From 1901 until 1909 he was a professor at the prestigious institute at Göttingen, where he had the opportunity to work with some significant figures, including David Hilbert and Hermann Minkowski. Schwarzschild became the director of the observatory in Göttingen. He married Else Posenbach, the daughter of a professor of surgery at Göttingen, in 1909. Later that year they moved to Potsdam, where he took up the post of director of the Astrophysical Observatory. This was then the most prestigious post available for an astronomer in Germany. He and Else had three children, Agathe (who was a Classics professor at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand), Martin (who went on to become a professor of astronomy at Princeton University), and Alfred.