Einstein family

• 1. Introduction

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  The Einstein family stretches back to at least the late seventeenth century, when a man named Jakob Weil was born. He is the oldest recorded relative of the physicist Albert Einstein, who himself lived from 1879 to 1955. What this family's story offers is not a single dramatic arc but a series of interlocking lives: a father who gave up his love of mathematics to become a merchant, a mother who pressed a violin into a young boy's hands, a daughter whose existence was hidden from biographers for nearly a century, and a son who hung a picture of Sigmund Freud on his bedroom wall at a psychiatric clinic. The surname Einstein itself carries its own archaeology. It is either a German habitational name rooted in the Middle High German verb meaning "to enclose with stone," or a Jewish adaptation of that name, or simply an ornamental name built on the suffix -stein, meaning stone. Whatever its origin, that name would pass through generations of merchants, engineers, academics, and, eventually, one of the most recognizable figures of the twentieth century. The family continues to this day.

• 2. Hermann's Ambitions

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  Hermann Einstein was born on the 30th of August 1847 in Buchau, Kingdom of Württemberg, the son of Abraham Einstein and Helene Moos. From an early age he showed a strong aptitude for mathematics, and he would have liked to pursue studies in that field. The family's financial circumstances made that impossible. At fourteen, he enrolled at the secondary school in Stuttgart, did well academically, and then turned to commerce, taking up an apprenticeship as a merchant in the same city.

  On the 8th of August 1876 in Cannstatt, he married eighteen-year-old Pauline Koch. The couple settled in Ulm, where Hermann became a joint partner in the bed-feather shop run by his cousins Moses and Hermann Levi. Their son Albert arrived there on the 14th of March 1879. The following summer, on the initiative of Hermann's brother Jakob, the family relocated to Munich, where the two brothers founded an electrical engineering company called Einstein & Cie. Hermann handled the business side; Jakob was the technician.

  The Munich company, formally named Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Cie, manufactured arc lamps and dynamos and won contracts to install lighting systems across southern Germany and parts of northern Italy. But it struggled against much larger rivals, notably AEG and Siemens. In 1894 the factory was moved to Pavia, Italy, and Hermann, Pauline, and their daughter Maja moved first to Milan and then to Pavia. Albert stayed behind in Munich with relatives to finish his schooling.

  The business ultimately failed and was abandoned in 1896. Hermann then launched a fresh electrical engineering venture in Milan, this time without his brother, and that effort went somewhat better. But his health had declined. He died of heart failure in Milan on the 10th of October 1902 at the age of fifty-five. His grave is inside the Civico Mausoleo Palanti at the Cimitero Monumentale di Milano.

• 3. Pauline's World

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  Pauline Einstein was born on the 8th of February 1858 in Cannstatt, Württemberg, into a family that had done well in commerce. Her father, Julius Derzbacher, had adopted the family name Koch in 1842. Together with his brother Heinrich, Julius built what their contemporaries described as a considerable fortune in the corn trade. The brothers even earned the designation "Royal Württemberg Purveyor to the Court." Pauline grew up with an older sister named Fanny, and two older brothers, Jakob and Caesar.

  She was known as a well-educated and quiet woman with a strong inclination toward the arts. She was a talented and dedicated pianist, and she used that sensibility to shape her children's upbringing. She arranged for Albert to begin violin lessons at the age of five. That early instruction helped fuel his lifelong attachment to classical music, particularly the works of Mozart and Bach.

  After Hermann died in 1902, Pauline's life became a series of moves through German-speaking Europe. In 1903 she went to live in Hechingen, Württemberg, with her sister Fanny and Fanny's husband, Rudolf Einstein, who was a first cousin of Hermann. It was Fanny's daughter Elsa who would later become Albert's second wife. By 1910 Pauline had moved with Fanny's family to Berlin, and in 1911 she took a job as a housekeeper in Heilbronn. She spent time with her brother Jakob Koch in Zurich and later returned to Heilbronn.

  During World War I, Pauline developed cancer. In 1918 she was brought to a sanatorium called Rosenau in Luzern, while visiting her daughter Maria and son-in-law Paul Winteler. At the end of 1919, Albert traveled to Luzern and brought his terminally ill mother back to his apartment at Haberlandstrasse 5 in Berlin, where she lived with him and Elsa until her death on the 20th of February 1920.

• 4. Maja's Quiet Life

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  Maria Einstein, known throughout her life as Maja, was born in Munich on the 18th of November 1881. She attended elementary school in Munich from 1887 to 1894, then followed her parents to Milan when the family's Italian chapter began. While Albert stayed in Munich to continue his education, Maja enrolled at the German International School in Milan.

  From 1899 to 1902 she attended a teacher-training workshop in Aarau, and she afterward pursued Romance languages and literature at universities in Berlin, Bern, and Paris. In 1909 she graduated from the University of Bern; her doctoral dissertation was titled "Contribution to the Tradition of the Chevalier au Cygne and the Enfances Godefroi." The following year she married Paul Winteler, a Swiss philologist. The couple was childless. In 1911 they settled in Luzern, where Winteler had found work, and in 1922 they moved to Colonnata, near Florence in Italy.

  When Benito Mussolini introduced anti-Semitic laws in Italy, Albert invited Maja to come to the United States in 1939. She accepted and moved into his home at Mercer Street in Princeton, New Jersey. Paul Winteler was denied entry on health grounds, and the couple was separated. Maja spent several years in Albert's company in Princeton until a stroke in 1946 left her bedridden. She later developed progressive arteriosclerosis and died in Princeton on the 25th of June 1951, four years before her brother.

