Unsealed Letters Portray Einstein as Family Man -- and Lover

"It's true that M. followed me (to England) and her chasing after me is getting out of control. (…) Of all the dames, I am in fact attached only to Mrs. L., who is absolutely harmless and decent and there is no danger there to the divine world order."

An excerpt from a sappy romance novel? Actually, it was Albert Einstein who wrote these words to his step-daughter Margot in 1931.

About 1,400 of Einstein's letters, recently released by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, offer new insight into the Nobel Prize winner's gift for observation, his family relationships -- and his not-so-secret love life.

Einstein had willed the German-language letters to Margot, the daughter of his first wife Mileva Maric. Margot stipulated that they not be disclosed to the public until 20 years after her death. She died on July 8, 1986.

"Einstein was a very complex person," Professor Chanoch Gutfreund of the Hebrew University told German news agency dpa. "It was often difficult for him to put his thoughts into words."

But he apparently faced up to the challenge -- and left 3,500 hand-written pages behind. The letters to his first wife Mileva, their two sons, his step-daughter Margot, and his second wife Elsa Loewenthal put an end to the misconceptions that the physicist had been cold and cruel to his family.

The man behind the theory

"We can see a much more human image than the sterile person presented 30 years ago in biographies, which presented him as a genius with no personal or sex life," Barbara Wolff from the Hebrew University Einstein Archives told AFP.

The newly released letters reveal that Einstein not only had affairs with at least half a dozen women, he also wrote openly about them to his wives and children. He referred to the women either with just their first names (Estella, Ethel, Toni and Margarita the "Russia spy lover") or with a first initial.

Wolff said the letters didn't shed new light on Einstein's science, but that "if the image we had of Einstein before had three colors, now it has six."

No socks in England

Women were not his only topic of correspondence. The scientist also admitted that he "didn't wear any socks" during a visit to Oxford University, "even on the most festive occasions, but covered up this lack of civilization by wearing high-cut boots."

Albert Einstein was born in 1879 in Ulm, Germany, but spent much of his young life in Switzerland. In 1903, he married Mileva, with whom he had two sons. They divorced in 1919 and he married his cousin Elsa later that year.

Having returned to Germany at the age of 35, he renounced his German citizenship when Hitler came to power in 1933.

From Nazi Germany to Princeton University

"One fears everywhere the competition of the expelled 'brainy' Jews," wrote Einstein at the very beginning of Nazi rule. "We are even more burdened by our strength than by our weakness."

Einstein immigrated to the United States in 1933 and took a professorship at Princeton University in New Jersey, where he died in 1955 at the age of 76.

The Nobel Prize winner was involved in quantum physics, geometrization and relativistic cosmology, but is most known for his theory of relativity. It seems, however, that even such lofty scientific concepts aren't necessarily fulfilling.

"Soon I'll be fed up with the (theory of) relativity," he wrote on a postcard to Elsa in 1921. "Even such a thing fades away when one is too involved in it."