Start with the Intro Chapter Below

In the autumn of 1895, Professor Dr. Jost Winteler was at his desk in the small Swiss town of Aarau, 25 miles west of Zurich. Surrounded by books, newspapers, journals, and a couple of occupied bird cages, he sorted through the mail — letters from fellow ornithologists, correspondence from his book publisher in Zurich, and a regular stream of family news from his sisters and a brother in the Swiss canton of Glarus. Among them was a letter from his Zurich friend and colleague, Gustav Maier — easy to identify by the business manager’s custom letterhead. They became friends years earlier, organizing lectures for the Swiss Ethical Society.

A personal family matter troubled Jost. His mother, Anna Barbara, had just passed away at age 82, after months of terrible suffering. He believed her years of managing cattle in the elements were to blame for her crippling joint rheumatism — a hard life impressed into her bones until the end. “She bore this pain with tireless care,” he later wrote. There was every excuse to set Maier’s letter aside. He didn’t.

The letter conveyed a sense of urgency, describing a 16-year-old student who parted ways with his school in Munich and wanted to finish high school in Aarau. And if possible, he would come to board with the Wintelers for as long as he needed to graduate.

To Jost and his family of nine, it was a strange and sudden situation, but taking in students wasn’t unusual. Maier had sent correspondence just days earlier, on October 10, but it was all business as usual — no mention of a wayward student. Jost knew that a 16-year-old might still have up to three years of high school ahead of him before graduation. Jost sent Maier an affirmative reply. From their front window, the Wintelers could see Aarau’s landscaped train station, the trails of steam that billowed overhead from locomotives that came and went. Within days, as a train from Zurich arrived with his charge, Herr Professor Winteler — dressed in his usual three-piece suit and a pocket-watch — stepped out the front door of the family home at 710 Laurenzenvorstadt in Aarau.1

It was a short walk. But it wasn’t the first time he would host an out-of-town student at his home. Though the extra income from the Einsteins helped — about 90 Swiss francs per month — living alongside his young daughters required care. Things usually went well. That is, until one boarder from two years earlier had become enamored with his attractive and youngest daughter, Marie. She didn’t return his interest, and the home became somewhat awkward. Yet anticipation outweighed those apprehensions. Unlike most of their Swiss neighbors, the Wintelers were open to receiving someone they knew nothing about — only that he was a restless loner and a precocious young Jewish boy.

Jost crossed the dusty and potholed Bahnhofstrasse — that only ever got talked about fixing — and approached the carriage drive leading to the station. Travelers mingled along the long colonnade, book-ended by two tall towers standing like sentries. As passengers disembarked at the earthy platform, Jost searched for a young man with dark, curly hair carrying a musical instrument. Spotting a well-dressed figure stepping off the train, he settled his wire-rimmed glasses on his ears and stepped forward to introduce himself. A young man—with his luggage, a violin case, and glittering dark brown eyes—stepped forward wearing an expression of assurance.

When Albert Einstein shook hands with Jost, the Winteler household had just gained its most consequential boarder.

As horse-drawn carts on cobblestone streets strutted to and from the station, they began their walk home. The first of many. They would spend a lot of time together, sharing stories, including what had brought them to Aarau. The student’s unfortunate experience with authority would be one that Jost could tell himself—the type that still triggered flashbacks. For now, they kept those troubled stories for another time—there was a family waiting to meet their new guest. 

Years earlier, before Jost moved to the Laurenzenvorstadt home, they had squeezed into a minimally functional apartment in a four-story, overcrowded sixteenth-century building at 8 Rain Street—centered in the bustling part of Aarau’s medieval town center. It was a short walk to the old Kantonsschule—where Jost still taught—a high school converted from a hospital in 1802. But its popularity made it a victim of its own success, as overcrowded classrooms served students from near and far. Rumors of constructing a new school circulated, leading to an intense two-year build plan scheduled years hence. Those rumors gave Jost an idea for a new place to call home. And he found it. He and his family stepped out of the old Rain Street apartment for the last time in 1891. They passed remnants of where the medieval stone wall once stood; the farmland that dotted the landscape released an aroma that replaced the sounds from the bustling town center. Before long, they stood before a two-storey building with its bright, pink-hued walls and six large windows, and an ornate wooden door. Behind them was the site for the future high school—a stone-throw away as Jost had envisioned. But 710 Laurenzenvorstadt was an address of formality. Rössligut scribbled on a stamped envelope would suffice.

