Einstein

by Philipp Frank

  This aversion to all formality and ceremonial was a very important trait in Einstein’s character. It was particularly marked for ceremonies that were in any way depressing. Thus Einstein had an intense aversion to attending funerals, and on one occasion when he was in a funeral procession he remarked to his assistant, walking at his side: “Attending funerals is something one does to please the people around us. In itself it is meaningless. It seems to me not unlike the zeal we polish our shoes with every day just so that no one will say we are wearing dirty shoes.” Throughout his life Einstein had maintained this attitude of revolt against the customs of bourgeois life.

  3. Colleagues at Prague

  The University of Prague is the oldest university in central Europe. During the second half of the nineteenth century there had been German and Czech professors lecturing in their respective languages, but with political quarrels creating more and more difficulties, the Austrian government had in 1888 decided to divide the university into two parts, thus creating a German and a Czech university. It is perhaps an interesting historical accident that the first rector of the German University, where Einstein was appointed, had been Ernst Mach.

  At the time of Einstein’s arrival the two universities were completely separated and there were no relations between the professors of the two institutions. Even professors of the same subject had no personal contact and it frequently happened that two chemistry professors from Prague would meet for the first time at an international congress in Chicago. There was already a group among the Germans who propagated the idea of the “master race” and frowned upon any intercourse with “inferior races.” The majority of the German professors had too little interest in politics or were too timid to oppose the powerful will of this group by entering into contact with the Czechs.

  Nevertheless, the general attitude of superiority and hostility against the Czechs was quite evident in the conversations among the German professors and their families. Comical stories were told of how Czechs behaved in society for which, in the Germans’ opinion, they were not suited. The situation may be described by the following instances:

  During a population census undertaken by the government, a professor of political science sent a circular letter to the members of the university faculty urging them to list all their servants as German even if they were Czech. He reasoned as follows: Servants should only speak to their masters; since the latter are German, the language of all the servants must be German.

  Another professor, while walking with a colleague one day, saw a house sign that seemed about to fall down on the sidewalk. “It doesn’t matter much,” he said, “since it is extremely probable that when it falls it will strike a Czech.”

  One of the remarkable and frequently comical aspects of this hostility was that there was not even the slightest difference between the Germans and the Czechs in Prague so far as race and origin were concerned. The question of which nationality one belonged to was often a question of personal taste and which offered opportunities for earning a living.

  Anton Lampa, Einstein’s closest colleague, was the son of a Czech janitor. But, as frequently happened among the Czechs, the son had worked his way up, driven by his ambition and a great desire for knowledge and learning. Though his father was a Czech, he worked in a building belonging to Germans, so young Lampa attended German schools. He spoke Czech and German with equal facility, and upon graduating from the gymnasium he was faced with the problem of deciding whether to attend the German or the Czech university. He chose the former and later became a student of Ernst Mach. Yet despite his past Lampa was just as hostile to the Czechs as the other Germans. He was one of those who, for instance, refused to buy a postcard if the word “postcard” was printed on it in both languages, and demanded a card having only the German word on it. If the post-office clerk was a Czech, he would frequently say that such cards had all been sold out. The professor would then argue that it was the clerk’s duty to keep cards with purely German text, and so a quarrel would begin.

  Under these circumstances it was difficult even for a German who disapproved of this hostile attitude to come into contact with the Czechs. The latter were very suspicious and sensitive and felt insulted by every thoughtless word. They suspected everyone of wishing to humiliate and disparage them, and as a result it was not easy for a well-meaning German to maintain friendly relations with the Cechs. It is not surprising, therefore, that Einstein hardly came in contact with them. He disapproved the standpoint of his colleagues and did not join in their disparaging anecdotes, but he did not become intimately acquainted with any Czechs. But Czech students did attend his lectures and carry on scientific research under his direction, in itself a rare occurrence at the German University.

  Among his closest colleagues Einstein was attracted most strongly by a mathematician named Georg Pick. He was some twenty years older than Einstein and was an extraordinary personality, both as a man and as a scientist. Pick was above all a creative mind in mathematical research. In very concise papers he published many precisely formulated ideas, which were later developed by others as independent branches of mathematics. Nevertheless, he never received much of the scientific recognition he deserved, since he was of Jewish ancestry and had rather an uncompromising nature. He held firmly to what he considered was right and did not make concessions of any kind. After his retirement at an age of over 80, he died in a Nazi extermination camp.

  As a young man Pick had been an assistant of Ernst Mach’s when Mach was professor of experimental physics at Prague. Einstein liked to hear Pick reminisce about Mach, and Pick was particularly fond of repeating statements by Mach that could be interpreted as anticipating Einstein’s theories. Pick was also a good violinist, and through him Einstein became acquainted with a group of music-lovers and was urged to participate in chamber music. After that, Einstein had his regular quartet evenings.

  Einstein and Pick met almost daily and they discussed many problems together. In the course of long walks Einstein confided to Pick the mathematical difficulties that confronted him in his attempts to generalize his theory of relativity. Already at that time Pick made the suggestion that the appropriate mathematical instrument for the further development of Einstein’s idea was the “absolute differential calculus” of the Italian mathematicians Ricci and Levi-Civita.

