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, with the war won and the new Reich three years old, Jost sat down and wrote a dark poem about Germany.

Your day is still far away: the descent into hell must tire the fresh spirit of your youth. Do not sing to the oppressor who is pairing you in the Nordic style! Freedom and song will only come from the south one day.

There, still a boy, the child of promise grows and feels your former being surging in your bosom. I hear his approach like a storm wind, so pray that he descends on you all! — Jost Winteler, Jena, July 1874

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

Standing alone for truth does not always bring honor. Disillusioned, he abandoned Germany — taking with him the wife he had married there — and returned to Switzerland to find himself blacklisted, his academic career quietly closed off before it had properly begun. He carried that prediction in his pocket that no one was yet prepared to read.

In 1876, Jost completed a doctoral dissertation whose central idea lay mostly buried until curious esteemed scientists unearthed its genius decades later. According to Winteler’s insight, linguistic sounds cannot be evaluated in isolation but only in relation to all other linguistic units — a relational framework. 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. Daughter Marie remembered Albert’s new favorite phrase: everything is relative. Less than ten years later, Einstein published the paper on invariance, later called special relativity.

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. “Oh, little Marie, it’s as if I had so much to say to you and yet I don’t know what. You do feel it in your delicate little soul, though, without me saying it!”

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.

In 1909, married, a father, Albert went back for her.

He stood outside her window in Zurich, waiting. She refused to come down. What followed was a year of the most desperate letters Einstein ever wrote.

“I am as if dead in this life filled with obligations, without love and without happiness,” he told her.

They eventually met, in secret, in the hills above Bern; moments Albert later called “blissful.” For a moment, it seemed the door might reopen.

Then it closed.

“Failed love. Failed life. That’s how it always reverberates to me,” he wrote her.

Nearly thirty years later — in 1939, with Europe at war — the letters began again.

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 called her his adopted sister, and meant it — 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 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.

Pauline Winteler — the woman Albert had called Mama, the woman he had never stopped feeling he owed — was gone.

In December 1920, Paul and Maja Winteler sat down to write a letter to tell Maja’s brother, Albert Einstein, that they were embarking on an uncertain future. He was a painter. She was a pianist. Einstein had rewritten the geometry of the universe. Now Paul and Maja wanted their own.

In the spring of 1921, they headed south into Italy searching for something still unknown to them. It was Florence that wouldn’t let go of them.

They built a life of extraordinary richness. Their hillside estate in Sesto Fiorentino — they called it Samos — was part working farm, part salon, part paradise. Figs and grapes ripened in the Tuscan heat. Paul painted landscapes and built a pergola by feel and plumb line. During summers, Maja called the buzzing song of the cicadas the heat itself. Philosophers, painters, and professors gathered in their home. A Blüthner grand piano, sent by Albert, filled the rooms with sound Maja described as somewhere between a pipe organ, flutes, and violins. She walked home soaked from the rain after an evening opera, without caring in the least.

“It is a bliss to be alive,” she said.

What ended it all changed the families and humanity forever. It is one of the most quietly devastating stories in this book.

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 1 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.