German became the official language of instruction in Prague in July 1784, a little over a year before it replaced Latin at the university in Vienna, though its implementation was complex and by no means universally opposed to the spread of Czech as a scholarly language. As part of Joseph’s reforms, he made six years of basic school attendance compulsory for children across the empire, preferentially in the students’ native language, which had the effect of increasing Czech literacy. Even earlier, in 1774, Joseph’s mother Maria Theresa had created a chair in Czech at the university in Vienna; in 1791 a similar chair, first held by František Martin Pelcl, was established in Prague. Czech was also widely introduced into instruction after 1784 in courses on pastoral theology as well as midwifery, professions that demanded contact with the Czechophone peasantry in the countryside. Yet Latin held on tenaciously. An 1804 imperial decree switched the language used by the philosophical faculty, especially in the fields of philosophy, pure mathematics, and physics, back to Latin, which was still the language of most of the texts. (German was reintroduced in those fields in 1824.)32
There was no mistaking the fact that the university in Prague had shifted from a Latin, Catholic institution to a German-dominated (but still Catholic) one. As Czech literacy spread and intellectuals educated within the university chose to identify themselves with the Czech language and construct a Slavic nationalist vision of Bohemia’s future—a process known as the “revival” (obrození) and its protagonists as “awakeners” (buditelé)—academic journals in both languages proliferated, producing a segmentation of scholarship by language.33 As often happens with bilingualism in contexts of power asymmetry, the Czechs read the German work, but fewer Germans were even cognizant of the extent of their counterparts’ accomplishments.
“In the year 1848,” after the failed European revolutions, which were particularly violent in Prague, noted the fin-de-siècle Czech historian Jaroslav Goll, “the Prague university ceased to be German and became utraquist, which lasted until 1882.”34 Goll’s choice of term is fascinating, reappropriating as it does the Hussite term meaning “of both wafer and wine” to mean “of both German and Czech language.”35 The halls of the university now resounded with lectures on numerous subjects that were offered in either language depending on the capacities and inclinations of the professoriate. In the philosophy faculty, there were Czech lectures in philosophy, aesthetics, zoology, botany, mineralogy, geology, mathematics, general and Austrian history, classical and Slavic philology, geography, chemistry, and physics (both mathematical and experimental).36 As it more than doubled in size, the student body shifted to individuals who identified themselves as primarily speakers of Czech (though data on this front are notoriously soft, especially before the end of the nineteenth century). Self-described “Czechs” grew from 30 percent of the medical faculty to 56 percent, and from 53 percent of the law faculty to 62 percent, while in the philosophical faculty they approached 73 percent and in theology reached as high as 83 percent, meaning that by 1882 the university had shifted from approximate equality in 1855 to roughly two-thirds Czech and one-third German.37 Yet even as the university became more linguistically and demographically diverse internally, the aftershocks of 1848 also pushed its more thorough integration into the broader network of German universities, encompassing those of the German states, Austria, and Switzerland. This was the network that we already saw activated in the search for a physicist that yielded Albert Einstein’s name.
The pressure to reconsider the official policy—German dominant, Czech and other regional languages tolerated on an ad hoc basis—grew across the Habsburg Empire. The university in Budapest had already shifted from German to Hungarian in 1860, and in the 1870s the universities at Kraków and Lviv changed to Polish. Would the university in Prague become Czech as well? There was a comparison closer to hand: the Polytechnic in Prague, the oldest institution of its kind in Austria-Hungary (founded in 1807, eight years before the Vienna Polytechnic). In 1869, the government decided to split the Polytechnic, which had been utraquist since 1863, into two separate institutions, one German and one Czech—a significant transformation of the educational landscape accomplished with remarkably little fuss.38 Even though there were now two separate institutions, which creates the impression of two separate peoples, one should not forget that national indifference was still at play, however asymmetrically. Czechs still regularly went to the German Polytechnic (comprising over 10 percent of the student body in 1900, but declining thereafter), while no Germans ever attended the Czech.39 The Prague Polytechnics offered an alternative model for the university’s future to either continued utraquism or wholesale transformation of an institution into a Czechophone one.40
The question for Prague’s university was: Should it stay united, or would perhaps a split make for better policy? The answer entirely depended on what one thought a preferable outcome to be. Matters reached the breaking point in the early 1880s as the city of Prague grew in both size and prosperity, which intensified a demographic transition within the Bohemian capital that now became visible. In 1880 the Austrian census took explicit note of the “everyday language” (Umgangssprache). Instead of framing inquiries about the population in terms of potentially volatile ethnographic criteria, Viennese officials introduced this option in order to facilitate international comparisons.41 It had the effect of channeling perceived ethnic anxieties into a linguistic frame.42
