In Elsa's Apartment, Einstein was Hiding an Escaped Soldier and Womanizer

Einstein's biographies miss some of the drama that happened around him during World War 1. After signing a pacifist manifesto, he shunned certain opportunities to oppose the war. The place where Einstein worked, Captain Fritz Haber's Institute, fell under the oversight of Germany's Ministry of War. After finishing his theory of gravity, strangely, Einstein started to work for a German military contractor, designing airplane wings. He also became so painfully ill that gradually he became disabled, bedridden, such that he had to move in with his cousin Elsa, who wanted him to marry her, despite his long-lasting efforts to not marry her. Einstein created his “Institute of Physics” in Elsa’s attic, and he hired Elsa’s twenty-year-old daughter, Ilse, as his secretary. In turn, Ilse became fascinated by one of Einstein’s friends, who had been demoted, disinherited, fired from his jobs, banished, conscripted into the army, arrested, and imprisoned in a military fortress. He was a married man who had affairs with many women and who believed that he had the necessary vision to end the war. Then, Einstein fell in love with Ilse, and just as he was seriously raising the issue that instead of Elsa he could well marry Ilse, suddenly the soldier escaped from the German military base and he crashed the love triangle: the fugitive arrived to hide in Elsa’s apartment. This talk will reconstruct this historic episode from World War 1, in order to explain one of the elements that Einstein credited as necessary in his formula for success.