Original subtitles

In May of 1933, the most famous scientist in the world climbed a hill on

the edge of Zurich and walked through the gates of a psychiatric hospital.

He no longer had a home to go back to.

In Germany, his summer house had been raided, his property seized, and the new

regime treated him as an enemy.

In a few months, he would sail for America, and he would never set foot in

Europe again.

But first, he had come to see a patient.

A quiet, troubled young man of 22 who had once dreamed of becoming a

psychiatrist himself.

His name was Edvard.

He was Albert Einstein's youngest son.

It is said that the two of them played music together that day. The father on

his violin, the son at the piano.

Then Einstein said goodbye and walked out.

He lived for 22 more years.

He never saw his son again.

And Eduard was not the first child Albert Einstein had lost.

For most of the 20th century, the world believed that he had two children, both

of them sons.

Then, in 1986, the editors of his collected papers were finally allowed to

examine a box of family papers that had been kept in a bank vault in California.

Among them were the love letters a young Einstein had written to the woman who

would become his first wife.

And in that old correspondence, there was a baby.

A little girl, born in secret in 1902.

Her parents called her Liesel.

No photograph of her has ever been found.

There is no grave and no record of what became of her.

She simply vanishes from the page and from history.

before her second birthday.

A daughter who disappeared.

A son who spent most of his adult life behind the walls of a mental hospital.

Another son who defied his father, buried two of his own little boys, and

built his life on the far side of America.

Two stepdaughters, one of whom, according to her own letter, he once

considered marrying.

And a first wife.

a gifted physics student who gave up her own dreams and spent her last years worn

out by the care of the son her famous husband had left behind.

This is the story of the man who explained light, time, and gravity to

the whole world and could not hold his own family together.

As far as possible, we will tell it in their own words, from the letters they

left behind.

Before we begin, dear viewers, Please take a moment to like this video and

subscribe to the channel with the bell, so you never miss the stories nobody

else tells.

And now, let's go back to the beginning, to a classroom in Zurich at the very end

of the 19th century.

In the autumn of 1896, a 17-year-old boy who had grown up in Munich enrolled at

the Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich to train as a teacher of physics and

mathematics.

He was cheeky, untidy, and bored by most of his lectures.

He skipped classes and taught himself from books instead.

His name was Albert Einstein.

In the same small group of six students sat a young woman from the southern edge

of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

She was the only woman among them.

Her name was Mileva Maric, and in the years ahead, the two of them would

change each other's lives in ways neither could have imagined.

Mileva had been born on the 19th of December, 1875, in the small town of

Tito, in a region that belongs to Serbia today.

She was more than three years older than Albert.

She had been born with a hip problem, and she walked with a limp her whole

life.

Her father, a former soldier who had become a court official, pushed her

education as far as the rules allowed.

and then a little further.

As a teenager, she attended physics lectures at a boys' school in Zagreb by

special permission.

She came to Switzerland because it was one of the very few countries in Europe

where a woman could study science at a university.

Even there, she was a rarity.

At first, they were simply classmates.

Then, they were study partners.

Then, they were in love.

Their letters, many of which survive, are full of pet names.

He called her Dolly.

She called him Johnny.

He wrote about physics and about kisses on the same page, sometimes in the same

sentence.

In the spring of 1901, he told her how happy and proud he would be when the two

of them together had brought their work on relative motion to a victorious

conclusion.

Historians still argue about what exactly he meant by that.

Some writers believe Mileva helped shape his early ideas.

Most scholars say the surviving evidence does not show it.

His family did not share his enthusiasm.

In the summer of 1900, Albert told his mother Pauline that he intended to marry

Mileva. He described the scene afterward in a letter.

His mother threw herself onto the bed, buried her head in the pillow, and wept

like a child.

Then she began to argue.

By the time you are 30, she told him, she will already be an old hag.

Biographers say she objected to almost everything about the girl.

Her age, her foreign background, her limp, her bookish seriousness.

And then Pauline gave her son a warning that would turn out to be painfully

accurate.

If she gets pregnant, she said, you will be in a real mess.

That same summer, Albert graduated, though only just, and his professors had

little affection for him.

None of them offered him the assistance job he hoped for.

Mileva did worse.

She failed her final diploma examination.

For the next two years, Albert drifted from one temporary post to another.

He tutored students, filled in for teachers who were away, and wrote to

professors all over Europe asking for work.

Almost none of them answered.

His father, whose small business was struggling, worried about him

constantly.

In May of 1901, the two young lovers slipped away for a few days near Lake

Como in the north of Italy.

Mileva later described the trip in a letter to a friend.

They crossed a mountain pass by sleigh through deep snow, holding on to each

other.

