26. September 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

Bern is a medieval city that has changed little structurally since 1410 when a law was passed, after a fire that burned all the wooden buildings, that decreed all buildings be made of stone.   Of course the old city now has contemporary shops and is connected by buses and trams to the new city, yet still, it retains its original character.  The four main thoroughfares of the old city are covered in cobblestones and because the available stone, limestone, is porous, the eaves extend out farther than usual.  Awnings that originally covered the carts of vendors have been assimilated into the architecture so that the walkways are now covered, forming arcades on either side of the streets.

As you can see, the city remains much as it was, including a series of eleven fountains, each centered around a painted statue, where women in 1901 without running water assembled to do washing.

Bern is where Albert wrote the five papers that established his reputation in the year 1905, his anus mirabilus, while he was working full-time at the Bern Patent Office, newly married (1903) to Mileva, and soon-to-be the father of Hans Albert.  In his memoir, he records that these were the happy years.  (Interesting that happiness is reported BEFORE the success for which he is famous.  Hemingway also claimed the years before his acknowledgment, when married to Hadley Richardson, were his happiest.)

The apartment where Albert and Mileva lived when they were first married has been preserved as a tiny museum in two floors, those being what we would call the second and third floors.

You first enter two rooms of their apartment, one with a tiny fireplace and Albert’s desk from the Patent Office added, the other with table, chairs, grandfather clock, and photographs.  All are wood and quite beautiful.  The desk is the kind with cubbies, each filled with Albert’s belongings.

Between the two rooms in a little foyer is a closet with what appears to be Mileva’s wedding clothes and Hans Albert’s bassinet.  While it might be possible to look at period furniture dispassionately, the fabric of the clothing and the bassinet connected me to the real family.

Up the original staircase is a room full of information about Einstein, all of which was familiar to me from reading biographies.  It was my husband’s first initiation into the various particulars, so worthwhile for his participation and interest.  (No, I don’t discuss my day’s work with him beyond whether it went well or haltingly.  Though peculiarities in the research might come out, he doesn’t get the full gestalt until a trip such as this one or when reading the published book.)

The real treasure trove of content is in the Historical Museum here in Bern, housed in a castle and devoting an entire floor to Einstein.  With video demonstrations, newsreel, photographs and artifacts, the museum recreates the context of his work, his life, his legacy.

The Theory of Special Relativity is explained in animations, step-by-step, on four screens, the viewer able to rewatch each one as many times as necessary to understand the concepts.  This is the theory that presents the speed of light as the constant, and not space or time, as was previously thought.  As a writer, I’m struck with how much of grasping the concept is the same as understanding point of view.

The artifacts that were of greatest interest to me were those that demonstrated the particulars of daily life.  Seeing the heavy iron Mileva would have used, the telephone on which Albert might have called his mother, the stove that heated the rooms and old films of the trolley cars made the reality of their lives more palpable.

There were several rooms set up–a bedroom like where each lived in Zurich while in school, a store where Mileva might have shopped in Bern.  Such exhibits prevent me from imagining/writing their lives in a 21st century, revisionist way.

Three facts I didn’t know emerged:  Einstein’s father’s company was commissioned to light Oktoberfest with electricity–suggesting that Albert might have attended, especially the year it was first completed.  I can imagine the  moment of flipping that switch and seeing the grounds lit for the first time would be quite a sight.

I also learned that despite being aware that he was not a good marriage partner, Albert fell in love again in old age, after Elsa’s death, after his platonic relationship with his secretary Helen Dukas.  His inamorata was a Princeton librarian, Johanna Fantova, aka Hannie, also a European refugee.  He wrote her love poems like those he wrote to Mileva and liked to take her sailing–a lifelong passion akin to playing his violin.  Fortunately for Hannie, they didn’t marry.  He bemoaned in his memoir that he failed miserably at marriage.  Twice.

