Six Untold Moments From the Winteler–Einstein Story

In 1870, a twenty-four-year-old Swiss graduate student named Jost Winteler arrived at the University of Jena believing in a future in Germany. That same year, war broke out with France. Germany claimed to be the victim. Jost boldly stood up in a lecture and claimed the opposite. If anyone could prove him wrong, he would fight on the front lines himself. No one tried.

Four years later, Jost sat down and wrote a dark poem about Germany.

Your day is still far off, Germany: The descent into hell

must tire the fresh spirit of your youth.

Sing not to the oppressor who pairs you in Nordic fashion!

Freedom and song will only come from the South one day.

There grows, still a boy, the child of promise,

feels your former being surging in his breast.

I hear his approach like a storm wind,

so pray that he descends on you all!

Hitler wasn’t born yet. The poem was patient.

In 1876, Jost completed a doctoral dissertation whose central idea lay mostly buried until curious esteemed scientists unearthed its genius decades later. He called it configurational relativity and invariance.

When Albert Einstein stepped into Jost Winteler’s home, he became like a son. He stayed for a year. Jost’s dinner table talks and the long Sunday walks brought new intellectual enlightenment.

Jost Winteler didn’t invent Einstein’s relativity. But the philosophical scaffolding Albert assembled began years before the Bern patent office. It started in the home of the Swiss schoolteacher in Aarau.

Jost died in 1929 — four years before Hitler came to power. Ten years before his prophecy would fully detonate.

In February 1896, Marie Winteler left Aarau for a teaching post away from home — the first real separation since she and Albert had fallen in love. He was sixteen. Almost immediately, he sat down to write.

“I am not worthy enough to be loved in return by such a magnificent soul,” he told her.

For the boy who would become Albert Einstein, she was not a teenage infatuation. She was the first time anyone had reached him.

It didn’t last. Albert chose science over Marie — the patent office, the four papers of 1905, the work that would eventually remake the universe.

Later, Albert went back for her. But, just as the door seemed to open, it closed.

Nearly thirty years later —with Europe at war—letters flowed again. She posed a final haunting question.

But in the last year of her life, Marie wrote:

“I am keeping everything I know about him to myself.”

Until now.

There is a photograph of Pauline Winteler, but it doesn’t exist. That absence says everything. For more than a century, the women of the Winteler household are only scenery at best in Einstein biographies — three women in particular who helped shape the boy who became Einstein in ways no patent office ever could.

Pauline. She opened her home to him — a sixteen-year-old stranger, far from his own family. Within weeks he was calling her “Mama.” She called him “Stepson.” It started as a joke. It never stopped being true.

Their letters capture something biographers have missed: a teenager who could be playful, teasing, and openly affectionate with his surrogate mother in ways he couldn’t with his own mother. He signed off as “Your Albert, Stepson,” and meant it.

What Pauline gave him wasn’t grand. It was tea in the parlor, roasted potatoes by the stove, apron strings he tugged just to make her scold him, a kiss behind the ears before bedtime. Much later, he carried something heavier alongside the warmth: a quiet, recurring sense that his choices — his heartbreak over Marie, the pain it caused in her family — had cost Pauline something. He told her so. He never stopped feeling he owed her for it. Then it was too late.

Rosa. His bond with Rosa Winteler was the simplest of his life. He liked Rosa calling him the “adopted brother.” — a sibling bond with no judgment. Albert’s break with Marie left much of the Winteler family hurt and angry. Rosa stood by him. In a life of unspeakable loss, he stood by her.

Anna. The third Winteler daughter’s story is the one most likely to unsettle readers. With Anna, looking for a simple celebration of the Einstein-Winteler bond, none will be found. Anna married Michele Besso — Albert’s closest friend and sounding board — caught awkwardly in between when she and Albert were at odds. Albert had called her the “morally strict aunt” on one hand, and “foster-mother” on the other. She had cared for Albert since he was sixteen, and that instinct never left. In 1931, before Hitler, she wanted to preserve him for humanity’s sake on a fictitious scholarly island — it was time to leave Germany.

Together, these three Wintelers complete history that was never given the room to tell. None of this diminishes Einstein. It completes him — and it returns to three women a story that was always partly theirs.

On a warm November evening, everything changed.

On November 3, 1906, thousands were still making their way home from the Rosengarten cemetery in Aarau when gravediggers suddenly appeared and began digging three new holes.

That afternoon, both Winteler and Einstein family members stood under a Thuja tree west of the crematorium. In disbelief, they stared down at a double grave.

Two days earlier, before the Old Clock Tower struck nine, indescribable violence had erupted without warning in the Winteler family parlor where Albert often sipped tea like one of the family.

“Without any tangible cause, suddenly, in the midst of the evening peace of the house, his terrible deed befell us,” Jost later wrote.

Albert’s sister Maja and her husband Paul Winteler arrived in Florence in the spring of 1921 — not as tourists, but as artists. In their late thirties they made a conscious, almost audacious decision: to build their own paradise.

And they did. Their hillside estate above Florence was part working farm, part salon, but a living dream.

“It is a bliss to be alive,” Maja wrote one morning with birdsong in the air and Florence spread out below.

What ended it changed humanity itself.

One morning in March 1939, tugboats pulled a French ocean liner into New York Harbor. Through the darkness, Maja Einstein-Winteler watched the fishing trawlers appear, then Long Island’s lights stretching impossibly wide. Passport control came at 2 a.m.

After 40 years together, she had left her husband Paul on a platform in Florence weeks earlier. She told him she’d be back in six months. Fate had other ideas.