Already equipped with the spring-fed water tube system from the adjacent hills, the house would warm its large interior with wood- and coal-fired stoves. But the new era of technology still stood opposed: the town’s first generator station would see the school fully wired, but it was still candles and kerosene lamps for Rössligut.

For the forty-five-year-old, bearded and bespectacled Jost Winteler, the move coincided with a long-desired sense of stability and a promising future for his family.

With students from near and far, to neighbors, boarding newcomers into a home of nine may have seemed crazy, but the Wintelers thrived on its energy. It wasn’t just room and board. Pauline’s maternal and loving personality left lasting impressions—former students still wrote and visited. Jost and Pauline had a strong marriage. Their children, ranging from nine to nineteen, watched as he always kissed her on the cheek when he returned home.
His openness, which stemmed from an upbringing in a close-knit region of eastern Switzerland, influenced his own family’s upbringing. The “buttoned-up attitudes” of the Swiss, he said, made them seem cold and unfriendly.

He hoped to inspire his children to individual expression of thought. “Get your thinking caps on!” Jost would say as he corralled everyone into the parlor or kitchen. He started things off with inspiration from the great intellectual minds of Goethe and Heine, but often couldn’t resist reciting his own poetry.

Little changed in Jost’s appearance since his university days — except for the hesitant, ragged goatee that grew into a full beard. Aarau colleagues, like Hans Kaeslin, saw him as “the brilliant teacher, the deep thinker of doubts and contradictions of the mind,” who would always “emphasize the spiritual moments in the fullness of life.”

But those who got to know him recognized his personal disappointment: not behind a lectern in the halls of high academia. It always echoed in Jost’s mind. A jolting experience in the early stages of his career with a former boss.

Neither Jost nor Albert had arrived in Aarau by accident. Jost’s own arrival, in fact, had been a quarter-century in the making.

After the University of Zurich, the hype of opportunity drew Jost to Germany and the reputable University of Jena in the spring of 1870, a breeding ground for philosophers. “And then the war came,” he said, remembering the lifelong impact the 1870 Franco-Prussian conflict had on him. But that’s where he met his wife, Pauline Henriette Teresa Eckardt, then 24 years old. They married on November 16, 1871. Jost gave her the nickname Röschen (Rosa). It stuck.

A devout Swiss, Jost expressed his patriotism without reservation to friends and neighbors. The active mountaineer, professor, author, and poet became well known beyond Switzerland’s borders and developed a reputation as an anti-authoritarian, open-minded freethinker. Principle over power. Culture over conformity. But he would stand alone, suffering the effects of maintaining a principled stance.

Jost was all too self-aware that ever since his university days, his bold political activism and position against aggressions—especially that of the Monarchical German Empire and the Franco-Prussian War—conflicted with his attitudes toward power and servitude. Disillusioned, the outspoken scholar returned from Germany in 1876 to find himself blacklisted. He soon felt the consequences of taking a stand as a lone voice, being systematically undermined, transforming the expectation of a university professorship into a far-fetched dream. Political gamesmanship left him trapped in low-paying high school teaching roles for the foreseeable future. Instead of a professor’s handsome 8,000 francs, he was making less than 4,000. Comfortable for a couple, but harsh for nine. He found himself unable to tolerate or succumb to the abuses of power, preferring to part ways with his first three schools of employment — Romanshorn, Burgdorf, and Murten, where he had risen to Director. By that point, he and Pauline were raising seven children—four boys and three girls. His “honest and useless resistance to ultramontane superiority,” as he once described it, left his pride and dignity wounded. “I had no idea what would become of me and my family (and seven badly behaved children!),” he said in 1884, with no job, no income, and denied a path to higher professorial status.

