Their choice for primo loco, or first position, was clear: “Einstein’s research on the electrodynamics of moving bodies has made a new era.”9 This assessment came with the highest of imprimaturs, that of Max Planck, the leader of German theoretical physics, from his post in Berlin. When writing to leading colleagues from other institutions about whom they should consider, Planck—who had published all of Einstein’s 1905 “miracle year” papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and relativity theory in the Annalen der Physik, which he edited—lauded the work of the young Zurich professor:
It surpasses in boldness everything that has been achieved so far in speculative natural science, indeed in philosophical epistemology, so that non-Euclidean geometry is child’s play by comparison. And in fact the relativity principle, in contrast to non-Euclidean geometry—which up to now has only seriously come into use in pure mathematics—claims with full justification a real physical significance. With the extent and depth of the revolution in the domain of the physical worldview summoned by this principle one can only compare that caused by the introduction of the Copernican world system.10
It was somewhat unusual to propose for such a chair an extraordinary professor of such recent vintage, but the committee members were convinced that the only reason Einstein had not yet received an ordinarius post was his youth. Prague could get in early on a good thing. “Without a doubt Einstein has had the deepest influence on the development of modern theoretical physics,” they wrote, “and there is no doubt that theoretical research in the coming years will entirely follow the path that he has blazed.”11
It remained to fill out the other two positions on the list. The second was equally easy: Gustav Jaumann, ordinary professor of physics at the polytechnic in Brno (known in German as Brünn), who had been an extraordinary professor at the German University in Prague before being promoted to the chair in Moravia. Jaumann was thus more familiar to the locals, but for that reason also a bit riskier, as the committee noted: “Jaumann’s position in contemporary physics is an isolated one; this is connected on the one hand with the fact that his entire mode of thinking diverges from the mode of thinking of the dominant theory, on the other hand it is however also not characteristic of his mode of presentation to attract those who think differently to a closer engagement with his theory.”12 Although they provided a list of honors for Jaumann—which they had not done for Einstein—and noted that he was more senior in age, there was a distinct lack of enthusiasm for this familiar face. Hence, secondo loco. If Einstein turned them down, they would settle for Jaumann.
The committee named Emil Kohl to the third position on the list. There was little to say about Kohl, and the committee included all of it in their report. He was from Vienna, where he had received his doctorate in 1890—15 years before Einstein had earned his—and had then taught in secondary school while working on his habilitation, the second doctorate required for a professorship at a German university. He received this in 1903 also from Vienna and had been named as tertio loco for a post in Czernowitz (in the far eastern reaches of the Habsburg Empire) only recently. Needless to say, the job went to someone higher on the list, and he remained as an instructor (Privatdozent) in Vienna, working on fluid dynamics and waves in matter, including seismic phenomena.13 This was not someone working at the cutting edge of electromagnetism, nor someone who had strong connections to Mach, as did Jaumann and—as we shall see in a later chapter—Einstein.
Had he been granted the opportunity to read the report when it was sent off to the Ministry of Education, Planck would have been pleased, as would any of the leading theoretical physicists in German space. This was a list designed to hire one and only one outstanding candidate: Albert Einstein. The ministry, however, had other plans. In July 1910, as a postscript to a letter to Arnold Sommerfeld, professor of theoretical physics in Munich, Einstein related the bad news: “I am not going to Prague. The Ministry has—as I learn from Prague—made difficulties.”14 The minister of education, Karl von Stürgkh, as was his prerogative, had inverted the order of the first and second positions. Jaumann received the call.
To make sense of this decision, it is essential to understand both why there was a German University in Prague and the difficult status of this institution within an empire run out of Vienna. This means stepping back—way back—to the long history of the university in Prague. Einstein almost certainly knew almost none of what follows, but that does not mean it did not matter to him every day he spent in the city. We start in the fourteenth century.
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For some German nationalists both in Einstein’s time and since, there had always been a German University in Prague, and it had been founded in 1348 by Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, who made the Bohemian capital the center of his empire.15 Arguments about continuity that last for centuries are hard to pull off, especially in Central Europe, where dynastic tumult and catastrophic warfare have more often been the rule than the exception, and so it proves here. Much of the confusion stems from semantic ambiguity about what precisely one means when calling a university “German.”
The Holy Roman Empire, which Charles IV helmed, is often called, in German, the first German Reich—in reference to which the Nazis would, in time, name their dominion the third—but Charles was also the king of Bohemia. Born in Prague to a mother of the Přemyslid dynasty, he had been raised in France and Italy, represented the House of Luxembourg, and spoke Czech as well as German (but preferred Spanish). Is “German” supposed to be an ethnic category? If so, it is devilishly difficult to figure out what the students of the university Charles founded might have defined themselves as, even if one were to irresponsibly set aside decades of debate about what “ethnicity” might have meant in medieval Europe. Therefore people who want to make this argument often turn to language: if the university denizens spoke German, they were Germans. But from its foundation, the university in Prague, like all universities in Central and Western Europe until centuries later, was run in Latin. Insistence on a national identification of the university is pointless when referring to the historical origins of the university and only became meaningful, and pointed, in the nineteenth century.