• 5. Lieserl, the Hidden Daughter

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  Lieserl Einstein was born on the 27th of January 1902 in Újvidék, Austria-Hungary, the town now known as Novi Sad in Serbia. She was the first child of Albert Einstein and Mileva Maric, born a full year before her parents married. Her mother cared for her for a brief period while Albert worked in Switzerland; Maric eventually joined him there without the child.

  Lieserl's existence was entirely unknown to biographers until 1986, when a batch of letters between Albert and Mileva was discovered by Evelyn Einstein, the adopted daughter of Hans Albert Einstein. Those letters revealed that the couple had not even agreed on the child's name before she arrived. Maric hoped for a girl and used the diminutive "Lieserl" in her correspondence; Albert leaned toward a boy and used "Hanserl," a diminutive of Hans. In a letter dated the 12th of December 1901, Albert wrote, and the record preserves his tone, that he was happy about their "Lieserl," whom he secretly preferred to imagine as a "Hanserl."

  After the birth, Einstein's letters shifted in register. Writing shortly before the 4th of February 1902, he asked whether the child was healthy and whether she cried properly, adding that he loved her even though he had never met her. The last mention of Lieserl in the surviving correspondence is a letter dated the 19th of September 1903, in which Albert noted she had scarlet fever and asked how she was registered, adding that precautions should be taken "so problems don't arise for her later."

  What happened to Lieserl is not documented. Michele Zackheim, who wrote a book on the subject titled "Einstein's Daughter," concluded that Lieserl had a developmental disability, lived with Maric's family, and probably died of scarlet fever in September 1903. Robert Schulmann of the Einstein Papers Project has favored a different hypothesis, that she was adopted by Maric's close friend Helene Savic. Milan N. Popovic, Savic's grandson, rejected that possibility after extensive research, and also concluded the child likely died in September 1903.

• 6. Hans Albert's Legacy

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  Hans Albert Einstein was born on the 14th of May 1904 in Bern, Switzerland, the second child and first son of Albert and Mileva. His parents separated in 1914 when the family moved to Berlin and Mileva returned to Zurich with both boys. Hans Albert earned his doctorate at ETH Zurich in 1936 and emigrated to the United States in 1938.

  He spent his career at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a professor of hydraulic engineering. His research on sediment transport brought him wide recognition in that field. He had four children: three biological sons and one adopted daughter, Evelyn Einstein, whose discovery of the family's correspondence in 1986 brought Lieserl's existence to light. Of Hans Albert's biological sons, only Bernhard Caesar Einstein survived to adulthood. Bernhard became an engineer and held multiple patents. He and his wife Doris Aude Ascher had five children, extending the Einstein line into a further generation. Hans Albert died on the 26th of July 1973.

• 7. Eduard and the Weight of Illness

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  Eduard Einstein was born on the 28th of July 1910 in Zurich, the younger son of Albert and Mileva. When his parents separated in 1914, he and Hans Albert stayed with their mother. He grew up in Zurich while his father remarried in 1919 and eventually, in 1933, left Europe for the United States under the pressure of Nazi Germany's rise.

  Eduard showed genuine academic promise and musical talent at school. Some of his poems were published in the school newspaper of his gymnasium, and those same poems referenced the same teachers described in the autobiography of Nobel laureate Elias Canetti. He set out to study medicine with the goal of becoming a psychiatrist. At the age of twenty-one he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Two years after that diagnosis he was institutionalized for the first of several times.

  His brother Hans Albert believed that the electroconvulsive therapy Eduard received during hospitalization caused lasting damage to his memory and cognitive abilities. Biographers of Albert Einstein have expressed similar concerns about the treatments available at the time. At some point Eduard told his father that he hated him. After Albert emigrated to the United States, father and son never saw each other again, although their correspondence continued.

  Eduard's interior life remained active despite his confinement. He stayed interested in music and art, continued to write poetry, and read Sigmund Freud with such intensity that he hung a portrait of Freud on his bedroom wall. His mother Mileva cared for him until her death in 1948. After that, Eduard lived most of the time at the Burghölzli psychiatric clinic in Zurich. He died there of a stroke on the 25th of October 1965, at the age of fifty-five. He is buried at Hönggerberg Cemetery in Zurich.

• 8. The Tangle of Kinship

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  The family tree of the Einsteins contains a wrinkle that puzzled even those within it. Albert's second wife was Elsa Einstein, but the two were related before they married in 1919. Elsa's mother, Fanny Koch, was the sister of Albert's mother Pauline. That made Albert and Elsa first cousins through their mothers. At the same time, Elsa's father Rudolf Einstein was the son of Raphael Einstein, who was a brother of Albert's paternal grandfather. That made them second cousins through their fathers. The same woman whom Albert had known from childhood as a cousin became his wife.

  The family's roots go back further still. Albert's second-great-grandfather Lob Moses Sontheimer, who lived from 1745 to 1831, was also the grandfather of the tenor Heinrich Sontheim of Stuttgart, who was born in 1820 and died in 1912. The oldest documented relative of Albert Einstein is a fourth-great-grandfather named Jakob Weil, born in the late seventeenth century. From Weil through Hermann's failed electrical ventures in Munich and Pavia, through Pauline's piano lessons and Maja's Florentine exile, through Lieserl's hidden birth in Novi Sad and Eduard's poems published in a gymnasium newspaper, a single family line carried within it an improbable concentration of scientific talent, artistic sensitivity, and private grief. Bernhard Caesar Einstein's five children, grandchildren of Hans Albert, continue that line today.