Einstein in Bohemia

by Michael D. Gordin

  The writing of Tycho, which began in 1913 while Brod was still at the post office, consumed him, as he devoted his afternoons and evenings to researching and producing his first historical novel and his longest work to date.22 When the Great War broke out, the hunched back left by his childhood kyphosis kept him out of the conflict and allowed him to finish the book. Tycho was a new departure for Brod not only in style and scope but also in ambition, a decision he signaled by shifting from his previous publisher, Axel Juncker, to Kurt Wolff’s house. “I don’t want to give him”—Juncker—“Tycho Brahe,” he wrote to Wolff in June 1914. “I don’t have another book, since I do not want to publish anything small or imperfect now. Tycho Brahe ought to be decisive and grant me victory.”23 Wolff gladly took the book and promoted it heavily, though with some trepidation that there would be no market for a work set among seventeenth-century astronomers in the midst of the European carnage. It was serialized in the prestigious monthly Die weißen Blätter, which published Kafka’s novella Metamorphosis at the same time, and in complete form appeared in 1916, notwithstanding a copyright date of 1915 on the title page.

  * * *

  “With ever more urgent letters the great Tycho Brahe, as soon as he felt himself in a secure position at the Prague court of Rudolf II, invited the young astronomer Johann Kepler to visit him. The correspondence had been carrying on already for several years.”24 So begins the novel, with Kepler’s journey in 1600 to visit the imperial astronomer Tycho Brahe planting the reader firmly in the context of early modern Prague. Though we meet Kepler first, it is evident from these lines—if the title has not already alerted us—that Tycho will be the agent who drives the narrative, even though he is a compromised protagonist, reduced to persistent supplication to bring a young apprentice to his doorstep. We soon learn that Tycho is looking for more than an assistant: he wants “a friend! A truly worthy comrade and brother!”25 The character of Kepler is clear enough from the start, as he immediately dismisses astrology—an important duty of the imperial astronomer in Rudolf’s occult-friendly court—to the two astronomers who pick him up in Prague to bring him to the palace at Benatek: Hagecius (the Latinized name of Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku) and Frans Gansneb Tengnagel.26 Already Kepler is in conflict with the normal order of things.

  That normal order is chaos, some of which Kepler exacerbates. He walks into the heart of an extended family—Tycho Brahe’s wife and several children, the household dwarf Jeppo, and a retinue of astronomical assistants (principally Tengnagel and Longomontanus)—and disrupts it through the very contrast of his personality with that of his new master. Where Tycho, once we meet him, is voluble, impulsive, generous, defensive, apprehensive, and in general constantly reacting from moment to moment, Kepler is stasis personified. He is interested in understanding the mechanics of the heavens and persuaded that Copernicus’s postulation of the sun as center of the universe is correct. This is bad news for Tycho, who wants his new apprentice to help defend his own cosmology, which features a stationary central Earth orbited by the Moon and the Sun, around which all the other planets circle in turn. Brod’s Kepler is not moved by the hubbub around him or the wishes of his patron. He is, always, just himself:

  In this gaunt man with the small, as though unripe, undeveloped little face lived an idiosyncratic insistence, an entirely simple direction of all his braced mental forces, that sealed him off entirely from everything external, made him inviolable, but also unable to absorb anything that did not concern his science. His entire gift and, corresponding with that, his entire passion was directed to only one goal, to the scientific comprehension of the world, as the next step of which he held before his eyes the elucidation of the laws of the heavens so exclusively that a friend once could remark: If there were from a certain moment onward no stars, there would also no longer be any Johannes Kepler.27

  Kepler is oblivious: he “truly noticed nothing; he possessed a happy blindness to everything that distracted him from his scientific goals.”28 At times, this astronomer seems utterly inhuman: “That was Kepler. He had no heart. And thus indeed he had nothing to fear from the world. He had no feelings, no love. And thus he naturally was also safe from the aberrances of feeling.”29 These are precisely the characteristics, as Tycho explains to Tengnagel, that make Kepler so essential for the future of his science: “Kepler is indeed no longer a man, but a ghost. Kepler is nothing outside of us, as I now understand it, no, each of us has his own Kepler inside him and has to withstand against him, against his inner Kepler, the hardest test of his soul.… Kepler is both our Devil and our Savior, both in one, my Tengnagel.”30 These are precisely the kinds of passages that biographers recite as firsthand descriptions of Einstein in Prague, even though they are a rather poor characterization of the physicist.

  There are many loops and intricacies to the plot—Tengnagel’s affair with Tycho’s daughter Elisabeth, the sad fate of the dwarf, a military-style siege that occurs when Tycho’s sons’ attempt to rout Tengnagel31—but the central arc of the novel involves the tension between Tycho and Kepler and the personal realization (the “path to God”) that emerges for Tycho as a result. Roughly a third of the way through the book, a simmering dispute breaks out between Tycho and Nicolaus Reimers Baer (1551–1600), also known as “Ursus” via the Latinization of his last name, who served as the imperial astronomer before Rudolf enticed Tycho to Prague.32 This controversy, which has been well treated by historians and was well chosen by Brod for the heart of his novel, began in 1588, when Ursus published a version of the geoheliocentric system that Tycho claimed (with some justification) had been plagiarized from his own notes while Ursus had visited Tycho’s majestic observatory of Uraniborg on the island of Hven. Ursus’s resulting fame led, in part, to his appointment as imperial astronomer in 1591. When Tycho learned of Ursus’s claims, he denounced his rival as a thief and discredited him both in print and through his extended network of patrons, with the end result that Tycho displaced Ursus in Rudolf’s court. Ursus responded by publishing De astronomicis hypothesibus (On Astronomical Hypotheses) in 1597, an astonishingly slanderous and vulgar work—including adulterous innuendos about Tycho’s wife—so toxic that most copies were pulped through the efforts of Tycho and members of the court.33 (Brod compressed the chronology and pushed it back so that Ursus’s book appeared over two years later, tightening the story’s drama.)

