author. They may be found in facsimile reproduction in volume 2 of the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein (CPAE 2, docs. 14, 16, 23), and in the accompanying English translation volume. In the next volume (18) of the Annalen that same year, Einstein appeared as the sole author of the paper in which he presented his equation E = mc2, though with different symbols (CPAE 2, doc. 24). This was an offshoot of the relativity paper. He also submitted his successful doctoral dissertation to Zurich University that year, which was published as a monograph (CPAE 2, doc. 15) and in the Annalen with slight revisions (not in CPAE), both in 1906.
The Joffe Story, regarding the Einstein-Marić co-authorship of the three 1905 papers (sometimes extended to all five publications), originated, as did many other questionable contentions, from Trbuhović-Gjurić's biography of Mileva Einstein-Marić. In it she writes (in translation):
The distinguished Russian physicist, director of the Physical-Technical Institute, later the Institute for Semiconductors at the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in Leningrad, Abraham [Abram] F. Joffe (1880–1960), pointed out in his “Recollections of Albert Einstein” that Einstein's three epoch-making articles in Volume 17 of “Annalen der Physik” of 1905 were signed in the original “Einstein-Marić.” Joffe had seen the originals as an assistant to Röntgen, who belonged to the Board of the “Annalen,” which had to referee contributions submitted to the editors. For this work Röntgen engaged his summa cum laude student Joffe, who in this way gained sight of the manuscripts, which are no longer available today. (T-G 1983, 79; 1988, 97)
It is immediately obvious that Trbuhović-Gjurić does not quote Joffe's actual words from his article–she quotes only the title (in translation). Nor does she distinguish between her own speculative contribution and information purportedly coming from Joffe. The same holds for Evan Harris Walker (1991, 123) who wrote that he had actually seen the original passage in the Russian journal. Not until 2002 did an English translation finally appear in print, albeit in an anti-Einstein diatribe (Bjerknes 2002, 196), later reprinted in Stachel (2005, lvi). Further translations appeared in Krstić (2004, 113–114), and Milentijević (2015, 123). Given the extreme rarity of public knowledge of Bjerknes's self-published book, or of Krstić's 2004 biographical volume that contains his own English translation of the relevant passage in Joffe's 1955 article (Krstić 2004, 113–114), prior to 2005 authors choosing to write about this subject had to rely solely on the problematic account provided by Trbuhović-Gjurić, or more frequently, her story as paraphrased for the benefit of English-speaking readers by Senta Troemel-Ploetz (1990, 419).
So the first thing that should be done in examining Trbuhović-Gjurić's claims is to see what Joffe actually wrote in his article.1 It was written as a memorial to Einstein following his death in 1955. As translated from the original Russian:
For physics and especially for the physics of my generation—that of Einstein's contemporaries, Einstein's entrance into the arena of science is unforgettable. In 1905, three articles appeared in the “Annalen der Physik,” which began three very important branches of 20th century physics. Those were the theory of Brownian motion, the photon theory of light, and the theory of relativity. The author of these articles—an unknown person at that time, was a bureaucrat at the Patent Office in Bern, Einstein-Marity (Marity—the maiden name of his wife, which by Swiss custom is added to the husband's family name). (Joffe 1955, quoted in Stachel 2005, lvi)
It is apparent from his statement that Joffe is celebrating Einstein, “an unknown person [singular] at the time” as “the author [singular] of these articles.” He does not claim that two people named Einstein-Marity appeared on the original manuscripts, nor does he claim that he had seen the manuscripts of these papers or any name on them. He states merely that “a bureaucrat” in the patent office—“Einstein-Marity”—was “the author of these articles.” In parentheses he further states that the hyphenated name adheres to a Swiss custom by which the husband adds the maiden name of his wife to his own surname. (“Marity” is the Romanized transliterated version of “Marić” that appears on her Swiss marriage certificate (T-G 1983, 64; 1988, 82), and it was this version, transliterated again into the Cyrillic “Mapити,” that Joffe used in his article [Stachel 2005, lxxi, n.117]; we will return below to the vexed issue of this hyphenated name.)
What of the rest of Trbuhović-Gjurić's assertions in the paragraph quoted above that are obviously not in Joffe's statement? Trbuhović-Gjurić writes that Joffe was a scientific assistant to Wilhelm Röntgen (the discoverer of X-rays), and that, as a member of the editorial Board of Annalen der Physik, he evaluated the three papers and showed them to Joffe. However, she provides no substantiation for her claim that Röntgen and Joffe were involved in reviewing the manuscripts. There are good reasons to believe that this is nothing but evidence-free speculation on her part.
The editor of Annalen der Physik at that time was Paul Drude, and his adviser on theoretical physics was Max Planck, both of whose areas of expertise were in theoretical physics. Drude was the author of books and papers on electromagnetic theory, to which Einstein's relativity paper was related; and Planck had published on blackbody radiation, a topic relating to Einstein's paper on quantum theory. Thus, there was no reason for them to have shown the 1905 manuscripts in question to Röntgen, who was an experimental physicist, nor does any other evidence indicate that he had sight of the manuscripts.
The authors of the foremost account of the development of theoretical physics in Germany wrote regarding the editorial practices of the Annalen der Physik in 1905:
As the advisor on theoretical physics for the Annalen der Physik, in 1905 Planck was already familiar with Einstein's work. For five years, Einstein had regularly submitted papers to this journal, the most important of which treated thermodynamics and statistical physics, subjects of particular interest to Planck at that time. Einstein extended these studies to a related interest of Planck's, blackbody radiation, in 1905. Einstein's relativity theory of the same year set Planck to work; it was the subject, Max Born observed, that “caught Planck's imagination more than anything else.” (Jungnickel and McCormmach 1986, 248; quoted in Stachel 2005, lix-lx)
To add to the unlikelihood that Drude sent the manuscripts to Röntgen, we are supported by Joffe's own account of his academic work at precisely the time in question. In his book Begegnungen mit Physikern (Meetings with Physicists) (Joffe 1967), a German translation of the Russian original (Joffe 1962), he describes his experience as a graduate student with Röntgen. He reports that the latter suggested to him that when he defended his doctoral dissertation in May 1905 he should discuss what one would now describe as the prehistory of the special theory of relativity, specifically the Lorentz and FitzGerald contraction equations (Joffe 1967, 23). Significantly, he makes no mention that Röntgen showed him Einstein's 1905 relativity paper shortly afterwards. Had he had the opportunity to see the original manuscript at that time, it is inconceivable that he would not have mentioned such a momentous experience in this context. Later in the book Joffe acclaims Einstein for his creation of the theory of relativity and for his wider influence on the physical worldview (Joffe 1967, 92). He goes on to identify some of Einstein's other achievements, among which he includes his work on Brownian motion and what became the photon (light quantum) theory of radiation. This covered the three 1905 papers which proponents of the Mileva Story claim were co-authored by Marić, citing Joffe as the source for this contention.
It is unsurprising that virtually all the authors who have written about Marić in recent decades have no knowledge of the scholarly material alluded to above, and it is regrettable that they have taken on trust everything Trbuhović-Gjurić wrote about the Joffe story. Most often the story will have been encountered in the more convenient English language version provided by Troemel-Ploetz (1990, 419), which glosses over problematic aspects of the original account, such as Trbuhović-Gjurić's failure to quote Joffe's actual words, that one would hope the perceptive reader would recognize. One author, who had the advantage of being able to read Trbuhović-Gjurić's account in German, is Andrea Gabor. After writing that “the original version of Einstein's three most famous [1905] articles … were signed Einstein-Marity,” she stated that “Abraham [Abram] F. Joffe, a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, claimed that he saw the original [1905] papers when he was assistant to Wilhelm Röntgen, who belonged to the editorial board of Annalen der Physik, which published the articles.” She went on to add an inaccuracy of her own to muddy the waters even further: “An article in a 1955 Soviet journal of physics quotes Joffe, now deceased, as ascribing the 1905 papers to ‘Einstein-Marity.’” (Gabor 1995, 20) Also published in 1995 was an error-strewn account of the story, derived this time from Troemel-Ploetz's misleading version, by the well-known British feminist sociologist Hilary Rose (1995, 143). In this way Trbuhović-Gjurić's gross distortion of Joffe's paragraph has become widely disseminated.
