Einstein's Secret Love Life: 11 Women, 6 Mistresses, 1 Verdict

In 1918 Albert Einstein was asked to choose between the woman he loved and her twenty-year-old daughter. Ilse wrote down his answer. 👉 Subscribe to our channel for a new secret file every week:    / @confidentialsecrethistory   ▶ Watch next: Why Did Roy Cohn Warn Donald Trump Not to Marry Ivana?    • Why Did Roy Cohn Warn Donald Trump Not to ...   Everyone knows the face. Almost nobody knows what the letters say. Albert Einstein spent sixty years writing to the women in his life, and most of that correspondence stayed sealed until long after he was dead. The 1986 love letters, the Konenkova letters sold in 1998, and about 3,500 pages of family correspondence unsealed in 2006 turned the gentle genius into somebody else entirely. This documentary follows every one of those relationships in order. Marie Winteler, the schoolgirl whose family took him in at sixteen, and the letter to her that somebody tore apart. Mileva Marić, the physicist he married, the daughter named Lieserl who disappears from the record in 1903, and the list of household conditions he handed his wife in 1914, in writing. The divorce he paid for with a Nobel Prize he had not yet won. His cousin Elsa, whose own daughter Ilse wrote the letter that opens this film. Betty Neumann, Toni Mendel, Margarete Lebach, and the Soviet agent's wife he signed himself "Almar" with. At the end of his life, three weeks before he died, Einstein wrote to the one friend who had been there from the start, Michele Besso, and admired him for something he said he had failed at himself: living for many years "not only in peace but in lasting consonance with a wife". Then he wrote the verdict on his own two marriages, in his own hand: "an undertaking at which I twice rather shamefully failed." CHAPTERS 0:00 "Mama or me?" 2:12 The family he never really left 4:30 Crazy again 5:58 The letter someone tore apart 7:21 Twelve years later 9:43 The physicist he married 10:50 Lieserl 12:12 The conditions 13:13 The boys leave 14:13 The Nobel Prize divorce 15:33 Two eclipses 16:32 The daughter's letter 17:45 The peace treaty 19:17 The other women 20:57 What Einstein came to believe about love 22:03 Almar 23:14 The friend who stayed SOURCES The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein (Princeton University Press) and Einstein Papers Project translations Albert Einstein Archives, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the July 2006 unsealing of about 3,500 pages of family correspondence Leo Baeck Institute, New York; ETH-Bibliothek Zürich; Library of Congress Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe Michele Zackheim, Einstein's Daughter: The Search for Lieserl Milan Popović, In Albert's Shadow: The Life and Letters of Mileva Marić Robert Schulmann and John Stachel, on the Einstein and Marić correspondence Dennis Overbye, Einstein in Love; Jürgen Neffe, Einstein: A Biography; Abraham Pais, Subtle Is the Lord Radmila Milentijević, Mileva Marić Einstein: Life with Albert Einstein The Konenkova letters, Sotheby's, New York, June 1998 The New York Times, 19 April 1955, and contemporary press #AlbertEinstein #MilevaMaric #History #Documentary #DarkHistory