is insufficient. Schuckert of Nuremberg gains the contract. Within twelve months Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Co. is broke.
‘The misfortune of my poor parents,’ Albert confides in Maja, ‘who for so many years have not had a happy moment, weighs most heavily on me. It also hurts me deeply that at sixteen I must be a passive witness without being able to do even the smallest thing about it. I am nothing but a burden to my relatives. It would surely be better if I did not live at all. Only the thought that year after year I do not allow myself a pleasure, a diversion, keeps me going and must protect me often from despair.’
The brothers Einstein turn to northern Italy. They sell the house in Munich and look to constructing a hydroelectric power system for Pavia. Once there they make a new home in a grand house that had belonged to the poet Ugo Foscolo.
Albert falls in love with Italy. He assists his father and uncle with designs, reads, thinks, hikes alone across the Ligurian Alps to Genoa, where he stays with his uncle Jakob Koch.
He spends the summer of 1895 in Airolo writing essays and philosophical notes inspired by Leibniz: ‘It is wrong to infer from the imperfection of our thinking that objects are imperfect.’
‘You’ll have to earn a living,’ his father tells him. ‘Take up electrical engineering in preparation to take on the Einstein business.’
‘No, Father. I’ll take the entrance exams for the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zürich.’
‘It’s only a teacher-training college. Not a university like Heidelberg, Berlin or Göttingen.’
‘It’ll do.’
Hermann makes an official application for Albert to be relieved of his citizenship in the state of Württemberg, which is accepted, costing three marks. It excuses him from military service. No more a German citizen, he’ll be a stateless student at the ETH.
Not quite. The director of the ETH is unenthusiastic about Albert’s application. He hasn’t got entirely the right qualifications and has only achieved the Matura, the high-school diploma. The director announces: ‘According to my experience it is not advisable to withdraw a student from the institution in which he had begun his studies even if he is a so-called child prodigy.’ Albert should finish his general studies. Even so, if the Einsteins insist, the director will make an exception in so far as the age rule is concerned and allow Albert to sit the entrance exam, which Albert does.
Alas, he does so badly in languages and history that he is sent back for another year in secondary school, thirty minutes from Zürich in Aarau, in the canton of Aargau. The Aarau Kantonsschule has a fairly liberal reputation and specialises in science.
AARAU
At the start of the autumn term Albert goes to Aarau, forty-five kilometres from Zürich, where arrangements are made for him to be housed with the Winteler family. Jost Winteler teaches philology and history at the Kantonsschule.
The sixteen-year-old Albert feels at ease in the Winteler house, thinking of them as his second family. Jost Winteler, a native of Switzerland’s Toggenburg region, is a former journalist and an ornithologist. A handsome, free-thinking liberal, he loathes power politics, and he and Albert share a profound disapproval of German militarism. The Wintelers have four sons and three daughters. The house is filled with books, music, parties and spirited discussion. Winteler arranges kite-flying excursions. He has a habit of chatting with his birds. For the country treks Albert sports his grey felt hat.
The family treats the young smiling philosopher as one of its own. Albert calls Jost Winteler ‘Papa’ and his wife, Pauline, ‘Mamerl’ or ‘Mummy No. 2’. He treats Mamerl as his confessor.
He spends hours hanging around in his blue nightshirt drinking coffee with one of the sons of the house, Paul, who becomes his close friend. Albert relishes his reputation as a subversive student. He entrances the women of the household, captivating them with his bright eyes, bedraggled hair and insolent expressions. He plays Bach and Mozart for them on his violin. His playing is powerful and graceful. Eighteen-year-old Marie, who accompanies him on the piano, is a pupil at the Aargau teachers’ college. In her long full skirt and blouse with flared sleeves, she is the most beautiful of the three daughters. Albert feels powerfully attracted to her. Playfully, he quotes Goethe’s ‘The Ratcatcher’ to her: ‘I bid the chords sweet music make, And all must follow in my wake.’
No matter that Marie is far from his intellectual equal, the couple fall in love. They laugh and are rarely out of each other’s sight. They meet with friends at one or other Kaffeehaus.
The families have no objection; indeed, they treat the pair as unofficially engaged. When Albert returns to Pavia on a spring holiday, Marie’s letters, he admits to his mother, allow him to understand homesickness. He writes to Marie: ‘Dear little sunshine, You mean more to my soul than the whole world did before.’
MARIE’S FAVOURITE PHOTOGRAPH
She calls him Geliebter Schatz: Beloved Treasure.
In his letters to her from Pavia, Albert’s realistic about the love affair. She admits she can’t keep up with his thinking. Albert is obsessed with the nature of electromagnetism. He fantasises about what he might see riding along on a light wave. Marie finds it unromantic.
He has Berlin in his sights, where he’s heard that Wilhelm Röntgen has made advanced studies into cathode radiation. The radiation occurs when an electrical charge is applied to two metal plates inside a glass tube filled with low-density gas. Röntgen sees a faint glow on light-sensitive screens: a penetrating, previously unknown type of radiation causes it, X-ray radiation.
The obstacle to Albert going there is his antagonism towards Germany and German culture. Germany is riddled with all sorts of anti-Semitism. The Germans are resentful towards the Jews who are so successful. They fear the Jews will gain yet more power. Albert finds it hard to fathom why there’s so strange a contrast between the Germans’ hospitality and their hostility.
He also wants to be free of conventional nationalism. He wants Swiss citizenship.
He attempts to reassure Marie: ‘If you were here at the moment, I would defy all reason and would give you a kiss for punishment and would have a good laugh at you, as you deserve, sweet little angel! And as to whether I will be patient? What other choice do I have with my beloved, naughty little angel?’
The tangled familial relationships produce unexpected outcomes during Albert’s stay in Aarau. Maja is romantically attached to Marie’s brother Paul. Anna Winteler becomes attached to Albert’s new best friend, the engineer Michele Angelo Besso.
ANNA AND MICHELE
Six years older than Albert, Besso, born in Riesbach in Switzerland into a rambling family of Sephardic-Jewish-Italian descent, has an immediate appeal for Albert and vice versa. Albert first encounters him at a music evening at the house of Selina Caprotti. An ETH graduate with dark curly hair and nervous staring eyes, Besso has a philosophical passion for physics the equal of Albert’s. He also shares a record of insubordination, having been expelled from high school for complaining about the