One final point. In an article with the title (translated from the German) “‘The parents’ or ‘the father’ of relativity theory” Margarete Maurer (1996, 24) adds an additional argument purportedly in support of Trbuhović-Gjurić's account. She quotes a paragraph from a popular-science book by Daniil Semenovich Danin, published in Moscow in 1962, that in its essentials is very similar to Joffe's 1955 paragraph (above), except that Danin writes that the three 1905 articles mentioned by Joffe were “signed Einstein-Marity (or Marić—which was his first wife's family name.)” (Danin 1962, 57, emphasis added; see Stachel 2005, lv, for a translation of Danin's whole paragraph.) Maurer states that the context indicates that Danin had had conversations with Joffe, and that he was therefore transmitting information he had obtained from Joffe. However, as Stachel (2005, lv–lvi) points out, the articles could not have been signed “Einstein-Marity” and “Einstein-Marić,” so Danin “has no clue how they were signed.” Stachel goes on to observe that the close similarity between Danin's wording and Joffe's indicates that he was merely repeating an account he had read elsewhere, and, as so often happens in such cases, had mistakenly introduced a word (“signed”) that was not in the original article.
From Single to Dual Authors
As we have already seen in Joffe's parenthetical remark, he used the idiosyncratic name “Einstein-Marity” to refer to the author of the three 1905 papers. He took it to be a Swiss custom for a husband to add his wife's maiden name following his surname, and he evidently wished to honor Einstein in this memorial with his full name in Swiss usage. While this usage did occur occasionally (e.g., the Swiss scientists Friedrich Miescher-His, Johannes Friedrich Miescher-Rüsch, and Julius Wagner-Jauregg), Joffe was wrong in thinking that it was a general Swiss custom.
Evan Harris Walker, having been informed by Senta Troemel-Ploetz of Trbuhović-Gjurić's passage regarding the Joffe statement, went even further with her erroneous assertion that Joffe had seen the papers. In his talk presented to a session at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1990 (see the Introduction), Walker stated: “If Joffe remembered that form of her name, it would have had to be because he had seen something that Mileva had signed herself, something that she signed ‘Einstein-Mariti’” (Walker 1990, 15, using the transliteration from the Russian “Mariti” instead of “Marity”). As he subsequently argued in a letter to the journal Physics Today:
Joffe's use of “Einstein-Mariti” (“Ϻарити”) agrees with Mileva's adoption of the Hungarianized spelling of her Serbian name Marić, a fact that Joffe would only have known had he seen the original signed by her, since this usage of “Mariti” apparently is not to be found in any of the Einstein biographies. (Walker 1991, 123)
Walker closed his AAAS talk by saying: “This, taken with all the rest, is compelling evidence that Joffe did see the original 1905 papers, and that the name there was ‘Einstein-Mariti’!” (Walker 1990, 15).
Of course, what is compelling evidence for Walker may not be for others.2 First of all, Walker is wrong that no Einstein biographies before Joffe's article contain the usage Marity for Marić. The second edition of the well-known documentary biography of Einstein by Carl Seelig, published in Zurich a year before Joffe's memorial, gives her name as “Mileva Marić or Marity” (Seelig 1954, 29; 1956a, 24).
Second, in his letter to Physics Today in 1991 Walker concludes, on the basis of an evidence-free presumption of Marić's requisite knowledge of electrodynamics, that “[i]t would seem then that Mileva Marić deserved to be a co-author, and her name should have appeared on the original 1905 [relativity] paper. … And in fact it did” (Walker 1991, 123; also, Walker 1990, 14). As supposed evidence that “it did,” he quotes at length the problematic passage from Trbuhović-Gjurić's book. It is remarkable that Walker made this statement despite the fact that, as he writes in his published letter to Physics Today (using the transliteration I rather than J), “I have found the paper of Ioffe's mentioned above.” He goes on: “There Ioffe states, referring to the 1905 papers, ‘Their author was Einstein-Mariti’—to which Ioffe added, believing that this referred to Albert Einstein alone—‘an unknown clerk in the patent bureau in Berne (Mariti was his wife's surname)’” (Walker 1991, 123). Rather than accepting what Joffe actually wrote, he chose to read into Joffe's statement an imagined failure to recognize that Einstein-Marity referred to two authors, not one. How that would be is not clear. Did he now mean that Einstein-Marić (or Mariti) refers to Einstein and Marić? What about their first names? Instead of adhering to Joffe's actual statement, Walker chose to follow Trbuhović-Gjurić's erroneous account and the unjustified inference that Einstein-Marity referred to both Einstein and Marić, apparently because it, rather than the evidence or lack thereof, supported his own preconceived conclusion.
The paper published by Troemel-Ploetz in 1990 became probably the most widely known source for the claim of Marić's co-authorship based on a misreading of Joffe's writing Einstein-Marić for the author (singular) of the 1905 papers. It too derives from Trbuhović-Gjurić's erroneous account of Joffe's original statement, but with some errors of her own that mislead her readers even more than Trbuhović-Gjurić's report. She writes the following about the Trbuhović-Gjurić passage, without quoting the passage itself:
Much more disastrous and devastating, however, is what happened to the five articles that appeared in 1905 in the Leipzig Annalen der Physik. Two of them, including his 21-page dissertation, were written in Zurich. It's an open question how much Mileva Einstein-Marić contributed to them. … The other three articles published in Vol. XVII of Annalen der Physik were written in Bern while Albert Einstein was at the Swiss Patent Office and were written together with his wife. He later received the Nobel Prize for “Einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des Lichtes betreffenden heuristischen Gesichtspunkt” [paper on the quantum hypothesis]. “Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper” contains the special theory of relativity. Abram F. Joffe, the famous Russian physicist who was then an assistant to Röntgen (a member of the editorial team that examined the articles sent to Annalen der Physik for publication) wrote in his Erinnerungen an Albert Einstein [ref: in original: Joffe 1960 (actually referring to Joffe 1955)] that the original manuscripts for these two and also for a third paper were signed Einstein-Marić [ref: T-G 1983, 97 (actually 79); T-G 1988, 97]. Would the male editors have dropped the name of a male co-author, or that of a woman who was not the author's wife? Would not a male co-author have protested against his name being dropped in the publication and would he not have asked for some form of reparation? The manuscripts, together with all the notes for these three papers, are no longer extant. The New York Times of February 15, 1944, wrote about the manuscript of the theory of relativity that Albert Einstein “had destroyed the original after the theory had been published in 1905. An $11,500,000 reward was promised to the person who could bring the original manuscript to the Library of Congress [ref: T-G 1983, 72 (1988, 90)].” (T-P 1990, 419)
It is evident from her article that Troemel-Ploetz had not consulted the original Russian source and was relying solely on Trbuhović-Gjurić's embellished account with its assumption that “Einstein-Marić” referred to two authors, not one.
