[lit-ideas] Einstein's last years

From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Lit-Ideas" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 23 Apr 2004 21:42:47 -0700

From a Companion's Lost Diary, a Portrait of Einstein in Old Age
April 24, 2004, By Dennis Overbye, NYT.

Around Princeton she was known as Einstein's last
girlfriend. She cut his hair - shocking as it might be to
imagine anyone tampering with that wispy cosmic aureole.
They sailed together until the doctors took his boat away.
They went to concerts together. He wrote her poems and
letters bedecked with jokes and kisses. And he called her
several times a week to chat about the day.

Now it turns out that she was taking notes.

In February librarians found a 62-page manuscript in which Johanna
Fantova, a former curator of maps in the Firestone Library
at Princeton University, who was 22 years younger than
Albert Einstein, recorded his musings, opinions and
complaints over the last year and a half of his life.
Einstein died in April 1955, at age 76; she died in 1981,
at age 80.

"Unless a similar discovery is made in the future, this new
manuscript from Firestone Library is the only extant diary
that anyone close to Einstein has kept, at least of this
final period of his life," writes Alice Calaprice in an
article describing the diary to be published next month in
The Princeton University Library Journal. Ms. Calaprice is
a former editor at Princeton University Press, which is
publishing Einstein's papers.

The manuscript, typewritten in German, was found in Ms.
Fantova's personnel file by scholars looking for
biographical information to go along with a journal article
about the poems Einstein wrote to her. It is now in the
Firestone Library and available to scholars.

The diary amounts to a sort of portrait of the genius as an
old man. In many ways the most interesting thing about it
is how ordinary Einstein is. "It's mostly how his
80-year-old bones ache and who came to visit, lots of human
interest," said Dr. Donald C. Skemer, Firestone's curator
of manuscripts.

"The secret of the unified field theory is not in here,"
Dr. Skemer added, referring to Einstein's quixotic attempts
in later life to write down a single equation that would
explain all the forces of nature.

Dr. Freeman Dyson, a mathematician at the Institute for
Advanced Study in Princeton, where Einstein worked for 22
years, called it "an unvarnished portrait of Einstein
struggling bravely with the manifold inconveniences of
sickness and old age."

Comparing himself to an old car that has something wrong
everywhere, Einstein complains about his bad memory and the
steady parade of visitors - so many that he sometimes
pretends to be sick in bed so that he will not have to pose
for the obligatory photographs.

But belying Einstein's image as an absent-minded, sockless
dustball wandering around in a world of his own, Fantova
describes him as a keen and occasionally acerbic follower
of current events, who lectured her to pay attention to the
news. He was suspicious of Adlai E. Stevenson, whose
speeches he found pompous, and referred to another visitor,
the Nobel physicist Werner Heisenberg, a founder of quantum
mechanics and the leader of Germany's atomic bomb project
during World War II, as "a big Nazi." He was openly
scornful of the nuclear arms race and the anti-Communist
crusade of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.

Reading at one point that McCarthy suspected subversion on
his own committee, Einstein remarked that it was getting to
be like the French Revolution: "Whoever hangs the other
person first wins.'

He refers to himself as a political "revolutionary,"
saying, "I am still a fire-spewing Vesuvius."

Einstein stood the world on its head in 1919 when British
astronomers observed starlight being bent around the Sun
during an eclipse, confirming his general theory of
relativity, which explained gravity as warped space-time.

He became Princeton's main - and perhaps only - tourist
attraction in 1933, when he arrived as a refugee from Nazi
Germany, with an entourage that included his second wife,
Elsa, her daughter, Margot, and his secretary, Helen Dukas,
to take a job at the newly formed Institute for Advanced
Study.

Elsa died in 1936. But both before and after there were
other women in his life.

Fantova, who was born Johanna Bobasch in what is now the
Czech Republic in 1901, met Einstein in 1929 in Berlin,
according to her diary. (Her husband, Otto Fanta, was the
son of Otto and Bertha Fanta, hosts of a famous salon in
Prague around 1911; their guests had included Einstein and
Franz Kafka.) Einstein gave her the job of organizing his
personal library and later took her sailing at his summer
house in Caputh.

When Johanna arrived in Princeton in 1939, she recalled
Einstein asking her what she was going to do: after all,
"you know, you'll have to work in America."

After attending library school at the University of North
Carolina, she found work at the Firestone Library in 1944,
becoming its first map curator in 1952.

