Aside from the geopolitics inflecting Einsteinová’s position, the very local, Prague-specific cultural resonances of the Einsteins’ marriage—“German” man, “Slavic” woman—influenced how others related to them, even if the couple themselves did not entirely comprehend all or even most of these tensions. Here we can highlight one short literary work, A Czech Serving Girl (Ein tschechisches Dienstmädchen), which its author, the same Max Brod who graced the Fanta circle that Einsteinová apparently never attended, published in 1909, two years before the Einsteins’ arrival in Prague. The first edition of 124 pages highlighted the city’s local color: the cover featured an illustration by Lucian Bernhard of the Malá Strana and the Hradschin castle, seen through the tower of the Charles Bridge. It sold out, and a second edition was issued before the end of the year.73 It is by no means a great piece of literature, but the work and its reception provide important insights into the specifically gendered aspects of the German man–Slavic woman dyad that was echoed in the Einsteins’ marriage.
The story is told in the first person by William Schurhaft, an “indifferent” young Viennese similar to the protagonists of Brod’s early fiction, in which he was heavily under the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy, emphasizing apathy and detachment from the everyday world. At least, that is Schurhaft when the novel opens. He has been sent by his businessman father to Prague in a paternal attempt to knock him out of his torpor and engage him in life: the father imagines that the Baroque scenery, the history of the city, and the omnipresent tensions of the Czech–German conflict will rouse the lad. The extracts of his father’s letters sound uncannily like the correspondence Einstein would send back to his friends in Zurich a few years later. At first, Schurhaft’s boredom continues: “But I do not like Prague at all. I get no impression from its curiosities, about which people have told me so much.”74 He does eventually come to life, though not in the way his father had hoped. A young woman—specifically highlighted in the title as “Czech” rather than the more neutral-sounding “Bohemian” (böhmisch)—named Pepí Vlková fills in for another servant in his apartment for one day, and Schurhaft becomes obsessed with her. (Pepí is also the name of a serving girl in Franz Kafka’s much later novel The Castle; many of Kafka’s female characters have Czech names.) He scours the city for her, learning some of the language and interacting with Czech locals and city landmarks (like the astronomical clock in the Old Town Square) as he woos and finally beds her. Once again she vanishes, and Schurhaft, self-obsessed as always, is distraught. He finally finds out that she has committed suicide, throwing herself into the river after a dispute with her abusive husband—about whom Schurhaft, who had spent so much energy exoticizing Pepí as an avatar of her culture rather than considering her as a person, knew nothing. Her corpse washes up at the base of the Palacký Bridge, where a few years after the novel’s publication there would be a monument by which a German University professor of physics would walk to work every day.
The book was hotly criticized when it appeared, much to Brod’s astonishment. Here he had thought he was praising Czech culture by extolling its beauty and admiring the mellifluous sound of the language. Indeed, throughout his long career in the city Brod often functioned as an interpreter of Czech culture (for example, the works of the writer Jaroslav Hašek and the composer Leoš Janáček) to Germanophone audiences.75 He spoke the language well and perceived himself to be a Bohemian, committed to Prague in both its German and its Czech guises. But that is not how Czech critics understood him. Even when they thought the book relatively harmless, they saw it as indicative of how Germans perceived Czechs:
Max Brod’s just-published small novel, Ein tschechisches Dienstmädchen, is a characteristic endeavor to endow artistic elements to the trivial. The author doesn’t always succeed, there are many forced combinations here, but some pages nonetheless yield beauty. The book’s plot is on the whole unimportant, the mood is mostly confined to how the author looks at Prague. The author’s impartiality is surprising—there are no attacks on Czechs, no insinuations à la [Karl Hans] Strobl, however here and there a rather ironic “strammdeutsch” [i.e., uptight German] viewpoint.76
The harshest review came from the writer Božena Benešová, a noted feminist in a society that was increasingly mobilized around women’s rights, who saw the book as treating Czech women as sex objects and the Czech people as the passive recipients of German condescension, however admiring a tone Brod might take: “There remains to him only the capability for analysis and contemplation, and the capability to transform Pepička into a representative of an entire people.”77 From the point of view of Czech intellectuals, the pairing of a German man and a Slavic woman in Prague was always problematic, symbolic of the subjugation of Prague by Vienna. Einsteinová’s isolation partook of this valence too.
Understandably, she was eager to get out. On 13 August 1912, an acquaintance named Lisbeth Hurwitz noted in her diary: “Today the Einstein family was over for dinner. He has been called to the ETH, and we got the impression that they would gladly leave Prague.”78 Once Einsteinová was back in her adoptive homeland of Zurich, you can almost hear the sigh of relief in her letters. “We are well and are all, big and small, very happy to have turned our backs on Prague. To me, in particular, because of the children, our stay there was so unpleasant,” she wrote to her close friend Helene Savić. “Hygienic conditions there are such that sometimes it was really hard for me with my boy. You know already that there is no drinkable water there; milk is of just as doubtful quality; the air is always full of soot, there are no gardens, and there is very little free room, so that the children really had to live inside.”79 Zurich was certainly more pleasant for her, but the family situation did not suddenly turn into a paradise. Teddy’s health did not improve, for one. There was also the matter of her husband’s affair with Elsa Löwenthal, although it is not clear whether Einsteinová yet knew of it. Once Einstein got the call to Berlin in 1914, however, there was no escaping the truth.