In the above passage Troemel-Ploetz also repeats Trbuhović-Gjurić's mistaken assertion elsewhere that two of the five papers (supposedly the doctoral thesis and the Brownian motion paper) were written in Zurich (T-G 1983, 71–72; 1988, 90). In fact, all five were submitted from Bern in 1905 (CPAE 2, docs. 14, 15, 16, 23, 24), though the dissertation was not published until 1906.
As for the supposed destruction of the 1905 manuscripts, which Troemel-Ploetz regards as suspicious, the editors of CPAE, volume 1, state:
Einstein made no systematic attempt to preserve his papers before about 1920. Prior to that time, he routinely discarded manuscripts of published articles, and very few have been preserved. Einstein saved few letters addressed to him, though, fortunately, many of his correspondents kept the letters they received. Only a handful of early notebooks, containing lecture and research notes, have survived. (CPAE 1, xxvii)
The Olympia Academy
Soon after Einstein settled in Bern in February 1902, he became friends with two other young men, Conrad Habicht and Maurice Solovine. Einstein had earlier met Habicht, a former philosophy student and now a math student at the University of Bern, while tutoring in Schaffhausen. Solovine had responded to one of Einstein's newspaper advertisements in Bern offering tutoring in physics. Rather than physics tutoring, the three so enjoyed discussing intellectual topics together that they inaugurated what they called (probably self-mockingly) the “Akademie Olympia” (Olympia Academy hereafter). (Fölsing 1997, 98–99; Isaacson 2007, 79–84). Together the three friends discussed philosophical issues and read and discussed a wide range of philosophical and cultural works, often over dinner and then in a member's apartment late into the night.
While Einstein was settling down in Bern during 1902, in the latter half of that year Marić (presumably having left their daughter Lieserl with her parents) spent two short periods staying close to Einstein's place before returning for good to Bern in mid-December 2002 (Krstić 2004, 87–90). There she and Einstein finally married on January 6, 1903, but without any family members in attendance. Aside from the town clerk, only Einstein's Academy colleagues were present as witnesses. After the wedding, they joined the newlyweds for a celebratory dinner (Isaacson 2007, 85). After their marriage Marić attended meetings of the Olympia Academy, and, according to Trbuhović-Gjurić (1983, 63; 1988, 81, 83), she fully participated in their reading of books by eminent authors. She writes that their discussions (purportedly also attended by Michele Besso and his wife) lasted well into the night, and she adds the following details: “Mileva, together with Einstein, accorded especial importance to Hume's question whether or not the Ego has a substance aside from itself. The two of them often had long, deep going discussions, about this” (T-G 1983, 63; 1988, 81).
Trbuhović-Gjurić's source for this imaginative scenario is evidently Carl Seelig's biography of Einstein. Two sentences before the above quotation, she cites the following authors as well as their books read at Academy gatherings: Mach, Mill, Hume, Poincaré, and Dedekind. All of them, with their respective book titles, are cited in Seelig (1956a, 57). Aside from other errors in her account, she could not possibly have known what took place in private between Einstein and Marić, and has clearly embellished her account with an invented topic of their discussions, evidently inspired by Seelig's statement, “Hume postulated that there was substance neither in the ego, nor in nature” (Seelig 1956a, 61).
Charles S. Chiu provided one of the most extensive (and imaginative) subsequent discussions of Marić and the Olympia Academy in his book published in 2009. He writes:
Mostly sitting silent in the background, Mrs. Einstein nevertheless follows the discourse of their friends with fascination. But because of her shy nature, she is most reluctant to join the current discussions; only when their guests have left does she become talkative and explain to Albert her personal conclusions regarding the constitution of the Ego, ethics, or the existence of ether in the universe. But in time, the other members of the “Academia” begin to notice the quiet Mrs. Einstein. The mathematical precision of her thoughts and her tendency to examine all theories according to their practical application become apparent even in the most unimportant conversations with Mileva. They invite her to participate in the diverse investigations of the “Academia.” (Chiu 2008, 40)
Chiu's account follows so closely that given by Trbuhović-Gjurić (he even has Besso attending the Academy meetings) that there can be no doubt as to his source for this scenario. But he further embellishes Trbuhović-Gjurić's already overblown story that put Marić at the very heart of the Academy's events by having her explaining to Einstein her conclusions regarding both the ego and the ether in private conversations (see T-G 1983, 53; 1988, 58).
However, the Academy member Maurice Solovine, in his later recollection of their meetings, made no mention of Marić's mathematical discussions or of her having created the impression Chiu describes in the above quotation. Solovine wrote (although he gets the date of the doctorate wrong): “When Einstein received his doctorate he married Mileva Marić, a young Serbian woman with whom he became acquainted at the Polytechnic where she was a student. This event caused no change in our meetings. Mileva, intelligent and reserved, listened attentively to us, but never intervened in our discussions” (Solovine 1956, xii).
The Little Machine
Although Einstein is well known as a theoretical physicist, he also displayed an interest in electrical technology that may have had its roots in his family background (Fölsing 1997, 9, 28–29, 35; Isaacson 2007, 11–12, 23, 143). One of the two top course grades of 6 that he received while studying at the Zurich Polytechnic was for Electrotechnical Laboratory (appendix C). (The other was for Scientific Projects in Physics Laboratories.) After leaving the Polytechnic he evaluated many technical inventions during his years of work at the Bern patent office, and later served as an expert consultant on patents (Fölsing 1997, 105). Moreover, in a letter written in 1930 he stated that he had “never ceased to concern [himself] with technical matters” (Fölsing 1997, 105), and he occasionally collaborated with experimentalists such as Wander J. de Haas (see, e.g., CPAE 6, doc. 14).
Against this background it should be no surprise that on July 15, 1907, though deeply engaged on his theoretical research, he wrote to Conrad Habicht, his fellow member of the Olympia Academy, and Conrad's brother Paul, “I have discovered another method for the measurement of very small amounts of energy” (CPAE 5, doc. 48). He had invented a device that amplified a very small initial voltage through electrostatic induction into an output voltage that could then be measured using a common electrometer (CPAE 5, ed. note, 51). The device, what they called a “little machine” (Maschinchen), could be useful for studying extremely small voltage fluctuations as low as 0.0005 V (CPAE 1, doc. 39, p. 396). Paul Habicht, who had a workshop in Schaffhausen for making and selling scientific instruments, worked on building a prototype of the new invention for possible sale. The credit for this invention has become a source of controversy.
Marić's Role
Following her discussion of the Olympia Academy, Trbuhović-Gjurić turned immediately to Marić's purported role in the invention of the little machine:
Together with Paul Habicht she [Marić] began to work on the construction of an electrostatic influence machine for the measurement of small electric voltages by means of multiplication. It took a long time, not only because she had so much to do, but also mainly because of the thoroughness with which she followed all possibilities for perfecting it. When both were satisfied they left it to Albert to describe this apparatus as a patent expert. (T-G 1983, 65; 1988, 83)
Aside from the usual lack of a source for this statement, Trbuhović-Gjurić's account finds no support in the documents relating to the construction of the device. Moreover, contrary to the above account, Carl Seelig (1954, 73; 1956a, 60) whose short “Documentary Biography” of Einstein is generally reliable, writes that Marić's contribution to the work on the little machine was marginal: “Their [Einstein's and the Habicht brothers’] attempts to perfect it with occasional help from Mileva lasted several years.”
As usual, Troemel-Ploetz recycles Trbuhović-Gjurić's account of the development of the device without caveats in her 1990 article (T-P 1990, 418–419). But the original documents pertaining to this episode (published in CPAE 5 in 1993) tell a very different story. This published material includes sixteen letters exchanged between Einstein and the Habicht brothers during the years 1907 to 1911 in which the device is discussed.3 The letters follow Einstein's presentation of the device in papers published in 1907 and 1908 (CPAE 2, docs. 39, 48), and provide a well-documented account of its development (see also Maas 2007; CPAE 5, ed. note, 51–55). In none of these letters and, in particular, the six letters from Paul Habicht (who was attempting to build the device) to Einstein giving details of the stages in the construction of the device, is there any mention of Marić playing a role.
