Einstein: An Intimate Study of a Great Man

By Dimitri Marianoff and Palma Wayne

Einstein: An Intimate Study of a Great Man, first published in 1944, recounts the personal life of physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955). The book was written by Einstein’s son-in-law, who married his daughter Margot in Berlin in 1930. Einstein was a simple, direct man, but remains today larger-than-life, and as author Marianoff writes, “Einstein’s life is not an exciting one. It is not filled with the rush and sweep of spectacular adventures. It has none of the scope and danger of the explorer, who freezes and suffers and agonizes in his search. It is not filled with the stir and headiness of eventful, flamboyant episodes. It is not a colorful panorama of the human pilgrimage...It has no color at all except the color of greatness...It is a mighty epic journey of science—a steady, breathtaking march whose heroic altitude is of such heights that it precludes the ecstatic language so often applied to singular human endeavors...It has no thrill in it, except the thrill of having changed the tide of man’s history and created new channels for his growth...It has no drama in it, except the overpowering drama of a conquest so immeasurable that as long as man remains on earth he will have benefited by it.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Phocion Publishing
• Release date: Nov 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781839740145

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© Phocion Publishing 2019, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

Acknowledgments 6

Preface 7

CHAPTER 1 — The Approach 8

CHAPTER 2 — Albert 12

CHAPTER 3 — Marriage 16

CHAPTER 4 — Elsa, Margot, and Albert 19

CHAPTER 5 — The Road 29

CHAPTER 6 — The Purpose 36

CHAPTER 7 — The Journey 41

CHAPTER 8 — The Arrival 55

CHAPTER 9 — Gift of the City Fathers 63

CHAPTER 10 — A Conversation 66

CHAPTER 11 — A Man of Germany 70

CHAPTER 12 — Einstein and Money 74

CHAPTER 13 — Land of Heroic Mold 80

CHAPTER 14 — His Love of Russia 84

CHAPTER 15 — Leyden 86

CHAPTER 16 — The Rise of Hitler 93

CHAPTER 17 — Rocket Flights 101

CHAPTER 18 — Einstein and Music 105

CHAPTER 19 — The Decision to Leave 108

CHAPTER 20 — Einstein and People 116

CHAPTER 21 — We Leave Germany 122

CHAPTER 22 — The Art of Cleavage 126

CHAPTER 23 — Einstein in Belgium 131

CHAPTER 24 — Exile 135

CHAPTER 25 — Prisoner of the World 138

CHAPTER 26 — Hear, O Israel 143

CHAPTER 27 — Death of Ilse 147

CHAPTER 28 — Einstein and Fame 156

CHAPTER 29 — Albert and Elsa 160

CHAPTER 30 — My Arrival in America 163

CHAPTER 31 — Princeton 169

CHAPTER 32 — A Cook—A Gardener—A Millionaire 173

CHAPTER 33 — Elsa’s Passing 177

CHAPTER 34 — The Effect of Every Vision 180

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 185

Einstein

An Intimate Study of a Great Man

DIMITRI MARIANOFF

with PALMA WAYNE

Einstein: An Intimate Study of a Great Man was originally published in 1944 by Doubleday, Doran and Co., Inc., Garden City, New York.

* * *

One day on a city’s street I saw a woman standing with a little boy. She had a hand on his shoulder, and with the other she pointed to a man in a car and said:

There is Albert Einstein. Don’t ever forget that you have once seen him.

With that picture in mind this book is written.

Acknowledgments

We wish to acknowledge our deep indebtedness to Professor Robert A. Millikan, who so warmly and generously gave of his time to clarify important scientific viewpoints touched upon in this book. Also grateful thanks are due to Professor Paul Epstein of the California Institute of Technology for his helpfulness in authenticating certain material.

We are indebted to Haig Gordon Garbedian for permission to quote from his book Albert Einstein: Maker of Universes, and to Edwin E. Slosson for sources of scientific material. We wish gratefully to acknowledge the substantial assistance rendered by William J. Perlman in the preparation of the material of this book and for his having written the original outline on the Relativity Theory incorporated in these pages.

