Einstein’s newly regained German citizenship only remained settled until 25 August 1933, when Germany’s National Socialist government rescinded it, transforming him into the world’s most famous refugee. He was granted asylum in the United States and offered a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he became a prominent advocate for those tragically displaced by Hitler’s racial laws and the conflict in Europe. In 1935, the Einstein family traveled to Bermuda so that they could reenter the United States on permanent visas. On 1 October 1940, after the obligatory five-year waiting period, Einstein, his stepdaughter Margot Einstein-Marianoff (née Löwenthal), and his secretary Helen Dukas traveled the short distance from Princeton to Trenton, New Jersey, to take their oath of allegiance as American citizens.28 Even then, as visible and as prominent as he was—he was likely the most recognizable American alive—J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI explored in 1950 the possibility of stripping Einstein of his citizenship as an undesirable alien for his open pronouncements in favor of civil rights and nuclear disarmament.29 That limited effort failed, and Einstein died as an American citizen.
As one can see from the turbulent history of Einstein’s citizenship, calling him a “German” is not a straightforward matter. Although he was born in Germany, he spent much of his life trying to avoid being considered a citizen of the German state. Likewise, his confessional status as a Jew meant that for many people in the land of his birth he was not straightforwardly German as a matter of ethnicity. On the other hand, it seems obtuse simply to go by his last passport and call Einstein “American,” full stop. Rather than attempting to resolve these issues by reference to strict categories, Einstein’s biography urges us to recognize the complexity of personal and state identifications of individuals. They are not the background to history—they are often its very substance.
The simultaneous malleability and solidity of categories was equally true in the context of Prague. According to the census, during Einstein’s time in Prague the city’s population was 93 percent “Czechs” and 7 percent “Germans,” defined by how individuals listed their “everyday language” (Umgangssprache). (The proportions for Bohemia as a whole were not so lopsided, with roughly a third of all residents set down as German.) As is true for accounts of the many aspiring nation-states that emerged out of multinational empires during this period, nationalism has been the dominant framework for histories of the region that would be called Czechoslovakia from 1918 to 1993. Sometimes, Prague is identified as a “city of three peoples,” with Czechs, Germans, and Jews living cheek-by-jowl, sometimes discordantly but often productively.30 (Set aside for a moment that many of the city’s residents were bilingual to some degree and that there were Jews to be found among both linguistic communities.31) More often, the history that has been told has been one of implacable hostility between Prague Germans, who despite their small numbers benefited enormously from Habsburg privileges, and nationalist Czechs, who wanted autonomy or even independence.32
Einstein was largely unaware of all this complexity. He interacted exclusively with people who identified as German because that was who he met at the German University. Outside of more intimate contacts, such as those he made in the Fanta circle, he only conversed with German-speakers because, knowing no Czech, he had no alternative. Nonetheless, every local he met would peg him as part of a group, as a German and sometimes as a Jew, depending on the context. Neither was a good fit. His Jewishness was, as we shall see, somewhat of a murky matter during this period, his Germanness no less so. He was neither a German citizen nor a Habsburg German; still less was he a local “Prague German.” If he had to be categorized, it would be as a Swiss—a fact that almost lost him the position in Prague in the first place. The problem of identity is truly central to this story.
So central, in fact, that I am going to avoid using the word. Following the suggestion of the sociologist Rogers Brubaker and the historian Frederick Cooper, I opt for “identification” over “identity.” As they note, doing so “invites us to specify the agents that do the identifying. And it does not presuppose that such identifying (even by powerful agents, such as the state) will necessarily result in the internal sameness, the distinctiveness, the bounded groupness that political entrepreneurs may seek to achieve. Identification—of oneself and of others—is intrinsic to social life; ‘identity’ in the strong sense is not.”33 Those in Prague who called themselves “Germans” or called Einstein “German” were making deliberate, highly politicized choices, just as those historians who write “German history” by confining themselves within the borders of what was after 1871 (or 1918, or 1945, or 1990) the German state without taking into account the German-speaking populations of Austria-Hungary, Switzerland, Romania, Russia, France, Belgium, Italy, Namibia, and the United States are doing.34 For the purposes of this book, “being German” means much less than “speaking German,” and thus much of what follows will be told in terms of people who were Germanophone (or Czechophone).35 In this way we can avoid assuming national identification and instead watch it in the process of construction.