In a letter from Einstein to his friend Jakob Laub in November 1908, which appeared in the same volume, Einstein wrote, “The Maschinchen is ready and works well for higher voltages. In order to test it for voltages under 1/10 volt, I built an electrometer and a voltage battery. You wouldn't be able to suppress a smile if you saw the magnificent thing I patched together myself” (CPAE 5, doc. 125). In a letter addressed to Conrad Habicht a few months later (March 1910), Einstein wrote: “I'm inviting you here to stay with us, so the two of us together can do the final experiments with the Maschinchen and piece together the paper. … We have a spare room for you and your brother” (CPAE 5, doc. 198). Ad Maas (2007, 309), curator of the Leiden Museum Boerhaave, the Netherlands, who has researched the origins and development of the little machine concludes: “There is no evidence that Einstein's wife was involved in the development of the little machine as has been alleged by Trbuhović-Gjurić.” The above documented information does not preclude occasional help from Mileva (Seelig), but it does contradict the notion that Marić built the device together with Paul Habicht.
Despite the publication of the relevant letters in 1993 (CPAE 5), several authors writing after that year repeated Troemel-Ploetz's repetition of Trbuhović-Gjurić's account. One was Hilary Rose, who wrote in a book chapter with a short section devoted to Marić that “[t]wo key episodes document the process by which her work, if not actively appropriated, was certainly lost by her to him [Einstein].” One of these, according to Rose, was that “two [sic] of the originally submitted [1905] manuscripts were signed also by Mileva, but by the time of their publication, her name had been removed.” The other one was reported by Rose as follows:
In one episode Mileva, through the collaboration with a mutual friend, Paul Habicht, constructed an innovatory device for measuring electric currents. … Having built the device the two inventors left it to Einstein to describe and patent, as he was at that time working in the patent office. He alone signed the publication and patented the device under the name of Einstein-Habicht … Later when the marriage had collapsed she found that the price of her selfless love … was that her work had become his. (Rose 1994, 143)
None of this is accurate, most notably the assertion that the two inventors were Marić and Paul Habicht, with Einstein playing no role. Although Einstein published the papers in 1907 and 1908 outlining his method of measuring small quantities of electricity (CPAE 2, docs. 39 [end] and 48), the machine was not built to Einstein's satisfaction until 1910, by which time he was no longer working at the Bern patent office. Einstein helped draft a technical article describing the device, but when the prototype was completed in March 1910 he allowed the Habicht brothers to take credit for its design and testing. The article was published under the names of Conrad and Paul Habicht alone (Habicht and Habicht 1910). In the article they stated they had applied for a patent, but Maas writes that it is uncertain if one was actually granted (Maas 2007, 314–319; CPAE 5, ed. note, 53).
The Missing Patent
Troemel-Ploetz, again following Trbuhović-Gjurić, writes that at the time Einstein wrote his 1908 paper on the little machine, “he had the apparatus patented under the name Einstein-Habicht [italics hers] (Patent No. 35693)” (T-P 1990, 418–419). Trbuhović-Gjurić actually wrote only that Einstein had applied for a patent (zum Patentieren vorgelegt worden), but she does cite the alleged patent number, as usual without any source reference to confirm its existence and help others locate it (T-G 1983, 65; 1988, 83). But in a letter to Conrad Habicht in December 1907 Einstein reported, “I have dropped the patent, mainly because of the manufacturers’ lack of interest” (CPAE 5, doc. 69). This apparently accounts for the fact that all attempts to locate this patent have been unsuccessful, despite the reported patent number.4
More Reports of Collaboration
In the literature on Mileva Marić there are several other accounts of reports that claim she collaborated with Einstein on his scientific research. These come from family members or acquaintances who gave (mostly hearsay) accounts of events that supposedly occurred during visits that the Einsteins paid to Marić's parents in 1905 (and allegedly in 1907); from the same people's purported recollections that allude to a narration Marić's brother Miloš gave to his father after returning from a short stay with the Einsteins in Bern in 1904; and from a student who lodged with the Einsteins when they resided in Zurich either in 1909–1910 or 1912–1913, whose comment pertaining to an aspect of the Einsteins’ domestic life was passed on some fifty years later by the student's daughter. In this section I explore the provenance and reliability of this seemingly impressive list of reports.
Visits with the Marić Family
In one passage in her book, Trbuhović-Gjurić reports conversations that took place between Einstein and some student friends of Marić's brother Miloš when the Einsteins visited the Marić family home in Novi Sad supposedly in 1907 (see below). Many of the students, she writes (T-G 1983, 77; 1988, 95), knew of his papers “and considered them to be the result of the collaboration between Albert and Mileva,” which hardly constitutes evidence. Likewise, Krstić reports that the couple, with their young son Hans Albert, visited Novi Sad in 1907. He writes that Marić's orphaned cousin Sofija Golubović (née Galić), who was living with the Marić family in Novi Sad at the time, told him in 1961 that “Mileva and Albert would debate, work on mathematical computations and write together” (Krstić, 2004, 127).
However, according to Michele Zackheim in her book recounting her efforts to trace the fate of the couple's daughter Lieserl, Einstein made no such visit in 1907: “By summer 1907, Albert was so busy with his job and his many projects that Mileva went alone with Hans Albert to visit her parents” (Zackheim 2000, 63). A little later in her book Zackheim was more specific. She writes that in August 1907 the Einsteins went on holiday in the Alps near Bern and stayed at the village of Lenk. She then states, without providing a source, that “within a week of returning home, Mileva left again with Hans Albert to visit her parents in Novi Sad” (Zackheim 2000, 64).5
So who is right about Einstein's visit, or non-visit, to Novi Sad in 1907? The now available evidence supports Zackheim's statement that Marić went with Hans Albert alone in late summer 1907, while Einstein remained at home in Bern. A confirmation of the first of Zackheim's contentions is provided by a letter Einstein wrote from Bern on July 15, 1907, in which he told Conrad and Paul Habicht that he would be going to Lenk, Switzerland, “on August 1 with wife and child for a ca. 10-day vacation” (CPAE 5, Engl., doc. 48). On August 7 Einstein sent a letter from Lenk to Wilhelm Wien in which he wrote that he was currently on “two weeks of vacation” (CPAE 5, Engl., doc. 52). (Fölsing [1997, 227] confirms that at the patent office Einstein had two weeks annual leave.) On August 11 Einstein wrote Wien again, this time from Aeschi, Switzerland (CPAE 5, doc 53). The above being the case, it is not possible for Einstein to have accompanied his wife and Hans Albert on a second vacation visiting her parents in the middle of August 1907. And indeed, a photograph reproduced in Krstić's book (Krstić 2004, 129) with the caption “Einstein/Marić family photo taken during the 1907 visit to Novi Sad” shows Marić with Hans Albert, her sister Zorka, her brother Miloš, and her young cousin Sofija Galić—but not Einstein. (Zackheim likewise captions the same photo as taken “circa 1907, Novi Sad” [Zackheim 2000, photo section].)6
Another piece of evidence comes in a letter Marić wrote to Kaufler Savić from her parents’ family estate in Kać, dated by Zackheim as being from the summer of 1907 (Zackheim 2000, 63). The letter is written throughout in the first person singular (it opens with the words “I have been with my parents for a week now”), indicating that Einstein had not traveled with her and Hans Albert on that occasion (M-KS, 87). Popović dates the letter “(1906?),” but that can hardly be correct, as neither Trbuhović-Gjurić nor Krstić (nor indeed Zackheim) mention any such visit in 1906. Nor is it likely to have been 1908, as Marić and Hans Albert visited her parents without Einstein over Easter of that year, as we know from a letter he wrote her from Bern (CPAE 5, doc. 96), and there is no documentation to indicate a second visit. Nor can it be from 1909, in the June of which year Marić sent a letter to Kaufler Savic from Novi Sad in terms that preclude its being in the same year as the one that Popović dates from 1906 (see contents of the latter letter above): “Only today I received your dear letter, and I got it here, where I have been staying for just over two weeks” (M-KS, 96). Taken together, the above items demonstrate that it can be stated with confidence that Zackheim was right to assign the date of the letter in question to mid-August 1907, and that Einstein did not accompany Marić when she visited her parents in that year.
