The collected papers of Albert Einstein. Vol. 8. The Berlin years: correspondence, 1914--1918. Part A: 1914--1917. Part B: 1918. Edited by Robert Schulman, A. J. Kox, Michel Janssen and József Illy. In 2 vol (Q2706561)

This is Volume 8 of the annotated edition of the collected papers of Albert Einstein, consisting of two books: Part A and Part B. Part A covers the years 1914-1917 and Part B covers the 1918 correspondence. The two parts form a unity; indexes, the cited literature and a calendar of Einstein's life in the period 1914-1918 are in Part B. Part A contains 424 letters, postcards and telegrams; Part B contains 253 items. The correspondence covers aspects of Einstein's private life -- the breakup of his first marriage, for example -- but most of it concerns relativity theory and other physical subjects. Many letters have only been discovered by the editors fairly recently. Particularly interesting is, for example, the complete coverage of the extant correspondence between Einstein and the Dutch astronomer De Sitter. It concerns their relativistic cosmological models: the ``Einstein cylinder world'' and the ``De Sitter hyperboloid world''. The issues in the debate were clarified in the correspondence between Einstein, Weyl and Klein in 1918, which is included in Part B. The correspondence is in German, the annotations are in English. An English translation of the correspondence, without the annotations, appeared in the same year (see Zbl 0922.01022).