A few weeks after they came home, She realized she was pregnant.

They were not married.

He had no steady income.

In Switzerland, at the turn of the century, an unmarried mother faced

shame, and a young man hoping for a respectable government post could be

ruined by a scandal like this one.

In July, already about three months pregnant, Mileva sat the diploma

examination for a second time.

She failed again, without improving her grade at all.

Her dream of a career in science was, for all practical purposes, over.

Over the following months, Albert sent her letters full of encouragement and

plans.

In one of them, he called the baby our Liesel and then admitted that he

secretly hoped for a boy, a little Hansel.

Toward the end of the year, Mileva went home to her parents in Novi Sad to have

the child far from the eyes of Swiss society.

The baby arrived at the end of January 1902 in her grandparents' house.

The birth was hard, and Mileva was too weak to write.

So the news reached Albert in Bern in a letter from her father.

Albert's reply, dated the 4th of February, still survives.

Poor dear sweetheart, he wrote. You must have suffered greatly that you can't

even write to me yourself.

Then the questions came pouring out.

He wanted to know if she was healthy, if she already cried properly, what kind of

little eyes she had, and which of them she resembled more.

And then came a line that is hard to read today.

I love her so much, he wrote, and I don't even know her yet.

He never did get to know her.

As far as anyone can tell, Albert Einstein never once laid eyes on his

daughter.

That spring, he was scraping by in Bern, giving private lessons to pay the rent.

In June of 1902, thanks to a recommendation from a friend's father,

he finally landed a job as a technical expert, third class, at the Swiss Patent

Office. It paid a steady salary.

It was also exactly the kind of respectable position that an

illegitimate child could have threatened.

That autumn, Albert's father, Hermann, fell gravely ill in Milan.

On his deathbed, he finally gave his son permission to marry Mileva.

Then, according to biographers, he asked everyone to leave the room so that he

could die alone.

On the 6th of January, 1903, Albert and Mileva were married at the civil

registry office in Bern.

No relatives came.

The only witnesses were two friends from a little reading club they jokingly

called the Olympia Academy.

And Lizarl was not there.

She had stayed behind in Serbia with her mother's family.

In the late summer of 1903, Mileva traveled back to Novi Sad on her own.

No letter explains why, but it is hard to imagine any reason other than the

little girl.

While she was there, Albert wrote to her.

His letter, dated the 19th of September, is the last surviving document that

mentions their daughter.

I'm very sorry about what has befallen Lieserl, he wrote.

It's so easy to suffer lasting effects from scarlet fever.

Then he asked a strange, practical question.

As what is the child registered?

We must take precautions, he went on, that problems don't arise for her later.

And then, silence.

After that letter, Liesel's name never appears again.

Not in Albert's letters, not in Mileva's, not in any official record

anyone has managed to find.

No record of her birth has turned up.

No record of her death.

No adoption papers.

When Mileva came back to Bern that autumn, she came back without the child.

And she was pregnant again.

What happened to the little girl?

Researchers have spent decades trying to find out.

The American writer Michelle Zachheim searched archives, churches, and family

records in Serbia for years.

In 1999, she published a book called Einstein's Daughter.

She concluded that Lieserl was probably born with a serious disability.

and that she most likely died of scarlet fever in September of 1903, when she was

about 20 months old.

Robert Schulman, one of the historians who first studied the letters, leaned

toward another answer.

He suspected the child was quietly adopted, perhaps with the help of

Mileva's closest friend, Helena Savick.

Neither theory has ever been proved.

What is certain is this.

Albert Einstein, who became the most written-about scientist in history,

never once mentioned his first child in public.

Neither did Mileva.

As far as anyone knows, their two sons were never told that they had ever had a

sister.

By the time the truth came out, in 1987, Albert and Mileva had both been dead for

more than 30 years.

Whatever they knew about Liesel, they took it with them.

On the 14th of May, 1904, Mileva gave birth to a healthy boy in Bern.

They named him Hans Albert.

The family lived in a narrow apartment on Kramgasse, in the old town, just down

the street from the famous clock tower.

And for a few years, by most accounts, it was a happy home.

Hans Albert later recalled that when his mother was busy around the house, his

father would put his own work aside and watch over the children for hours.

He bounced them on his knee, told them stories, and played the violin to keep

them quiet.

He built his son toys with his own hands.

One of them was a little cable car made out of matchboxes and string.

Decades later, Hans Albert still remembered it as one of the nicest toys

he ever had.

And while he rocked the cradle, the patent clerk was thinking.

In 1905, the year his son turned one, A 26-year-old Albert Einstein published a

series of papers that changed physics forever.

One explained that light travels in tiny packets of energy.