* * *
The same strategy helps us navigate the kaleidoscopic history of Prague. The city was at various points the seat of the Přemyslid dynasty, the medieval capital of the Holy Roman Empire, a troublesome and rebellious counterweight to Habsburg centralism, a prosperous provincial node between the two major Germanophone imperial centers of Berlin and Vienna, the capital of a fledgling state—at first a republic, then occupied by Nazi forces, and then a communist polity—and more besides and in between. Any close acquaintance with the history of Prague in a specific period quickly teaches you that stories have a way of breaching the dams between political regimes and occasionally bending back to wash up medieval flotsam on the beaches of modernity. Although obviously physically fixed in the landscape and forced, as we all are, to move through the years in a linear fashion, when it comes to the spacetime of memory, the city demonstrates a persistent capacity to contravene expectations.
No wonder that one of the most enduring ways to speak of the place—popular among folklorists of the past and tourists of the present—is as “Magic Prague,” the domain of alchemists and Golems, mystical rabbis and deranged princes, heroic mercenaries and fantastical scribblers. The shelves are lined with book after book promising a portrait of a Bohemian wonderland amid the Baroque towers and Cubist apartment blocks of the city on the banks of the Vltava (or, if one prefers the German, the Moldau).36 Thankfully, these are not the only surveys of the history of Prague available. Instead, a series of vivid, longue durée narrative histories stress the harsher realities of national conflict with a decided emphasis on artistic creativity.37 It seems that you must either choose a Prague populated by poltergeists or one abounding in aesthetes. This book offers a third option.
While the Prague one finds in these pages does have its share of poets and eerie coincidences—though you would strain to find them supernatural—the central characteristic of this Prague is as a city of knowledge, a place where science, philosophy, and rationality were serious business. Largely because of the Cold War, Prague has fallen in the popular, especially Anglophone, mind on the far side of a divide that snakes through Europe, like the erstwhile Iron Curtain, cleaving the West from the East.38 During most of its history, up to and including Einstein’s time there, that was not the case. Not only was Prague not a mystical wonderland, but it was a hub of European science, the home of Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, Christian Doppler and Ernst Mach, and, yes, Albert Einstein. Bohemia as a whole was unquestionably modern. It was the seat of Austria-Hungary’s large chemical industry, producing 37.7 percent of its chemicals as well as 65.5 percent of its food and 95 percent of its sugar. Prague already had an electric tram system in 1891. It hosted international conferences and was plugged into a transnational network of Germanophone universities.39 That was, after all, how Einstein got there.
Now that we are situated with our protagonist, his city, and his tim
e, let us turn to what kind of book this is. In each chapter, we will follow Einstein and Prague, though in some there will be rather more Einstein than Prague, and in others the reverse. There is no single way of being a person in a place at a specific time, and I hope to capture that multiplicity by guiding you in and out of the entangled pair of Einstein and Bohemia before that interaction dissipated from the memory of the public and historians alike. In order to fully grasp how Einstein understood his context and how Praguers made sense of him, sometimes I have to wander rather far from the mustachioed theorist. He will always come back. None of the stories here are arbitrary—they are all tightly connected to man, place, and time—and they are all verifiable in the documentary record. Some good stories did not make it in because they were digressions, and others were excluded because they were simply not true. Instead, we move through Einstein’s life in, out, and around Prague both in real time and in later recollections of it. Einstein is a tool for narrating the history of Prague, and Prague is a tool for narrating the scientist’s life.40
The first chapter explores the seemingly simple question of why and how Einstein settled in Prague in the first place. The next two chapters trace his life in the city, both in his scientific work to formulate a relativistic theory of gravitation and in his social life at home and with acquaintances. By the beginning of chapter 4, Einstein has left Prague, returning only once for a brief visit. Yet some of the most significant resonances of his Bohemian moment were felt in the years after he left, both by those in the city and by the physicist in Berlin and Princeton. The next three chapters explore the ripples of Einstein’s Bohemia in philosophy of science, Germanophone literature, and Jewish and Zionist politics. The final chapter returns us to the unsung majority—those who identified as Czechs—and the way they fashioned their own image of Einstein at different points across the twentieth century. Historical narrative, like memory, does not always flow linearly, and sometimes the story doubles back or sneaks ahead. Likewise, the cast of characters beyond Einstein do not stay confined in cameo roles. Some, such as the philosopher and physicist Philipp Frank, the novelist and critic Max Brod, and the Zionist intellectual Hugo Bergmann, prove just as essential as our main character.
