Albert Einstein, sanctified as a pacifist who sacrificed human vanity on the altar of science, was a womanizer who fathered illegitimate children and may have beaten his wife, according to a new book.
The genius was capable of physical passion, but he degenerated into a misogynist who nonetheless ended his life surrounded and protected by women, according to the book, "The Private Lives of Albert Einstein."Written by British journalists Roger Highfield and Paul Carter, it portrays him as an initially loving father who rejected one son because of mental illness and never became close to the other.
"The desire for impersonal detachment and the desire for intimacy were secretly at war within Einstein - just as his idealism was at war with a bleak cynicism, and his modesty at war with arrogance," they write in the book, to be published next month.
Einstein had a passionate affair with Mileva Maric, a Serb who met the young German Jew while they were both physics students in Switzerland. They married despite the protests of Einstein's parents, but only after their first child was born.
The child, a girl called Lieserl, was sent away and there is no record that Einstein ever saw her. She has never been traced.
Maric, a promising physicist herself, lost her drive and never succeeded as a scientist. Because Einstein gave his Nobel prize money to her, it was speculated that Maric was in some part responsible for his discoveries.
But Highfield and Carter write that the money was a bribe to get her to agree to a divorce.
The book cites recently released documents, mostly letters, that detail the decline of Einstein's marriage to Maric, her physical and mental breakdown, and his secret liaison with the cousin who became his second wife.
This caused a break with his elder son, Hans Albert. "He developed a bitterness toward his father that he never mastered, and which hurt Einstein badly," the book says.
"But the unluckiest member of the family was Einstein's younger son, Eduard, whose emotional turmoil in the years after the divorce eventually developed into mental illness," it added.
Friends, relatives and teachers felt Eduard had inherited the spark of his father's genius.