Cults of historians, scientists, and everyday people persist in idolizing Albert Einstein. For his family, though, the name Einstein has cast a long, complicated, and difficult shadow. Today the two living grandchildren and five living great-grandchildren are weary of being hounded by Einstein worshippers and weary of trying to live up to the unprecedented achievements of their ancestor. They struggle to live private lives, well distanced from his fame, and they have succeeded: The most notable aspect of the Einstein descendants is how nearly invisible they are.
Even in anonymity, though, there is no escaping the family legacy. Albert Einstein, a man of remarkable insights, was also a man of many serious flaws. His quixotic behavior and strained personal relationships loom menacingly over his descendants. Today the Einsteins are a fractured family.
I recently spoke with Aude Einstein, Albert’s granddaughter-in-law and the mother of all five of his great-grandchildren. I had spoken to other family members previously while researching a book about Albert’s missing daughter, Lieserl, and I believed Aude was the only new source now available to me. I was petrified about calling her, and I rehearsed how I could broach the subject of her renowned ancestor without her hanging up on me. My anxiety was unfounded. As soon as I heard her welcoming voice, I thought it would be all right.
Aude Ascher Einstein is in her seventies and lives in Switzerland. She is now divorced from Bernhard Einstein, the grandson of Albert. We had a friendly, lengthy telephone conversation. A few days later, though, she wrote to me and retracted her interview. “My family and I myself do not want you or anybody to write about our family. Sorry, but it would hurt and be destructive for the already precarious, fragile situation of our family. I deeply regret to have talked too much with you on the phone.”
I was not surprised, and in deference to her wishes, this article contains no other information from our conversation. “One cannot,” Albert Einstein wrote, “expect one’s children to inherit a mind.” Yet his surviving family members are, to an extent, forced to define themselves against the judgments and expectations of a world that hungers for any lingering vestiges of the legendary genius.
THE CHILDREN
Albert’s family life was steeped in drama from the start. All three of his children were by Mileva Maric, his first wife: Lieserl, Hans Albert, and Eduard, called Tete, all born between 1902 and 1910. Lieserl, their out-of-wedlock daughter, appears to have died when she was 21 months old, most likely of scarlet fever at her mother’s home in the Serbian province Vojvodina. Little is known about Lieserl; her only legacy is a complicated mystery filled with secrecy, subterfuge, and cryptic messages. Tete was admitted to the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital in Zurich when he was 38. He had been diagnosed as schizophrenic, but many people believe he was overdosed with drugs and harmed by the many “cures” that were used at the time. His father wrote to Mileva in 1932, “I am not in favor of psychiatric treatments.” Less than two months later, when Tete was struggling to keep his emotional equilibrium, Albert wrote to him, “When you come to visit you must teach me about psychoanalysis; I’ll try to keep a straight face.”
Tete and Hans Albert both tried to live up to their father’s astonishing achievements. Hans Albert’s adopted daughter, Evelyn Einstein, remembers that many of Einstein’s friends and colleagues thought Tete was the one who had inherited his father’s intellect. “He was definitely the genius,” she says. “Next to Tete, my father was just a plodder.” But Hans Albert was certainly smart enough. He studied at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and became a hydraulic engineer. “Rivers don’t like to be changed around,” he said. “They fight back.”
When Hans Albert was 21, he met Frieda Knecht, a woman nine years his senior. Frieda was, like his mother, Mileva, highly intelligent and intensely opinionated. Albert and Mileva, who had been rancorously divorced for three years, were united in their opposition to the proposed marriage. There were “such significant faults of heredity in both families,” Albert wrote of Mileva’s and Frieda’s families. “If they would never have children, I could rest easy. But the heredity of our own children is not without blemish.” This was an emotionally complicated statement; Albert had always accused Mileva and her family of having “bad genes,” never admitting that he and his family might too. Now he was saying that Frieda came from unhealthy stock, that she was 4 feet 11 inches tall due to dwarfism, that Frieda’s mother was unbalanced (when reportedly she had an overactive thyroid). Hans Albert and Frieda married despite these protests and remained together until her death.
THE GRANDCHILDREN
With Lieserl gone and Tete institutionalized, it was left to Hans Albert to pass on the Einstein genes. Bernhard Einstein, born in 1930, was Albert’s first grandson; Klaus, born in 1932, was his second. In 1938 the family immigrated to America from Switzerland, settling in Clemson, South Carolina, where Hans Albert found work studying soil conservation with the U.S. Agricultural Experiment Station. But within a year tragedy struck: Klaus died of diphtheria. A number of biographers assert that his parents were adhering to the canons of Christian Science and had not sought appropriate medical attention.