Albert Einstein is dead. Bohemia, too, no longer exists. But in the pages that follow they come together again, bringing their worlds into view once more.
CHAPTER 1
First and Second Place
I … was so physically and psychically spent from life in Prague that I greeted the return to orderly and calm circumstances as a kind of salvation. People both in Vienna and among us in Germany had then no proper conception of how the Germans in Prague felt.
—Carl Stumpf1
It can be easier to venture to a place unknown than to return to something familiar. In the new place, you do not know the stories, the scripts, the patterns that provide the loose rubric by which the locals shape their days. This helps account for that feeling of liberation when you encounter the unfamiliar: here, you have the opportunity to reinvent yourself, unconstrained by the norms and expectations that bound you in a place laden with overfamiliarity. This ease breeds two illusions: the first, that in this new place there are no barriers or taboos; the second, that those barriers that do exist do not also apply to you.
Albert Einstein knew very little about Prague before he arrived, with that little itself cobbled out of general knowledge, hearsay, perhaps a guidebook or two, and prior epistolary interactions with resident faculty and Viennese bureaucrats. His ignorance did not prevent him from becoming enveloped in a complex cultural environment, although it did hinder him from noticing how total his immersion was. History shapes you whether or not you are aware of it, and you sometimes have lines and a role allotted to you without your ken. Einstein walked into a play in Prague—one that was neither a tragedy nor a comedy, though it had elements of both—that had been running for centuries, and he would perform his part in various ways, first by virtue of his position alone, and later, as he came to appreciate some of the specifics of the story, somewhat according to his choices.
In this chapter we follow the story before the story, on several scales. For Einstein to arrive at Prague, he needed to be offered a position, and this involved its own drama, some of which Einstein knew about and some of which he did not. The minor controversies that attended his hiring as an ordinary professor of mathematical physics at the German University in Prague conditioned his reaction to the city before he accepted the position. The position itself occupied a minor role in a larger narrative, that of why there was a German University in Prague in the first place. To get a sense of the full depth of that story, one needs to appreciate the very long history of the university in Prague, founded in 1348, the oldest university in Central Europe. All of Einstein’s interactions with Prague, from before he arrived until his death, were in some way mediated by this university, and its history looms large in these pages. One cannot understand why the faculty of philosophy offered a position to Einstein, what he encountered when he accepted, nor what transpired afterward without some fairly deep background about that institution.
The university in Prague was founded in 1348, and we could take that date as the creation of the German University as well—there are those who do—although more properly, the latter was created in 1882, when the preceding institution split into a German and a Czech university, separate and not quite equal. As philosopher Carl Stumpf’s words at the beginning of this chapter indicate, one dominant way of viewing the history of Prague is through the lens of a constant conflict between Czechs and Germans—setting aside for the moment the Jews, who will be addressed in a later chapter—reaching all the way back to the medieval period and the rise of the city as Bohemia’s metropolis. I, too, will follow this strand of tension, as it was central for many of the people in the pages that follow, especially those who identified as “German.” It is, however, important not to overstate the clash. While there were periodic conflagrations, for most of the population, most of the time, residents managed to live and work side by side. Historian Tara Zahra calls this “national indifference”: the deep bonds of connection across groups that are often obscured by the flames of nationalism fanned by intellectuals.2 This is all very true, and I will flag that indifference in this chapter and the ones that follow when it appears.
