Einstein's girlfriend Marie Winteler: love is relative

These are the most dramatic lines that Albert Einstein ever wrote to a woman:

"When I read your letter, it was as if I were watching my grave being dug, but the little bit of luck I had left was destroyed, leaving only a bleak duty of life."

The addressee was neither his first wife Mileva, nor the second, his cousin Elsa, nor one of his many lovers. Rather, Einstein addressed these words to his former childhood sweetheart Marie Winteler. The biographers had previously dismissed this as a crush. Letters that were stored in the Bernisches Historisches Museum but were evaluated and published in 2018 show that the relationship was much more intense than expected. And that she flared up again in later years.

Marie Winteler was a simple girl from Aarau, the capital of the Swiss canton of Aargau. She was considered the prettiest of the daughters of the host family, where Albert Einstein lived as a teenager for a year to catch up with the Matura at the local high school. He needed this to study at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich.

When he moves in with the Winteler family in October 1895, Marie is 18 and has just completed the teacher training seminar. Einstein, just 16 years old, must have fallen in love with her at the moment. The extensive correspondence, which was previously largely unknown, begins when she moves out in January 1896 to take her first place.

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"O, it has become so dull now with us, since you have blown us away, and in my brain still much, much duller and stupider", the first letter begins - and sets the tone for the numerous other, which follow in high cadence. Einstein's favorite themes are the music that connects the two (he plays the violin, her piano), the sausages and Kirchweihnudeln, with which he intends to fatten her, because it seems too thin, and the long time until the next reunion - though it usually is not more than a few days.

The letters show the genius of the century as romantic with a penchant for tuberculosis: "What infinite happiness is the feeling: we are one soul together! ... Love makes us great and rich and no god can take them from us!" Albert likes to call his mistress "Mäusl" and "Sweetheart" or "Mariechen", "Herzensmariechen", "Goldmariechen".

But pure luck does not last much longer than a year. In October 1896 Einstein moved to Zurich to begin his studies. There he meets Serbian Mileva Mari, his fellow student and future first wife. He wavers and at times stops writing to Marie, although he still sends her the dirty laundry. Now she is also unsure.

Apparently Einstein is quite willing to marry Marie. His mother travels specially to Aarau to save the relationship. But Marie, insulted by his temporary hesitation or suspecting that he would be a husband as an insecure companion, finally gives him a basket. "I love you from the bottom of my heart and I adore your noble mind", he writes to her at the end of March 1897. But he is ready to accept the painful decision of his "cruel darling".

Schäferstündchen in Bern

Albert can not forget his Marie. But in the next few years he pretty much avoided her. He knows that otherwise his peace of mind would be in danger: "If I saw the girl again a couple of times, I would certainly be crazy, I know that & I'm afraid like the fire." For her part, Marie seems to be deeply embittered. She works at times as a teacher, but is often ill. A terrible family tragedy puts even more weight on her soul: in 1906 her mentally ill brother shoots her mother and brother-in-law in the home in Aarau. The mother dies in Marie's arms.

It is probably in the summer of 1909, when the relationship flares up again. Marie is now 32, Albert is 30 years old. He lives in Bern, has published groundbreaking work here, but his marriage to Mileva is in crisis. Then he remembers Marie, with whom he had once spent so carefree hours. As a result, there are several intimate meetings. We know about it thanks to three letters and a postcard from the Bernisches Historisches Museum - previously this affair was completely unknown.

Again love is fierce. They meet on the Bern local mountain Gurten, in Bremgartenwald, in Zollikofen. "For me, those hours are the climax of life," he writes to her. But again, a shadow over the relationship soon sets - after the golden summer, it is apparently over with the rendezvous. Once again it is Einstein who is fighting for his love.

Marie in defiance

"This morning I wanted to drive to you, because I thought I could not stand it anymore," he wrote to her in March 1910. "I think of you with the deepest love in every free minute and I am as unhappy as only a human being Missed love, missed life, that's how it always sounds to me. " He has not written such lines to any other woman.

Marie can not be softened. Rather, she, who has enough experience with Einstein's fickleness, decides to a kind of defiance reaction: She marries a man she does not love, the Bern watch manufacturer Albert Müller. When she tells Einstein of her decision in the summer of 1910, he is devastated. And reacts with the words quoted at the beginning, according to which he looks to his own grave.

Presumably, the two never saw each other again. At a safe distance from the woman who could so easily inflame him, Einstein's wounds healed. Marie Winteler, on the other hand, never got over the break, even though she had initiated it. She bore two sons, but her marriage was unfortunate from the start. After the divorce in 1927 she voluntarily renounced alimony and held with piano lessons over water.

In the thirties, she went through a mental illness, spent nearly five years in a clinic. In 1938, she contacted again by letter Einstein, who had long since emigrated to the United States. She sent him poetry and a photo, told of her great poverty and asked him, especially after the war broke out, more and more urgently for money and the opportunity to come to America. After all, he had promised her in happy days to help her when she was in need.

Einstein, who was bombarded during the war with the letters of hundreds of doomed Europeans, reacted distantly. He answered, even sent a little money once - he did not respond to the request for emigration.

Marie Winteler spent her last years in the "Cantonal Mental Hospital" in Meiringen, Bern. Shortly before her death, she described her relationship with Einstein at the request of a biographer: "He would have loved to marry me, but I had become stubborn because of all sorts of incidents and told him to take the path of duty yes, it was actually a great pain when I had long realized that it was the fault of a woman who had disturbed our love. "

Marie Winteler died on September 24, 1957 in Meiringen at the age of 80 years. "The Wintelers," she once wrote to her Albert, "almost all have not been lucky."