At first the plan was for the whole family to move to the Prussian capital, but Einstein made it intolerable for Einsteinová to join him, a sordid story that is recounted in all his biographies. Already in December 1914 he was writing about her with disgust: “For me however it was a question of life or death; my nerves could not much longer withstand the years of heavy pressure this barbarian nature exerted on me.”80 “Barbarian” was strong language, and not especially frequent in Einstein’s lexicon; the last time he seems to have used it was in his description of the Slavic inhabitants of Prague.
Consequently, while Einstein assumed his post in Berlin, Einsteinová stayed in Zurich with the children, and he came frequently to visit. Starting in 1916, under Löwenthal’s increasing pressure, he began divorce proceedings. The debates between Albert and Mileva were protracted, acrimonious, and centered on two issues: access to the two boys and questions of money. Famously, a clause in the divorce agreement allocated to her the money from a Nobel Prize, should Einstein eventually win one. (He did, in 1921.) Perhaps appropriately for a marriage that had begun to disintegrate completely while in Prague, a persistent financial negotiation harkened back to the Bohemian capital. Again and again in the epistolary back-and-forth about finances, Einstein raised the issue of the “Prague money” (Prager Geld). This first cropped up in a letter from Albert in April 1914 as “an old tax bill [that] came from Prague for about 80 Kr. which I must pay.”81 This was linked to a bank account they had set up while he was at the German University, and he wanted the money in order to save it for the children: “I must thus insist that the money lying in Prague be transferred to my name. I will have it credited to the children and am convinced that the sum can in this way most securely benefit the children.”82 Two years on, the only invocations of Prague in the couple’s letters concern this financial transaction, with Einstein proposing “to deposit my Prague money as well as 6000 Marks in the savings account created here for the benefit of our children in a place approve
d by both of us.”83 The deposit ended up coming to 7,583 crowns, and Einstein calmed down. The dissolution of the marriage was finalized on 12 June 1918.84
Einstein married Elsa Löwenthal, returning her last name to her maiden designation of “Einstein,” on 2 June 1919, a few days after the eclipse expedition that would in time transform Einstein into a global celebrity. For her part, Einsteinová, now going by “Einstein-Marić,” raised the two children in Zurich and battled with severe depression. Pleasant reminders of her former life would occasionally crop up. During the First World War, which began as a conflict between Serbia and Austria-Hungary, Marie Curie arrived in Switzerland from Paris on a vacation with her daughters. She and Einstein-Marić went hiking in the Alps together, two Slavic women raising families without their husbands. They got along very well.85
* * *
It would be a mistake to come away with the impression that Prague was all gloom, misery, and heartbreak for the Einstein family. The physicist was happy with his work on general relativity, even though he eventually abandoned the static theory. He enjoyed walks in the surrounding countryside. He came to appreciate the status of an ordinary professor, and he made some good friends. Fittingly, the most lasting of these friendships, the one that meant the most to him, was with someone who simply passed through the city. Paul Ehrenfest, the Viennese-born physicist who had married a Russian physicist and was now hoping to settle in Central Europe from St. Petersburg, visited the region seeking support during Einstein’s time at the German University. Einstein invited him to Prague, and this proved the beginning of a vibrant and intellectually rich relationship.86
At first, making the arrangements for the visit was difficult, as in late January Einstein’s guest room was occupied—the editors of his collected papers speculate that Einstein’s mother, Pauline, or one of his friends from college was in residence—but by mid-February the long-anticipated meeting could take place.87 “Tell me the date and hour of your arrival and which train station you will come to, and you will stay with me so that we can use our time well,” Einstein wrote.88 Ehrenfest arrived on 23 February 1912 from Brünn (today Brno), where he had been visiting his old university friend Heinrich Tietze. When Einstein had an appointment to play violin, he dropped his guest off with Anton Lampa. (Neither left a record of how that went.) Ehrenfest got along particularly well with Hans Albert.89 The two physicists maintained a highly collaborative exchange, largely through correspondence, until Ehrenfest’s death in 1933 at age 53.