  Einstein’s immediate assistant at this time was a young man named Nohel. He was the son of a small Jewish farmer in a Bohemian village, and as a boy he had walked behind the plow. He had the quiet poise of a peasant rather than the nervous personality so often found among the Jews. He told Einstein a good deal about the condition of the Jews in Bohemia, and their conversations began to arouse Einstein’s interest in the relation between the Jews and the world around them. Nohel told him about the Jewish peasants and tradesmen who in their daily activities used the Czech language. On the Sabbath, however, they spoke only German. For them this language, so close to Yiddish, was a substitute for Hebrew, which had long since been given up as the language of daily life.

  Einstein at the time of his most intense scientific work (Illustration Credit 3.4)

  Einstein, Paul Ehrenfest, Paul Langevin, Kammerling-Onnes, and Pierre Weiss at Ehrenfest’s home, Leyden, the Netherlands (Illustration Credit 4.1)

  Another colleague with whom Einstein became quite intimate was Moritz Winternitz, a professor of Sanskrit. He had five children to whom Einstein became greatly devoted, and he once remarked: “I am interested to see how a number of such commodities produced by the same factory will behave.” Professor Winternitz had a sister-in-law who very often accompanied Einstein at the piano when he played the violin. She was an elderly maiden lady whose life had been spent in giving piano lessons and who had thus acquired a somewhat dictatorial manner. She used to speak to Einstein as if she were addressing a pupil. Einstein often remarked: “She is very strict with me,” or “She is like an army sergeant.”

  When Einstein was to leave Prague, he had to promise her tha
t he would recommend as his successor as professor of theoretical physics only someone who could also replace him as her violin partner. When I went to Prague to replace Einstein and was introduced to her, she immediately insisted that I keep this promise by playing the violin. To my regret, I had to tell her I had never in my whole life had a violin in my hands. “So,” she replied, “Einstein has disappointed me.”

  4. The Jews in Prague

  The appointment as professor at Prague led Einstein to become a member of the Jewish religious community. Even though this relation was only formal and the contact was only a very loose one at that time, it was in this period of his life that perhaps for the first time since his childhood he came aware of the problems of the Jewish community.

  The position of the Jews in Prague was a peculiar one in many respects. More than half of the German-speaking inhabitants in Prague were Jewish, so that their part among the Germans, who comprised only about five per cent of the total population, was extraordinarily important. Since the cultural life of the Germans was almost completely detached from that of the Czech majority, with separate German theaters, concerts, lectures, balls, and so on, it was not surprising that all these organizations and affairs were dependent on Jewish patronage. Consequently, for the great masses of the Czech people, a Jew and a German were approximately the same. At the time when Einstein came to Prague, the World War I was just in the making and the Czechs felt that they were being driven into a war by the government against their own interests but in the interests of the hated Germans. They looked upon every German and Jew as a representative of a hostile power who had settled in their city to act as a watchman and informer against the Czech enemies of Austria. There is no doubt that there were some Jews, who, aping other Germans, somehow adapted themselves to this role of being policemen and instruments of oppression. But the core of the Jewish population was disgusted.

  On the other hand, the relation of the Jews to the other Germans had already begun to assume a problematical character. Formerly the German minority in Prague had befriended the Jews as allies against the upward-striving Czechs, but these good relations were breaking down at the time when Einstein was in Prague. When the racial theories and tendencies that later came to be known there as Nazi creed were still almost unknown in Germany itself, they had already become an important influence among the Sudeten Germans. Hence a somewhat paradoxical situation existed for the Germans in Prague. They tried to live on good terms with the Jews so as to have an ally against the Czechs. But they also wanted to be regarded as thoroughly German by the Sudeten Germans, and therefore manifested hostility against the Jews. This peculiar situation was characterized outwardly by the fact that the Jews and their worst enemies met in the same cafés and had a common social circle.

  At this time in Prague there was already a Jewish group who wanted to develop an independent intellectual life among the Jews. They disliked seeing the Jews taking sides in the struggle between Germans and Czech nationalists. This group was strongly influenced by the semi-mystical ideas of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. They were Zionists, but at that period they paid little attention to practical politics and concerned themselves mainly with art, literature, and philosophy. Einstein was introduced to this group, met Franz Kafka, and became particularly friendly with Hugo Bergmann and Max Brod.

  Hugo Bergmann was then an official in the university library. He was a blond young man with a gentle, intelligent, and yet energetic personality. He was the center of a youthful group in Prague that attempted to create a Jewish cultural life not based on orthodox Judaism, which approached the non-Jewish world with sympathetic understanding, not aversion or blind imitation. Bergmann based his theories not only on Jewish authors but also on German philosophers such as Fichte, who preached the cultivation of the national spirit.