What we can say for certain is that a Slavic people who called themselves Czechs had established a dynasty (the Přemyslid) centuries before the establishment of a university, and also that before the twelfth century there were already people who spoke German living and working among the Czechs.16 Over time Prague grew, and grew prosperous, and Charles IV wanted to see his capital become a major metropolis. He executed a number of building projects and reforms to elevate the city, such as the founding of the New Town in March 1348 across the Vltava (Moldau) River from the Hradčany castle that still towers over the city. Creating a university fit directly into these ambitions. The pope approved Charles’s request to establish a studium generale on 26 January 1347, and the emperor acted by issuing an imperial and royal charter for the institution on 7 April 1348. This meant that theology could now be taught in the heart of Europe, and faculties of arts and medicine were also created at this time. (The law faculty was organized somewhat separately in 1372.)17 Very quickly the institution began to attract students from both the region and farther afield, and this very attractiveness contained the seed of later problems.
The medieval university needed to organize its burgeoning student and faculty population somehow, and the statutes of 1360 borrowed a technique from the arts faculty at the University of Paris—which otherwise had a quite different governance structure—to separate the population into four nationes based on land of origin and then make decisions, such as who was to serve as rector, with each group casting a vote.18 The term nationes is one of those pernicious false cognates that might make one think that it had something to do with “nations,” and perhaps even “nationalism” in our modern sense. (Nationalist interpretations of the university appropriating it in precisely this manner don’t help.) But the nationes were quite explicitly geographic
rather than ethnic, and each comprised speakers of many languages—all of whom were at the very least bilingual, since they did all university business in Latin. The Bohemian natio included students and faculty from Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, and neighboring territories. The Bavarian natio comprised those from Bavaria, Austria, Tyrol, Frankia, Swabia, Switzerland, Hessen, the Rhineland, the Netherlands, Westphalia, and part of Hannover—many of the contemporary residents of these areas would be rather shocked to be regarded as “Bavarian.” (Einstein himself would have fallen in this natio, either as a Swabian or as a Swiss.) The two remaining nationes were the Saxon (Brandenburg, Braunschweig, the Hanseatic cities, Mecklenburg, Lower Saxony, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and the Baltics) and the Polish (Poland, Lithuania, Prussia, Schleswig, Thuringia, Saxony, and others). None of these populations, it should be obvious, was homogeneous, and each accounted for a different proportion of the student body across the first half-century of the university. Over this period the Bohemian natio grew from 12 to 22 percent of the university’s graduates, while the Polish grew even more, from 16 to 30 percent, and the Bavarian started at 30 percent before dropping to 20 percent.19 Of course, there were conflicts—what university system does not have them?—but when they occurred they were more likely to be theological and confessional than anything else.
It was just such a confessional dispute that led to the first of three major divisions of the university in Prague, that of 1409. The problem had started about 25 years earlier, when the papal schism of 1378—during which one pontiff decamped to Avignon and the other held fast in Rome, both decrying the illegitimacy of the other—sent shockwaves across Latin Christendom that finally hit Bohemia in 1384. The theological masters and doctors of the university debated which side to support, but the question was not only, or even not primarily, a doctrinal one. For Wenceslaus IV, Charles’s son and successor, it was a political dilemma of significant proportions, and he wanted backing from the university to be neutral in the dispute. (He also wanted to set up a third pope in the German states, but never mind that now.) The Bohemian natio was willing to support him, but the other three were for Rome. To get the desired result, Wenceslaus did what short-sighted rulers have done repeatedly before and since: he amended the franchise. He granted the Bohemians three votes to the others’ single vote in a decree issued at Kutná Hora (Kuttenberg) in 1409.20
That solved one problem and created a whole slew of others. The Polish, Saxon, and Bavarian nationes—both students and masters—preferred to leave rather than put up with second-class status. Between 500 and 800 members of the university community pulled up stakes, some of them founding another great school at Leipzig, others heading to recent establishments in Heidelberg, Erfurt, Vienna, or Cologne.21 (The Polish natio particularly preferred nearby Leipzig.) These numbers were sizable, given that the city as a whole had a population on the order of 40,000 at this time. For later nationalists of both Czech and German persuasion, this was the first split of the university, and whether it was interpreted as a triumph of national reclamation of a local institution from foreigners or as a catastrophe born of xenophobia depended on one’s slant. Indisputable across the political spectrum is that the Decree of Kutná Hora diminished the stature of Prague from that of a European city to that of a regional one. As even R. W. Seton-Watson, British historian, political activist, and devoted advocate of Czechoslovak nationhood, put it evenhandedly in 1943: “That Prague had been the intellectual centre of the whole Reich under Charles IV is true; that it was no longer so after the lapse of a generation is equally certain.”22 That same year, Nazi historian Wolfgang Wolfram von Wolmar could only concur: “The work of the German emperor Charles IV, the first university of the empire, was degraded by his incompetent son into a provincial school and was stripped of its European reputation.”23 It is unlikely that these two would agree on anything else.
