3
Portrait of the Physicist
as a Young Man
Apart ... 4. Away from others in action or function; separately,
independently, individually.
Oxford English DictionaryIt is not known whether Hermann Einstein became a partner in the featherbed
enterprise of Israel and Levi before or after August 8, 1876. Certain it is that by
then he, his mother, and all his brothers and sisters, had been living for some time
in Ulm, in the kingdom of Wurttemberg. On that eighth of August, Hermann
married Pauline Koch in the synagogue in Cannstatt. The young couple settled
in Ulm, first on the Miinsterplatz, then, at the turn of 1878-9, on the Bahnhof-
strasse. On a sunny Friday in the following March their first child was born, a
citizen of the new German empire, which Wurttemberg had joined in 1871. On
the following day Hermann went to register the birth of his son. In translation the
birth certificate reads, 'No. 224. Ulm, March 15,1879. Today, the merchant Her-
mann Einstein, residing in Ulm, Bahnhofstrasse 135, of the Israelitic faith, per-
sonally known, appeared before the undersigned registrar, and stated that a child
of the male sex, who has received the name Albert, was born in Ulm, in his res-
idence, to his wife Pauline Einstein, nee Koch, of the Israelitic faith, on March
14 of the year 1879, at 11:30 a.m. Read, confirmed, and signed: Hermann Ein-
stein. The Registrar, Hartman.' In 1944 the house on the Bahnhofstrasse was
destroyed during an air attack. The birth certificate can still be found in the Ulm
archives.
Albert was the first of Hermann and Pauline's two children. On November 18,
1881, their daughter, Maria, was born. There may never have been a human
being to whom Einstein felt closer than his sister Maja (as she was always called).
The choice of nonancestral names for both children illustrates the assimilationist
disposition in the Einstein family, a trend widespread among German Jews in the
nineteenth century. Albert was named (if one may call it that) after his grand-
father Abraham,* but it is not known how the name Maria was chosen. 'A liberal
* Helen Dukas, private communication.35