As a coda to this section, it is pertinent to note that Zackheim (2000, 93) reports that “in early summer, 1933 … [Einstein] and Helene Savić may have seen each other in Novi Sad where Helene was visiting friends … Serbian historians are unyielding in their conviction that he was indeed in Novi Sad at that time. Two well-known and highly esteemed citizens of Novi Sad, Dr. Aleksander Moč and Dr. Koster Hadži, maintained that they spoke with Albert that summer at the Queen Elizabeth Café. … Dr. Moč, for one, had known Albert for many years. The three gentlemen reportedly sat at a table near the sidewalk, talking about the postwar situation in Germany.” However, the whereabouts of Einstein in the spring and summer 1933 has been chronicled in reputable biographies and there is no record of his having visited Serbia at that time (Fölsing 1997, 666, 671–674, 676–677). Isaacson (2007, 418–425), in particular, closely researched Einstein's several commitments and itineraries during the months in question and found no evidence of any trip to Novi Sad in 1933. The reported conviction of (at least some) Serbian historians that Einstein did go to Novi Sad in early summer should be treated with the utmost skepticism.
Even more unlikely is the widely believed story in Albania that Einstein visited that country in the early 1930s to obtain an Albanian passport to enable him to enter the United States. That Einstein had retained his Swiss citizenship, and had a Swiss passport, evidently doesn't make a dent in the will to believe patriotically-inspired stories of this kind. (See https://prishtinainsight.com/urge-fake-history/) An Albanian-American newspaper even quoted eyewitness testimony to “prove” that the story was true (http://gazetadielli.com/albert-einstein-in-albania-and-the-albanian-passport/).
The 1905 Visit
Since it is evident from the above that Einstein did not accompany Marić on her visit to Novi Sad in 1907 as Trbuhović-Gjurić and Krstić claimed (T-G 1983, 76–77; 1988, 95; Krstić 2004, 126–128), it follows that the events involving Einstein and Marić reportedly occurring in 1907 are either inaccurate or should be attributed to the securely documented visit in 1905.
The official chronology of Einstein's life (CPAE 11, p. 184) has Einstein's first visit to the home of his wife's parents in “late summer” 1905. He did not visit again until 1913 (CPAE 11, p. 195). According to Zackheim (2000, 61), in late August 1905 the couple spent the first week of Einstein's annual two-week holiday with Marić's friend Helene Kaufler Savić and her family, mostly at Kijevo, a lakeside village near Belgrade. For the second week they journeyed to visit Marić's parents in Novi Sad and also stayed at the Marić family's estate at Kać for several days. Similarly, both Trbuhović-Gjurić 1983, 74; 1988, 92–93) and Krstić (2004, 114–115) chronicle these two separate excursions in late summer 1905, embarked upon several weeks after Einstein had sent his relativity paper to the Annalen der Phyik at the end of June that year (CPAE 2, Engl., 171).
A hearsay account of supposed scientific collaboration between Einstein and Marić during their several days stay at Kać during their week's visit to Marić's parents in 1905 appeared in a film titled One Stone—Einstein (with English subtitles) released by a Serbian television company in 2006. In the film, Dragiša Marić, described as “a cousin of Mileva Marić,” alludes to “grandparents Žarko and Rada [Marić]” and other unnamed relatives who reportedly witnessed Marić and Einstein working together at the family estate in Kać:
As for ourselves, a part of our family, grandparents Žarko and Rada, and all those who lived on our salas [estate], witnessed the couple, who were scribbling something all day long, working. Day and night they were together, and doing well. They spent summers here, and as their biographers tend to say, “they spent their happiest and most inspiring summers here.” Grandpa Žarko later told us that they were working late into the night. All the theories born in that miracle year of 1905 were born here, in Kać, to be taken abroad and published. There are other proofs as well, but this is what we know by word of mouth. (Čvorić 2006)
Figure 8.1 Mileva, Hans Albert, and Albert, 1904–1905.
Courtesy of ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Bildarchiv (photo archive), photographer unknown, Hs_1457–72. Public Domain Mark.
Krstić (2004, 116–117) similarly reports what he describes as “eyewitness descriptions of the couple's joint scientific work” during their short stay in Kać in 1905 that he obtained more than five decades later. However, he provides no specific information, writing only that he “spoke in detail with Mileva's close relative Žarko Marić (1880–1965) and his eldest daughter Djurdjinka (1903–1990), who were living in the villa Kula during all three [actually two] stays of the Einsteins in Kać.” Though he does not state explicitly that it was Žarko who provided the eyewitness report, the reader is left to draw this conclusion. (Clearly it could not have come from his daughter Djurdjinka, since she would have been only about two years old at the time [Krstić 2004, 116].) He makes no mention of any other person to whom he “spoke in detail” about the Einsteins’ stay at Kać, but he does claim (2004, 117, 120) that Marić “sewed for Hans Albert, calculated and wrote, and worked together with Albert, or talked and walked with him.” A little later he writes that the couple “would sit in the garden and discuss some physics problems, which were not at all understandable to the others.” However, he does not cite any specific individuals as the source of this information.
Interestingly, in Trbuhović-Gjurić's account (1983, 74–75; 1988, 92–93) she does not mention any reports of the Einsteins’ working together on science during this stay in Kać in 1905, although she presumably had contact with the same people cited in the 2006 Serbian film and by Krstić during her extensive research that she undertook during the 1960s which included communications, both oral and written, with members and acquaintances of the Marić family (T-G 1983 and 1988, 6).
What are we to make of these hearsay accounts obtained some fifty-five years later as reported by Krstić and (apparently) nearly a century later in the case of the Serbian film—accounts conspicuously missing in Trbuhović-Gjurić's report of the same short period in 1905? To start with, it is hardly credible that the couple, on their first visit for one week in 1905 during which they introduced Einstein and the infant Hans Albert to Marić's parents, would have acted so discourteously, “scribbling something all day long, working … day and night,” as Dragiša Marić asserts. The statement that “all the theories born in that miracle year of 1905 were born here in Kać, to be taken abroad and published,” if we are to treat it with a seriousness it manifestly does not merit, is contradicted by the dates of Einstein's papers. Of the five main papers of 1905, the ones on quantum theory and Brownian motion were already published by August. Einstein had completed his second doctoral dissertation in April 1905 but did not submit it officially to the University of Zurich until July 20, where the faculty unanimously accepted it on July 27—before the trip to Novi Sad (CPAE 2, ed. note, p. 170). Likewise, the paper on relativity theory was received by Annalen der Physik on June 30, well over a month before the visit with the Marić family. Einstein's brief, three-page paper on E=mc2 was received by the Annalen on September 27, well after the Einsteins had returned to Bern.
