None of this seems to have registered in any tangible way with Einstein, at least not enough to leave a trace in a letter, a notebook, or a reminiscence of a friend. All this fervor both gymnastic and granite invigorated the city’s overwhelming Czech majority yet passed the physics professor at the German University by. He surely observed it, and just as surely put it out of his mind. This chapter is about the Prague Einstein did see and the Prague he did not. Rather than comparing a “German Prague” to a “Czech Prague” in a fashion that would resonate with the boosters behind the Palacký project, Einstein was involved in a different set of binaries. Prague was his new home. He began to assemble impressions of the city, understandably drawing them by contrast to Zurich, the Swiss metropole he had left. It was not a flattering comparison for Bohemia: Zurich was for Einstein an anti-Prague, and Prague became an anti-Zurich. All of his comments on his new environs bear the implicit or explicit mark of its failure to live up to his standards. Einstein’s understanding of himself as a displaced Swiss structured his contradictory feelings toward the city, while his social milieu, including some of the leading Germanophone intellectuals of the day, simply registered him as a German joining their island in the Slavic sea. He may have forgotten it all after he left, but while there his interactions with the city were passionate, heavily gendered, and ultimately superficial—though no less strongly felt for their lack of depth.
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Einstein would later harbor a fondness for Czechoslovakia, the state that would emerge out of the ashes of the Habsburg Empire in 1918, with its capital in Prague. This affection clearly colored the stories he would tell his friends, family, and early biographers about his time in the city, generating the impression that he had spent his three semesters at the German University most contentedly. In a 1930 biography, Einstein’s stepson-in-law Rudolf Kayser—writing as Anton Reiser, partly as a concession to the physicist, who objected to the whole project and forbade its publication in Germany (he acceded to its appearance abroad)—painted a poetic vision of Prague that bears some traces of the oral exchanges from which it must have been drawn:
He was in provincial Austria, a land of nationalist struggles; in an old romantic city of Catholic tradition. The old buildings, the dark streets, the magic of ruin, evoked an atmosphere of a decidedly artistic sort. The gravestones of the old Jewish cemetery told a thousand years’ story of his race. Einstein’s artist’s nature was stirred by all this.
He had gone with fear and misgiving to his new home. He soon felt adapted to his conditions; the city filled him with enthusiasm. In contrast to his first experiences at Zurich, his position pleased him.12
Einstein’s most important biographer and successor as professor of physics at the German University, Philipp Frank, likewise wrote that Einstein “often remembered his stay in Prague, where he learned to value the Austrian people, with pleasure. He had never shared the Prussians’ suspicious views about the Austrians.”13 Even Hans Albert, Einstein’s elder son, who had been old enough to retain his own memories of the city, corrected a Czechoslovak journalist in the 1970s about misapprehensions that Einstein had not liked the city: “If they say that my father was not enthusiastic about Prague, they are greatly misled. He loved Prague and he spoke about it with enthusiasm even many years later.”14
Hans Albert and the others aside, Einstein’s correspondence of the time presents a very different picture, one that started with superficial exoticization and ended in grumpy complaining. The process began with his first letter back to Zurich on 5 April 1911, as he looked on the new adventure with anticipation: “We arrived here after a wearying journey & right away have already found an apartment. But there are countless difficulties to overcome when you arrive to such different and unfamiliar conditions.”15 Two days later, after moving out of a hotel and into the apartment on Třebízkého ulice, he sent a letter to his close Zurich friend, the physician Heinrich Zangger, which framed the city as a land of picturesque sites and seething nationalist tensions:
Prague is a beautiful city to look at. The people are, each according their own destiny, arrogant, shabby-genteel, obsequious. They are masters in cooking. A certain grace is present in many of them. Houses & surroundings are somewhat dirty & gone to seed. The animosity between Germans & Czechs appears significant. Example. I ask our institute’s porter where one can find wool blankets. My predecessor—Herr Lippich—learns that he had recommended to us a store owned by a Czech. He immediately sends his maid to us to ask me to buy the blankets in a “German” shop.16
Virulent nationalism was the exception rather than the rule among the residents of Bohemia, but Einstein had no way of knowing that. His interaction with his predecessor shaped his approach to the city. While he would never adopt the nationalist rhetoric of Lippich or his colleague Anton Lampa, he would not hesitate by November to tell Zangger in a letter that Bohemians were intrinsically dishonest.17
Indeed, Einstein continually oscillated between feelings of tremendous satisfaction in his new position and acute frustration, the latter often directed at the residents of Prague—understood implicitly to be the Czech majority. In a letter to Michele Besso, Einstein began with praise of his wonderful institute and his hopes to get a lot of work done over the summer before slipping with virtually no transition into a complaint that “the people are alien to me” in Prague. “There are absolutely no people with natural feeling: unemotional and a peculiar mix of snobbish and servile, without any sort of goodwill toward their fellows. Ostentatious luxury next to creeping misery on the streets. A bleakness of thought without faith.”18
Visitors brought back the familiar, often making the situation worse by reminding him of how pleasant life was elsewhere. After almost a year in the city, he included in a chatty missive to family friends, Alfred and Clara Stern, an extended diatribe about Prague:
