October 2005
Pure Genius
Eureka! Munich celebrates 100 years of Einstein's brilliance
This year Germany honors Albert Einstein: eccentric genius, humanitarian and the greatest scientific mind of the 20th century. After renouncing German citizenship in his youth, Einstein spent significant periods of his life traveling. A self-described, country-less “lone traveler,” Einstein is seldom associated with his southern German roots. In the volumes written about his life and work, only a few cursory words acknowledge the luminary physicist’s formative years in Munich.
Albert Einstein was born in Ulm on March 14, 1879, to Hermann and Pauline Einstein. The following year the family moved to Munich, where Hermann and his brother, Jakob, founded an electric company, which supplied some of Munich’s first electric lighting. The Einsteins’ electricity customers included the bohemian district of Schwabing and the Oktoberfest beer vendor Schottenhamel. The Schottenhamel tent was the first at the festival to use electric, rather than gas lighting. The young Albert Einstein worked there to install the electric cabling.
Though the Einsteinstrasse in Haidhausen bears the scientist’s name, the family never resided there. The Einsteins made their home close to the city center, with addresses at Müllerstrasse 3 and later Rengerweg 14 (now Adlzreiterstrasse) near Goetheplatz. In these homes, Albert and his sister, Maja, spent their childhood.
According to Maja Einstein, baby Albert was exceptional from the start. Their mother was “astonished at the sight of the back of his head, which was extremely large and angular.” Years later, posthumous examinations would confirm his mother’s observation: indeed Einstein’s brain was abnormal. The operculum region, which is partly responsible for speech production, was missing. To compensate, Einstein’s parietal lobe, responsible for mathematical and visual-spatial thought, was 15 percent wider than normal. Despite a few peculiarities, the infant grew into a curious and intellectually talented child who understood complex physical and mathematical concepts from a young age. Young Einstein was encouraged by his father and uncles, but was considered a slow learner owing to his delayed and reserved use of speech. Later Einstein attributed his childhood slowness to his development of the Theory of Relativity, arguing that as a child he began internalizing notions of space and time much later than most, and could therefore apply a more mature intellect to the concepts. A great deal of lore surrounds Einstein’s delayed development and difficulties in school, much of which was experienced as a child and young man in Munich. Despite his Jewish heritage, Einstein was enrolled in Catholic elementary school at the age of six, where he excelled during his first years. This changed, however, at the age of nine, when Einstein began secondary school at what was then the Luitpold-Gymnasium.
About his schooling Einstein would write, “The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.” Young Einstein mistrusted authority and suffered under the school’s rigid structure. He irritated teachers by questioning the ancient Greek laws of mathematics and physics, a habit that would serve him well later in life. Though he often skipped classes and had to cram for exams, Einstein received high marks in math and science. He fared less well in the subjects related to language, the arts and the humanities. By the age of 12 Einstein had taught himself Euclidean geometry and at 16 wrote his first scientific paper, “The Investigation of the State of Ether in Magnetic Fields.”
That same year, in 1894, the Einstein family business failed and the Einsteins relocated to Pavia, Italy. Young Albert stayed on in Munich with the intention of completing his studies at the Luitpold-Gymnasium. He lasted only one term. Constrained and often criticized for his obstinate “free-thinking,” the young Einstein decided to educate himself and left the institution without his parents’ knowledge. Later he would write, “It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.”
It’s a tad ironic that the school from which the disgruntled Einstein fled in frustration would later adopt his name. The Albert-Einstein-Gymnasium is still in operation today, though it has changed its location since Einstein attended it more than 100 years ago.
This year, Germany’s “Einstein Year” honors both the 50th anniversary of Einstein’s death and the centennial of the
annus mirabilis, or “wonder year.” In 1905, Einstein published a series of ground-breaking papers that would reshape 20th-century physics. Of particular interest to Munich residents is the exhibition at the Deutsches Museum, “The Adventure of Discovery: Albert Einstein and 20th-Century Physics” (Abenteuer der Erkenntnis: Albert Einstein und die Physik des 20. Jahrhunderts), which is on display through December 2005.