  Even such an intelligent and ardent Zionist as Bergmann, however, could not interest Einstein in Zionism for the time being. He was still too much concerned with cosmic problems, and the problems of nationality and of the relation of the Jews with the rest of the world appeared to him only as matters of petty significance. For him these tensions were only expressions of human stupidity, a quality that on the whole is natural to man and cannot be eradicated. He did not realize then that these troubles would take on later cosmic dimensions.

  At this time Max Brod was a young writer of multifarious interests and talents. He was also very much interested in historical and philosophical problems, and in his novels he described the life of the Czech and other inhabitants of Prague and Bohemia. His novels were characterized by clear, rather rationalistic analyses of psychological processes.

  In one of his novels, The Redemption of Tycho Brahe, he described the last years of the great Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, which were spent in Prague. The chief theme of the novel is the antithesis of the character of Tycho and of the young astronomer Kepler, whom the former had invited to work with him so as to have a collaborator who would add his young unprejudiced creative ideas to Tycho’s great experience and powers of observation. It was often asserted in Prague that in his portrayal of Kepler, Brod was greatly influenced by the impression that Einstein’s personality had made on him. Whether Brod did this consciously or unconsciously, it is certain that the figure of Kepler is so vividly portrayed that readers of the book who knew Einstein well recognized him as Kepler. When the famous German chemist W. Nernst read this novel, he said to Einstein: “You are this man Kepler.”

  5. Einstein’s Personality Portrayed in a Novel

  It therefore seems appropriate to quote several passages where Brod characterizes his Kepler and in which we may perhaps find certain aspects of Einstein’s personality. The words of a poet may be more impressive than the description of a scientist.

  Kepler’s calm, quiet nature sometimes aroused a feeling of uneasiness in the passionate Tycho. Brod describes Tycho’s feelings toward Kepler in a way that is probably equally true of the attitudes of Einstein’s scientific colleagues toward him:

  “Thus the storm raged in Tycho’s spirit. He took the greatest pains to keep his feelings for Kepler free from alloy.… In actual fact he really did not envy Kepler his success. At the very most, the self-evident and in all respects becoming and worthy manner in which Kepler had achieved renown sometimes excited in him an emotion bordering upon envy. But in general Kepler now inspired him with a feeling of awe. The tranquillity with which he applied himself to his labors and entirely ignored the warblings of flatterers was to Tycho almost superhuman. There was something incomprehensible in its absence of emotion, like a breath from a distant region of ice.… He recalled that popular ballad in which a Landsknecht had sold his heart to the Devil and had received in exchange a bullet-proof coat of mail. Of such sort was Kepler. He had no heart and therefore had nothing to fear from the world. He was not capable of emotion or of love. And for that reason he was naturally also secure against the aberrations of feelings. ‘But I must love and err,’ groaned Tycho. ‘I must be flung hither and thither in this hell, beholding him floating above, pure and happy, upon cool clouds of limpid blue. A spotless angel! But is he really? Is he not rather atrocious in his lack of sympathy?’ ”

  This appearance of pure happiness, however, which the superficial observer was frequently inclined to ascribe to Einstein likewise, is certainly only an illustion. Tycho, who, as is well known, was the inventor of a cosmic system that represented a kind of compromise between the old Ptolemaic and the new Copernican system, was very curious to hear Kepler’s opinion of this system. He always suspected that in his heart Kepler favored Copernicus and his radically new theory. Kepler, however, avoided the expression of any definite opinion on this subject before Tycho. He discussed only concrete astronomical problems with him, no general theories. Tycho felt that this was an evasion and urged him to talk about it. Finally Kepler answered him:

  “ ‘I have little to say.… I am still undecided. I can’t come to a decision. Besides, I don’t think that our technic
al resources and experience are yet sufficiently advanced to enable us to give a definite answer to this question.’ ”

  There was a pause, during which Kepler sat completely self-absorbed, with a blissful smile on his countenance. But Tycho was already somewhat irritated and interrupted him:

  “ ‘And does this satisfy you, Kepler, this state of affairs? I mean this uncertainty regarding the most essential points of our art. Doesn’t the lack of decision sometimes take your breath away? Doesn’t impatience deprive you of all your happiness?’

  “ ‘I am not happy,’ Kepler answered simply. ‘I have never been happy.’

  “ ‘You not happy?’ Tycho stared at him with wide-open eyes. ‘You — not — what do you lack, then? What more do you want? What would you have in addition to that already bestowed on you? — Oh, fie, how immodest you must be if you don’t reckon yourself happy, you who are the happiest of all men! Yes, must I, then, tell it to you for the first time? Don’t you feel that you — now I will put it in one word, that you are on the right way, on the only right way? … No, now I don’t mean the outward success, the applause surrounding you, which has been accorded you. But inwardly, inwardly, my Kepler — must I really say it to you? — inwardly, in the heart of our science, you are on the right path, the path blessed by God; and that is the noblest, happiest fate that a mortal can encounter.’

  “ ‘No, I am not happy, and I have never been happy,’ Kepler repeated, with a dull obstinacy. Then he added quite gently: ‘And I don’t wish to be happy.’