Grateful acknowledgment is hereby made to Dr. M. N. Morandini of the University of California War Training for his material help in the elucidation of the Theory of Relativity and for checking the statements pertaining thereto.

Further indebtedness is acknowledged to Emil Hilb, rocket expert Joseph Manildi of Cal Tech, Max Rothenstein—and to Spence, who listened.

Preface

I herewith wish to express my gratitude for the full literary collaboration of Palma Wayne, who has so ably and with unusual dramatic power captured the human value of my recollections of the years I spent in the Einstein family.

—Dimitri Marianoff

When the material for this book was brought to me I thought I assumed a huge responsibility in attempting to write a life of Albert Einstein—and certainly an enormous presumption.

Mr. Marianoff and I felt these pages must be construed in no way as an estimate or a summing up of him. No one at the present moment can do that.

I wish they had left some record of what so great a geometrician as Archimedes said, besides this: Give me a place to stand 2nd I will move the earth—a record of what he looked like, how he lived, what he did.

I wish I knew how Galileo talked, and what he thought of politics and music and social economics—deep in his Tuscan mind.

I wish with a passionate wish that I might find the man from Mars’ Hill and the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians—in other than his own undying words. What was it that made him ask of God to remove his thorn in the flesh? Was it stuttering or rheumatism or any of the other afflictions theologians only guess at? My grace is sufficient for thee, came back the answer. How did that grace bear him up in the irritation of daily living? In what manner did he act or look—this man who is an eternal note in the universe?

They are all eternal notes because they will live forever.

So, when Albert Einstein strides up and down the corridors of the Athenaeum in Pasadena playing his violin, or when he quietly lays his passport on the desk of the German Consul in that dark, small office in Brussels, repudiating the honorary citizenship which that nation had once bestowed upon him, or when he talks with Rabindranath Tagore, or appears at that never-to-be-forgotten moment before ten thousand human beings in Albert Hall in London in a plea that made a circle around the earth—these are the moments the world wants to know about, and those that come after us will read of a slice of the human as well as of that achievement of his—and when they do, these pages will have accomplished their purpose.

—Palma Wayne

CHAPTER 1 — The Approach

It was at 5 Haberlandstrasse in Berlin on that exciting afternoon that I first saw him. I rang the bell timidly, and it was answered by a stout maid, blonde and Germanic-looking, who ushered me into the living room of the man to whom, when he opens his mouth to speak, a whole world cups its ear and bends down to listen.

It was large and spacious, furnished partly in the Empire style. It was comfortable, old-fashioned, and unpretentious. The wallpaper, a dark green in color, was badly in need of replacement. On the round table in the center was a white embroidered linen tablecloth with a good Hamburg crocheted lace edge. In a wall cabinet rested some very fine pieces of antique porcelain. A heavy silver frame containing a Russian ikon sat on a small table under a painting of a child by an old master. In a corner of the room stood a large, commonplace, open cabinet with shelves and shelves of medals. With speaking significance they were there from every civilized nation in the world—from universities, colleges, foundations, and societies. An oriental sword and a cylindrical diamond-studded tube of gold encasing a tiny scroll of Hebraic scripture lay on the lower shelf. This sort of amulet is used in Jewish households as a symbol of God’s protection and is generally placed over the lintel of a door. But to Einstein it was without meaning. It was given him by an admirer. In the opposite corner of the room was a grand piano with four or five violins under it and a printed copy of a Mozart original manuscript on top of it.

Beyond this room was a library of many books, with a large framed picture of Michael Faraday on one of the walls. Hanging alone on another wall, the ideal way to hang good pictures, was an original landscape by Signac.

I was not kept waiting long, for very soon Frau Elsa Einstein entered. Her resemblance to her husband was striking, but it was not surprising as she stemmed from the same stock, being his second cousin. Her hair was bobbed and combed back from a prominent forehead. Her face was round and the features aristocratic in accent. But the most striking were two very clear blue eyes. They beamed on everyone like two azure pools of warmth—in fact, in them lay the fundamentals of Elsa’s character.