Dragiša Marić's assertion that “this we know by word of mouth” amply serves to illustrate the observation of Charles Fernyhough (2012, 130–131): “Findings on rich false memories show that the misinformation is particularly strong when other people, especially family members, are providing the interjected information. Some benefits accrue to collaborative remembering.” As for Krstić's much more limited claim, aside from the reservations that apply to hearsay reports relating to supposed events obtained many decades later, it is so vaguely (and tendentiously) worded that it scarcely counts as evidence.
There remain the accounts by Trbuhović-Gjurić (1983, 77; 1988, 95) and Krstić (2004, 126–128) of events that occurred during the (for Einstein) non-existent summer 1907 visit to Novi Sad. Trbuhović-Gjurić reports, as does Krstić, that Einstein several times visited the café “Königen [Queen] Elisabeth” and talked with friends of Marić's brother Miloš. The consistency of these two reports suggests they are authentic, but Krstić provides no source for his account, and Trbuhović only one, Dr. Ljubomir-Bota Dumić, a one-time student friend of Miloš's (see chapter 6). It would appear that whoever it was who provided the reports of the café conversations conflated the year in which they occurred with that of the Einsteins’ 1905 visit. Neither author mentions alleged scientific collaboration between Einstein and Marić being reported during these conversations.
In regard to the supposed 1907 visit, Trbuhović-Gjurić again makes no mention of any family members having seen the couple working together on physics, but, as already noted, Krstić (2004, 127) reports that in 1961 Marić's cousin Sofija Golubović “told [him] that the Einstein couple and [Marić's brother] Miloš, now a soldier, used to talk about scientific themes, and that Mileva and Albert would debate, work on mathematical computations and write together.” Given Krstić's above report of the Einsteins’ stay for several days in 1905 in Kać, and this one relating to their very short stay in Novi Sad that could only also have been in 1905, we are being asked to believe that the Einsteins spent most of their week's holiday at Marić's parents’ two homes working together on physics for many hours each day. This is made all the more unlikely by the fact that for several months earlier that spring and summer Einstein had labored on his time-consuming production of four major papers, and would hardly have wanted to spend another week of his well-earned vacation engrossed in yet more physics problems. Given all this, the recollection Krstić obtained from Golubović in 1961, as reported in his 2004 book, must be considered highly suspect. That Trbuhović-Gjurić makes no mention of having received such reports during her extensive research in the 1960s only serves to increase the doubts that the collaboration scenarios reported by Krstić are authentic.
In the context of the 1905 visit Trbuhović-Gjurić (1983, 75; 1988, 93) writes that Marić told her father, as witnessed, among others, by Desana Tapaverica, a relative and the wife of the mayor of Novi Sad Dr. Bala: “A short while ago we finished a very important work that will make my husband world famous.” Trbuhović-Gjurić adds that “[m]uch later, she [Mrs. Bala] recalled these words and narrated them,” though to whom she does not say. Krstić (1991, 93–94) reports the same story as told to her father “and [to] her good friend Desana Tapavica [sic] who was married to Dr. Bala, the mayor of Novi Sad.” Krstić cites the sources of the report as Sida [Sidonija] Gajin in 1955 (whom he describes [2004, 5] as a godparent or sponsor of Marić's), and also Žarko Marić in 1961. In his 2004 book, Krstić (2004, 115) quotes the same sentence, with the addition of a second sentence: “He received his doctorate, too.” This time Krstić (2004, 115, n. 252) appends a footnote in which he cites Sofija Golubović as an eyewitness to the incident, adding that he heard the same comment but without the second sentence from Sidonija Gajin and Žarko Marić, “who were told that by Mileva's father Miloš.”
According to the report, Marić referred to work that had been completed very recently, which indicates that it was the special relativity paper, written during five or six weeks from late May to the end of June 1905 (Stachel 2005, 113). However, of the four papers that Einstein (CPAE, 5, doc. 27) described to Conrad Habicht in late May 2005, it was the one on the photon theory that he described as “very revolutionary,” not the relativity paper, though at that time it was already in “rough draft.” One wonders how Marić (or indeed Einstein) could predict at that stage that the latter paper would make Einstein world famous. (In fact, it was not until 1919 that he became world famous, but for the later much more ambitious general theory of relativity following its experimental confirmation.)
That, by Krstic's accounts, he obtained recollections by four people (witnesses or hearsay) of the sentence in question may indicate that Marić did tell her father the words as reported (or something like them), or it could be an example of what Fernyhough described as “collaborative remembering” by family members and friends, especially the reporting of the word “we.” If the former (or possibly a mixture of the two), we can't be sure of the exact wording as it was recounted some fifty or more years later. From an historical point of view nothing definite can be concluded from this particular incident as described by Trbuhović-Gjurić and Krstić.
Challenging the Ether
In her 1990 paper, Senta Troemel-Ploetz poses the question: “Why did he [Einstein] not acknowledge in public that it was she [Marić] who came up with the idea to investigate ether and its importance?” (T-P 1990, 418). For the contention implicit in this question she cites, as usual, Trbuhović-Gjurić's biography, where the latter quotes verbatim a hearsay statement that Einstein reportedly said to Marić's younger brother Miloš during the 1905 visit with the Marić family: “She was the first to direct my attention to the significance of the ether that was believed to pervade space” (T-G, 1983, 69; 1988, 87).
Miloš, later a medic in the Serbian army during World War I, was taken prisoner by the Russians in 1917. He remained in Soviet Russia after he was released at the end of the war and never returned home (M-KS, 119; Krstić 2004, 217–220), so it not possible that the above report about the ether came from him directly. As usual, Trbuhović-Gjurić provides no source for the alleged statement. Presumably it was handed down to relatives and friends of the Marić family whom Trbuhović-Gjurić met while researching her book. If so, its unreliability after so long a time should hardly need emphasizing, yet Trbuhović-Gjurić (and Troemel-Ploetz) accepted it, as other similar statements, without caveat.
In this instance there is not only no evidence to support the assertion that Marić directed Einstein's attention to the significance of the ether (a topic he could hardly have failed to have come across in his early readings of physics texts), there is conclusive evidence to the contrary. His interest in motion relative to the hypothetical ether is abundantly evident in several of the letters he wrote to Marić in their student days. For instance in September 1899 he wrote: “In Aarau [where he had recently visited] I had a good idea for investigating the way in which a body's relative motion with respect to the luminiferous ether affects the velocity of the propagation of light in transparent bodies” (E-M, 14). He had written even earlier a precocious essay with the title “On the Investigation of the State of the Ether in a Magnetic Field” in 1895, when he was only sixteen, more than a year before he had even met Marić (CPAE 1, doc. 5). In addition, as already noted in chapter 7, when Einstein discussed the same topic in a remarkably prescient passage in a letter written in August 1899, Marić failed to show any interest in it in her lengthy direct reply to his, writing only of personal matters (E-M, 10–11, 12).
The Varičak Report
Moving forward to the end of first decade of the twentieth century, Trbuhović-Gjurić (1983, 87; 1988, 105) recounts another hearsay story, this time purporting to demonstrate Marić's mathematical participation in Einstein's work. This one concerns Svetozar Varičak, whom she reports as having lodged with the Einsteins when he was a student in Zurich. Trbuhović-Gjurić writes that Svetozar's father Vladimir, a mathematics professor at Zagreb University, had met Einstein at a mathematics conference in Berlin in 1910, on which occasion the professor mentioned in a private conversation that his son was going to Switzerland to study chemistry and had no place to stay. Einstein responded: “My wife is a Serb and provides board and lodging for students. When the time comes, your son can stay with us. I will speak to my wife about it.” Trbuhović-Gjurić then states that Svetozar Varičak's daughter “recalled having heard her father recount that from time to time Einstein helped his wife with the housework because it troubled him that when she had completed the household chores she was still trying to solve mathematical problems in his notes after midnight.”