In winter I had a visit from my mother and from a school friend & thus became properly acquainted with the architectural beauties of Prague. A short stay in Prague—only for pleasure—is extraordinarily worth it. But here life has its dubious dark side. No drinkable water[.] Much misery alongside boasting and arrogance. Class prejudices. Little true cultivation [Bildung]. Everything is byzantine and priest-ridden. My older bear-cub must go to Catholic religious instruction and—horribile dictu—to church. The ink-shitting at the office is endless—everything, so it seems, to give the retinue of scribes in the state chancelleries an apparent justification for existence (That sentence is not bad; if it were printed it would perhaps be memorialized in your pretty collection). When I come to the institute, a servile person smelling of alcohol bows and says “most obedient servant.” Something like individuality is uncommon here, is also only rarely found among the students. Surely the Imperial gymnasium professors have already corrupted a good deal. But there are nonetheless a few splendid chaps among my students.19
It goes without saying that this was an unfair representation of the city and its residents, but it is a revealing one. Notice that he had lived in the city for months without taking the opportunity to acquaint himself with the major sights—it was only his mother’s visit that had roused him to become a tourist. This ignorance of the town’s attractions had not prevented him after only a month in residence from trying to entice Besso to visit in the same letter quoted earlier. Writing to Zangger a little later, one sees the surface images already tainted by dissatisfaction with people: “Thus I hope to get you to spill the beans and at the same time show you the wonderfully beautiful city, the city of these barbarians. These people truly have a backwards culture. I have so far not discovered true scientific interests among my colleagues, only a certain haughtiness.”20 (Both friends eventually came for visits.)21
Einstein’s views of life in Prague were based on surface impressions, generalizations of a few encounters to entire classes of people. Without spending years in a place, indeed, it is hard to understand how else one would build up a picture of a city. Such superficiality had also marked
his arrival in Bern, which he explored before assuming his post at the patent office. “It is charming here in Bern. An antiquated, extremely cozy city in which [one] can live exactly as in Zurich,” he had written to his fiancée, Mileva Marić. “On both sides of the streets stretch really old arcade passages, so that even in the heaviest rain one can go from one end of the city to the other without becoming noticeably wet. In the houses it is uncommonly clean, I saw this everywhere yesterday when I looked for my room.”22
Prague did not generate such happy associations. One senses that his frustration with his colleagues, with the quality of the students, and with the stalling of his quest for general relativity all had something to do with his exasperation. “As good as I have it here superficially, I cannot shake the feeling of being in a kind of exile,” he wrote to Carl Schröter, professor of botany at the ETH, in early February 1912. “One who has spent his formative years in a democratic society cannot properly get used to such a caste system as they have here. One never stops finding the nobility and dignity nonsense comical. Since I’ve been here, I now properly know how to value the simple and healthy habits and customs of the Swiss. Here there is also none of that lively scientific interest among the students as in Zurich.”23 The capital of Bohemia could never live up to the image of his former city on the lake.
Even before he had begun to entertain the idea of returning to Zurich, Einstein started to position it as the anti-Prague in almost every reference to his environment. Where Zurich was imagined clean, he rendered Prague dirty; where Zurich was imagined modern, he rendered Prague backward. Where Zurich was deemed “German,” Prague was identified as Slav. “I like it very much, even if Prague is no Zurich,” he wrote within three weeks of arrival. “I have an institute with a rather good library and few official duties. I already work the whole day in the institute, at present about molecular motion in solid bodies. Also new research on radiation theory is planned. Truly otherwise it is different here than in Zurich. The air is full of soot, the water is life-threatening, the people are superficial, shallow, and uncouth, if also, as it seems, in general good-hearted.”24 But there was no need to worry, he affirmed two months later; they would get by: “Things go well for us here, even though life here is not so entirely pleasant as in Switzerland, quite besides the fact that we are strangers here. There is no water here that you can drink before boiling it. The population for the most part cannot speak German and acts hostile toward Germans. Even the students are less intelligent and industrious as in Switzerland. But I have a beautiful institute with a rich library.”25
Einstein’s reaction to the Bohemians and to his new circumstances was knee-jerk, prejudiced, and highly stereotypical—down to the complaint about potable water, a staple of entitled travelers’ accounts then and now—but it was also completely human. He and his young family were largely alone. They were without friends and social ties in a city where doing one’s shopping often posed a linguistic challenge. It was natural to compare Prague to Zurich, the only city in his peripatetic life where he (and his wife, as we shall see) had fully felt at home. Yet Einstein’s continuous presentation of Prague as backward significantly distorts certain facts. First, with a population of over half a million, Prague was vastly larger than Zurich. Einstein, who had not lived in such a large city since his teenage years in Munich, was rather taken aback by its size. Prague was also modern in terms of infrastructure. When the Einsteins had moved to Bern, they had had to use oil lamps to light their home; in Zurich, they had used gas; in Prague, they had electricity (and a live-in maid).26 One might think that the son of a man who had made his living wiring cities for power would have had a greater appreciation for Prague’s sophistication in this regard.
