 Edith Stein was born on 12 October 1891 into a bourgeois Jewish family in Breslau, Prussia (now Wroclaw, Poland). Her father died when she was two, leaving her mother to run the family business—a lumberyard—while raising seven children. Edith attended local school and then the Victoria Gymnasium in Breslau. Having graduated first in her class in the Abitur in 1911, Stein entered the University of Breslau to study psychology. Her professors included William Stern and Richard Hönigswald. Another professor, Georg Moskiewicz, introduced her to Husserl’s Logical Investigations and remarked that in Göttingen the students philosophize day and night and talk only of the phenomenon. Inspired, she transferred to Göttingen in 1913. There she became an active member of the Göttingen Philosophical Society, that included Reinach, Ingarden, and Conrad-Martius. In Göttingen she also attended Scheler’s lectures, which left a deep impression. Stein approached Husserl to write a doctorate on phenomenology, and his initial reaction was to recommend instead that she sit the state teaching examination. However, encouraged by Reinach, she completed her thesis in summer 1916 and graduated summa cum laude for her dissertation, Das Einfühlungsproblem in seiner historischen Entwicklung und in phänomenologischer Betrachtung (The Empathy Problem as it Developed Historically and Considered Phenomenologically), part of which was published as Zum Problem der Einfühlung (On the Problem of Empathy; Stein 1917).