Story Highlights
- historical event:
- Eduard Einstein (pictured) was the son of the scientific genius Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić, a Serbian mathematician and physicist.
Eduard Einstein was the son of the scientific genius Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić, a Serbian mathematician and physicist. Mileva was born in the town of Titel in modern Vojvodina (Serbia).
Mileva received her secondary education in Zagreb (Croatia), where she was the only girl in an otherwise all-male school (she had received special permission to enroll there). In 1896 Mileva enrolled in the well-known ETH college (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule) in Zürich. Albert Einstein was also studying there, and they soon started a relationship. Mileva became pregnant in 1901, broke off her studies and went to Vojvodina to give birth. The fate of her child remains unknown to this day.
Einstein and Mileva married in 1903. They had two sons and a daughter, who were Christened by an Orthodox priest. Their youngest so,n Eduard, was born in 1910, and proved to be a sickly child.
Albert and Mileva divorced in 1919, and the children remained in her care. Albert had an affair with his close cousin Elsa (their mothers were sisters, and their fathers were cousins), whom he married less than a year after he divorced Mileva.
Eduard Einstein was a good student and started studying medicine, because he wanted to become a psychiatrist. However, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of 20 and was sent to the psychiatric clinic in Switzerland. During one of the low points of his illness, he told his father that he hated him. Albert refused to visit him again after this incident.
Eduard died on this day in 1965, aged 55, at the psychiatric clinic Burghölzli in Zürich. He outlived his father by roughly 10 years.