Her relationship with Einstein seems to have flourished
from the late 1940's until his death. He was in his 70's,
and she was in her late 40's and early 50's. "She was
always there," said Gillett G. Griffin, a retired curator
at the university's Art Museum, who was often invited to
the Einstein house for dinner. Mr. Griffin said he thought
that for Einstein, who missed prewar Europe and never felt
at home in Princeton, "she was part of the old world."

"She read Goethe to him," he said. "She was a link to
things he missed."

After Einstein's death in 1955, Fantova sold his letters
and poems, along with a folder of photographs, to Mr.
Griffin, who gave them to the Firestone Library.

The letters, which were unsealed in 1996, have not been
published, although scholars have viewed them at Firestone.
They are mostly written during his vacations on Long
Island, and they are full of complaints about aches and
pains, according to Ms. Calaprice.

The poems, several of which are included in Fantova's
diary, are playful, full of bad puns and jokes at
Einstein's own expense. One lamenting Fantova's absence
reads:

Exhausted from a silence long

This is to show you clear how strong

The thoughts of you
will always sit

Up in my brain's little attic.

Mr. Griffin said he thought Einstein had written the poems
to cheer Fantova, whom he described as having a "dark
outlook" on life.

Neither he nor anybody else knew that Fantova had kept a
diary of her conversations with Einstein, though her
friends had urged her to do so.

She writes that she first resisted the advice to keep a
diary, but then decided that "these monologues" should be
preserved and published. "They should cast some additional
light on our understanding of Einstein, not on the great
man who became a legend in his lifetime, not on Einstein
the renowned scientist, but on Einstein the humanitarian."
But the diary was never published, and when Fantova died,
the typescript and her other personal papers wound up in
her personnel file at the library.

After the Einstein letters and poems were unsealed in 1996,
the Princeton library journal got permission from the
Hebrew University, which owns the copyright for Einstein's
writings, to include the poems in a series of articles
about historic couples. In a quest for information about
Fantova, Alfred Bush, a retired curator at the library,
consulted her personnel file last February.

Dr. Skemer said that he had been squelching rumors for
years that an Einstein diary existed. When he heard about
the discovery, he recalls saying, "Wait a minute, we've
been looking for that."

Fantova's diary records the highs and lows of life around
the Einstein household. Einstein's 75th birthday occurred
on March 14, 1954, and among the flood of presents from
around the world was a parrot, sent in the mail by a
medical institute.

Einstein took a liking to the parrot, which he named Bibo,
but he decided the bird was depressed. He tried to cheer it
up by telling it bad jokes.

A year later Bibo rewarded his efforts by developing an
infection and passing it on to Einstein. He worried that
the 13 injections required to cure the bird would kill it,
and so was elated when Bibo got better after only two
shots.

Einstein was also preoccupied with the fate of his friend
J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Institute for
Advanced Study and the former head of the American effort
to build an atomic bomb during World War II, who was under
assault for his leftist leanings.

In the end, Oppenheimer lost his security clearance and was
removed from the Atomic Energy Commission. Noting that
Oppenheimer knew more about atomic energy than anyone,
Einstein said he had a new name for the commission: the
"Atomic Extermination Conspiracy."

It annoyed him, though, that Oppenheimer was taking it all
so seriously.

"Oppenheimer is not a gypsy like me," he told Fantova one
day. "I was born with the skin of an elephant; there is no
one who can hurt me." Criticism, he said, flowed off him
like water.

In the end, the diaries relate, he worried that his name
meant both too much and too little in the world. He turned
down a Soviet peace award because he feared being labeled a
Bolshevik and declined to write a letter warning against
pre-emptive war with China on the ground that his words
would have no effect.

In science, he knew that his colleagues regarded him as an
anachronism.

By 1953 the action had long since shifted from general
relativity to nuclear physics. Using the strange laws of
quantum mechanics, whose innate unpredictability he had
famously abjured, modern physicists were splitting atoms,
building bombs and discovering new elementary particles by
the dozens.

The revisions and re-revisions of his unified field theory
seemed increasingly abstruse and irrelevant to his fellow
physicists.

"The physicists say that I am a mathematician, and the
mathematicians say that I am a physicist," he told Fantova.

"I am a completely isolated man and though everybody knows
me, there are very few people who really know me."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/24/nyregion/24EINS.html?ex=1083781415&ei=1&en=62e4ea762d7d83ae

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[lit-ideas] Einstein's last years

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