Trbuhović-Gjurić's account of how Svetozar Varičak came to have stayed with the Einsteins is suspect on three counts. First, there is no record of Einstein's going to Berlin before 1912. Second, it is hardly likely that Einstein would have taken time out from his teaching duties at the University of Zurich (the relevant period is from October 1909 to March 1911) and his time-consuming researches in theoretical physics to attend a mathematics conference. Third, she provides a three-sentence verbatim response by Einstein to Vladimir Varičak's comment in what she reports was a private conversation, which invites the question: How could anyone possibly know this kind of detail when recounting the story to Trbuhović-Gjurić? In fact, she does not tell her readers, in relation to what is now third-hand (at least) hearsay, from whom she came to know the story of Marić's supposedly working past midnight on Einstein's “notes.” She doesn't say she heard it directly from Svetozar Varičak's daughter, and if she had, one would be left wondering how she made contact with the daughter since there is no evidence that the latter was an acquaintance of the Marić family.
Einstein traveled to Berlin for the first time in April 1912 (CPAE 5, doc. 384; Fölsing 1997, 330), where he met with eminent physicists about a possible position in Berlin. He had already been appointed professor at the ETH and would soon be moving back to Zurich from Prague. On May 14, 1913, news of Svetozar appears in a letter from Einstein to Vladimir Varičak, in which Einstein reported, “Your young lad is a very keen student and always in good spirits” (CPAE 10, supplementary doc., p. 21). This indicates that when he was a student Svetozar evidently stayed with the Einsteins for a period of time, in which case he very likely would have conveyed to his daughter some years later his impressions of the Einstein household, but how Trbuhović-Gjurić came to hear of them remains a mystery.
The alleged recollection of Svetozar's daughter refers to “notes.” Other than his lectures for a single course at the University of Bern as an instructor (Privatdozent), the first time Einstein required extensive, carefully prepared lecture notes was when he was appointed professor of theoretical physics at the University of Zurich, commencing on October 25, 1909 (Fölsing 1997, 251). Having been told in early May 1909 that he had been appointed to the post, he evidently set to work on preparing his lecture notes not long after that, as Marić reported to Kaufler Savić on June 25: “My husband is now very busy preparing his lectures.” It was in the winter semester 1909–10 that she complained to Kaufler Savić about Einstein's neglect of her on account of his “damned science,” and at the end of December 1912 she wrote that Einstein “is entirely working on his problems. … I must confess with a bit of shame that we are unimportant to him” (M-KS, 97, 102, 108). It seems rather unlikely that, at some time during this period or just after, Marić would have “work[ed] past midnight trying to solve mathematical problems” in Einstein's notes while he did some housework. There is clearly a kernel of truth in the report in that, when he was a student, Svetozar Varičak evidently did lodge with the Einsteins in Zurich in 1913 (though whether he did so also in 1910 as Trbuhović-Gjurić's states is unknown). Even so, hearsay of unknown provenance purporting to recount what Svetozar said to his daughter many decades earlier does not qualify as historical evidence.
Versions of the Varičak story told by other authors exemplify what happens when accounts are repeated. According to Troemel-Ploetz:
A mathematician of the University of Zagreb recalled that Albert Einstein every now and then helped his wife doing the household chores because he felt sorry that after her housework was done, she had to do his mathematical problems till way past midnight. (T-P 1990, 426)
Now Svetozar Varičak was a student of chemistry at the time (it was his father who was the Zagreb mathematician). More importantly, Troemel-Ploetz's account misleadingly reads as if it were a direct, first-hand report on the activities of Einstein and Marić, rather than a report made by Svetozar to his daughter that reached Trbuhović-Gjurić many decades later.
Andrea Gabor writes in the chapter on Marić in her book Einstein's Wife:
Svetozar Varičak, a student who lived with the Einsteins for several months in about 1910, remembered how Marić, after a day of cleaning, cooking, and caring for the children, would then busy herself with Einstein's mathematical calculations, often working late into the night. Varičak said he remembered feeling “so sorry for Mileva” that he sometimes helped her with the housework. (Gabor 1995, 20)
Gabor, too, presents this story as if it came directly from Svetozar Varičak. Moreover, in the original story it was Einstein, not Varičak, who felt sorry for Mileva, and it was Einstein, not Varičak, who helped with the household chores. Again, both reports allude to Einstein's mathematical “problems” or “calculations,” implying these were related to his current researches, whereas Trbuhović-Gjurić's report refers more specifically to Einstein's “notes.” In Krstić's account, for which he cites Trbuhović-Gjurić, he does refer to Einstein's notes, as does Milentijević citing Krstić. However, both authors present the story as if it were historical fact, with no mention of the obscure provenance and problematic nature of Trbuhović-Gjurić's hearsay source (Krstić 2004, 141–142; Milentijević 2015, 143–144).
Invented Dialogue
Troemel-Ploetz's propensity to accept Trbuhović-Gjurić's assertions without reservation is further exemplified when she writes that “during their common student years his [Einstein's] own view of Mileva Einstein-Marić was that she would make a better physicist than many men” (T-P 1990, 419). The original passage in Trbuhović-Gjurić's book from which this derives included a purported exchange between Marić and Einstein in which Marić exclaimed, “I believe that I would be just as good a physicist as my male colleagues,” to which Einstein replied, “a better one, better than many others” (T-G 1983 and 1988, 41). Apparently Troemel-Ploetz did not ask herself how anyone could possibly know what was said in a private conversation at that time. This supposed exchange is one of several scenarios and verbatim conversations attributed to Einstein and Marić during their early student years at Zurich Polytechnic in this section of Trbuhović-Gjurić's biography (T-G 1983 and 1988, 40–41).
As usual, Trbuhović-Gjurić does not cite a source for the scenarios in question. It turns out that this and the other exchanges between Einstein and Marić were reproduced word for word (translating from English into Serbian and German) from a fictionalized biography of Einstein written for children and young readers by Aylesa Forsee.7 Her book was manifestly not intended to be treated as a nonfiction work for adults, as is evident from the numerous other imaginative scenarios and episodes with dialogue invented by the author throughout the book in order to engage young readers—not to contribute to Einstein scholarship.8 Forsee (1963, viii) writes in her acknowledgments that Hans Albert Einstein cooperated “in clearing up conflicts in biographical materials.” But an examination of the items cited here suffices to show that this “clearing up” could not apply to these scenarios with invented dialogue, which are obviously intended to render the story of Einstein's life more accessible to children and young readers. A typical example is the following exchange set in 1905:
“You should send this to the Annals of Physics,” Mileva declared, when she had glanced through the article Einstein had written about his research on photons that he had titled “The Quantum Law of the Emission and Absorption of Light.”
“I'm not sure the editor would be interested,” said Einstein, thinking of the bulky Annals of Physics full of technical papers and peppered with footnotes and references. The editor accepted the article, but Einstein's theory that light was made up of photons aroused arguments. It clashed with the long-held and not completely disproved theory that light was transmitted in waves.
“Doesn't it bother you when critics attack your ideas?” asked Mileva.
