l v i I N T R O D U C T I O N T O V O L U M E 1 4 to Berlin to determine what Betty had decided in regard to their relationship (Doc. 300). In late September 1924 Einstein tried to end the relationship himself. Somewhat despondently, he confided to Moritz Katzenstein that he doubted whether he was doing the right thing. Would Betty not be better off, after all, continuing with him in a meaningful relationship and abandoning the prospect of marriage? “The degree of intimacy which marriage necessitates is a plague, doubly so when something is not right,” he wrote. In a passage that he partially crossed out, he confessed that he “could not bear being alone” with Elsa at the time. Even though he had earlier ex- pected that the breakup from Betty would feel like a liberation, he now regretted having intervened “unnaturally and ungratefully” with fate (Doc. 324). Back in Leyden in early October, Einstein lamented the loss of his “most favorite little toy” and revealed the extent of his indecisiveness: he oscillated between the voice of Katzenstein, the one who told him that the only decent thing to do was to let her go and find someone else, and that of Betty’s cousin Minna Mühsam, who argued that he was a philistine and should not give her up to “an uncertain destiny against her will” (Doc. 335). At the end of the month, Einstein wrote Betty that he had decided to follow Katzenstein’s advice: they should “completely avoid each other, so that misfortune can be averted.” He urged her to look for someone her own age and become a wife and mother. Describing himself as “an old fellow,” he was now prepared to “look in the stars for that which is denied to me on Earth” (Doc. 350). From Lisbon, the last port before leaving Europe for South America, he wrote about the breakup to Betty’s mother, Flora Neumann-Mühsam. Unable or unwilling to delve into details, he could now only say that “circumstances beyond my control forced me into my hasty retreat,” and that “as a conscientious and decent person” he had “to crawl into my shell” (Doc. 459). The stress of his sudden flight from Berlin in November 1923 may have caused a recurrence of Einstein’s abdominal ailments that first started in 1901. By May 1924 his health had improved (Docs. 159, 253). By the end of the year he described his life as being “interesting, but I have to carry a heavy burden,” possibly in refer- ence to the recent end of the affair with Betty Neumann and the state of his mar- riage. Evidently in a resigned mood, he went on to write to Maja that “when you start with [life], you have to continue with it until you bite the dust or lose your strength” (Doc. 389). Einstein may have been provided with another reminder of the finite nature of human life when, in late January 1925, he survived an alleged assassination attempt by the Russian student Marie Evgeniewa Dickson. The press reported two versions