Finally, I saw the will above.  Mileva and Elsa were both dead before he died, so he provided $20,000 for his secretary, Helen Dukas, $20,000 for his step-daughter Margot (Elsa’s daughter), $15,000 for his son Eduard who was hospitalized in a psychiatric institution in Zurich, and $10,000 for his son Hans Albert, a hydro-geologist in California.  Any remainder, including all proceeds from his literary estate, was left to Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

I will leave those numbers alone.  They speak for themselves.

Posted in Margot Einstein, Elsa Einstein, Helen Dukas, Johanna Fantova, Ernest Hemingway, History Museum, Hadley Richardson, Eduard Einstein, Hans Albert Einstein, Special Theory of Relativity, Switzerland, Mileva Maric, Generating Fiction from History and/or Fact, Oktoberfest, Anus Mirabilus, Bern, Einstein | No Comments »

24. September 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

Einstein spent his childhood from age one to fifteen in Munich, though the Munich of today is a reconstruction of the city, thanks to Munich being the Nazi headquarters and therefore the target of Allied bombs in WWII. When it became apparent to Hitler that Munich would fall, he didn’t move the art work out of the cathedrals because he felt it would demoralize the population. Instead, he had everything photographed. From these Nazi photographs the old city was reconstructed so that in the Alstadt, much appears as it did before.

The two gates that remain from the medieval city are the Isator and the Sendlinger Tor. Both Einstein households—his parents moved farther out of town as the business prospered—were near the Sendlinger Tor, so I was particularly interested in what a child could actually see from there. In the opening scene of my novel, Einstein is a three-year-old, left by his mother in the city to find his way home—a practice she was committed to in building his independence. This is fact, but how he learned to find his way home is a matter of fiction. Originally, I imagined that he oriented himself by the towers of the Fraumunster Kirche, but standing at the Sendlinger Tor, I realized that these towers, high as they are, are not visible. As if to oblige me, there stood a child, a little girl of about three, and through her eyes it was apparent that I needed to revise the scene so that three-year-old Albert would orient himself by the Tor itself.

I also sought out the Luitpold Gymnasium, the high school that Einstein attended, hated, and from which he arranged to be dismissed at age fifteen when his parents moved to Milan and left him behind to finish school. (He had a dual purpose. Not only did he hate the militaristic German educational methods, but if he did not revoke his German citizenship before age seventeen, he would be obliged by law to serve in the German army.) The school itself looked too new to be over one hundred years old, which leads me to believe that it was rebuilt after the war, the school he attended possibly having been destroyed. This is a subject for further research.

It happens that Munich is celebrating Oktoberfest during our stay, though, unlike four million people annually, it was not the purpose of our coming. Oktoberfest is the annual celebration of the wedding feast of the long-dead King Ludwig I and has continued since 1810.  That means Albert might have attended as a child.  My husband and I took a stroll through the celebration, an immense fairgrounds full of the most hair-raising rides I’ve ever seen, plus booths selling wurst, very fishy-smelling fish on a stick, pretzels, and decorated, heart-shaped cookies worn on a string around the neck by both men and women, all dressed in traditional Bavarian costumes. The main attraction, however, seems to be the ubiquitous beer halls where hundreds pack in to get drunk, sway, and sing both American and German songs, loudly, to the music of an oompah band.

After a several mile circle of the grounds at 6:00 PM, having sampled nothing, we were driven home in a bicycle-powered, two-seat carriage—the vehicle of choice in the car-and-taxi clogged roadways. The driver told us that to get a seat in a beer hall, one had to go at 10:00 AM. Since Albert Einstein was an introverted child who preferred building houses of cards, watching chickens, and proving the Pythagorean theorem, I suspect he might have been as anxious to leave as I was. Furthermore, he didn’t drink—he claimed it made one stupid—and while not a teetotaler myself, after seeing Oktoberfest, I’ve no doubt he was right.

Posted in Sendlinger Tor, Luitpold Gymnasium, Oktoberfest, Nazi headquarters, Munich, Einstein, Research methods, writing | No Comments »