Albert Einstein passionately wooed his first wife Mileva Maric, against his family’s wishes, and the two had a turbulent but intellectually rich relationship that they recorded for posterity in their letters. Einstein and Maric’s love letters have inspired the short film above, My Little Witch (in Serbian, I believe, with English subtitles) and several critical re-evaluations of Einstein’s life and Maric’s influence on his early thought. Some historians have even suggested that Maric—who was also trained in physics—made contributions to Einstein’s early work, a claim hotly disputed and, it seems, poorly substantiated.
The letters—written between 1897 and 1903 and only discovered in 1987—reveal a wealth of previously unknown detail about Maric and the marriage. While the controversy over Maric’s influence on Einstein’s theories raged among academics and viewers of PBS’s controversial documentary, Einstein’s Wife, a scandalous personal item in the letters got much better press. As Einstein and Maric’s relationship deteriorated, and they attempted to scotch tape it together for the sake of their children, the avuncular pacifist wrote a chilling list of “conditions,” in outline form, that his wife must accept upon his return. Lists of Note transcribes them from Walter Isaacson’s biography Einstein: His Life and Universe:
