Frank’s Einstein: His Life and Times is far and away the most influential book ever written about its titular subject. Every subsequent biography has derived significant material and much of its structure from the authorial choices Frank made in the early 1940s.120 Einstein’s school friend Michele Besso read it with pleasure and wrote to Einstein discussing its finer points.121 No small part of its status draws, understandably, from the fact that Einstein supported Frank’s efforts and even intended to write a preface for it (which regrettably never materialized).122 However, for all its wonderful first-person texture, that feeling of the reader being actually beside Einstein, we have no idea what sources Frank drew upon in assembling it. He did not use footnotes and never attributed quotations to verifiable sources. One scholar who knew both Frank and Einstein reported that the book “is known to be based largely on epistolary correspondence,” but he in turn did not attribute this claim to an actual source.123 There is no way to uncover these letters, assuming they existed. None remain in Einstein’s rather carefully curated archive, and Frank’s own papers were inadvertently destroyed by a relative after his death. As Frank told Thomas Kuhn in 1962: “Some of the Einstein letters I brought from Prague, but most letters I lost, really, on the way.”124 All we have is the text he left, composed in the wake of a tumultuous 20 years battling for the philosophy of science in Prague.
Frank’s biography of Einstein remains an engagingly readable book and finds a new audience in every generation. Some sections had greater impact on Einstein’s legacy than others. Frank’s extended discussion of relativity physics from a logical positivist perspective was for decades the dominant way this theory was understood in the Anglophone world. But the part of the book that has been carried over, almost unchanged, into the lion’s share of later biographies is Chapter 4, “Einstein in Prague.” Frank’s position as Einstein’s immediate successor in that city granted him absolute credibility in narrating this period, almost as though he had been an eyewitness to what had happened. An archival manuscript detailing the history of Einstein’s time in Prague by local philosopher Emil Utitz, for example, consists almost entirely of recountings of Frank’s stories.125 Uncovering Einstein’s life in Prague requires digging behind Frank’s accounts—some real, some apocryphal, and some seemingly projected from Frank’s own decades of experience at the German University to Einstein’s three semesters there—to find different narratives and follow alternative pathways through history.126
CHAPTER 5
The Hidden Kepler
In the year 1608 there was a heated quarrel between the Emperor Rudolph and his brother, the Archduke Matthias. Their actions universally recalled precedents found in Bohemian history. Stimulated by the widespread public interest, I turned my attention to reading about Bohemia, and came upon the story of the heroine Libussa, renowned for her skill in magic. It happened one night that after watching the stars and the moon, I went to bed and fell into a very deep sleep. In my sleep I seemed to be reading a book brought from the fair. Its contents were as follows.
—Johannes Kepler1
These words open the Somnium (The Dream), often considered one of the first works of science fiction, by Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), considered even more often as one of the crucial figures in the development of Copernican astronomy. Kepler worked on the manuscript—published posthumously by his son Ludwig in 1634—throughout his life, but the most thorough revisions took place while he was the imperial astronomer at the Habsburg capital of the Holy Roman Empire: Prague.2 It is a brief, fanciful tale. In his dream, the narrator meets an interlocutor, an Icelandic boy named Duracotus, who has been educated by the Danish nobleman astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601). Duracotus’s witch mother, Fiolxhilde, puts Duracotus in touch with demons who present him with a description of what the universe looks like from the point of view of Levania, known to us as the Moon. The narrator wakes up just as Duracotus gets to the creatures that inhabit it. While the Somnium begins in Prague with a book, a book that interacts with local mythic lore to spawn a story that grows ever larger and more impressive, it ends with a disappointing jolt. There is no more fitting place to begin this chapter, which is about a book from Prague, a dream of Kepler, and an effort to uncover a world hidden in plain view. All three became entangled with Einstein in unexpected ways.
The book in question is by Max Brod, whom we encountered earlier with Einstein at Bertha Fanta’s salon, and was published in 1916. Entitled Tycho Brahe’s Path to God (Tycho Brahes Weg zu Gott), the historical novel concentrates on the last year in the life of the imperial astronomer in Prague, Tycho himself—finally settled after scrambling for patronage following the ignominious collapse of his fortunes in Scandinavia—and in particular his chaotic family environment in the suburban palace of Benátky nad Jizerou (Benatek in German, the language Brod used) and especially his newly arrived, mercurial assistant, Johannes Kepler. Strange as it might seem, this novel has been treated by generations of historians and physicists as one of the most important sources about Albert Einstein’s life in Prague. This is, as we shall see, a total misunderstanding, but no less influential for being erroneous. Tracing the origins of this error and uncovering the historical story of Tycho Brahes Weg zu Gott will reveal more about early-twentieth-century Prague—and, as it happens, about Einstein and his world—than the mythology that has encrusted it.
