[1] Estella Katzenellenbogen was born in 1886 as the daughter of the physician Moritz Marcuse and his wife Louise, née Gumpertz, in Berlin.
He created a series of eleven paintings in 1913/1914 with motifs from Homer's Odyssey and Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso.
After his suicide in 1926, she began a liaison with Albert Einstein, with whom she attended concerts and receptions, and whom she visited at his summer house in Caputh.
[11] When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933 Estella Katzenellenbogen and her family were persecuted because of their Jewish origins,[12] even though she had been baptized as a Protestant.
Her son Konrad worked from April 1941 as secretary to Thomas Mann, with whom Estella Katzenellenbogen was repeatedly invited to tea.
From 1944, Estella Katzenellenbogen ran a branch of the Nierendorf Gallery at 8650 Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, which traded mainly in works by Paul Klee.
The heirs of Ludwig and Estella Katzenellenbogen have listed fifty artworks with the German Lost Art Foundation.