Another offered a way to prove that atoms are real.

A third introduced what we now call the special theory of relativity.

And a short paper that autumn contained the most famous equation in history.

the one that says energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.

Historians call it his miracle year.

At home, it was the year of diapers, a small salary, and a wife whose own

scientific dreams had quietly been set aside.

Recognition came slowly at first.

In 1909, Einstein left the patent office to become a professor at the University

of Zurich.

And on the 28th of July, 1910, Mileva gave birth to their second son, Eduard.

From the start, he was small and fragile.

The family called him Tete, after the French word for little, and the nickname

stayed with him for the rest of his life.

In 1911, the family moved to Prague, where he had been offered a full

professorship.

A year later, they were back in Zurich again.

this time to teach at the Polytechnic, where Albert and Mileva had first met.

Eduard was ill again and again.

Fevers, lung trouble, long weeks in bed.

In 1917, he would spend months in a sanatorium high in the Swiss mountains

at Arosa.

His father's letters from those years are full of worry about the boy's

health.

But something else was growing in all that time indoors.

Edouard read far more than a small child should have been able to, and he

understood what he read.

He seemed to remember everything.

And when he sat down at the piano, people stopped talking to listen.

His older brother was the practical one, the boy who took things apart to see how

they worked.

Tete was the delicate one, and the brilliant one, and from very early on,

the one his parents feared for most.

Meanwhile, the marriage was coming apart.

Mileva felt lonely and overlooked, and she sank into long periods of gloom.

Her husband was becoming famous among scientists and spent more and more time

away.

Then, in the spring of 1912, on a visit to Berlin, Albert reconnected with his

cousin Elsa.

They were related on both sides of the family.

practical, and openly admiring.

She had divorced her first husband, a textile merchant, in 1908, and she lived

in Berlin with her two daughters, Ilse, who was 15, and Margot, who was 12.

Albert and Ilse began writing to each other in secret.

In 1913, Einstein was offered one of the most prestigious posts in European

science.

He was to become a member of the Prussian Academy in Berlin.

with a generous salary and no teaching duties at all.

In April of 1914, the family moved there.

For Mileva, it was a disaster.

She knew almost no one in the city, apart from her husband's family, who had

never liked her.

And among them was Elsa.

Within weeks, the arguments in the Einstein apartment had become constant.

In the middle of July, Albert gave his wife a document.

It was a list of conditions under which he would agree to go on living with her.

You will make sure, he wrote, that my clothes and laundry are kept in good

order. You will make sure that I receive my three meals regularly in my room and

that my bedroom and study are kept neat.

You will renounce all personal relations with me, he went on, insofar as they are

not completely necessary for social reasons.

You will not expect any intimacy from me.

You will stop talking to me if I request it.

And you will leave my bedroom or study immediately, without protest, if I

request it.

Mileva accepted at first.

But within days, it was clear that nothing could save the marriage.

On the 29th of July, 1914, she took the two boys and boarded a train back to

Zurich.

Hans Albert was 10 years old.

Edward was four.

Albert went to the station to see them off, accompanied by his friend, the

chemist Fritz Haber.

By several accounts, he cried all afternoon and into the evening after the

train had gone.

But he did not go with them.

A few days later, Germany went to war, and the border between the father and

his sons became far harder to cross.

For the next four years, the boys knew their father mostly through the post.

Hans Albert, old enough to understand what had happened and to take sides,

sometimes stopped answering his letters altogether.

In November of 1915, in the very month he presented the finished equations of

his general theory of relativity, Einstein wrote to his 11-year-old son

about learning the piano.

That is the way to learn the most, he told him.

when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don't notice that the

time passes.

It is a lovely piece of advice.

It was written by a man who, that month, was so absorbed in his work that he

hardly noticed time passing either.

His visits, when they happened, were short and tense.

In 1916, Mileva's health collapsed, and for a time, the boys had to be looked

after by friends.

The following year, Albert himself fell seriously ill in Berlin with stomach

trouble that left him weak for months.

The person who nursed him back to health was Elsa.

She cooked for him, fussed over him, and soon arranged for him to move into the

apartment next to hers.

By then, there was little doubt about how this was going to end.

Albert wanted a divorce.

Mileva refused for a long time.

Finally, he made her an extraordinary offer.

Everyone in physics expected that he would win the Nobel Prize sooner or

later. If he did, he promised, every penny of the prize money would go to her

and the boys.

In the court papers, he admitted that he had been unfaithful.

On the 14th of February, 1919, Valentine's Day, the marriage of Albert

Einstein and Mileva Maric was formally dissolved.

But before he married Elsa, something happened that was hidden for most of the

20th century.