It is frequently impossible to trace the genesis of historical fantasies, but in this instance we can locate it precisely: Philipp Frank’s 1947 biography of Albert Einstein. It stands to reason that given Frank’s extensive personal contact with his subject and those who had known him at the German University, his rendering of Einstein’s Bohemian period would be taken as especially authoritative. Surprisingly, in addition to some personal anecdotes and rumors that he relates—here, as always in Frank’s Einstein, without any attribution of sources—the biographer fills a sizable portion of his account of this period with lengthy extracts from Brod’s novel. As he justified this choice:
It was often asserted in Prague that in his portrayal of Kepler, Brod was greatly influenced by the impression that Einstein’s personality had made on him. Whether Brod did this consciously or [half] unconsciously, it is certain that the figure of Kepler is so vividly portrayed that readers of the book who knew Einstein well recognized him as Kepler. When the famous German chemist W. Nernst read this novel, he said to Einstein: “You are this man Kepler.” [“Dieser Kepler, das sind Sie.”]3
While it is true that Einstein’s relationship with Walther Nernst was at times fraught—Einstein’s Hungarian collaborator Cornelius Lanczos characterized it as a “curious love-hate relationship”4—it seems that both eminent scientists remained cordial, and no one besides Frank seems to have recorded any mention of the novel by Nernst. Shortly after the physical chemist’s death in late 1941, Einstein wrote a heartfelt but equivocal valediction for his former colleague in the Scientific Monthly: “Although sometimes good-naturedly smiling at his childlike vanity and self-complacency, we all had for him not only a sincere admiration, but also a personal affection.… He was an original personality; I have never met any one who resembled him in any essential way.”5
Einstein did not feel the same way about the author of Tycho. Not much of a reader of fiction, he did—upon the encouragement of his close friends the physicist Max Born and his wife Hedwig—read the novel. His judgment of the work was mostly positive: “I have read the book with great interest. It is without doubt interestingly written by a man who knows the shoals of the human soul. As it happens I believe that I met this man in Prague.” His judgment of the author was a bit harsher: “He apparently belongs to a small circle there that was contaminated with philosophy and Zionism, loosely grouped around the University philosophers, a medieval-seeming small flock of impractical people that you have met through reading the book.”6 He did not mention the depiction of Kepler and certainly did not suggest that he saw a representation of himself, however altered, on its
pages.
Nevertheless, with only two exceptions to my knowledge, every major subsequent biography of Einstein has equated the physicist with the depiction of Kepler in Tycho Brahe’s Path to God and then quoted Brod’s descriptions of Kepler as though they were straightforward reportage of Einstein’s character.7 Interestingly, not a single pre-Frank biography makes any mention of the novel, although they occasionally invoke Kepler for other reasons.8 Not only is this unreflecting quotation of Frank’s quotation of Brod spurious historical reasoning, but Brod’s Kepler is not an especially accurate representation of the Einstein we have seen in these pages.
As should by now be clear, there is no straightforward way to trace Einstein’s experience in Prague, especially when it comes to the later ramifications and memories of that relatively brief period. Most often, the Prague period is overlooked as too short, too scientifically unimpressive, or too marginal to be discussed in detail. Tycho Brahe’s Path to God is the exception that exemplifies this rule. When people today, following what they find in the biographies, want to learn about Einstein’s character as a young man, one of the places they will likely turn to is a novel by Max Brod set in early-seventeenth-century Bohemia. The book, like Einstein’s Prague period, has succumbed to the inevitable warpings and permutations that accompany the flow of the past into recorded history. When we slow things down, examine the origins of the book’s association with Einstein, and then trace out the documentable relations of Einstein with its author, as well as the author’s composition of this particular novel in the first place, we instead enter a completely different domain, one yoked to Einstein’s life story by coincidence, but no less part of the narrative for that.
Brod’s novel depicts the relationship between Tycho and Kepler, itself a salient episode in the long history of science in Prague. The major figure the book informs us about is its creator, Max Brod, who was during Einstein’s time in Prague the center of a vibrant coterie of Germanophone Jewish writers but today remains largely unknown, or known only as a shadow. Brod was the friend, supporter, and later literary executor of Franz Kafka—he published the latter’s works posthumously (despite the author’s demand that the manuscripts of The Trial, The Castle, and other texts be burned)—and Kafka’s reputation has largely left Brod in the shade. The conventional interpretation of Tycho Brahe’s Path to God further eclipses this figure by foregrounding Einstein (and Kepler) rather than the man who wrote it. What, however, might we learn about this novel and its relationship with Einstein if we start not from Frank’s quite possibly apocryphal invocation of Nernst, but instead with Brod?
Brod enjoyed the blessing and the curse of outliving most of his generation—he died in December 1968, a few months after the Soviet-engineered invasion of his beloved Prague. He thus had the opportunity to read Frank’s biography of Einstein, including its interpretation of the astronomical novel he had published in the midst of the Great War. Brod had known Frank personally, having sat in on some of his physics lectures at the German University, indulging an interest in the science that was blossoming even during Einstein’s time in Prague (he published on the philosophy of physics in 1913).9 He continually, as we shall see, denied that there was any significant mimetic relationship between his fictional Kepler and the real Einstein. In fact, in 1956 he maintained that it was a mistake in historical fiction in general (and his in particular) to bypass the main figures and instead put too much weight on “the supporting cast, with whom (as for example with Kepler in my Tycho Brahe) at times much takes place that contrasts in the first order with the chiseled sculpture of the hero and does not so much serve as a representation of his opponent.”10 For Brod, the main character was Tycho; for us, it will be Brod. First, I will turn to Brod’s place in the literary world of Prague, and then I will move to the real Tycho he researched and the fictional Tycho he depicted. These routes will, in the end, bring us back to Einstein, but not in the manner Frank indicated. By following the course of the novel’s production and reception, we will perceive a Prague that coexisted alongside the Prague of Albert Einstein and that did much in later years to shape his legacy.