It is difficult to evaluate these anxieties by a quantitative standard, as the pre- and post-1880 censuses simply collected different data and therefore are not comparable, even when taking into account the increasing density of the city and its significant geographic expansion through its incorporation of new urban regions beyond the traditional four of Old Town, New Town, Lesser Town (Malá Strana), and Hradčany. This inhibits historians’ ability to get a sharp picture of the relative sizes of the populations that chose to identify themselves as either Czech or German. In 1848, counts of the four historical districts tallied 66,046 Germans (66 percent of the total population), overwhelming the remaining Czech population and the 6,400 identified as Jews. The numbers in decades immediately following prove hard to reconcile (sometimes including suburbs later incorporated into Prague’s municipality, sometimes registering Jews, and sometimes doing neither). What is clear is that by 1890 German-speakers did not constitute more than 19 percent of the population of the Old Town, and there were even fewer elsewhere in the city. The newer districts that were integrated into the city from 1883 to 1901 were overwhelmingly Czech-speaking and dropped the proportion further.43
The German population declined for three reasons. Cities across Europe in the nineteenth century ballooned due to migration of rural populations to urban industrial jobs, and this was no less true in Austria-Hungary. There were, however, significant differences in these migrants’ destinations: Czech-identified peasants in the countryside tended to aim for Prague above all; Germans, however, might opt for Berlin or Vienna. As of 1900, for example, 60 percent of Prague’s residents had been born outside the city, and most of these had come from Czechophone villages.44 Together with a low birthrate among German families in the Bohemian capital, these two factors combined to produce the perception of a stark reversal of fortune for Germans. That in turn led to the third reason: the tendency of Prague’s Jews over time to increasingly answer “Czech” on the census when asked about everyday language, a transition that factored into much of the nationalist politicking around Jews in the city.45 Yet despite this, in 1912—during Einstein’s time in the city—when estimates pegged Germans at roughly 7 percent of the population or less, there were still 196 German associations in the city and 36 distinct student groups to service a population of 32,800.46 Feeling beleaguered, German activists abandoned the liberal vision of Germanness as a voluntary identity of progress and moved to a narrower, ethnicized understanding that was increasingly exclusionary.47 The dynamic would bring forth bitter fruit in the 1930s.
Reading back from
the ethnic-baiting disasters that led to World War II—an essential component of Einstein’s relationship with the city in later years—it is understandable that a significant historical literature has emerged that chronicles how the boundaries between two once-neighborly communities developed into an unbridgeable gulf of antagonism, sometimes with the goal of blaming either the Czechs or the Germans for starting it.48 It is easy to take this antagonistic line too far, with the effect of naturalizing the nationalist split rather than explaining it. There remained widespread bilingualism throughout this era, calling into question precisely the simplistic binary answers that the census offered.49 While it is important to remember this, it is also important to note that Einstein did not interact with this fluid, nationally indifferent Prague, because he himself counted as monolingual in this context (his passable French and rudimentary English not being relevant in these surroundings). He was understood, quite simply, as a “German,” for the straightforward reason that his job was, after all, as a professor at the German University. This explicitly tagged his post to the language, and language had by this time become identity. But at our point in the story, not only had Einstein not received the offer thanks to ministerial interference, but there was not even a German University yet.
That would come in 1882. Its reluctant midwife would be Ernst Mach, the physicist who had established the reputation of that science in the Bohemian capital, inspiring the later local enthusiasm for Einstein, and who happened to be during the academic year of 1879–1880 the rector of Prague University, one of the highest posts a professor could attain in Habsburg Bohemia.50 Mach had originally hoped to keep the university together, maintaining its utraquist status but holding onto German leadership, but both political pressures and enrollment realities indicated that if the university stayed united, it would eventually become entirely Czech. To preserve a German institution, the link to tradition had to be sacrificed.51 A petition to divide the university on linguistic lines had in fact been submitted to the emperor as long ago as 12 August 1872, but it took a protracted course through the various houses of representatives, regional and central, before being approved by Emperor Franz Joseph on 11 April 1881 and promulgated in law on 23 February 1882. By that fall, there were two universities in Prague where there had previously been one. (The theology faculty stayed intact and caused Mach no end of problems in his second term as rector—this time only of the German University—in 1883–1884, and he resigned in frustration. It would also divide in 1891.) Both the Czech and German universities were taken to be equal heirs of the original institution promulgated by Charles IV five centuries earlier, but they were both in a more immediate sense equally young, products of the age of mass politics. The university had been split for the third time, and it would be granted a half-century’s reprieve from further trauma.