In May of 1918, Elsa's elder daughter Ilse was 21 years old and working as

Einstein's secretary.

She wrote a long, troubled letter to a friend, the doctor Georg Nikolai.

Yesterday, she wrote, the question was suddenly raised about whether Albert

wished to marry Mama or me.

According to Ilse, Albert himself was refusing to decide.

He was prepared, she wrote, to marry either Mama or me.

The letter is preserved in Einstein's collected papers, and it is still one of

the strangest documents in his whole life story.

In the same letter, Ilse wrote that she did not believe she should become his

wife.

What mattered most, she said, was the happiness of the three of them, and

especially of Albert.

It seems she made the decision for everyone.

On the 2nd of June 1919, Albert married her mother.

Ilse and Margot moved into the household as his stepdaughters.

They already carried his surname because it had been Elsa's name before her first

marriage.

That November, the whole world learned his name too.

British astronomers had photographed a total eclipse of the sun and found that

starlight bent around it.

exactly as Einstein's theory had predicted.

The results were announced in London on the 6th of November 1919.

Within days, newspapers on every continent were calling it a revolution

in science.

Almost overnight, a professor known only to other physicists became the most

famous scientist on Earth.

In Zurich, two boys could now read about their father in the morning papers, like

everyone else.

In November of 1922, while he was traveling to Japan, Einstein learned

that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the year 1921.

He kept his promise.

The prize money went to Mileva, held in trust for the boys.

She used it to buy three apartment houses in Zurich, planning to live on

the rents.

She and the boys moved into one of them, a tall house on Hüttenstrasse.

For the first time in years, She had a home that nobody could take away from

her.

Or so she believed.

The boys were growing up.

In October of 1923, Albert took Eduard to Ulm, the town where he himself had

been born.

Father and son climbed the great cathedral tower together, just the two

of them, and looked out over the countryside.

Hans Alba joined them later on the trip.

It is one of the few scenes from those years in which Einstein simply seems to

be a father enjoying his sons.

That autumn, Hans Albert was in his second year at the Polytechnic in

Zurich, studying civil engineering.

He had chosen a practical path of his own, and he was about to prove that he

was every bit as stubborn as his father.

In the autumn of 1925, Hans Albert announced that he wanted to marry a

woman named Frieda Knecht.

She had been a neighbor in Zurich, and she was nine years older than him.

His father's reaction was furious, and it is recorded in his own letters.

He worried about her age and about what he called unfavorable hereditary factors

in her family.

A wedding, he wrote, would be a pity for the good breed.

Having children with her, he said, would be a crime.

He wanted to prevent what he called a catastrophe.

For a while, he broke off contact with his son entirely.

Read those letters today, and it is impossible to miss the echo.

A quarter of a century earlier, his own mother had wept on her bed over the

older, foreign, unsuitable woman her son loved, and Albert had married her

anyway.

Now he was the parent sounding the alarm, and his son was the one who would

not listen.

Mileva was against the match too.

Hans Albert made Frida his wife in 1927.

Einstein had finally given in, on one condition.

The couple were not to have children.

They ignored that too.

When Einstein finally met his daughter-in-law in 1928, he was

pleasantly surprised by her.

and relations between father and son slowly warmed.

On the 10th of July, 1930, in the German city of Dortmund, where Hans Albert was

working as an engineer, Friede gave birth to a son, Bernhard.

Albert Einstein, who had once called such a child a crime, became a

grandfather.

A second boy, Klaus, followed in 1932.

The stepdaughters were also making their own lives.

Ilse married a literary editor named Rudolf Kaiser in 1924, and Einstein gave

her his American savings as a dowry.

Kaiser later wrote a biography of his famous father-in-law under a false name.

Margot, the younger girl, was so shy that she reportedly hid when visitors

came to the apartment.

She found her voice in art and became a sculptor.

In November of 1930, she married a Russian-born writer named Dmitry

Maryanov.

In Berlin, Albert treated both girls as his own.

In Zurich, his own sons saw him only on visits.

Edvard, meanwhile, was growing into a gifted and unusual young man.

At school in Zurich, his poems appeared in the student newspaper.

Many of them were sharp and satirical.

He was a passionate pianist, and music would stay with him all his life.

He wrote aphorisms about life and the human mind.

And he fell under the spell of Sigmund Freud.

He hung a portrait of the great psychoanalyst on his bedroom wall, and

he decided that he wanted to spend his life studying the human mind and healing

it.

His letters to his father from those years are long, dense, and searching.

Albert answered them seriously, as one adult to another.

He argued with his son, encouraged him, and told him that he brought him great

joy because he did not go through life apathetically, but as a seeing and

thinking being.

