Kowalewski was one of the many acquaintances from Einstein’s 16 months in Prague who reached out to him in later years in hopes of rekindling former connections. “Do you still remember me, Professor G. Kowalewski, from your regrettably so brief time in Prague?” he wrote to the physicist in 1922. “I am now professor of pure mathematics at the Dresden Polytechnic”—he had moved in 1920, shortly after Czechoslovak independence. “My wife really wanted to leave Prague, and in Dresden there was such a good and honorable opportunity.… Only in the hope that you still have a little interest in me from your time in Prague do I dare to burden your time with such things.”35 Einstein responded to the scientific content of the rest of the letter but did not mention Prague, nor did he refer to it in a further epistolary exchange with Kowalewski in 1926.36
Noteworthy here is not that a former colleague wished to approach someone who was now a global celebrity—that is understandable enough—but the frequency of such missives in his later years, which raises a deeper point. Einstein did not simply arrive in Prague, work on general relativity, and then leave. On the contrary, he participated quite actively in the various forms of bourgeois sociability that were typical of that time and place. He was not a professor at the German University in title alone; he performed that post’s cultural role just as fully. Prague was not a way station for Einstein, at least upon his arrival there in spring 1911. He set about building a network of friends and was especially keen to find a group of acquaintances with whom he could play violin. His mathematician colleague Georg Pick had a quartet in which Einstein participated (as Kowalewski tells us), but the physicist was always looking for more places where he could socialize musically.37 It was in this capacity that he first became acquainted with Bertha Fanta and her salon.
Fanta held regular gatherings at her home above her husband Max’s successful pharmacy, the Unicorn, directly on the Old Town Square. A circle of Germanophone intellectuals, many Jewish but also some (like Kowalewski) not, convened there to discuss philosophy and literature, gossip, and play music. Kowalewski tells us that “Einstein also sometimes appeared at these evenings.”38 The philosopher, Zionist, and university librarian Hugo Bergmann—who was married to Fanta’s daughter Else—attended some of Einstein’s courses as an auditor and claimed that he was the one who first brought Einstein over to the Fantas’, where Bergmann regarded him as “a frequent visitor.”39 Regardless of how often Einstein came, we know that he appeared enough to make an impression. It was at this house that the possible sole meeting between Franz Kafka and Einstein took place, as the young writer was also an occasional attendee, although he became increasingly reluctant to visit, complaining to his close friend Max Brod in 1914: “Tomorrow I’m not coming to Fanta’s; I don’t like going there.”40
Kafka may not have enjoyed the Fanta circle, but many others did. Bertha Fanta was widely regarded as a remarkable woman. Born into the Sohr family in Libochowitz (now Libochovice) in 1866, she moved early to Prague and spent most of her life there. We know little about her childhood, how she met Max, or the early years of their marriage, but she did leave an extended set of autobiographical notes about her journey into the philosophy of Franz Brentano, a rare first-person testimony from a woman of this era.41 In the early years of the twentieth century, she was the center of a salon that met at the Louvre Café at the edge of the Old Town and was mostly devoted to adoring discussions of Brentano’s philosophy. (Max Brod was ostensibly expelled from the circle for a story he had written in which a womanizing civil servant was presented as a Brentano adherent.)42 Kafka, who had attended the Louvre Café gatherings even before Brod, left with his friend in sympathy—though, to be frank, he had also grown tired of it, much as he would of Fanta’s subsequent domestic salon.43
As her new circle developed, Fanta, heavily under the influence of Bergmann, shifted her emphasis toward literature and also Zionism. (She was also very fond of the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, who visited her house whenever he was in the city.)44 Bergmann remained devoted to his mother-in-law, dedicating his 1913 book on the philosophy of math to her and lamenting her 1918 death even 15 years later.45 Max Brod, too, was deeply moved by Fanta’s sudden death, presenting one of the eulogies at her funeral. As he wrote about the loss to Kafka: “Now a heavy blow has struck me: the sudden death of Mrs. Bertha Fanta, that you surely know about from today’s newspaper. I really liked this woman. She was a completely pure person and she conducted a passionate war against her small defects. She always held so firmly to life, feared death, philosophized about immortality.”46 He added that toward the end of her life she had been learning Hebrew and intended to emigrate to Palestine with her daughter and Bergmann.
