The
Pringsheims

The Pringsheims were not simply a family of prominent individuals. Over several generations, they moved from rural Silesia into the worlds of business, science, and culture, eventually becoming part of the educated German bourgeoisie.

The family traced its origins to Chajim Jochem, an innkeeper who came to Silesia around 1700. The first generations lived mainly in smaller rural communities, at a time when Jewish merchants and craftsmen still faced considerable restrictions in German towns. Only later did branches of the family move into larger cities, including Breslau, Berlin, and Munich.

During the nineteenth century, this geographical movement was accompanied by a remarkable social transformation. The Prussian Edict of Emancipation of 1812 improved the legal position of Jews, while also encouraging assimilation into Christian and German society. Within the Pringsheim family, conversions became more frequent. At the same time, members of the family achieved considerable economic success. Pringsheims made fortunes in mining, railways, and banking, providing subsequent generations with the means to attend some of Germany’s leading universities.

Nathanael Pringsheim was the first scientist in the family. He would not be the last.

What began with a botanist developed into a striking family tradition. Later generations produced mathematicians, physicists, and biologists. Several Pringsheims and their descendants became involved in the transformation of physics at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Among them was Nathanael Pringsheim’s nephew Ernst Pringsheim (1859–1917), a physicist whose work focused on optics and thermal radiation. He built the first functional infrared spectrometer and, together with Otto Lummer, carried out decisive experiments on black-body radiation that helped pave the way for Planck’s quantum theory.

Rudolf Ladenburg, a grandson of Nathanael, contributed to the development of modern physics, while Nathanael’s granddaughter Agate Carst was among the first women in Germany to receive a doctorate in physics.

The connections between the different branches of the family were personal as well as intellectual. Rudolf Ladenburg studied in Munich and lived for a time in the house of his distant relative Alfred Pringsheim (next section). He received his doctorate under Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen and later became an atomic physicist.

His cousin Agate Carst also studied physics in Munich. She subsequently worked with Rudolf in Berlin, where their research contributed to a better understanding of hydrogen physics. As children, the two cousins had already spent holidays together on the Carst family estate in Silesia.

Agate’s story also illustrates the educational ambitions of the women in the family. She was one of five children of Nathanael’s youngest daughter Marta and the landowner Eli Carst. Three of the four Carst daughters—Agate, Irene, and Margot—earned doctorates, an exceptional achievement for women of their generation.

The Pringsheims lived in a grand villa that became a meeting place of Munich society and housed Alfred’s celebrated collection of Italian majolica. It was in this unusually privileged environment of mathematics, music, art, and intellectual exchange that Alfred and Hedwig Pringsheim raised their children.

Their daughter Katia showed considerable aptitude for mathematics and the sciences. In 1901, she became the first woman in Munich to pass the Abitur. She later attended mathematics and physics lectures at the University of Munich, including those of Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen. Her scientific education did not continue after her marriage to Thomas Mann.

Her brother Peter pursued a scientific career. He studied physics, received his doctorate under Röntgen in Munich, and later became a professor at the University of Berlin. His research made him one of the pioneers in the study of luminescence, including the fluorescence of organic molecules.

There was also a later Pringsheim who returned to Nathanael’s own field. Ernst Georg Pringsheim, another distant relative, became a botanist and specialist in algae. While studying in Munich, he met Katia at one of Röntgen’s physics lectures. In 1903 he proposed marriage; Katia declined.

Ernst Georg subsequently pursued a distinguished career in botany and developed methods for cultivating and maintaining collections of algae. In this sense, he can be regarded as Nathanael Pringsheim’s scientific successor within the extended family.

Seen together, these individual lives reveal something larger. The Pringsheims formed a network extending across generations and cities. Family relationships connected estates in Silesia with universities and laboratories in Breslau, Berlin, Heidelberg, Leipzig, and Munich. Cousins studied together, stayed in one another’s houses, and collaborated scientifically.

For several generations, their history could appear to be an extraordinary example of Jewish emancipation and integration into German society: from rural Silesia to economic prosperity, from business to the universities, and from the universities into the highest circles of German science and culture.

Although Peter Pringsheim had been baptized as a Protestant, the National Socialists persecuted him because of his Jewish ancestry. He initially fled to Belgium. Following the German invasion in 1940, he was arrested and taken to an internment camp in France. His brother-in-law Thomas Mann helped secure his release and later supported his emigration and academic employment in the United States.

For Alfred Pringsheim, the destruction of the world he had inhabited was equally stark. He regarded himself as a German patriot and hesitated to emigrate. His Munich house was forcibly sold to the Nazi Party in 1933 and demolished to make way for a new party administration building. His famous majolica collection was subjected to a forced auction. Only in 1939 did Alfred and his wife manage to leave Germany for Zurich.

Other members of the family were scattered still farther. Agate Carst left Germany and eventually settled in Brazil; her cousin Rudolf Ladenburg had already moved with his family to Princeton.

Not everyone escaped. Irene Carst, another of Nathanael Pringsheim’s granddaughters, was deported in April 1942 and murdered by the Nazis.

Helgoland held a special place in the history of the Pringsheim family. Nathanael had been instrumental in initiating a marine research station on the island, devoted to the study of marine life. His connection with Helgoland outlived him: a few years after his death, the North Sea Museum opened on the island.

In 1897, three years after Nathanael’s death, many members of the extended Pringsheim family gathered on Helgoland for the ceremonial opening of the museum. Devoted to the animals, plants, and geology of the island, it had been made possible in part by a generous donation from Nathanael’s daughters Marta and Margarete. The occasion brought together many members of the family and provided an opportunity to honor Nathanael’s memory.

For a moment, the Pringsheims were assembled in one place: descendants of a Jewish family whose story had begun in Silesia two centuries earlier and had carried them into the laboratories, universities, salons, and concert halls of modern Germany.