Einstein must have been in a good mood during the entire visit. He wrote to his friends the Sterns on 2 February that “two days ago I was (hallelujah!) offered a position at the Polytechnic in Zurich and have already communicated my Imperial and Royal resignation here.”90 By the twelfth of the month the agreement with the ETH had been inked.91 Einsteinová was overjoyed. Ludwig Hopf, Einstein’s former assistant and fellow participant in the Fanta circle, expected it had been an easy decision: “Leaving Prague will surely not hit you too hard. Or have you in the meantime come to like it?”92
Not really, although now that he was going he did not want to leave unpleasant impressions behind him. When rumors surfaced attributing Einstein’s 25 July 1912 departure to poor conditions at the German University and especially blaming the Czechs for making the physicist uncomfortable in Bohemia, he felt it important to “emphasize that I had in Prague no grounds for dissatisfaction.” He wrote a lengthy letter extolling the city and its people that was published on the front page of both the Prager Tagblatt and the Viennese Neue Freie Presse on 5 August. In it he wrote:
As I recall the Ministry was accommodating to me in the most extensive manner, and also during my activities in Prague I have had no difficulties with the education department; on the contrary, various small matters, including also those of a financial nature, were always resolved according to my wishes. My institute in Prague was completely sufficient for my purposes and in every connection satisfactorily equipped. Besides it is incorrect that here in Zurich an enormous and richly financed institute will be set up just for me.… My decision to leave Prague is simply to be attributed to the fact that I already before leaving Zurich had promised that under acceptable conditions I would happily return.
He concluded, somewhat at variance with what he had reported in his letters to Zurich from Prague during his first months there, that the reason he was leaving was “the more favorable living conditions that Zurich has over Prague. I do not allude to Prague’s national relations—that never bothered or disturbed me—but rather I mean only the favorable location of the city on the lake and amid the mountains, that naturally greatly tempts a family man. These are the true reasons for my departure from Prague. Of any confessional prejudice that one might suspect I have felt and noticed nothing.”93
The ministry in Vienna and the German-identified locals in Prague were delighted with his valediction. In the final lines of the newspaper article, Einstein praised his successor, the Viennese Philipp Frank, as an excellent theoretical physicist. When a new rector of the German University assumed his post on 28 October 1912, he asked the prorector, Heinrich Rauchberg, to give a report on the preceding year. Rauchberg mentioned, matter-of-factly and in passing, that Einstein had left for the ETH and that Philipp Frank had arrived.94 It was a very smooth transition. Einstein’s legacy in Germanophone Prague—and, as it happened, in the broader intellectual community in both Europe and North America—would be closely linked to Frank. Einstein’s Prague story now became his.
CHAPTER 4
Einstein Positive and Einstein Negative
Überhaupt I must say that the hospitality of Prague towards wandering philosophers much surpasses that of Berlin and Leipzig. In great capitals it is more difficult to give one’s time to strangers …
—William James1
On 6 January 1921, Philipp Frank stood waiting on a platform at the main train station in Prague, a few steps from the top of Wenceslaus Square, the heart of the New Town. In the past eight and a half years, Frank had watched his world become engulfed in the brutal destruction of the Great War and the Habsburg Empire, in whose capital he had been born and studied, disintegrate into a handful of separate states. He had moved countries and changed citizenships while staying put. In the fall of 1912, he had assumed the position of professor of theoretical physics at the German University in Prague, a large but somewhat provincial city in the northwest region of the Austrian half of Austria-Hungary. It had been quite an honor for the young physicist, who had been elevated as Albert Einstein’s successor at the eminent physicist’s own recommendation. Now, in 1921, he had the same job with the same title, but he lived as a citizen of the capital city of the new land of Czechoslovakia. There was an apartment crunch in the booming postwar metropole, so he and his newlywed wife, Hania Gerson—they had married on 16 November 1920—were bivouacking in Frank’s office at the Physical Institute on what was now known as Viničná ulica, the same room Einstein had occupied and that had seen the early drafts of the static theory of general relativity. (The Franks would obtain their first apartment in the coming fall.) Here he was, standing by the tracks of what had once been Franz Josef Station but was now known as Wilson Station, after the American president who had supported the new state’s independence.
The man he was searching for descended from the train “and still looked like an itinerant violin virtuoso,” he recalled.2 Einstein had come back to Prague. In order to avoid the paparazzi who now followed his predecessor—the eclipse expedition that had launched Einstein into celebrity was barely a year and a half in the past, and there was no sign of the enthusiasm abating—Frank brought him to the office where he had worked less than a decade earlier. Einstein was delighted. “After a pleasant trip I arrived happy and healthy in Prague, where I was expected by Frank and his young wife, Pick, and certain friends,” he wrote the next day to his own newlywed, Elsa Einstein, back in Berlin. “Yesterday evening I was invited with local friends to Winternitz’s, where it was
very festive. It pleased me beyond description. I live with Frank at the Institute [and] his young wife, a former Russian student (very nice) in private digs—there’s a shortage of housing in Prague. People live here somewhat better than in Berlin. It is very comfortable.”3
Einstein spent only two nights in Prague before heading off to Vienna. It was a visit with a purpose: Frank and others had invited their hero to return to Bohemia and participate in an event at the Prague Urania, the local planetarium and astronomy lecture hall. After an evening out with old friends, he was prepared for his public talk and an open debate on the stage. This was big news even in the rapidly transforming capital city, and the Prager Tagblatt enthused about the visit. The lecture hall filled up well in advance of the event, and when it began, Einstein was formally greeted by the rector of the German University, professor of geology Franz Wähner. Next came the venerable city counselor Josef Eckstein, who offered effusions linking Einstein to German nationalist pride:
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