The decline of the influence of Prague’s university in the fifteenth century was probably overdetermined, however, as Bohemia was during this period engulfed in the traumatic religious conflict known as the Hussite Wars. Jan Hus, after whom this strife is named, was not himself a violent man. A product of the University of Prague, he was ordained as a priest in 1400, at the high point of the city’s intellectual life. Two years later he began advocating a reform of certain church practices along some of the lines proposed by the influential Oxonian John Wyclif. Symbolically most salient to Hus’s followers (though not to Hus himself) was the demand that at Holy Communion the parishioners receive both the wafer and the chalice—that is, “of both kinds,” sub utraque specie in Latin. Those who later marched under the banner of Hus’s martyrdom eventually adopted the term “Utraquist” to designate their interpretation of Catholic doctrine, and for over two centuries they functioned in Bohemia as a semi-independent entity, often conducting services in Czech (as Hus also had).24 The price of that quasi-autonomy was enormous bloodshed, which broke out after the fiery execution of Hus as a heretic at the Council of Constance in 1415. The violence swept across the region, eventually endowing Hus and the later Hussites with the retrospective reputation as forerunners of Martin Luther’s Reformation and the ensuing wars of religion.25
Throughout this period, the university continued to exist, functioning very much as a regional university. In 1417, it declared itself officially Utraquist, and within two years the Catholic masters had left Prague. They remained excluded from the university until 1462, though even after that date limited Catholic influence lingered. A century later, in 1562, the Catholic Counter-Reformation sent the recently established Jesuit order to Prague to set up a separate institution of higher education that would exist in parallel with the Utraquist university: a “Clementinum” to the preexisting “Carolinum.” And so the university in Prague was again divided, although in this instance the split was initiated by the establishment of a new, unintegrated school. Once again, the issue was not language or ethnicity—though it would later be interpreted as such by nationalists of both persuasions—but a confessional standoff between Catholics and Utraquists.26
Thus Prague had two distinct universities in 1618, when two imperial officials and a secretary were thrown out of a window at Prague Castle onto a dung heap and set off what would later come to be known as the Thirty Years’ War. This conflict lasted a much shorter time in Prague. In November 1620, on a hill just east of the city (today, inside its perimeter) named White Mountain (Bílá Hora), Utraquist forces were defeated by the Habsburg armies of Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II, aided by the Catholic League, and the Counter-Reformation arrived in Prague in earnest. The symbolism of the defeat at White Mountain—interpreted later as the attempted extirpation of the Czech nation, but at the time seen as the beginning of the end of the Utraquist Church—still resonates within Czech political mythology.27
The re-Catholicization of Bohemia reached into all aspects of life in the region, and the university was no exception.28 The split within the institution came to an end with the abolition of the Utraquist Carolinum two days after White Mountain, though its remnants were united with the Clementinum in 1654 as the now-renamed “Charles-Ferdinand University.” The fusion was done faculty by faculty, with the Clementinum controlling the religiously sensitive theological and philosophical faculties (which included what would later become the natural sciences), and the Carolinum holding onto medicine, law, and the ceremonial functions of the university. Administratively, the Jesuits were displaced from their control of the institution (though they were still very prominent in teaching), and it was set directly under the control of the monarch.29 The institution remained Habsburg, Catholic, and Latin-speaking until the end of the eighteenth century, when a series of reforms from Rome and then Vienna began a new chapter.
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On 21 July 1773, Pope Clement XV dissolved the Jesuit order. Given the prominence of Jesuits within the halls of the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, this had enormous implications. The university became no less Catholic, but it did becom
e significantly less Latin. With the Jesuits gone—the order finally left Bohemia in 1781—the pressure to conduct courses in that language began to slacken. German began to creep in as a language of instruction.30 This was the default replacement for a number of reasons: First, correspondence between Bohemia and Vienna was conducted in German, while Czech, associated with Utraquism and rebellion, had been suppressed in the elite circles that fed the university. Second, Emperor Joseph II had proclaimed German the language of administration for the multilingual Habsburg Empire, a move made for efficiency of administration more than any other reason, and in 1781 he issued his Edict of Toleration (Toleranzpatent), which removed certain restrictions on non-Catholic Christians (though it also contained a series of strictures designed to assimilate and Germanize Jews). Both reforms ended up Germanizing the character of the university.31 Lutherans and Calvinists could now attend the institution. The close temporal juxtaposition of these various changes focused attention on the university as a politically sensitive space, and a linguistic one at that.
Einstein in Bohemia Page 4