But Edouard also confessed something darker.

It is at times difficult to have such an important father, he wrote, in words

that are usually translated this way, because one feels so unimportant.

He was still a teenager.

The fear behind that sentence would follow him for the rest of his life.

In 1929, Eduard began to study medicine at the University of Zurich, planning to

become a psychiatrist.

By early 1930, there were already worrying signs.

In a letter dated the 5th of February, Einstein was relieved that Tete had gone

back to his usual activities.

He even suggested that what his son had been through might one day help him

understand his own patients.

And he gave him a piece of advice that has become one of the most quoted lines

he ever wrote.

It is the same with people as with riding a bicycle, he told his son.

Only when you keep moving can you comfortably keep your balance.

Millions of people know that sentence today.

Very few know that it was written to a frightened 19-year-old boy.

Later that year, Edward fell in love with a woman considerably older than

himself.

Nobody in the family ever said much about her, and the relationship ended

badly.

What followed was a collapse.

According to biographers, he tried to take his own life, and it was his mother

who found him in time.

Afterward, the signs of a deeper illness, perhaps gathering for years,

came fully into the open.

The doctors would eventually call it schizophrenia.

At one point, by one account, he told his father that he hated him.

Where was Albert?

Much of the time, he was on the other side of the world.

In December of 1930, he sailed to California for the first of three

winters as a visiting scientist in Pasadena.

Even from the ship, he wrote to his son.

He told him that, after what his stepdaughter Ilse had gone through, he

was now a little less skeptical about Freud's methods.

It seems Ilse, too, had tried psychoanalysis.

But a letter from the middle of the ocean was no substitute for a father in

the room, and Edvard knew it.

The hospital that would become Eduard's home stood on a wooded hill above

Zurich. Its name was the Burgholzli, and it was one of the most famous

psychiatric clinics in the world.

Its longtime director, Eugen Bleuler, had invented the very word schizophrenia

in 1908.

Carl Jung had trained there.

For a young man in Zurich who dreamed of becoming a psychiatrist, the Burgholzli

was the summit of the profession.

It was the place he might have hoped to work one day.

Instead, in the autumn of 1932, at the age of 22, Edward Einstein was admitted

there as a patient.

His father's letters from those months are a mixture of tenderness and

helplessness.

In August, during his son's first great crisis, he wrote that he did not believe

in psychoanalysis as a treatment.

Nothing good ever comes of it, he said.

In October, after Eduard had been taken into the clinic, he tried to comfort him

with a story about a man who had found his own institution a perfect place for

creative work.

He told his son he was reading Anderson's fairy tales.

And he asked Eduard to explain psychoanalysis to him the next time they

met, adding that he would try to keep a straight face.

Early in 1933, after a short recovery, Eduard was admitted to the Burgholzli

again.

Privately, Einstein was devastated.

In one letter, he described what had happened in words that are still painful

to read.

The more refined of my sons, he wrote, the one I considered really of my own

nature was seized by an incurable mental illness.

He came to believe that the condition was inherited and that it came from

Mileva's side of the family.

Her younger sister, Zorka, had also suffered from serious mental troubles

for years.

Whether or not he was right about the cause, the belief seems to have settled

in his mind that nothing could be done.

And then, history itself turned on him.

On the 30th of January, 1933,

Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.

Einstein was in Pasadena at the time.

He was Jewish, he was a pacifist, and he was the most visible intellectual in the

country.

He announced that he would not go back.

When his ship reached Belgium in March, he went to the German consulate in

Antwerp and handed in his passport.

The Nazis raided his summer house near Berlin and seized his property.

On the 10th of May, his books went into the fire with thousands of others.

Rumors spread that there was a price on his head.

And so, in May of 1933, he made that trip to Zurich, to the hill and the

hospital and the son he was about to leave behind.

We do not have a full record of what passed between them.

Edouard was 22 and very ill.

His father was 54, grey-haired, exhausted, and about to become a

refugee.

If the family story is true, and they did sit down together with a violin and

a piano, then perhaps music did what words no longer could.

Then the visit was over, and neither of them could have known that it was the

last time.

That autumn, Albert Einstein sailed for New York with Elsa, his secretary Helen

Dukas, and his mathematical assistant.

He took up a post at the new Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New

Jersey.

He would spend the rest of his life there.

He never returned to Europe.

Not for his son's illness, not for his first wife's death, not for anything.

He kept writing to Edouard, and he kept paying for his care.

But the boy who had once climbed the cathedral tower at Ulm with his father

would never see him again.

The next blow fell on the stepdaughters.

Ilse had left Germany for Paris, and there, in 1934, she fell gravely ill.

