Pauline Einstein

Pauline Einstein, b. cook

Pauline Einstein (born February 8, 1858 in Cannstatt , Kingdom of Württemberg as Pauline Koch; died February 20, 1920 in Berlin ) was Albert Einstein's mother .

Life and meaning

Pauline Einstein was the youngest daughter of the Cannstatt grain trader Julius Koch . She promoted the development of her son with commitment and success. In opposition to his parents, Albert Einstein married Mileva Marić , a Serbian woman, in 1903 , whom her parents abhorred. The mother and son later buried the resentment they created.

On June 8, 1876, Pauline married Hermann Einstein , who had been a partner in the bed spring factory Israel & Levi in Ulm since 1870, in the Israelite prayer center in Cannstatt . From 1878 to 1880 the couple lived in the building at Bahnhofstrasse 20 in Ulm, a Wilhelminian-style building that was built by two Jewish owners. This house where Albert Einstein was born was destroyed by bombing raids on December 17, 1944 during World War II. In the meantime all remains of the birth house have been removed. In June 1880 the family moved to Munich , where Hermann Einstein joined his younger brother Jakob Einstein's company, which was converted into an electrical engineering factory in 1885. Hermann and Pauline as well as Jakob and Ida Einstein lived in the house Adlzreiterstraße 14 with their children. Among them as the son of the latter Robert (o) Einstein, the uncle of Lorenza Mazzetti , whose wife and daughters were murdered in 1944 by an SS commando in Italy. Pauline's widowed father Julius Koch joined both families in Munich in 1886. He died on March 14, 1895, on the sixteenth birthday of his grandson Albert Einstein, in Hechingen with his daughter Fanny Einstein and his son-in-law Rudolf Einstein.

In Munich, Pauline Einstein had her son Albert given private lessons so that he started school in grade 2 at the age of five. She gave him violin lessons when he was six. Pauline also played the piano herself and was accompanied on the violin by engineers from the company, later also by Albert. According to his own statement, playing the violin was a lifelong source of inspiration, also with regard to ideas about physics. In 1894 the factory in Munich was closed to forestall bankruptcy. The family moved to Milan . From 1894 to 1895, Pauline and Hermann Einstein allowed their son not to go to school and to prepare for a separate entrance examination at the Zurich Polytechnic at home .

In Italy, the Einstein brothers ran an electrical engineering factory in Pavia from 1894 to 1896 together with Lorenzo Garrone , which went bankrupt in 1896. From then on, Hermann Einstein operated small electrical engineering companies in Milan alone. Pauline Einstein became a widow in 1902 after Hermann Einstein died of a heart condition on October 10, 1902. After a short stopover with her friend Auguste Hochberger in Heilbronn , Pauline Einstein moved to Hechingen to live with her sister Fanny and her brother-in-law Rudolf Einstein, a textile manufacturer. Pauline Einstein moved with them to Berlin in 1910. Due to financial discrepancies, however, she was unable to stay there in 1911, whereupon her son Albert Einstein sent her to Heilbronn as a housekeeper to the wealthy pensioner Heinz Oppenheim. In 1914 Pauline Einstein traveled again to Berlin, where she ran the household for her eldest and widowed brother Jakob Koch.

In 1914 Pauline was operated on in Berlin for uterine cancer , Albert Einstein paid the operation costs. From 1915 to 1918 Pauline Einstein was again housekeeper for Heinz Oppenheim in Heilbronn. Her illness returned in 1919. At that time Pauline lived with her daughter Maja Einstein and her husband Paul Winteler and then in a nursing home in Lucerne . In December 1919 Pauline Einstein was brought to Berlin in a separate train ambulance with a doctor from Lucerne, a nurse and daughter Maja Einstein. For the last two months she was cared for in the study of her son Albert in his apartment at Haberlandstrasse 5 in Wilmersdorf by a nurse from Lucerne.

literature

• Jürgen Neffe: Albert Einstein. A biography. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-498-04685-3
• Christof Rieber: Albert Einstein. Biography of a nonconformist. Thorbecke, Ostfildern 2018, ISBN 3-7995-1281-0
• Franziska Rogge: Einstein's sister. Maja Einstein - her life and her brother Albert. Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Zurich 2005, ISBN 3-03-823138-X
• Frank Steiner: From Ulm to Princeton. In: Frank Steiner (ed.): Albert Einstein. Genius, visionary and legend. Springer, Berlin / Heidelberg / New York 2005, ISBN 3-540-21060-1 , pp. 1-40

Web links

• Short life history: Pauline Einstein (English)