A lecture by David Tonner
In December 1920, Paul Winteler and his wife Maja, sister of Albert Einstein, wrote to him: "We are embarking on a quite uncertain future." Albert had presented the geometry of the universe. Now they would redesign their own.
They traded the Swiss Alps for Italy — it was Florence that refused to let them go. Their home in Sesto Fiorentino became part working farm, part salon, part paradise—alive with Bach, oil paint, Tuscan summers, and a circle of artists, professors, and philosophers. They called their home Samos. "It is a bliss to be alive," Maja said.
In 1874, Paul's father had predicted a dark descent into hell for Germany. Fascism was patient. It tightened its grip. Mussolini welcomed Hitler to Florence. Samos was five miles away. Then came the racial laws—their marriage now a crime, their home a target. What had once felt distant was now at their iron gate.
Albert felt the full weight of Papa Winteler's prophecy. "One is not safe until one is dead," he wrote Maja from Princeton, fearing for his Jewish sister's life. Albert's universe was expanding. Theirs was collapsing.
Drawing on previously unpublished family correspondence—voices never before heard in public— David Tonner tells the story of what Florence gave two remarkable people who needed it most, and what it eventually asked of them in return.
David Tonner is a descendant of the Winteler family and author of the forthcoming book Special Relatives – Two Families Bound by Genius and History.
If you are in Florence and would like to attend the lecture in person at the British Institute Library, please register here or send an email to bif@britishinstitute.it .
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This lecture is sponsored by Robert Morales.