Then, “as if by a miracle,” Jost recalled, that summer the biggest break of his career arrived. An opportunity at the Aargau Kantonsschule in Aarau, one of Switzerland’s most reputable high schools, came to Jost’s attention. Although he preferred heading their German studies department and was ideally suited for it, he accepted the history teacher position. A door had finally opened for Jost. Now he was holding his own open.

Albert Einstein: In Search of a School

As Aarau’s new high school construction was well underway in late 1894, Albert was proving to be a challenging student in secondary school at Munich’s Luitpold Gymnasium. His parents had left the young teenager there years earlier to finish school when they moved their family business to Italy. Albert did not fit in. His young mind needed more than their rigid style of teaching, which discouraged questions. He soon developed a cynical disdain for the stifling, regimented methods. As his sister, Maja, later recalled, “The military tone and systematic training in the worship of authority irritated him.” When he tried to engage one teacher in a back-and-forth discussion, the instructor shut him down with, “You sit there in the back row and smile.” By year-end, Albert was off the school roster with an unknown future. He left Munich with a one-way ticket to his family in Milan.

Hermann and Pauline Einstein, Albert’s parents, were taken aback when he showed up at their door. Albert stood firm and declared his intent to attend the Eidgenössische Polytechnische Schule (Federal Polytechnic) in Switzerland — the only national university in Switzerland. Its reputation was highly regarded as one of Europe’s most refined and liberal-minded post-secondary institutions. Also, it embraced women when few did. But telling him to return to Munich was hopeless. They gave in. 

The Einsteins had realized early on that Albert’s scope of knowledge and understanding in science was beyond that of children his age. When he once went to the Electrical and Mechanical Trade Fair in Frankfurt as a young boy, it was like a playground to him. His magazines on space, time, and the speed of light were “devoured with breathless attention,” Einstein recalled. With confidence that bordered on abrasiveness, he required someone with the ability to nurture, challenge, and let him grow. 

In the summer of 1895, Albert amused himself by writing a technical paper titled The State of the Ether in a Magnetic Field. When Albert sent a copy to an uncle, it revealed a peculiar self-awareness: “It is rather naive and imperfect, as might be expected from such a young fellow like myself.” In the meantime, as his parents looked over at their lost teenager—happily writing about some ‘ether’—they needed to find help for him.

The Einsteins had a family friend from their early days in Ulm, Germany — Albert’s birthplace. His name was Herr Gustav Maier. New to Zurich, he was a respected banker and department store director. The Einsteins asked the astute Maier to connect with the Federal Polytechnic on their behalf. Although he did not know Albert well, Maier found the institute’s Director Albin Herzog, and argued that the young man’s remarkable intelligence outweighed the age requirement hurdle to take the entrance exams. Herzog pushed back. It was not advisable to withdraw a student from the institution in which he had begun his studies, even if he was a so-called “child prodigy.” Maier got what he wanted anyway: Albert could take the exams. 

The results revealed on October 14, 1895, were lop-sided—he excelled in the sciences but failed subjects in the general section, such as French, botany, and politics. Professor Weber, head of the physics department, was impressed enough to invite him to audit his lectures. Director Herzog suggested something more practical: He would overlook the age requirement, but Albert had to return with a Matura in hand—a high school certificate.

Maier’s work was not yet complete. He turned his thoughts to a friend—a professor—in Aarau.

He wrote to Jost Winteler.

Only days later — set at the foot of the Jura Mountains, on the Aare River—in the lively house called Rössligut, Albert Einstein found home.

As Albert and Jost approached the front door, just across the street, the rough-hewn stone walls of a new high school were taking their final form behind wooden scaffolding. By springtime, denizens of Rössligut would have no excuse for being tardy. The brilliant building with rows of illuminating windows mirrored the bold face of the pink-ochred Winteler house. For now, inside the home, the family approached to welcome their new, mysterious guest.

Munich’s demeaning professors were behind him. The bearded professor who brought him home from the train station would prove to be everything they were not.