Maja Winteler-Einstein is the younger sister of Einstein, as well as a confidante since childhood.

In 1910, she marries Paul Winteler, the son of Einstein’s Swiss host family. She successfully finishes her Romanticism studies the year before with a doctorate. In Berlin, where she was one of the first women to have studied a number of semesters, she frequently visits her brother. She follows him into exile to Princeton shortly before the outbreak of World War II. A stroke prevents her return to Switzerland after the end of the war, and she is confined to bed.

After her death, an acquaintance of Einstein tells him how he read the finest classical and modern literature to her every evening.