My Middle Years

Elsa Löwenthal and Albert Einstein

In 1906, I was promoted to technical examiner second class. In 1908, I was licensed in Bern, Switzerland, as a Privatdozent . My second son, Eduard, was born on July 28, 1910. In 1911, I became first associate professor at the University of Zurich, and shortly afterwards full professor at the (German) University of Prague, only to return the following year to Zurich in order to become full professor at the ETH Zurich. At that time, I worked closely with the mathematician Marcel Grossman. In 1912, I started to refer to time as the fourth dimension.

In 1914, just before the start of World War I, I settled in Berlin as professor at the local university and became a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. I took German citizenship. My pacifism and Jewish origins irritated German nationalists. After I became world-famous, nationalistic hatred of me grew and for the first time I was the subject of an organized campaign to discredit my theories. From 1914 to 1933, I served as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin, and it was during this time that I was awarded his Nobel Prize and made my most groundbreaking discoveries.

I divorced Mileva on February 14, 1919, and married my cousin Elsa Löwenthal on June 2, 1919. Elsa was my first cousin (maternally) and my second cousin (paternally). She was three years older than me, and had nursed me to health after I had suffered a partial nervous breakdown combined with a severe stomach ailment. There were no children from this marriage. The fate of my and Mileva's first child, Lieserl, is unknown: some believe she died in infancy, while others believe she was given out for adoption. Eduard was institutionalized for schizophrenia and died in an asylum, while Hans became a professor of hydraulic engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, having little interaction with me. In 1922, Me and mt wife Elsa boarded the SS Kitano Maru bound for Japan. The trip also took us to other ports including Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai.