Einstein in Bohemia
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A case in point concerns another famous German-speaking Jew who lived in Prague during 1911–1912 and who was enmeshed in precisely the same social circles as Einstein: the writer Franz Kafka, author of the posthumously published novels The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926) and the 1915 novella The Metamorphosis (about a man turned into a dung beetle, published nine years before Kafka’s early death from tuberculosis). For much of the world today Kafka represents Prague. Because of his massive impact on global literature and thought, derived in no small part from his incisive dissection of the psychological pressures of modernity, Kafka has attracted a voluminous scholarship, some of which meticulously situates his creative energies within the city of his birth.7 Given that both were Jewish, both stand in as symbols of important transformations of the tumultuous twentieth century, and both were in Prague at the same moment, it is overwhelmingly tempting to imagine Einstein and Kafka engaged in a meeting of minds.
The meeting happened, but the minds did not register it. On 24 May 1911, Einstein gave a talk about relativity theory in front of the local discussion circle of Bertha Fanta, an erudite, philosophically ambitious, and well-connected woman who lived above her husband’s pharmacy in Old Town Square. Fanta’s group had become a magnet for German-speaking intellectuals, especially those affiliated with the German University, and a pronounced complement of Jews (she and her family became increasingly Zionist over the course of the 1910s). Albert Einstein was introduced to the circle as a way to satisfy his desire for companions with whom he could play his violin. It was a matter of courtesy that the physicist, who had already earned a strong reputation for his foundational contributions to special relativity and quantum theory, would deliver a presentation about his work among them. In attendance on 24 May were his university assistant Ludwig Hopf, the prominent Prague author Max Brod, and (according to the latter’s diary) Brod’s friends Robert Weltsch and Franz Kafka. The discussion was apparently lively, and Hopf also held forth on the work of psychiatrists Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. Kafka apparently did not say anything in particular.8 The next day the group reconvened but Kafka stayed home.
Such was the fabled meeting between Einstein and Kafka: they likely shook hands and little more. There was no extended discourse on metaphysics and spacetime, no exploration of the fate of the individual in industrial civilization, no debate about aesthetics in music or literature. Neither Einstein nor Kafka ever mentioned the encounter. In itself, that might not be surprising: lots of people meet at cocktail parties and then forget their interlocutors. But these two became very prominent people in later years. In 1919, British reports of the confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity—work on which he began in earnest while living in Prague—catapulted the scientist to international recognition. He was front-page news around the world and in 1921 made a celebrated return to Prague to give a standing-room-only public talk. Kafka seemingly paid no attention. It is implausible that he was ignorant of either Einstein or relativity—in fact, he made a rare, and characteristically wry, mention of the latter in his diary on 10 April 1922, noting that as a child his engagement with sexual topics was “so innocent and uninterested approximately as it is today in regard to relativity theory.”9
What about from Einstein’s side? People in Berlin who knew Einstein and his second wife Elsa claimed that it was possible that Kafka had visited the physicist in his apartment on Haberlandstraße, since the two did share a mutual friend, the Hungarian-born physician Robert Klopstock. These strands are flimsy (as are the unreliable reports that Einstein returned a copy of The Castle to Thomas Mann in Princeton, claiming that its “perversity” kept him from finishing it).10 Just as Kafka did not recall having met the famous Einstein after 1919, Einstein did not remember a meeting with the posthumously famous Kafka once his novels began to appear in the mid-1920s. A great deal of energy has been fruitlessly expended over the decades trying to confirm a mutual regard between these two towering figures of twentieth-century intellectual history. You can be together with someone and still be alone.
Between Einstein and the controversial Rudolf Steiner, founder of anthroposophy—an esoteric movement that argued for cultivating the mental faculties to access an objective spiritual dimension beyond the senses—a different lack of recognition took place. Welcomed across Europe, Steiner was very popular in Prague, especially among the Fanta group. (He corresponded with Bertha Fanta and visited her home on his trips to the city.) Hugo Bergmann, Fanta’s son-in-law and a frequent interlocutor with Einstein during his time in Prague—and a person who we will encounter often in these pages—claimed in his diary that he “tried once, ca. 1911, to bring Einstein together with Rudolf Steiner, and also brought Einstein to Steiner’s lecture, but unfortunately he had no comprehension of it.”11 A Prague-based anthroposophist named Franz Halla stated after Einstein’s death that he had met the physicist at Steiner’s 1911 lectures in the city on “Occult Physiology.”12 Both Bergmann and Halla were dismayed that Einstein had no appreciation for what they saw as Steiner’s particular genius, especially when it came to scientific topics like non-Euclidean geometry. But their recollections depict events that could never have happened. Steiner did give lectures in Prague in 1911, but they ended in March, when Einstein had not yet left Zurich.13 (In a bizarre coincidence, Kafka went to one of these lectures and even visited the anthroposophist in his hotel room before the latter left Bohemia.)14 At least with Kafka and Einstein, we know they met but just did not care about the meeting. With Steiner, Einstein neither cared nor made Steiner’s acquaintance.
Why do these non-events matter? They demonstrate the distinction between history and myth. The former are stories we produce in the present from the traces the past has bequeathed to us. History is fundamentally constrained by the evidence. Myths are different. They are not necessarily false, but their form is not dependent on the surviving traces of the past. They grow from our present aspirations, which enable us to find meaning in them. The interconnection of Einstein and Bohemia is a historically tractable domain, amenable to excavation in libraries and archives (in the case of the present book, those were located in Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Israel, and the United States). The interconnection of Einstein and Kafka is another matter entirely. It is understandable that we want to have our heroes align, to enjoy simple stories in which the good guys meet, something important happens, and everyone recognizes it. That, alas, is not always the case. The histories we can write are stranger and less straightforward, and therefore vastly more interesting. Throughout this book, I focus on those aspects of Einstein’s time in Prague (and its aftershocks) that are trapped within our shards of evidence, and I steer away from the apocryphal or the invented, however satisfying they might feel. There is universe enough in the documents.
Situating Einstein in a place turns out to be rather common: over a dozen volumes and many more scholarly articles fall into the genre we might call “Einstein in X.” You can easily find Einstein in Zurich, in Bern, in Switzerland, in Paris, in Berlin (several books on that), and even in Ulm, the birthplace that he left while an infant.15 Many of these works appeared around 1979, the centenary of Einstein’s birth, when celebrations around the world marked the launch of what has become a veritable Einstein industry. It is thanks to these works that the present book is possible: Einstein’s archive is so comprehensive, his published collected papers (an ongoing project) so well curated, his image so vividly recorded in the memoirs of his colleagues and acquaintances that a historian can reconstruct a good deal of Einstein’s life and circle to an astonishing level of resolution. The same is true for Prague in the early decades of the twentieth century, a bequest of the equally impressive Kafka industry, which has uncovered many valuable details of cultural life in the city—its art, philosophy, literature, public life—especially among its intellectual Jewish inhabitants. So, even though Einstein and Kafka never met in a significant way, we now know a vast amount about the cultural history of the city they
both occupied at one moment, enough to flesh out manifold connections between person and place.
It should not, therefore, be a shock that there is a volume called Einstein and Prague, though it is only available in Czech. Like so many of its brethren, it appeared in 1979, under the editorship of the gravitational physicist Jiří Bičák, who is still active today at the Charles University in Prague. A slim paperback of 63 pages, it is not so much a history of the subject at hand as a collection of documents: an introduction by Bičák; a translation into Czech of a section of the biography of Einstein by the physicist and philosopher Philipp Frank; Einstein’s most famous scientific paper produced in Prague, proposing that light bends by a certain amount when passing massive bodies like the sun; and Einstein’s preface to the Czech translation of his popular book on relativity from 1916.16 Bičák’s book serves as a fitting Czechoslovak contribution in the context of the festivities of 1979, but it does not take a wider view of Einstein’s interaction with the city. Likewise, the few shorter studies that have examined this moment have concentrated rather strictly on the scientist himself. One of the things it means to be in a place, however, is that you are usually not there by yourself. To understand Einstein in Bohemia, we need a larger cast of Bohemians (none of whom happened to be lower-case bohemians).17
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A major theme of this book concerns precisely this question of belonging to a larger community, a matter that is especially tricky to nail down for Einstein, who in later years was fond of speaking of himself as a loner (despite decades of evidence of him as a social and socially engaged individual). Some forms of belonging in the modern world are thrust upon us; citizenship is a good example. It is also an instructive one for teasing out Einstein’s relationship with Prague. That might seem like a non sequitur, but the conflict over citizenship has everything to do with Einstein’s relationship to the category of “German,” perhaps the crucial issue that shaped his every experience in the Bohemian metropolis. A brief survey of the chaotic story of the citizenship of the famously antinationalist Einstein serves to highlight many of the political and cultural assumptions that structured his world both in Prague and beyond it.
The first time we encounter documents expressing Einstein’s views on citizenship, he was trying to get rid of one. He was born in Ulm, located within the German state of Württemberg, and he retained that citizenship after the family’s departure for Munich, capital of the state of Bavaria, shortly afterward. As his graduation from secondary school approached, however, Einstein refused to enlist in the obligatory military service. At a month and a half shy of his seventeenth birthday (and thus still a minor) he asked his father to renounce his citizenship for him. As of 5 February 1896, when the decision was confirmed by the town of Ulm, Einstein was officially stateless, a status rather more thinkable in his day than in our own highly legalized international order.18 He visited his family in Italy and soon settled in Switzerland to complete a year of preparatory schooling before enrolling at the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. He became a Swiss citizen on 21 February 1901, almost five years after he had forsaken his previous citizenship. Despite his birth within the newly formed German Reich, Einstein seemed happier being Swiss. The tension between those two forms of belonging would burst into head-on conflict two decades later.
It is hard to determine how important questions of citizenship were to Einstein. He traveled extensively internationally—at first around Europe in the 1910s and then around the world in the decade after—and he kept his passports in order. In notes to himself, however, the man who had moved from Zurich to Prague (in Austria-Hungary), back to Zurich, and finally in 1914 to Berlin, the capital city of both the state of Prussia and the German Empire, toyed with the idea that perhaps citizenship was not that important. In a document he drafted between late October and early November 1915, when the Germany he lived in was in the grips of World War I, he wrote: “The state to which I belong as a citizen plays scarcely any role in my emotional life; I consider the affiliation with a state as a business arrangement, something like the relationship to a life insurance policy.”19 So he wrote, but then he crossed it out. It was to his advantage to keep quiet about questions of citizenship. Although he was now a professor at the University of Berlin and a director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics (and thus a German civil servant), he insisted that he remained a Swiss citizen. The state at least tacitly concurred: unlike many of his colleagues, Einstein, as a foreign national, was not approached for war work.20 He confirmed this status in a letter to the Berlin-Schöneberg Office of Taxation in 1920: “I am Swiss, here in Berlin since spring 1914.”21
Einstein’s cavalier attitude toward his belonging in Germany put him at odds with some of his closest friends. Unique among his colleagues living under the Central Powers, Einstein was not subject to the boycott and travel ban that the victorious powers of France, Belgium, Britain, and the United States imposed on the defeated states after the war. A well-known pacifist and opponent of the war, he was an ideal ambassador to Paris or New York (the latter of which he visited as part of a fundraising expedition for the London-based Zionist Organization) once the confirmation of general relativity hit the newsstands. He endured his celebrity in part in hopes of helping end the boycott. The eminent chemist Fritz Haber, discoverer of the eponymous process for fixing atmospheric nitrogen—and also an architect of the system of gas munitions during the Great War—vociferously protested against Einstein traveling to these (in his view) still quite hostile powers:
If you at this moment journey to America, where the new president postpones the ratification of the law through which the peace between the United States and Germany ought to be proclaimed, if you at this moment travel with the English friends of Zionism while sanctions allow the opposition between England and us to persist with new acuity, then you are announcing publicly before the entire world that you want to be nothing other than a Swiss who by chance has his residence in Germany. I ask you to consider whether you really want to make that announcement now. Now is the moment in which adherence to Germany has a bit of martyrdom to it.… For the entire world you are today the most important of the German Jews. If you at this moment fraternize ostentatiously with the English and their friends, then people here at home will see that as a testament to the faithlessness of the Jews.22
(Haber’s linkage of Germans and Jews as compatible but occasionally conflictual identifications broaches another theme of this book.)
Einstein’s response was characteristically dismissive. “I have declined many attractive calls [i.e., professorial appointments] to Switzerland, to Holland, to Norway, and to England without even considering accepting one,” he wrote. “I did that however not out of allegiance to Germany but rather to my dear German friends, of which you are one of the most excellent and wish me the best. Allegiance to the political structure of Germany would be unnatural for me as a pacifist.”23 He went on the trip to the United States, and many other places besides: Japan, China, the British Mandate of Palestine, and even Prague, all on his Swiss passport.24 He declared in 1922 to Gilbert Murray, the Australian-born British man of letters, that “I am not an appropriate representative for German intellectuals, because I am not seen by them in their full number as their representative. My outspoken international attitude, Swiss citizenship, and Jewish nationality work together so that I would not be met with in a political relationship by the majority of the masses with the trust that a representative of a country must possess to be able to serve as a liaison with success.”25
It would soon become harder for Einstein to maintain this attitude, because in 1922 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the prior year. Neither the diplomatic imbroglio that ensued nor its resolution would be thinkable without a globalized world intimately connected by steamships and telegraphs. In the fall of 1921, Einstein had left on an invited trip to East Asia, ignoring a not-so-subtle communication from Swedish colleagues who suggested he postpone the tr
ip because of an impending special announcement. Einstein received notification of the prize in Japan by telegram. Now there was a problem. Nobel Prizes needed to be received in person; if the laureate was not personally able to do so, his (or, disappointingly rarely, her) ambassador could stand in. Naturally, the Swiss ambassador presented himself for the honor, given that Einstein was at that very moment traveling as a citizen of the canton of Zurich. So did Rudolf Nadolny, the German ambassador to Sweden. The German version was that when Einstein assumed his Berlin position, German citizenship attached to him as a requirement of the post. Einstein had objected to this clause during negotiations in December 1913, and the Germans had not felt it necessary to resolve the matter. (A similar condition had applied when Einstein moved to Prague, and he had ignored it then as well.)26 After 1923, Einstein relinquished his opposition to the state’s narrative and settled in as a German citizen—though he still traveled on his Swiss passport at times.27