Once in a large factory in Russia I saw a gigantic dynamo, so huge it must have taken up the space of a large ballroom. It gave power to a plant that spread over an enormous acreage. On top of the dynamo rested a tiny cylinder, which looked odd swirling from side to side on this tremendous machine.

What is that? I asked the engineer in charge.

It is called a governor, he said, and without it the power in this dynamo would be uncontrolled and scatter its force in all directions.

So this, then, was Elsa the governor, the guardian, the protector of the household, and she did it thoroughly and in a masterly manner.

Asking questions was a routine of the Frau Professor—no one saw Einstein without first crossing this barrier. So she began. How long had I been in Berlin? How long did I plan to remain? What was my profession? And so on.

Today is not the first time I have come to 5 Haberlandstrasse, I said to her smilingly.

So? She nodded her head, nonplussed. You have been here before? I did not see you?

No one saw me. I ran away. Then I told her my story.

I was born in the Ukraine in Russia. When the revolution started I was in St. Petersburg writing—a contributor to the important magazines and papers of that day.

One does not care to dwell too long—nor did I—on the deadly malaise of the soul that dropped over Russia’s so-called intelligentsia. Not because we were stripped of everything—that did not count for much; most certainly all of Russia of that class was in the same boat. No, it was the national cataclysmic convulsion and the demands of the awful human readjustments that stirred our souls.

I fitted in here a little while and there a little while. I was a cog in this titanic new wheel and was engaged by the administration to choose for a new Russia its old literature and poetry. I did not linger long on those years; they had nothing to do with this moment, and yet to me they had everything to do with it.

Some years earlier I had met in Paris, where I had been writing articles on art exhibits, Lunacharsky, who was Minister of Education in the new Lenin regime. He wished to choose a group of outstanding Russian painters, classical as well as modern, to exhibit in Berlin, and he offered me the post of expert adviser—a position which put me in charge of the project. I never dreamed that a Russian, in the year 1922, would be allowed to leave that country, but with Lunacharsky’s intervention permission was given, and that is how I arrived in Berlin. But when the Vereshchagins and the Malyavins and Korovins were returned to Moscow they did not find me among them. So, what to do!

The only thing I did well was write, and taking shape in my consciousness, where it had lain dormant for many years, was an idea for a book dealing with the chemistry of man’s mental powers.

There were in Berlin at this time the most notable scientists in the world, including the famous Professor Planck, but whenever I heard their names my blood sat very still and quiet in my veins, and I knew they were not for me. When Einstein’s name was suggested, and I was told that he would always listen and sometimes support new ideas, my blood began to race, and I made up my mind to call upon him.

I started for 5 Haberlandstrasse, which was situated in a fashionable quarter of Berlin. I entered the foyer and took the elevator to the seventh floor of the apartment house and approached the door bearing the simple placard, Albert Einstein.

Suddenly the awful impertinence, the rash temerity of what I was attempting shook my whole body into a sort of paralysis. I could not even raise my arm to ring the bell. Stealthily and slowly I backed away, not alone from the door but from my own audacity, and reaching the stairs, dashed down the seven flights like a madman.

At this part of the story Frau Einstein laughed softly and nodded her head.

What I did not tell her was that the following week I had read an advertisement of a woman who gave private instructions in dancing and whose address was also 5 Haberlandstrasse. How I ever hoped to meet the scientist through this fantastic channel was one of the inscrutable modes of thinking of the human mind. Clumsy as a bear at this sort of diversion, and sweating like a pugilist, I took one lesson only, and forever after gave up all hope of meeting Albert Einstein.

My reason for presenting myself finally was this: in 1926 Alexis Granovsky, director of the Moscow Jewish Theatre, arrived in Berlin with his company and engaged me as his public-relations counsel. Wherever and whenever Granovsky’s Russian company played, it became an important moment. Like all important moments in life, they select and surround themselves with all that is fine and distinguished in human achievement.

This was such a night at the Theater des Westens in Berlin. Famous industrialists, celebrated writers and poets, bankers, notable scientists, men and women of the fashionable world made up its audience.

