Previously unknown dedication by Albert Einstein discovered in Dortmund University Library

According to Stephanie Marra, head of the TU Dortmund University Archive, the dedication is authentic. "We have compared our dedication with various digitally available dedications, entries, and autographs by Einstein and, on that basis, can clearly assess it as an original," Marra explained. The library classifies the book, according to its own statements, as the only known copy to date that Otto Nathan received from Albert Einstein with a personal dedication.

Content of the Dedication

The text of the dedication reads verbatim: „Dem lieben Otto Nathan / Dem Freund und Heiligen / Dies Buch über die Irrfahrten seiner Kollegen. A. Einstein 1952." Einstein, who was born in 1879 and died in 1955, had left Germany in 1933 after the National Socialists' seizure of power and continued his research in the United States. Nathan, a German-American economist who lived from 1893 to 1987, had also emigrated to the USA after 1933 and had met Einstein in Princeton, New Jersey, where he taught until 1935. The two shared a long-standing friendship, and Nathan later became Einstein's literary executor.

The fact that the dedication went unnoticed for decades is explained by the previous history of the book. Using his diaries, Grünzweig reconstructed that he purchased the book in July 1993 in a well-known New York antiquarian bookshop. The purchase price at the time was 35 US dollars, according to a price sticker still affixed to the book. Neither the scholar nor the staff of the antiquarian bookshop noticed Einstein's handwritten note, as the university library emphasizes. Given the sheer quantity of used books Grünzweig acquired at the time, the entry would have been easy to overlook.

A Book from New York for 35 Dollars

The university library also points out that the antiquarian price at the time would have been significantly higher if the shop's staff had noticed the dedication. In the library's assessment, this makes the book a minor stroke of luck for research: a previously unknown testament to a personal connection between two outstanding intellectuals of the 20th century, which changed hands in an antiquarian bookshop for a few dollars.

Significance for Research

The discovery also sheds new light on the eventful history of the two protagonists. Nathan and Einstein were close after their emigration to the USA, and Nathan accompanied Einstein as a friend and later as the administrator of his literary estate. A dedication from 1952, in which Einstein addresses Nathan as a "friend and saint," is therefore considered rare evidence of a personal relationship that has hardly been documented by original documents in previous Einstein scholarship.

TU Dortmund announced that the book and its dedication would henceforth be made accessible as part of the Grünzweig collection and subjected to academic analysis. Stephanie Marra emphasized that the library would preserve the volume permanently and include it in its catalogues. In the university's assessment, the find is therefore not merely a bibliophilic curiosity, but also a contribution to Einstein and exile research.

The report on the discovery was disseminated on 15 June 2026 citing the Deutsche Presse-Agentur. TU Dortmund stated that it intended to continue researching the find as part of the Grünzweig collection and to examine whether new insights into the relationship between the two men could be gained from the dedication.