by Besso who has just earned the displeasure of his superior; when asked to report on a power station, he misses the train, and on arrival finds he is unable to remember what he’s supposed to do. When head office receives a card from Besso asking to be reminded, his superior says that Besso is ‘completely useless and almost unbalanced’.
‘Michele,’ says Albert, ‘is an awful schlemiel.’
He’s Albert’s kind of man, and Albert is devoted to him: ‘Nobody else is so close to me, nobody knows me so well, nobody is so kindly disposed to me as you are.’
At one of Selina Caprotti’s soirées, Albert introduces Besso to Anna Winteler and they fall in love.
The passage of light unseen, imagined is almost – as it were – visible.
Zürich instead of Berlin beckons.
Not before Albert and his friends embark upon a three-day June trek in the northeast of Switzerland along Säntis – at over 2,500 metres, the highest mountain in the Alpstein region. The ridge trail is precipitous. Albert is hopelessly ill-equipped to make the expedition. He ties his overcoat around him with his scarf. His shoes are cracked and split. Squinting into the drizzle, he leans heavily on his walking sticks.
The small group of classmates clamber uphill to Fälalp, an upper basin, then through patches of snow to an even steeper incline among loose rocks beneath a solitary needle of rock on the Rossmad peak. They head in a westerly direction to the bare, rocky ridge above the glacier. Albert gazes, captivated, at the nearby summits of the Churfirsten mountains to the north of Lake Walen, to the east the mountain peaks of the Vorarlberg and to the north the Bodensee near Konstanz. The two-hour return hike to the Schwägalp is extremely steep in some places and requires considerable sure-footedness. He struggles to keep his balance on the razor edge and slips. He slides and rolls towards a sheer precipice.
He screams.
His nearest classmate, Adolf Frisch, stretches out his alpenstock.
Albert grabs hold of it for dear life and Frisch begins to pull him upwards to safety.
Frisch holds Albert in his arms. Albert is shaking, his face drenched in sweat.
‘Put your head down between your knees,’ Frisch tells him. ‘Now sit still. Breathe slowly out. Breathe in.’
‘Thanks, Adolf.’
‘It’s nothing.’
‘Nothing? You saved my life.’
‘Anyone would’ve done the same.’
‘I’m sorry to be such a nuisance.’
‘You’re not a nuisance. To be honest you aren’t cut out to be a mountaineer.’
In September 1896, aged seventeen, he passes the Swiss Matura with the highest grades in physics and mathematics. At last he can enrol at the polytechnic. Zürich becomes a reality.
The determination of his will and the intensity of his solitary mind studies will lead to him becoming arguably the greatest scientist who ever lived, with an intelligence that is far from normal.
ZÜRICH
There’s a melancholic inevitability about the separation from Marie. She’s accepted a teaching post in Olsberg, an isolated town in the Hochsauerland district of Westphalia, 570 kilometres distant.
Sensing one of life’s new beginnings, the seventeen-year-old Albert disembarks at the Hauptbahnhof in Zürich with a spring in his step. He carries his battered violin case in one hand, his suitcase in the other, and walks out to the Bahnhofstrasse.
Beyond the River Limmat he can see the neoclassical buildings of the polytechnic and the University of Zürich. The mountains embrace old Zürich, its churches, hotels, restaurants and banks, and its Roman ruins and the lake, the Zürichsee, in the southeast. Trolley cars trundle and clank up the hills of the Zürichberg and the Uetliberg. Zürich prides itself on its Calvinistic heritage.
With a monthly allowance of 100 francs provided by Aunt Julie Koch, Albert can afford a room to rent in the student quarter with Frau Kägi at Unionstrasse 4, off Baschligplatz.
Albert relishes the intellectual and artistic ferment of fin de siècle Europe. Freud thinks of dreams and sexual hysteria in Vienna and publishes The Interpretation of Dreams. Stéphane Mallarmé experiments with silence and the random in a Paris dominated by the novelty of the Eiffel Tower. The Dreyfus Affair shakes France. On 13 January 1898, Émile Zola publishes an open letter in L’Aurore addressed to the president, Félix Faure, accusing the government of anti-Semitism and the unlawful jailing of Alfred Dreyfus, sentenced to penal servitude for life for espionage. Zola points out the judicial errors and the lack of evidence, and is himself prosecuted and found guilty of libel on 23 February 1898. He flees to England, returning to France the following year. The Paris Universal Exhibition of 1900 attracts 51 million visitors. In 1901, the first Nobel prizes are awarded. In the same year Kandinsky is a founding member of the art group Phalanx in Munich.
Stability and freedom is what Zürich offers. Jung, who comes to Zürich from Basel in 1900, finds the city ‘relates to the world not by the intellect, but by commerce. Yet here the air was free and I had always valued that. Here you were not weighed down by the brown fog of the centuries, even though one missed the rich background of culture.’ Rosa Luxemburg, Marxist and eventual founder of the Communist Party of Germany, and her cohorts were already living in the city among the students, free-thinkers and social outcasts. Thomas Mann publishes his first novel, Buddenbrooks, in 1901. Art nouveau is all the rage. In 1905 Henri Matisse exhibits Le bonheur de vivre. Two years later Picasso reinvents painting with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
The ETH (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), stands next to the university on Rämistrasse. Set back from the street is a small courtyard. Its open oak doors reveal arches, balconies, dimly lit by skylights and high windows.
Theoretical physics is just coming into its own as an academic discipline. Its pioneers, Max Planck in Berlin, Hendrik Lorentz in Holland, and Ludwig Boltzmann in Vienna combine physics with mathematics to suggest territories that experimentalists have yet to explore. Mathematics is supposed to be a major part of Albert’s compulsory studies at the polytechnic.
As for Marie, Albert has grown weary of their relationship.
When Albert gives a disingenuous hint that he plans to visit her in Aarau, Marie is thrilled. She vows that she will love him for eternity. Albert finds this cloying. She sends him a gift of a teapot.
He realises the one-sided relationship can’t go on. He tells her bluntly that they should refrain from writing to each other.
Marie says she can’t believe he really means this.
Albert finds it hard to disguise his irritation. The gift of a teapot goes down badly. He doesn’t want a teapot.
She retaliates: ‘The matter of my sending you the stupid little teapot does not have to please you at all as long as you are going to brew some good tea in it. Stop making that angry face which looked at me from all the sides and corners of the writing paper.’
He stops writing