Margot went to nurse her sister.

In the spring, Elsa sailed back across the Atlantic to be at her daughter's

side.

Albert stayed in America.

In July of 1934, Ilse died in Paris.

She was 37 years old.

The young woman who had once stepped aside so that her mother could marry

Albert was gone.

Elsa came back to Princeton broken by grief, bringing her surviving daughter

with her.

In the autumn of 1935, the Einsteins moved into a white wooden house at 112

Mercer Street in Princeton.

It would be Albert's home for the rest of his life.

But Elsa did not have long to enjoy it.

Not long after the move, She developed a swollen eye, and doctors found serious

problems with her heart and kidneys.

On the 20th of December, 1936, after a painful illness, Elsa Einstein died

at home on Mercer Street.

Margot stayed.

So did Helen Dukas.

In 1939, Albert's beloved younger sister Maya joined them after fleeing fascist

Italy.

The most famous man in America now lived in a house of women.

Back in Zurich, Mileva was carrying her burden alone.

When Eduard was well enough, he lived with her in the apartment on

Hüttenstrasse. When he was not, he went back to the Burghölzli.

The good stretches could last for months.

He would play the piano for hours and talk about books.

The bad ones were frightening.

And the bills never stopped.

By the late 1930s, the cost of his care had eaten through what the Nobel money

had bought.

Mileva sold the two other houses.

In 1939, to keep from losing the last one, she signed it over to Albert while

keeping the right to manage it.

He sent money from Princeton, and they argued, by letter, about how much was

needed.

Their letters from those years show how hard the two of them searched for a way

out. At one point, Albert even urged Mileva to take Eduard and move back to

her homeland, which was now part of Yugoslavia.

They also discussed the treatments that the doctors were proposing.

In the 1930s, psychiatry was desperate for anything that might work against

schizophrenia.

One new method was insulin shock.

in which patients were given large doses of the hormone until they slipped into a

coma, sometimes again and again over many weeks.

Einstein wrote to Mileva about trying this method on Eduard.

In another letter, he argued against an operation on his son's brain.

Then, from 1938, came electric shock treatment, in its early years given

without anesthetic.

Exactly which treatments Edward received, and how often, is not fully

documented in public sources.

But his brother had no doubt about what had happened.

Hans Albert believed for the rest of his life that the electric shock treatment

had damaged Edward's memory and dulled the brilliant mind he had once known.

There were no real medicines for schizophrenia yet.

The first of them would not arrive until the 1950s.

For a young man diagnosed in 1932, the doctors had only these rough tools and

the hope that one of them might help.

By then, Hans Albert had made his own escape.

He had earned his doctorate in Zurich in 1936 with a study of how rivers carry

sand and gravel along their beds.

With war coming, his father urged him to leave Europe, and in 1938, he moved his

family to the United States.

They settled in South Carolina, where he took a job with the United States

Department of Agriculture, studying soil erosion and river sediment.

For a Swiss family who spoke English with heavy accents, it was a hard

landing in a hot, unfamiliar place.

And then, in their first year in America, the worst thing that can happen

to a parent happened to them.

In 1939, their younger son Klaus caught diphtheria.

a disease that today is almost entirely prevented by vaccines.

He died.

He was six years old.

That same year, Friede gave birth to another son, David.

The baby lived for only about a month.

Hans Albert and Friede had lost two children in a single year, in a country

where they had barely unpacked.

Einstein wrote from Princeton to comfort his son.

And the man who wrote that letter had once had a little daughter of his own,

whom he never mentioned to anyone.

Hans Albert threw himself into his work.

In 1943, he moved to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena,

continuing his research on rivers.

In 1947, he joined the University of California at Berkeley as a professor of

hydraulic engineering, and there he stayed for the rest of his career.

He became one of the leading experts in the world on how rivers move sediment,

and engineers in many countries came to him for advice on dams and floods.

Rivers don't like to be changed around, he reportedly liked to say.

They fight back.

In 1941, he and Frida had adopted a baby girl.

They named her Evelyn.

In America, father and son grew closer than they had been in Europe.

but they never became truly easy with each other.

Hans Albert visited Princeton when he could.

They talked about science and engineering.

It was easier than talking about the past.

Albert was proud of his son's work, and Hans Albert was proud of his father.

But there remained a distance between them that neither one seems to have

known how to close.

In Zurich, Mileva grew old.

The war years were long and lonely.

Her parents were dead.

Her sister Zorka was gone too.

Her elder son was across an ocean full of submarines.

Eduard moved between her apartment and the clinic, and as the years went by,

caring for him at home became more and more than one aging woman could manage.

In the end, the house on Huttenstrasse was sold too.

