Albert Einstein (1879-1955).

Autograph letter signed (‘A. Einstein’) to Erika Juliusburger, Princeton, 15 June 1952.

In German. Half page, 277 x 213mm. Envelope. Provenance: Stargardt, 4 July 2000, lot 521 (part of lot).

‘The completed and fulfilled life is something incorruptible’: a letter of condolence on the death of his old friend, Otto Juliusburger. Einstein sends ‘friendly thanks for news of the passing of your wonderful father. He remained faithful like few others to his principles and never shied away from being a lonely prophet in the wilderness when most people failed to grasp what is true and essential. This is the fate of all clear-sighted, benevolent and honest people. If we consider such a life, the end seems no sadder than the beginning. In this sense, nature has dealt well with us, in that the completed and fulfilled life is something incorruptible, removed from the caprice of fate’. Einstein and Juliusburger had seen each other little of late – which Einstein explains by the diminished mobility and need to communicate that come with age, to which in his own case was added an ‘unimaginable burden of correspondence’. But their mutual sympathy and esteem remained.

Einstein's friendship with Juliusburger dated back to his earliest years in Berlin, during the First World War: it was interrupted after Einstein's departure from Germany in 1933, but revived after Juliusburger’s emigration to New York in 1941.

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