Administratively, the division could have been nightmarish chaos, but its parts were sorted out relatively quickly, a testament to how much the post-1848 utraquist modus vivendi had already evolved into a divided university in all but name. Individual professors selected which university they wished to join, and research institutes allotted to individual fields followed their directors. The proliferation of institutes was a recent development: between 1878 and 1880, institutes opened for chemistry, zoology, mineralogy and geology, and mathematical and experimental physics.52 Given the realities of who occupied the senior chairs in 1882, that meant most institutes—including the last, where Einstein would work—went to the German University. Obviously, new buildings could not be conjured in an instant, and both philosophical faculties stayed in the Clementinum and both law faculties in the Carolinum, with the two universities sharing the grand hall (Aula), the Germans on even days and the Czechs on odd days, as decided by lot. There was a debate in the medical school as to who would get the cadavers on which days. Students opted to use different doors depending on nationality, and professors in the different universities grew further apart until interaction virtually ceased altogether, with rare exceptions.53
The Czech University emerged from the split with almost no institutes and persistently underfunded, but triumphant. Goll would recall it 20 years later as the end of an extended conflict, of which Bohemia had seen so many: “We strode through this period more beside one another than with one another, without love but also without hate—neque odio, neque amore—but still as neighbors that live and let live. It was like an armistice.”54 The student population grew enormously at the Czech University, an outcome that could have easily been predicted, as Czech-speakers had only one university to attend while German-speakers had dozens. By 1910 the Czech University had 4,128 students, while the German had 1,733. Nonetheless, Vienna offered 1,763,000 crowns to the Czech University, only 151,000 more than the German was allotted. The disparity was most evident at the medical school, where the German University could disburse 769,300 crowns for its 344 students, while the Czech had to make do with 724,400 for its 631.55 Student numbers kept dropping on the German side and rising on the Czech, while the faculty lines stayed equivalent at both institutions.56 If this was a peace treaty, it is unclear who won the war.
Faculty at the German University jealously fought to hold onto the privileges they had even as their status slipped, further encouraging younger faculty to seek more prestigious positions elsewhere. Without the willingness of some Czech students to attend science courses at the German University the situation would have been even worse; although many Czechs boycotted the twin institution, there was still crossover in mathematics, physics, and medicine. It did not work the other way: while in 1900 there were 77 native-speaking Czechs at the German University, and in 1910 there were 45, there were zero native-speaking Germans at the Czech University in either of those years.57 In 1909 the city council issued a glossy brochure entitled Prague as a German City of Higher Education to entice German-speaking students from abroad to come study there, despite what they might have heard about the Czech character of the city.58 The challenge of attracting German students was analogous to the problem of attracting German professors, and Albert Einstein was precisely the kind of young, exciting person who could help boost the visibility of the institution vis-à-vis its burgeoning Czech counterpart.59 That is, if the faculty were ever permitted to make him an offer. Now that we have seen some of the deep context that structured the tragicomedy of the quest to bring Einstein to Prague, it is time to return to where we left him: in limbo.
* * *
Minister von Stürgkh would not accept the initial list sent him by the Prague physicists. It just would not do. He informed Lampa, Pick, and Rothumnd that he would invert the order of the top two candidates on the list and make the offer instead to Gustav Jaumann. (There was no solace for Emil Kohl, whose progress had once again stalled at third place.) There was nothing especially unusual about this, from the point of view of either ministerial meddling with rank ordering or the choice of Jaumann.
If anything, Lampa should have expected it. When the position he currently occupied had opened up at the German University, a committee of the faculty (including Lippich and Pick, as well as three others) had contacted professors at other institutions to come up with a rank-order list and in June 1909 had ranked Anton Lampa second. In the first position they had placed Johannes Stark, then at the technical university of Aachen, who would later discover the Stark effect (the splitting of an atom’s spectral lines in an electric field) and win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1919. He would also famously become an early supporter of Adolf Hitler, a leader in the anti-Semitic campaign for an “Aryan Physics” against the so-called “Jewish Physics” of relativity and quantum theory, and an important scientific administrator in the Nazi state in the 1930s. But that was all in the future; at this moment he was a prominent experimental physicist at the cutting edge of the science. He was also a Bavarian and a citizen of the German Reich. Lampa was closer to home. Born in Budapest in 1868, he had grown up in various towns in Bohemia, studied at the University of Vienna, and
habilitated there in 1897, experimenting with Hertz electromagnetic waves. When von Stürkgh, already minister of education, received the rank-order list in 1909, he opted for Lampa because he was Austrian, full stop. (The physicist who came in third, Stefan Meyer, was a colleague of Lampa’s from Vienna.) Lampa had gladly taken the job, but now he was frustrated that the same ministerial trick was working against him.60 (To add a further irony to this game of musical chairs, when Jaumann had been hired at Brno, Lampa had been in third position.)61
Bureaucratic fiat was, naturally, irritating, but Jaumann was not at all an absurd person to be ranked ahead of Einstein. Given that every reader of these lines knew quite a bit about Einstein before picking up this book yet has likely never heard of Jaumann, that statement requires a bit of explanation. Gustav Jaumann was born on 18 April 1863 in Karánsebes in the Kingdom of Hungary (now Caransebeş in southwestern Romania), and his family moved to Prague when he was a child. He studied at the universities in both Vienna and Prague, beginning his doctorate at the latter under Ernst Mach in 1884. Mach immediately hired the talented student as an assistant, and Jaumann implemented important improvements in the electrometer for the lab. He earned his Ph.D. in April 1890 and habilitated an astonishing six months later. In 1893 he jointly authored a textbook with Mach and was hired as an extraordinary professor at the German University. He left for the polytechnic in Brno in 1903.62 Jaumann was, in short, a local and familiar candidate in 1910. Yet he was placed behind Einstein, which had something to do with not only the latter’s astonishing recent achievements, but also some of the aversion that comes with familiarity.
Einstein in Bohemia Page 5