Then she fell and hurt herself badly, and her health began to fail.

In the summer of 1948, Einstein wrote to Hans Albert that his mother was mortally

ill.

Mileva Maric suffered a severe stroke and died in a clinic in Zurich on the

4th of August, 1948.

She was 72 years old.

Some accounts say that one of Edouard's violent episodes shortly before had left

her terrified and exhausted.

After her death, a large sum of money was reportedly found hidden in her

apartment, about 85,000 Swiss francs tucked under her mattress.

It seems she had been quietly saving every franc she could for one purpose,

to make sure that her son would be cared for after she was gone.

She was buried at the Nordheim Cemetery in Zurich.

Over time, the grave was cleared and its exact place was forgotten.

For decades, the woman who had once sat beside Albert Einstein in the physics

classroom lay in an unmarked plot.

Only in 2005 was a plaque placed on the house in Zurich where she had lived.

And in June of 2009, more than 60 years after her death, A memorial stone was

finally placed in her honor at the Nordheim Cemetery.

Eduard was 38 when his mother died.

His father was in New Jersey.

His brother was in California.

A legal guardian was appointed in Switzerland to manage his affairs.

For some years, he spent long periods in private care in Zurich, living outside

the clinic when he was well enough.

In 1952, A Swiss writer named Carl Selig, who was working on a biography of

Albert Einstein, became Edward's guardian and friend, with his father's

approval.

Selig visited him, took him out for walks, and sent regular reports to

Princeton.

Through Selig, Einstein followed his son's life from a distance of 4,000

miles.

He never came himself.

Over the years, his letters to Edward grew fewer.

and Eduard grew more withdrawn, until there was little left to say on either

side.

Einstein never explained his absence in any public way.

Perhaps he believed a visit would only upset his son.

Perhaps he could not bear to see what the illness had done to the boy who had

once sent him poems.

Perhaps both are true.

What we know is simple.

For 22 years, the man who had once wept after his sons left Berlin, did not

cross the ocean to see the one who needed him most.

At Mercer Street, meanwhile, another illness had moved in.

In 1946, his sister Maya suffered a stroke, and over the following years,

she became confined to her bed.

Einstein reportedly sat with her every evening and read aloud to her from the

books the two of them had loved since childhood.

She died in the house on the 25th of June, 1951.

It is a tender picture of a devoted brother.

And it is hard not to set it beside another scene of a son in a Swiss

hospital on the far side of the ocean whose door his father never once came

through.

In April of 1955, an artery in Albert Einstein's abdomen burst.

Doctors offered to operate.

He refused.

I want to go when I want, he said.

It is tasteless to prolong life artificially.

I have done my share.

It is time to go.

I will do it elegantly.

He was taken to the hospital in Princeton.

Hans Albert flew across the country to be with him.

Margot, who happened to be a patient in the same building, was brought to his

room in a wheelchair.

She later remembered that he spoke calmly about the doctors, even with a

little humor.

and waited for his end as if it were a natural event.

Shortly after 1 o'clock in the morning on the 18th of April, 1955,

Albert Einstein murmured a few words in German.

The night nurse did not understand German, so nobody knows what his last

words were.

Then he died.

He was 76 years old.

His body was cremated that same day.

and his ashes were scattered in a place that was never made public, as he had

wished.

But one part of him was kept back.

The pathologist who performed the autopsy removed his brain and kept it,

without the family's permission.

Hans Eibet later gave his reluctant approval, on the condition that it would

be used only for science.

Einstein's will left sums of money to both of his sons, to Margot and to Helen

Dukas.

His papers and the rights to his writings were to go, in time, to the

Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

And his violin, the one that may have played for Eduard on that last afternoon

in Zurich, he left to his grandson, Bernhard.

In Switzerland, Eduard was told in the hospital that his father had died.

Those who knew him in those years said he rarely spoke about Albert Einstein at

all.

From 1957 onward, Eduard lived at the Burghölzli without a break.

He still played the piano when he could.

He still wrote poems and short sayings, flashes of the wit he had shown as a

schoolboy.

He was a heavy, quiet man in his late 40s now, largely forgotten by the

outside world.

In 1962, his loyal friend Karl Selig was killed in an accident.

After that, Eduard had very few visitors indeed.

His brother is said to have called on him during trips to Europe, but those

visits were rare.

On the 25th of October, 1965,

Edward Einstein died at the Burgholzli.

He was 55 years old.

The cause was a stroke, the same thing that had taken his mother.

He was buried at the Hungerberg Cemetery in Zurich, in a different graveyard from

Mileva, in the city where all three of them had once lived together.

He had spent more than 30 years in and out of the hospital where he had once

hoped to work as a doctor.