“Macht nichts—it doesn't matter,” said Einstein with a shrug. “Anyone who chooses to be an innovator must be prepared to follow a lonely path.” (Forsee, 1963, 18)
That Forsee's book cannot be remotely considered an historical work for adult readers (nor was it so intended) is further indicated by a passage in the book in which Einstein becomes increasingly attracted to “a young, black-haired Serbian woman” during their first months at the Zurich Polytechnic (Forsee 1963, 10; T-G 1983 and 1988, 40). “Mileva Marić seemed unresponsive at first; but after Albert learned a few words in Serbian, she started mastering German so she could talk with him” (Forsee 1963, 10). This is obviously pure fiction. Marić had studied German for many years at school; she also attended the Higher Girls’ School in Zurich for two academic years and a summer semester course in medicine at the Medical School of Zurich University prior to enrolling at the Polytechnic (Krstić 2004, 33). Her letters confirm her fluency in German. Even the limited number of such imagined scenes reproduced in Trbuhović-Gjurić's biography should have sufficed for later authors to recognize their fictional character and prevented their utilization of such material by later authors (see chapter 9).
Trbuhović-Gjurić's own propensity for imaginative invention is exemplified by her comments on the first Solvay Conference, held in Brussels from October 29 to November 3, 1911, and attended by the foremost European physical scientists, including Einstein. According to Trbuhović-Gjurić (1983, 97; 1988, 115), “during discussions [at the conference] Mileva attracted great attention by her profound knowledge of scientific achievements and her clear understanding of their importance” In fact, Marić did not accompany Einstein to the five-day conference, as two brief letters sent by Einstein to Marić during the outward journey testify (CPAE 5, docs. 300, 301).
More Hearsay
Another example of an unlikely hearsay story concerns a visit by Marić's parents to the Einsteins’ apartment in Zurich sometime in the early months of 1910. Trbuhović-Gjurić wrote that soon after the Einsteins had arrived back in Zurich from Bern in October 1909, “Mileva's home had become a meeting place for intelligent minds and talented musicians.” She then reports that when Marić's parents returned to Novi Sad after their stay in Zurich in 1910, her mother proudly recounted:
I didn't know that my Mitza [Mileva] was so highly esteemed in the world. When we were there, the most important and intelligent people came to their home and did not want to start talking until Mitza was present. Generally, she sat to the side and was content to listen, but as soon as she began to speak everyone turned to her and noted with great attention everything she said. (T-G 1983, 86; 1988, 104)
Trbuhović-Gjurić states that “Mrs Sofija Galić-Golubović of Belgrade, a cousin of Mileva's who grew up in the Marić family home, remembered well this report by Marić's mother.” Krstić (2004, 141) also cites Golubović as the source (in July 1961) for his similar, though briefer, account of the parents’ visit to Zurich in the spring of 1910. But in contrast to Trbuhović-Gjurić, Krstić suggests that the Einsteins’ guests were most likely Paul and Conrad Habicht. At the beginning of March 1910, Einstein invited the brothers to stay in the Zurich apartment to finalize work on the small electrical device on which they had been collaborating (CPAE 5, doc. 198).
The Rejected Dowry
Trbuhović-Gjurić and Krstić both recount yet another hearsay story, one that Marić's father Miloš supposedly told his son (also Miloš) and some of the latter's friends in Novi Sad. (In Krstić's version, the story was related to Miloš senior's “family and friends.”) Miloš visited his daughter and son-in-law in Bern, and, according to Krstić, this occurred following the birth of their son Hans Albert in May 1904 (T-G 1983, 76, 1988, 94; Krstić 1991, 92). During this visit he had taken with him a bankbook for an account worth 100,000 Austro-Hungarian crowns and offered it to Einstein as a belated dowry. It was an offer, however, that Einstein refused in the following terms, as reported by Trbuhović-Gjurić:
I didn't marry your daughter because of the money, but because I love her, because I need her, because we are both one. Everything I have done and accomplished I owe to Mileva. She is my genial source of inspiration, my protective angel against sins in life and even more so in science. Without her I would not have started my work, let alone finished it.
Trbuhović-Gjurić added that Marić completely agreed with the rejection of the dowry, and that Miloš wept when he told the young people in Novi Sad about it. However, the above account is suspect from the start. Einstein would not have said anything about having “finished” his work in 1904, when he had published only a few unimportant papers. Nor would he have said that without Marić he would not have started his work. There is also the improbability that the source of the story (see below) could remember in such detail the little speech purportedly uttered by Einstein after one week, let alone after several decades.
According to Trbuhović-Gjurić, the information came from a report by the journalist Miša Sretenović. Likewise, in his 1991 “Appendix,” Krstić (1991, 92–93) states: “In a 1929 interview by Misha [Miša] Sretenović, Mileva stated that Albert had called her his inspiration, his guardian angel; someone who protected him from life's mistakes, but also from mistakes in his scientific work. This extraordinary gesture [Einstein's refusing to accept the money] was well remembered, and ever after, Albert was called ‘our son-in-law’ and was dear and popular in Novi Sad.” Note that Krstić asserts that it was Marić who told the story to Sretenović, which we know from Marić's letter to Kaufler Savić in June 1929 was not the case (M-KS, 158). However, in his 2004 book he cites Marić's cousin Sofija Golubović for the story, stating in a footnote that she had told it to him in 1961 (Krstić 2004, 104, 104, n. 231). But if that was the case, why did he attribute the story to the journalist Sretenović in 1991 when he had a more direct source that he could name? Again, there is no evidence that Marić's father visited the Einsteins in Bern in 1904. All this raises grave doubts about whether the episode actually occurred.
In her 1990 article, Troemel-Ploetz prefaces the above quotation about the financial offer with the words: “He [Einstein] told Mileva Einstein-Marić's father” (T-P 1990, 418), as if it were a simple statement of fact rather than a story passed down through the generations. By the time it is reported by Peter Frize it has become something that Einstein “wrote to Mileva's father” (Frize 2009, 280, emphasis added). The historian Alberto Martínez notes that the same erroneous assertion is made in a replication of the quotation displayed inside the Einsteins’ apartment at Kramgasse 49 in Bern, where the couple lived from 1903 to 1905.9 Martínez observes: “There is no such letter to Einstein's father-in-law. The words are cited from a biography of Marić (from 1969) by Desanka Trbuhović-Gjurić, who claimed that Marić's relatives claimed to have heard Marić's father claim to have been told that by Einstein” (Martínez 2007).
A key to the mystery of the dowry may well lie in a discovery made by Michele Zackheim during her visit to Serbia in 1998. In the last home of Marić's mother, in a copy of David Copperfield, Zackheim found “a postal coupon that had probably been used as a bookmark.” She continues (2000, 174): “It was a receipt for money, although the amount was not specified—and also for a five-hundred-gram package. It had been sent to Mileva, in Bern, from her father in April 1905” One might speculate that if it was the dowry, the postal coupon was sent by Miloš Marić to his daughter rather than directly to Einstein because, as far as is known, the only contact Miloš had had with his son-in-law before August 1905 was a letter he sent at the end of January 1902 to let Einstein know of the birth of baby Lieserl (Zackheim 2000, 43; CPAE 1, doc.134). He certainly would not have been well disposed toward a man who had brought shame on the Marić family name by making his unwed daughter pregnant, not to mention that Einstein did not make the effort to go to Novi Sad to see his fiancée despite her being so unwell after the birth that she couldn't write to him herself and had to leave the task to her father (CPAE 1, doc. 134). Nor, of course, did he and his wife receive an invitation to his daughter's wedding (Fölsing 1997, 106).
But, aside from illustrating the inconsistencies among versions of the supposed episode as reported by different authors, and the way the story mutated when other authors recycled it, all this turns out to be beside the point. Radmila Milentijević (2015, 114, 442, n. 252) has documented that the offer of a dowry was in fact accepted by Einstein. With this information added to the strong doubts about the supposed episode expressed above, and the discovery of a receipt for money mailed to Marić by her father in April 1905, there seems to be no good reason to believe that the episode actually occurred.