The discussions at Bertha Fanta’s provided Einstein’s introduction to Zionism. Her salon may also have been where he was first exposed to the then quite popular ideas of Sigmund Freud, the radical psychiatrist from the Habsburg metropole.47 If so, the vector would have been Ludwig Hopf, Einstein’s assistant who had accompanied him from Zurich to Prague and was quite interested in psychoanalysis. In fact, Else Bergmann believed it was Hopf who first brought Einstein around.48 Several participants remembered collective discussions of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in which Einstein came across as a strict Kantian, a recollection that would likely have amused him. Yet another candidate for the person who first introduced Einstein to the Fanta circle was his colleague, the philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels, a lapsed Brentanist who at that very moment was enjoying quite a succès de scandale for his eugenic theories of sexual polygyny.49
Einstein relished a good debate about Kant as much as the next educated Germanophone intellectual of his generation, but he kept coming back for the music, and it was the music that he himself would recall once the rest of the Fanta circle’s doings receded from his memory. On one occasion his playing was accompanied by Brod, but the most important musical connection he made through the circle was surely Ottilie Nagel. A gifted pianist, Nagel was the sister-in-law of Moriz Winternitz, a professor of Sanskrit at the German University, with whom Einstein developed a close friendship. But while the chance to play his violin is what Einstein remembered from his time at the Fantas’, the reminiscences of the other attendees barely commented on it. Instead, they recalled a talk Einstein delivered to the assembled intellectuals on special relativity. He did make a presentation of the sort, but our best source for the event, Brod’s diary, recalls the date as 24 May, which happens to have been the day of Einstein’s inaugural lecture—a reasonable conflation, but not one that helps us learn what he said. Brod also notes that his friends Robert Weltsch and Kafka were in attendance, as was Hopf, with whom they fell into a conversation about Freud and Jung. The discussion continued the following day, but without Kafka, who declined to return.50 Whatever Einstein said seems to have slipped away without comment. Also absent from these recollections of Fanta’s circle is any mention of the physicist’s wife. She had a very different experience of Prague, and it is time that we turned to her.
* * *
It will be best if I call her Einsteinová. In Czech, women’s last names are adjectival, formed by adding an -ová suffix onto the husband’s or father’s last name: Kundera to Kunderová, Havel to Havlová, Navrátil to Navrátilová. True, most of the Germanophone milieu she would have interacted with in Prague would have referred to her as “Frau Einstein,” but the live-in maid, the merchants at the shops, and the porters would have called her Einsteinová. I adopt this name because all the alternatives usually deployed in histories about the Einstein family seem to me unsatisfactory. One cannot just write “Einstein,” because there would be confusion with her husband. Simply calling her by her first name, Mileva, is diminishing: everyone else in the story gets a last name. Likewise, calling her Marić (or, in its Hungarian version, Marity), her maiden name—which she assumed again, sometimes hyphenated as “Einstein-Marić,” after her divorce—negates the central fact of her life in Prague: she was not simply in Bohemia as “M
arić”; she was there as Einstein’s wife. That is precisely the literal meaning of the Czech naming convention, so despite the artificiality it is what I will use.
Einsteinová had not wanted to move to Prague. She had written her friends about the relocation with apprehension, seeking information about this foreign, exotic metropolis. In some ways, it was not that foreign to her. She had been born into a Serbian family on the Hungarian side of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and so she had been raised in a Habsburg milieu (her father had been a minor civil servant). Habsburg territory meant Habsburg rules, including the prohibition on girls’ attending gymnasia, so her father had sent her to Serbia, where she could get an education. Raised speaking German—the language of social mobility—at home, she had gone off to the ETH in Zurich to pursue higher education in physics, a choice again in response to the ban on female entry into the universities for credit in her own country. (The ETH began allowing women to study there in 1876, and the first graduation of a woman from the physics section was in 1894.) There she had met and begun a relationship with fellow student Albert Einstein, and they had married in 1903. (A child born the year previously had been given up for adoption in Novi Sad, Serbia.) She had followed Einstein to Bern and then back to Zurich, the city where she had felt most comfortable.51
Prague was decidedly uncomfortable for Einsteinová. Some of this was for the same reasons cited by Einstein: bedbugs and poor water. Some was the consequence of the utterly conventional gendered family dynamics of the couple. She had to take care of the household, manage the servants and the shopping, ensure there was enough boiled water to drink, and take care of the children. The extent of the domestic obligations also grew with the move to Prague, since the apartment was bigger and her husband’s elevated status demanded a more elaborate lifestyle.52 The family was also larger. Hans Albert was already in school, but the infant Eduard (called Tete or Teddy at home) was a difficult child, often sickly and upset. Einsteinová was also always in Prague. Einstein traveled a good deal: to Germany for talks, to Zurich to negotiate a return to the ETH, to Brussels for the Solvay Conference. Einsteinová, though she was entitled to a Swiss passport, never got one and always traveled with Einstein under his.53 When he was gone, she was confined to the city.