The boy who had worried that his father's fame would make him feel

unimportant was remembered, in the end, mostly as the son of Albert Einstein.

Hans Albert outlived his brother by less than eight years.

His wife Frieda died in 1958 after more than 30 years of marriage.

The following year, he married Elizabeth Robos, a scientist who studied the

chemistry of the brain.

He taught at Berkeley until he retired in 1971.

Colleagues described him as modest, kind, and gently humorous, a man who

played the piano to relax and preferred to talk about rivers rather than about

his father.

Two years later, while attending a scientific meeting in Woods Hole,

Massachusetts, he suffered heart failure.

He died on the 26th of July.

He was 69 years old.

In 1988, the American Society of Civil Engineers created an award in his name

for outstanding work in the study of rivers and erosion.

He had earned his place in his own field entirely by himself.

His gravestone says simply that his was a life devoted to his students,

research, music, and nature.

Of Albert Einstein's three children, he was the only one who built the life he

had chosen.

And even he had paid for it, with two small graves and a long, bitter quarrel

with his father.

Margot lived on at Mercer Street for decades, in the same house where her

stepfather had died.

She worked at her sculpture, kept to herself, and guarded the memory of the

family.

She left a large collection of family letters to the Hebrew University in

Jerusalem.

But she attached a firm condition.

The papers were not to be opened until 20 years after her death.

Margot Einstein died in Princeton on the 8th of July, 1986.

She was 86 years old.

And in that same year, 1986,

The editors of Einstein's collected papers were finally given access to the

letters from the estate of Hans Albert, kept in a bank vault in California.

When the first volume of that edition appeared the following year, the world

learned for the first time about Lieserl.

Newspapers around the world told the story of Einstein's secret daughter.

Historians who had studied his life for decades discovered that they had missed

the very first chapter.

The little girl from Novi Sad had been hidden for 85 years.

Twenty years after Margot's death, almost to the day, her letters were

finally opened.

On the 10th of July, 2006, the Hebrew University released some 3,500

pages of Einstein's correspondence with his wives and children.

The papers confirmed that he had spent time with a number of other women while

he was married to Elsa.

and that he had written to Margot about some of them quite openly.

But scholars also pointed out that the letters showed something else, far more

warmth and concern for his family than the image of the cold, distant genius

suggested.

There is one more name in this story.

Evelyn Einstein, the baby girl Hans Albert and Frieda adopted in 1941, grew

up in Berkeley and studied medieval literature.

After a bitter divorce, she fell on hard times.

For a while, she slept in cars.

Over the years, she worked as a dog catcher, a cult deprogrammer, and a

reserve police officer in Berkeley.

And she came to believe something extraordinary.

She said she had been told since childhood that she was actually Albert

Einstein's own daughter, born to a woman he had known in New York and quietly

placed with his son.

She admitted that she had no proof.

Evelyn Einstein died at her home in Albany, California on the 13th of April,

2011.

She was 70 years old.

Her brother Bernhard, the boy who had been eight when the family left Europe

and lost two little brothers in a single year, became an engineer and physicist.

He worked on electronic equipment that lets people see in the dark, and he held

a number of patents.

He died in 2008, leaving five children of his own.

Today, Albert Einstein's descendants live quiet, private lives, far from the

fame of the name they carry.

So, what are we to make of Albert Einstein as a father?

It would be easy to call him a villain, and it would not be fair.

His letters show a man who loved his children, who worried over their

illnesses. who wrote to them for decades and paid for everything they needed.

But the same pages show a man who could hand his wife a list of rules, call his

son's marriage a crime, and sail away from a son who could not follow.

He could see further into the universe than anyone alive.

He could not, or would not, see what his own absence was costing the people

closest to him.

A daughter he never met, who vanished at about the age of two.

A son who dreamed of healing minds and lost his own, and who never saw his

father again after the age of 22.

A son who built a life of his own by defying him and buried two children of

his own far from home.

A stepdaughter who died in Paris while he stayed in Princeton.

And a first wife who gave up her own work, raised his sons, spent his Nobel

money keeping his child alive, and died worn out.

in a grave the world soon forgot.

That was the price of genius, and it was not Einstein who paid most of it.

Remember that letter he wrote in February of 1930 to a frightened young

man in Zurich?

It is the same with people as with riding a bicycle, he said.

Only when you keep moving can you keep your balance.

Albert Einstein kept moving all his life.

From Zurich to Prague, from Berlin to Pasadena, from Europe to Princeton,

always forward, always toward the next great question.

And perhaps that is the saddest part of this whole story.

The man who kept moving never noticed how many of the people he loved could

not keep up.

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