Leo Stein (Kaminski)

From Poland to Berlin

Leo Stein, born Kaminski, immigrated to Berlin from Poland in the early 20th century. The exact date and circumstances of his arrival are not recorded in surviving family documents, but the name change itself tells a clear story.

Polish immigration to Berlin began in the 1860s and grew steadily through the turn of the century. By the time Leo arrived, the city held a substantial Polish diaspora, though Polish communities in Berlin tended to disperse rather than form distinct neighborhoods. Carrying a recognizably Polish surname in Wilhelmine or Weimar Germany carried real consequences: anti-Polish discrimination was official policy in the eastern Prussian provinces, and the social stigma extended into the capital. German authorities maintained surveillance over Polish workers, required special identity cards, and actively promoted what a 1901 Ministry of Interior document called the "generous Germanization of Polish names."

For Leo, the solution was elegant. "Kamiński" derives from the Polish kamień, meaning "stone." "Stein" is the German word for stone. The surname change was a direct semantic translation, the most common Germanization method documented in the era. It preserved meaning while erasing origin. A man named Stone could belong to any German city; a man named Kamiński could not.

Charlottenburg

Leo settled in Charlottenburg, a prosperous residential district in western Berlin. There he married Frieda Ottilie Erna Kaden, whose surname suggests German roots from Saxony or Thuringia (the town of Kaden lies near the Saxon-Bohemian border).

At age 38, he and Frieda welcomed their daughter Herta Susi Anneliese Stein on August 10, 1923. Herta's birth certificate would have carried the name "Stein," not "Kaminski." By that point, the transformation was complete.

Charlottenburg in 1923 was simultaneously a place of cultural brilliance (home to the Deutsche Oper, the Technische Hochschule, the grand Kurfürstendamm) and economic catastrophe: the hyperinflation of 1923 was destroying the savings of the German middle class. Leo's daughter was born into this volatile world.

From Berlin to Arizona

Leo Stein's daughter Herta would eventually marry the Austrian psychologist Dr. Peter R. Hofstätter, making Leo the maternal grandfather of Nadina Hofstätter Goodman. Through Nadina's marriage to Dr. Clifford Goodman Jr. in 1966, the Stein/Kaminski lineage traveled from Poland to Berlin to Austria to Arizona, three borders and three name changes across three generations.

The original name, Kaminski, survives only in genealogical records and family memory. But its meaning, stone, proved prophetic: the family's foundation held across a century of upheaval.