"Einstein in Ulm" Top 5 Page for this destination Ulm Things to Do Tip by Nemorino

This inconspicuous monument is supposed to represent the apartment building where the physicist Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879.

The building was quite new at the time, since it was erected in 1871. It was destroyed by bombs during the Second World War, in December 1944.

Einstein only lived here for a year and a half, after which his family moved to Munich. It is unclear if he ever returned to Ulm after that, but if he did it was only for brief visits.

In the 1929, on the occasion of Einstein's 50th birthday, the city of Ulm named a street after him. Einstein was somewhat amused by this, and wrote to the mayor: "I have already heard about the street named after me. My comforting thought was that I am not responsible for whatever is going to happen there." When the Nazis came to power they re-named the street because Einstein was Jewish, and after the war in 1945 the city changed it back again.

For Einstein's 125th birthday the city of Ulm commissioned an Austrian composer named Dirk D'Ase (born 1960) to write an opera called Einstein in Amerika, which was first performed at the Ulm City Theater on March 18, 2004.

The Adult Education Center (VHS) in Ulm is in a building called the Einstein House.

Today there is nobody named Einstein in the Ulm telephone book.

Second photo: In 2005 several temporary tin-can monuments were set up in Ulm to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Einstein's theory of Special Relativity. But the main purpose of these tin cans seems to have been to advertise local solar energy projects, and the connection to Einstein was tenuous at best.

Website: http://www.dirkdase.com/files/einstein.htm