One saw an art lifted to a perfection of presentation, and although it was spoken in another language no one cared what they talked. The play might equally well have been played in Chinese and everyone would have understood its exact shade of meaning. Granovsky’s direction was keyed in a special style—a swiftly paced manner. There were no stars. Everything and everybody were unified like a masterly symphonic score, and in the theater, so far, no one has ever approached such directing.

It was that period, which arrives after all brilliant performances, when people’s emotions and spirits soar above the crowd and a low humming buzzes and sings about them. This particular moment of the theater always reminds me of the Schwärmerei—the hour when the bees begin their swarming and there is a nameless enchantment in the air.

I was standing in the foyer surrounded by congratulating friends when I was approached by Isaac Steinberg, the former Minister of Justice in the Kerensky government. He burst into a flood of complimentary remarks and ended by saying:

I attended tonight with Albert Einstein and his family. He is in a whirl of enthusiasm about the company and the performance. He wants to know more about the Russian theater and has asked me to invite you to his house next Tuesday afternoon.

Can you imagine it? A thing so wanted, to come with such ease!

And so, I told Frau Einstein, I never took a long breath until I came here today.

Her clear blue eyes, which throughout her life had the faculty of appraising people with an almost uncanny exactness, beamed with understanding. Frau Elsa was used to such breathlessness in connection with Einstein.

She talked a great deal and would have gone on interminably. My eyes were constantly glued to the door. Suddenly it opened, and in came the man whose visit to an emperor or a nation is proclaimed by a national holiday.

CHAPTER 2 — Albert

Einstein’s face is one of the great, unforgettable faces of the world. The first thing you see is that rare and powerful head. The power lies in the colossal splendor of the benevolence of expression which wraps the whole countenance in a kind of radiant mildness. The nose is not Hebraic, but wide and fleshy. The tenement of bone structure that holds the mold eases at the mouth, and from there on to the chin it becomes decidedly feminine in its sensitiveness. But the eyes are the liquid, racial, and unmistakable eyes of Jewry. There is no surface duplication I have ever seen of the style in which Einstein’s head is cast. Sometimes you look at it and you think, Yes, there is the head of Abraham of Ur of the Chaldees, or Jacob perhaps at Luz when he beheld the ladder set up on earth that reached to heaven.

Like coins struck off for some special occasion, faces like his arrive out of the centuries—Tennyson’s scripturally austere face, the crag-like purity of Emerson’s, the heroic old Scandinavian viking’s head of Jan Sibelius, the purposeful and dramatic beauty of Mei-ling Soong Chiang’s, and the militant savior’s face of William Booth—not when he burned, but when he wept. It is a face that stirs something in one. I can say it no better than that.

Einstein is of medium height and inclined to be portly, and with this robust figure comes unexpectedly a very soft and gentle voice. His strands of graying hair, which are very curly, frame his head like a nimbus. He wore a leather jacket like a chauffeur’s. It was wrinkled and very tight, and I learned afterward he had worn it ten years or more. He had on shabby trousers and very old, worn-out shoes.

He greeted me warmly with a firm handshake. He talked brilliantly and absorbingly about the Russians—their art, their music, their literature, habits, and politics, and especially about the theater, which he loves. He talked long and earnestly on Lev Tolstoy, whom he has always admired with a burning enthusiasm.

We were joined now by Elsa’s daughter, Margot, whom he legally adopted when she was a young child.

Margot is small, with a delicate pallor and clear, beautiful blue eyes like a little bit of the sky set down in them, and very, very shy, with that shyness pussy cats have who rarely leave their mother’s side.

My eyes lingered beyond the period of politeness on some penciled notes which lay beside the Mozart composition, and the conversation drifted to the topic of graphology. I told Einstein it was one of my hobbies.

So! he exclaimed. That is very interesting to me.

He turned to Margot and asked her to bring him a letter lying on the desk in his study

When the letter was given me I studied it for a few moments, then said, This was written by a man of genius.

What makes you think so? asked Einstein calmly, then added rather brusquely, I suppose you think it is my handwriting?

