3 The New York Years (1931–1953)

The Family 9
court system. He had a brilliant career and, although he was only 49 years old
when he died from cancer of the kidneys on 1 July 1917, was to be appointed
to Germany’s supreme court in Leipzig. His library comprised several thousand
volumes, particularly the subjects of history, philosophy, and the classics. On
Sundays he would read Homer in the Greek original, without a dictionary.
“He was a gymnast,” Ernst Mayr recalls, “belonging to the local sports club, was
one of the pioneers of skiing in Germany (he bought his skis in Norway) and he
wasanenthusiasticmountaineer.HeservedintheBavarianGuardRegimentand
later was a reserve officer in the army, but when war broke out in 1914, he was too
old and ill to serve, much to his regret. He was not at all severe with us children,
indeed I have the feeling that my mother was more or less running the show.”
Ernst Mayr’s mother, Helene Pusinelli, was born of German parents in Le Havre,
France, on 22 July 1870 and died in Bad Boll, Germany, on 31 May 1952. She was
a member of a well-known Dresden family. An Italian ancestor, Anton Pusinelli
(1790–1828), had come to Germany from Nesso, a village on the eastern shore
of Lake Como (northernmost Italy). In 1809, he settled in Dresden where his
older brother Carlo owned a wine restaurant, which Anton took over after Carlo’s
death in 1812. Anton married Caroline Brügner (1790–1853) from Torgau and
they had six children, four girls and two boys, of whom the older one, Carl Anton
Pusinelli (1815–1878), became a rather wealthy pediatrician to the Saxon court in
Dresden and a close friend of the composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883). Carl
Anton treated quite successfully the children of the Saxon princes and had the
title “Hofrat,” but was not an employee of the court. His younger brother was Carl
Louis (1820–1879), Ernst Mayr’s grandfather. When Carl Louis was 23 years old,
he left Dresden and established an import-export business in Le Havre, France,
during the late 1840s. Upon a visit to his hometown in 1852, he married Camilla
Leonhardt (1833–1891), the daughter of his former boss in Dresden, and they had
11 children. The next-to-youngest was Helene Pusinelli, Ernst Mayr’s mother. She
was only a few weeks old when the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) broke out.
The family was expelled and returned (via Rotterdam and Hamburg) to Dresden
where, through his family connections, Carl Louis Pusinelli became the director
of a local bank. He had owned a profitable wholesale business in France and had
suffered substantial losses because of the expulsion. However, eventually he became
quite affluent through considerable compensations from reparation payments. He
died in 1879 of stomach cancer. His daughter Helene, her four sisters (another one
had died early) and five brothers grew up in Dresden and in part lived there later.
Her uncle and a cousin were medical doctors. However, all the family fortune,
invested in government securities at the beginning of World War I, was lost due to
hyperinflation during the 1920s.
The early Mayrs were members of the Catholic Church. Because the grandfather
Otto Mayr had married the Protestant Minna Müller, their three children became
members of a Protestant church, too. The Pusinellis in Dresden belonged to the
reformed Protestant church. They too had originally been Catholic.
How did the Mayr lineage in Bavaria and the Pusinelli lineage in the distant
Saxon city of Dresden meet? The best friend of Dr. Otto Mayr (OM 2) in Bavaria