Qualla: Caputh

Caputh: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Saalebaer, CC0. Albert Einstein could not swim. He bought a sailing boat anyway, and for four summers the most famous scientist in the world could be seen alone on the water below Caputh, working the tiller in no particular hurry and going nowhere in particular. The boat was moored beneath a small wooden house on a wooded slope above the Havel lakes, a few kilometres south of Potsdam and about thirty-five from the middle of Berlin. He was fifty years old when the house was finished, in 1929. He had it for barely four years. Then he sailed out of the season, went to America to lecture, and never came back to any of it.

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Image: Saalebaer | CC0

Caputh: Wood, Not Stone

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jochen Sievert, CC BY-SA 4.0. The house is timber, which for a man of Einstein's standing in 1929 was an unusual choice - the Berlin professoriate built in brick and stucco. The architect was Konrad Wachsmann, then in his late twenties and working for Christoph & Unmack of Niesky, a firm that manufactured pre...

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Image: Jochen Sievert | CC BY-SA 4.0

Caputh: Older Than the Physicist

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, FAL. Caputh did not need Einstein to have a history. In 1662 Philip de Chiese, quartermaster general to the Elector Frederick William of Brandenburg, built a palace on the shore, and in 1671 the Elector gave it to his second wife, Princess Dorothea Sophie of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderb...

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Image: A.Savin | FAL

Caputh: Four Summers

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Colin Smith on geo.hlipp.de, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Caputh years fall at the end of Einstein's Berlin period, when relativity was behind him and the search for a unified field theory - which he never completed - was ahead. What the village gave him was quiet, and a lake. He sailed constantly and, by every account, badly, in th...

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Image: Colin Smith on geo.hlipp.de | CC BY-SA 2.0

Caputh: January 1933

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Colin Smith on geo.hlipp.de, CC BY-SA 2.0. He was still abroad when Hitler took power. Einstein, horrified by the Nazi persecution of German Jews, decided not to go home, and he never set foot in Germany again. The house was not seized immediately. For a time it was rented out to a Jewish school - one of the institutions ...

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Image: Colin Smith on geo.hlipp.de | CC BY-SA 2.0

Caputh: What Survived

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, FAL. The house came under monument protection and was restored in 1979, still behind the Iron Curtain. After reunification came a restitution claim, and the property passed to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the institution Einstein had helped to found and to which his estate went...

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Image: A.Savin | FAL