Two Fascinating Weeks Filled with Puzzles and Mysteries
The two weeks I spent in an office of the Bernisches Historisches Museum in Switzerland were the most exciting I had during preparations of Volume 15.
Two years earlier, the museum had received a previously unknown collection of private letters from the Swiss Winteler family. Many letters in the collection had been torn and available only as fragments, which the museum staff scanned and catalogued. But a museum's mission and interest is different from that of an archive's. While a few of the letters from the collection were exhibited, others that were just as significant for scientists and historians remained behind closed doors.
The 34 documents from this collection, now published in Volume 15, reveal Einstein's earliest romantic love for the eighteen-year old Marie Winteler, daughter of his hosts in Aarau when he was a high school student. Prior to the release of this new correspondence, only one letter by Einstein to Marie and two letters by Marie to Einstein were known to scholars.
So there I was trying to decipher, understand, combine, and transcribe the partly and sometimes almost impossible to read bits and pieces left from the outpourings of affectionate and playful sentiments for Marie written by the seventeen-year-old Albert some 125 years ago.
I think these letters, now published in Volume 15 of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, offer novel glimpses into the evolving personality of the young man. The letters reveal Einstein's attempt to reestablish a close relationship with Marie Winteler some 15 years after their initial teenage romance. These documents seem to confirm what I have suspected for a long time, namely, that Einstein's marriage to his first wife Mileva Marić was in shambles as early as 1909/1910, two to three years before Elsa Einstein, who would become his second wife, entered the scene.