* * *
Max Brod was born on 27 May 1884 in the heart of Prague, and this connection with the city would form the single most important aspect of his life. His childhood was distinguished by both an excellent education and a severe affliction with kyphosis—excessive outward curvature of the spine, addressed by his mother through extraordinary treatments that prevented severe permanent deformation. Both distinctions accentuated his tendency toward intellectual pursuits.11 From his youth he was drawn to a literary career and to languages: he developed a strong command of Czech alongside several other tongues, which he used frequently. (His Hebrew—an important marker of self-identification for Zionists in and around the Fanta group—apparently remained weak, with Hugo Bergmann complaining: “When even one who stands so close to us as Brod writes about Jewishness without reading Hebrew!”)12 His father wanted young Max to study law, and so that is what he did, enrolling at the German University in 1902 and earning a doctorate in the subject in 1907. He wrote literature the entire time, and he selected his career as a civil servant in the post office precisely so he would have more time for composition. (He and Kafka discussed this challenge of selecting appropriate day jobs at length.)
Though his commitment to literature would dominate his long life, he simultaneously lived rich personal and political lives (the two were often intertwined). In 1913, when he began composing Tycho, he married Elsa Taussig, the daughter of the major Prague merchant Eduard Taussig. They never divorced despite the fact that his turn toward the erotic in fiction was accompanied by personal infidelities; his treatment of Elsa was a source of tension in his circle. His public life was divided between Jewish politics and German newspapers. Guided by his friendship with both Hugo Bergmann and Martin Buber, he became increasingly active in Prague’s Zionist movement, leading him to co-found the Jewish National Assembly (Jüdischer Nationalrat) on 22 October 1918—in parallel with the declaration of independent Czechoslovakia—and serve as an emissary to the new president, Tomáš Masaryk, to lobby, successfully, for the recognition of Jews as a nationality in the Czechoslovak constitution. (He did not visit Palestine until 1928, though Tel Aviv would in time become his second city after Prague.) In 1924 Brod quit the civil service to work as a music and theater critic for the Prager Tagblatt, the most important German-language paper in Prague, which after its 1875 creation came to be widely distributed throughout Austria-Hungary and after 1918 strongly identified with support for Masaryk’s regime at a time when identity politics pushed against Germanophone cooperation with the state.13
The Tagblatt would form the major outlet for Brod’s later critical writing, partially replacing literary journals, but it did not change the extraordinary level of his output. Bibliographies of his work list dozens of novels and biographies, hundreds of reviews and essays of criticism, poetry, drama, musical scores, translations, and more.14 He was fêted by his colleagues and admirers throughout his life, resulting in not one but two memorial collections on separate significant birthdays extolling his impact on numerous quarters of cultural life.15 His pivotal role among the so-called “Prague Circle” of writers—a role partially self-constructed and touted in his own historical accounts—enabled him to see that friends’ works found the right publishers; this position of authority raised his stature while he was in Prague and then diminished it once he left.16 His literary reputation started out high, but it was never unequivocal. In 1917 an assessment of the entire circle of Germanophone writers in Prague proclaimed that “Max Brod is perhaps not the most gifted of his colleagues, but he is certainly the most multifaceted.”17
In the early years of the century, much under the influence of the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, his works focused around heroes who embodied what he described as “indifferentism”: a renunciation of ambition and a removed, ironic approach to everyday life (as exemplified by Willia
m Schurhaft of A Czech Serving Girl, discussed in chapter 3).18 Already by the time of Einstein’s arrival in Prague, Brod had transitioned out of the expressionist phase that had made him the toast of Berlin critics to pen several novels on Jewish themes and then make a decided turn to historical fiction, of which Tycho was the first full expression—though the book’s saturation with Jewish motifs makes discriminating between these two literary periods difficult.19 From Tycho onward, issues of mediation and distance—between “Czechs” and “Germans” or between the Jews and everyone else—began to dominate Brod’s novels, culminating in his theorization of the idea of “Distanzliebe,” or the kind of love he felt for German culture even though, as an increasingly Zionist writer, he believed himself to be outside of it.20 Even recognizing the personal transformation of his aesthetic and philosophical ideas over the course of his productive career, it is hard not to concede that most of his novels have not commanded a persistent readership. The exception to this is Tycho Brahe’s Path to God, which some critics consider “perhaps his best work,” though its popularity seems to have something to do with the presumption of its connection to Einstein.21 This is surely the reason why it, alone among his many translated novels, remains in print in English.
Einstein in Bohemia Page 18