Confined seems to be the right word. In the few letters written by Einsteinová from Prague that have survived, she eagerly looked forward to some diversion from the daily domestic duties. In early October 1911, she leaped at the idea of going to Switzerland to see her husband, who was on one of his many travels. “It is now already an eternity since we have seen each other; will you still recognize me?” she wrote. “Should I really come to Zurich? The weather is wonderful here. Glorious autumn weather, wonderful, do we want to do something?”54 Einstein was increasingly absent even when he was in the city, beyond attending to his courses or working in his office on general relativity. He spent a good deal of time, sometimes entire Sundays, with the Winternitz family. One of that couple’s several children—Einstein was good with children—who recorded his memories of this period recalled that Einsteinová and the physicist’s children never came, not once.55 She had to fend for herself (and them) on those leisurely weekends. Hans Albert, eight years old by the time he left Prague, remembered the city vividly, attributing his lifelong career in hydraulics to his childhood fascination with the flowing Moldau. His wife’s biography of him points to darker memories as well: “Hans Albert’s recollection [was] that when he was eight years old, he began to sense tension and discord between his father and mother.”56
There were several reasons for the marital friction, none of which would have been intelligible to young Hans Albert. The most significant was connected to Einstein’s travels. On a trip to Berlin to talk to physicists in April 1912—his first to that city, as it happens—he connected with a cousin of his (on both his mother’s and father’s sides) named Elsa Löwenthal, née Einstein and recently divorced from Max Löwenthal, whose last name she had assumed. An affair ensued almost immediately.57 Einstein took pains to conceal it from Einsteinová. In his first love letter to Löwenthal, he begged her to write to him at his office address: “Sci. Institute Weinberggasse. Prague. If you have the chance, write me again, but only if it makes you happy. I will always destroy the letters, as you wished. The first I have already destroyed.”58 Later, after the Einsteins returned to Zurich, the distance between the pair was farther but the correspondence continued, Einstein taking care to find another address away from Einsteinová’s eyes.59 Even from Zurich, traces of Prague tinged the affair. In April 1913, at Löwenthal’s request, he sent her a photograph of himself taken right off Wenceslas Square.60
An incident that scandalized the physics community just after the Solvay Conference ended in early November 1911 gives us a window into Einstein’s casual views about marital fidelity. It concerned Marie Curie, whom Einstein had encountered at the conference; herself a Slav (Polish-born), she had been widowed for five years since her husband Pierre’s early death. Beginning in the summer of 1911, rumors had begun to swirl about a possible affair with 38-year-old physicist, and her married colleague, Paul Langevin, who was also present in Brussels. While the meeting was underway, the Parisian press published intimate letters about their relationship. Both Curie’s and Langevin’s names were dragged through the mud, and Einstein was horrified. He wrote to his friend Zangger in Zurich:
The tabloid horror story in the newspapers is nonsense. That Langevin wants to get divorced has long been known. If he loves Mrs. Curie & she him—then they do not need to run off together because they both have enough opportunities in Paris to see each other. I did not at all get the impression that there was anything special between them, but rather that all three met in harmless pleasantness. I also do not believe that Mrs. Curie is hungry for power or for anything else. She is an unpretentious, honest person whose duties and burdens almost overwhelm her. She has a sparkling intelligence, but despite her passionate nature is not attractive enough to become a danger to anyone.61
He continued to offer her moral support from Prague: “I feel compelled to tell you how I have learned to marvel at your spirit, your energy, and your honesty, and that I consider myself fortunate to have made your personal acquaintance in Brussels. Whoever is not among the reptiles will as always be glad that we have such individuals as you and also Langevin among us, real people one feels happy to be in contact with.”62 At this point, Einstein himself was not yet engaged in his own extramarital affair; this was purely a matter of decency. It is also noticeable that he did not seem concerned about the impact of these events on Madame Langevin.