No, it is not yours. But see this, and this, here! I pointed to the determined strokes of the exclamation marks. These reveal that he is set apart from the common groove.

Professor Einstein took a pencil and paper and began to jot down some notes.

If I were sitting opposite the man who wrote this letter, I went on, I would be very uncomfortable and most uneasy.

Why? Einstein asked.

Because the man who wrote that is not normal.

Einstein exchanged glances with Margot and asked her to bring some sheets of paper marked A—also from his study. On her return she handed me a letter written in English with immense flourishes and many chirographic signs.

You can also tell about this? asked Elsa suspiciously.

I looked at it, but not for long. Its indications were very plain. The person who wrote this, I said, is enormously stout. He could barely pass through that door.

At this Einstein and Elsa burst into uproarious laughter. No one ever forgets his laugh—a great, rumbling, titanic sound. You hear it like a splendid echo.

Wait! he said. By what deductions do you come to this result?

It is also considered a science, Herr Professor, I told him. Most graphologists arrive at their conclusions step by step. One sees in handwriting, I went on to explain, the pose and carriage of the hands. When they write they reveal strength, or weakness, or muscular robustness, or nervous energy, or weight, or lightness of body—all those things besides character or traits.

He listened intently for a moment, then he rose to his feet and went into his study. He soon returned with a photograph of a man of massive proportions and smilingly handed it to me.

The man of the English letter, he said. Did you make a study of this science? he added.

Yes, but what I have told you today is not all study. With me it is mostly a deep, intuitive sense.

He nodded his head vehemently at this and then said with much graveness, Something exists that no one understands.

There was at this sudden moment a strange feeling that I was very close to this man, one of those inner instructions that come rarely in anyone’s life. He felt it too. He told me later that he trusted his intuitions with a strength no material evidence could destroy, and that they rarely failed him.

When it came time to take my leave Margot handed her father a small notebook and asked him to jot down his impressions of me. Later she gave it to me. My memory of what he wrote is faulty, but as far as my recollection goes it was phrased something like this: On the pilgrimage through this strange world I was always convinced that there are so awfully many busy actors in the tragicomedy of human life and so few disinterested spectators. This is why I have always endeavored to join them. So it is no pure coincidence that I met you.

The last lines were a prophecy.

No one who was given an appointment with Einstein ever left without a memento of that visit—a scrap of paper on which he wrote something (those scraps of paper someday will bring a fortune), or a photograph signed by him. Such was the heart of that household.

He came to the door with me, saying good-by at its threshold—with his dreamer’s face placed on a square stocky body. As I grew to know him that figure changed a hundred times for me. It would become touchingly disarming, like a little boy’s in school with his hand tugging at his curls as he stood looking at nothing. And again, when all mental energy had drained from it, the body would slump and relax in the soft feminine pose one often sees in tired women.

Then sometimes one saw him in an unapproachable abstraction, and the body would stand unmoving, like a monolith with an air of determined immortality, and you felt you had nothing to do with him—ever!

About three weeks later Margot called me on the telephone, saying, I want to tell you about the man whose handwriting you first analyzed. He has just been committed to a mental hospital. If you will come over to the house I will tell you more about him.

The day I visited Margot we walked out into the Bairischerplatz, and she told me this man had been one of Einstein’s most brilliant pupils, that he looked upon him as one of the few geniuses in scientific research, but along with this high strain was a jumble of erratic thinking. Einstein soon saw that he was not normal, that these were the aberrations that defeated his genius.

Margot thought it a strange coincidence—the analysis of the letter and the result. I told her there was no strangeness in it. It was mapped out along well-defined lines—human, but definite.

She laughed indulgently. It was all beyond her knowledge. What she did know was that the sun shone and it warmed the earth, and that warmth brought out exquisite things—those things she loved with an intense ardor.

I must, at this point, say something about Margot.

Gerhart Hauptmann, who was a warm friend of the Einstein family, wrote to her once from Rapallo, Italy, these lines: When I think of something golden, I think of your heart at the same time. Our eyes were as one eye when it came to painting and sculpture. Modeling was one of Margot’s gifts. Her statuettes have many