Interestingly, this personal contrast of Bohemia with Switzerland had a persistent cultural resonance. Not only the Einsteins, it seems, contemplated Prague and Zurich together. When reading through contemporary sources from the decades before and after Einstein’s tenure in Prague, one comes across a host of references contemplating Switzerland as a model for Bohemia. These comparisons all had two main characteristics: they were broadly optimistic, and they were narrowly political.
To compare Bohemia with Switzerland was to juxtapose a subordinate region of a sprawling land empire to a sovereign nation, and that was precisely the reason why Czech nationalist activists did so. By focusing on the obvious similarities between the two regions—landlocked, economically productive, and, most important of all, containing a multilingual populace—these writers used Switzerland as a metaphorical tool after the revolutions of 1848, when it was invoked by Augustin Smetana to render thinkable the notion of an independent Bohemia.27 (Or perhaps a federated Habsburg domain in which Bohemia was granted significant regional autonomy; the Swiss model was flexible depending on the scale on which it was applied.)28 Before the emergence of the Helvetic analogy, perhaps the most dominant activist comparison for the Bohemian situation was with Daniel O’Connell’s Irish Repeal movement, which stressed the notion of Bohemia as colonized by Austrian Germans; this proved substantially less palatable to the international community, and its use decreased in frequency across the nineteenth century.29
The heyday of the Swiss/Bohemian twinning was the Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War I, when Edvard Beneš, the foreign minister of the new state of Czechoslovakia, repeatedly invoked Switzerland as a way of assuring the great powers that his country, broken off from the now-extinct multiethnic and multilingual Habsburg Empire, would be able to protect its own multiethnic and multilingual minority groups, which included a sizable proportion (approaching one-third of the population) of German-identified citizens. Although this argument did not gain much traction with the ambassadors present, Beneš returned to it again and again.30 The comparison remained a talking point in the 1920s, even as the majority of the Czechoslovak “German” political parties pursued a policy of noncooperation with the state. Prague philosopher Emanuel Rádl, for example, sought to reassure a Germanophone readership that the minorities had nothing to fear, since their situation “is also the case in Switzerland between the German- and the French-speaking population and, as I believe, also in Canada between the French and the English.”31
All of these developments lay in the future during Albert Einstein’s time in Prague, however, when he was seemingly unaware of the occasional musing about the vitality of Switzerland as an exemplar for the more politically attuned and creative of his contemporaries. The political version of the Swiss analogy functioned at the scale of Bohemia as a whole, considering the Czechs and Germans counterparts of the dominant Germans and French in the Alpine confederation. (Other nationalities like Hungarians and Jews were left out of the former framework, much as the Italians were left out of the latter.) Einstein’s anti-Prague of Zurich worked on a much smaller scale. His mental Switzerland was not a multilingual country; it was a monolingual, Germanophone city. As in Zurich, his entire social circle in Prague consisted of people who identified themselves as “Germans,” with the important exception of his wife. What follows is an exploration of the contours of this space, working inward to his domestic sphere from the public world that an ordinary professor at the German University was expected to inhabit.
* * *
The first important social event for anyone in that position was the inaugural lecture. On 23 May 1911, about a month and a half after Einstein’s arrival in the city and the beginning of his first semester of teaching, the German-language newspaper Bohemia carried an advertisement that the following day, at 7 p.m., those who arrived at the lecture hall of the physics institute of the university (they meant the German University, naturally) would have the chance “to meet our university’s new theoretical physicist, Professor Einstein, who will speak about a topic from his research specialization, the relativity principle, in which he has achieved outstanding things.” In order to induce the cultivated strata of the German elite to attend, the advertisement added an additional blandishment: “In co
nclusion the Viennese representative of the Zeiss firm of Jena will demonstrate some beautiful experiments with a new filter apparatus for ultraviolet light.”32
We do not have a transcript of the talk that Einstein gave, which we know covered the special theory of relativity, but by all accounts it was a success. Gerhard Kowalewski, a newly arrived professor of mathematics at the German Polytechnic in Prague and over the course of a year a member of Einstein’s relatively small social circle, was blown away. “The impression which his inaugural lecture made on me is unforgettable,” he wrote in his memoirs. “The entire Prague intelligentsia had gathered and filled the largest lecture hall which could be found in the natural-scientific institutes.… Many listeners were astonished that relativity theory was something so simple. Einstein described his theory in a masterful manner for the broader circles of the educated.”33 Einstein was also impressed with Kowalewski and put him on a list of three nominees when a position opened up for a mathematician at the German University, next to Viennese scholar Hans Hahn, one of the initial drivers behind the philosophical movement that would flourish into the Vienna Circle.34 In 1912, shortly after Einstein left the university, Kowalewski joined its faculty.
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