Other reasons for the growing chasm between Einstein and Einsteinová were more nebulous, perhaps not even clearly grasped by either party. There were many things that proved asymmetric in the Einsteins’ unpleasant reactions to Prague, but one important one was that it clearly mattered that Einsteinová was not just a woman, but a Slavic woman in a city where the relationship between Germans and Slavs—and specifically German men and Slavic women—was especially fraught.63 Philipp Frank, who as Einstein’s successor at the German University was likely privy to gossip that circulated about the Einsteins after their departure, included a passage in his canonical biography of Einsteinová’s husband stating that “she was as a Slav not very inclined to fit herself into the circle of professors’ wives. Because in their conversation the inferiority of the Slavic peoples and the greatness of the Germans played a central role. Even if it was not entirely sincerely meant, it still resulted in not exactly a pleasant atmosphere for a Slav.”64 There were probably several reasons why the Einsteins did not socialize with the other professors as much as was the norm—Einstein’s own dislike of such occasions and absorption in his work high among them—but the drawing room snubs must have played a role. Many later biographers make a point of Slavicizing Einsteinová, exoticizing this highly Germanized citizen of Switzerland in stereotypical ways.65 Even Hans Albert did so, calling his mother “a typic
al Slav, capable of strong negative feelings, and once hurt she could not forgive.”66
Even more than being a Slav, it mattered what kind of Slav she was not. Einsteinová was no Czech, and thus she was blocked from access to alternative social circles that would have been widely available in Prague. Einstein was entirely oblivious to this distinction; in fact, just before his arrival in Bohemia, he invited a colleague from Croatian Zagreb (also in the Austro-Hungarian Empire) to visit him in Prague, juxtaposing the invitation with a comment about the nearness of Zagreb to Serbia, as if all Slavic regions were neighbors, or at least mentally associated with each other.67 Although Serbian and Czech are not mutually intelligible, someone with fluency in reading the former could make her way through written Czech, and thus it is entirely possible that Einsteinová was also aware of the anti-German hostility to a much greater degree than Einstein, particularly as Czech merchants and city residents would understandably have related to her in no other guise than as a German professor’s German wife. Despite the very noticeable presence of pan-Slavic and neo-Slavic political and cultural movements—such as the Sokol Slet celebrated in late spring 1912 and the 1908 Slavic congress in Prague on the sixtieth anniversary of the first such gathering in the same city—the implied hierarchy that ranked the more Westernized, “civilized” Slavs (Poles and Czechs) above the politically powerful Slavs (Russians) and then everyone else was pronounced.68
As to the kind of Slav Einsteinová was, that had additional dimensions. Bergmann mentioned once meeting Einstein’s “first (Yugoslav) wife.”69 Formally independent since 1878, Serbia’s earlier conflicts had been with the Ottoman Empire it bordered to the south. Political focus soon shifted to the Habsburg Empire to the north, where Serbians resented Austro-Hungarian interference in the Balkans and complained of the treatment they received from other southern Slavs, especially Bosnians. One of Einsteinová’s biographers considered Vienna’s hostility to Serbians a major source of discrimination toward her in Einstein’s hiring process, as well as a factor in how the other professors (and professors’ wives) of the German University treated her.70 The deteriorating situation between Austria-Hungary and Serbia—which would in 1914 provide the context for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand that launched the Great War—was a topic of much discussion in Prague, which had become “a real headquarters for Southern Slavs” at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century.71 These Slavic gatherings provided no haven for Einsteinová, who did not identify herself with them and thus was frozen out on all sides. Einsteinová’s status, in some people’s eyes, as primarily a “Serbian” does provide the context, however, for one of Einstein’s only political statements before his pacifist awakening in World War I: “If only the Austrians can keep calm; a conflict with Austria would be bad for the Serbs, even in the case of victory. I believe, however, that the saber-rattling means little,” he wrote to Einsteinová’s friend Helene Savić in Novi Sad.72
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