National indifference was not, however, Einstein’s experience of Prague, largely because he experienced the city, at least consciously, almost entirely through interactions with “Germans”—from hereon in I will dispense with the scare quotes unless necessary—and often highly politicized nationalist Germans at that. On one important level, Einstein came to understand Prague through the lens of national (and personal) conflict, and the locus of that conflict was the German University.
* * *
One of the first things he thought to do when it came to Prague was tell his mother. In April 1910, while still settling in after the honeymoon period of his arrival from Bern as the new extraordinary professor of physics at the University of Zurich, Einstein wrote her with exciting news, presented as an aside: “In addition there is something else interesting. I will, most probably, as an ordinary professor with significantly better salary than I now have, be called to a large university. Where it is I am not yet allowed to say.”3 This would have been a notable step up for the former patent clerk who had been unable to secure a job after his graduation from the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. (Einstein had worked at the patent office in Bern from 1902 until 1909.) He had just turned 32 years old, remarkably young for consideration for an ordinary professor post, and after just a year into a term as an extraordinary professor. (A word about terminology: in the university system of the German states, including Austria-Hungary and eastern Switzerland, an extraordinary professor occupied a status similar to an untenured assistant professor; the ordinary professorship was the highest position, “ordinary” because it was part of the statutes of the university and c
ould not be dispensed with.4) Discretion—perhaps also a hint of nervous superstition?—prevented him from stating that the call might come from the German University in Prague.
As with most such openings, this one was the consequence of a retirement, that of Ferdinand Lippich, who had occupied the chair of mathematical physics since 1874 (five years before Einstein was born) and retired on 1 October 1910, three days shy of turning 72. The physicists were members of the faculty of philosophy, and the faculty made the decision to conduct a search to replace Lippich. Not that they had much choice: physics was an important field, and it seemed hard (Lippich’s case notwithstanding) to hold on to talented faculty for long. In 1909 Ernst Lecher, who had succeeded the towering experimentalist and philosopher of science Ernst Mach in 1895 when the latter decamped for Vienna, himself absconded to that city after a relatively short tenure. This had become a usual affair. Prague was broadly perceived by the German professoriate as, if not quite a hardship post, certainly less desirable than positions in Berlin, Munich, or Vienna, and it was a penultimate way station in the musical chairs of Germanophone academia across both the German and Habsburg empires as talent looked for its final resting place. Lippich was a man of the old school, and the German University began seeking someone new, in multiple senses of that term, to replace him.5
The search committee consisted of Anton Lampa (Lecher’s successor), Georg Pick (a senior mathematician who had spent his entire career at Prague), and Viktor Rothmund (a physical chemist).6 The composition of the committee already reveals something important about the search process: it was fundamentally conservative. No institution could cover all of physics, so most chose to concentrate in a few areas in which they were already strong or had the necessary equipment to attract their top choice. The members of the committee were those already there—and often the person retiring hired his (always “his”) own successor—so the choice of where to concentrate was based on these entrenched interests. As the committee empaneled in 1910 stated in its report, the choice of focus was clear: “Modern theoretical physics has experienced its most powerful stimulus from the study of electricity.”7 This would not have been the decision everywhere, as quantum theory and especially its applications to thermodynamics were hot topics (excuse the pun) at many leading faculties. But because of its members’ own backgrounds and concerns, the committee decided “to recommend to the faculty only such researchers to occupy the proposed post who have assumed a position in their works on this most important problem of modern theoretical physics and thus to guarantee that our university will remain secure of a share, corresponding to its tradition, in the further development of theoretical physics.”8 Each member of the committee had his own reasons to prefer this topic. Pick had been the research assistant of Ernst Mach upon his hire at the university; Lampa was an admirer of Mach’s, all of which encouraged them to look for someone who would be consistent with Mach’s empiricist philosophical views; and Rothmund, the most junior of the three, was drawn to related questions of atomic physics. Like all hiring committees, the trio was to come up with a ranked list of three names, filtered by the institution’s preferences.
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