  Considering that this was essentially an academic squabble, Brod handled the suspense fairly deftly. When reading Ursus’s screed, it occurs to Tycho, through a suggestion from his daughter Elisabeth (who is trying to intercede for Tengnagel, who is at that moment in the doghouse), that “Kepler would be the most appropriate person to put Ursus in his place once and for all. Much more suited than the decent Hagecius, who engaged with science still only as an amateur. Kepler’s basic style by contrast would rip out the weak counterarguments of his opponent by the roots.”34 The idea brings him solace and then almost immediately rage—for as Tycho reads Ursus’s work (at almost the exact midpoint of the novel), he discovers that Kepler is also in it, and that Ursus has praised the young astronomer almost as much as he has degraded Tycho. The Dane is puzzled:

  Then he found Kepler’s name again behind the frontispiece. This time especially boldly printed … “To the most famous mathematician Raymarus Ursus!” … This was a letter from Kepler. A forgery! No, such a clumsy audacity was not to be ascribed to Ursus.… It was an authentic Kepler letter. With his signature. And what a letter! Veneration, admiration, mastery … in each line a mess of praise.… Tycho wanted to scream; his tongue became very thick, it would not stir. His heart beat so fast and hurriedly that it had already hammered out an empty space in his chest … Kepler thus belonged to Tycho’s worst enemy, that was the explanation.

  “Betrayal” … mumbled Tycho softly.35

  Tycho is devastated, and he turns to this treacherous assistant on whom he had pinned his hopes and demands atonement: Kepler must write a decisive refutation of Ursus’s libel
, now more than ever in order to expiate Ursus’s additional crime of including the letter without authorization. Even though Ursus dies a few chapters later, Tycho never relaxes his demand that Kepler not work on the orbit of Mars, or on any cosmological system, until he accomplishes this vitally important task. In the novel, Kepler’s Apologia Tychonis contra Ursum is presented to Tycho on the latter’s deathbed, although it was in fact completed in April 1601, a few months before Tycho’s death. (It was not, however, published until 1858; it remains a masterly discussion of the history and philosophy of astronomical hypotheses.)36 The novel’s plot, in short, hinges on two divergent personalities negotiating the boundaries of loyalty and betrayal.

  God does come into it. This struggle over earthly reputation and terrestrial friendship among scholars of the heavens serves as the psychological impetus for Tycho’s reconciliation with his daughter, with Tengnagel, with Kepler, and with the Almighty. After many conflicts with Kepler, Tycho decides to forgive him and petition the emperor for his appointment as the next imperial astronomer. While in the royal anteroom, Tycho encounters the famous rabbi Judah Löw ben Bezalel—also known as the Maharal, and widely identified since the nineteenth century via an apocryphal attribution as the creator of the famous Golem of Prague—and the two begin conversing.37 Upon seeing Löw, Tycho recalls his own fall from grace in Scandinavia and his wanderings that led him to finally settle in Prague, and Brod makes a direct connection with the fate of the Jews:

  And now the Jewish people truly appeared to him—as homeless and transitory as he was, always demonized as he was, in their teachings as misunderstood as he was and yet nonetheless holding firmly to them, as robbed and wounded as he was, this people of misfortune—formally as a symbol of his own way of life. He recalled that he already earlier once had compared himself with Ahasverus, the Wandering Jew.38

  Tycho, a Danish Lutheran, in Brod’s rendition stands next to Löw as the most “Jewish” character in the book. It is therefore fitting that he takes spiritual counsel from the religious sage. “God does not exist for the sake of the righteous person, to serve him and support him,” Löw tells Tycho, advising him to reconcile with his family and his God, “but the righteous one exists to serve God and to support him.”39 At this point the reader might recall that the epigraph of Tycho Brahe’s Path to God comes from Genesis 32, which describes the battle of Jacob and the angel at Pniel, bringing the theme of exile and the connection of Löw’s theology with the contemporary ideas of Martin Buber to the fore. Rather than being a departure from Brod’s recent novels Arnold Beer and Jüdinnen, Tycho continued his exploration of Jewish identification.40 The novel ends with Tycho’s death on 24 October 1601. He has finally found his path to God: not through astronomy, but through reconciliation.

  This was the novel that Philipp Frank presented as based on the historical Albert Einstein of 1911–1912 as transcribed by the pen of Max Brod from 1913 to 1915. Obviously, a lot more happens in the storyline than reflections on Kepler’s ethereality. Most striking for a reader who comes to Tycho Brahe’s Path to God looking for a roman à clef about Einstein in Brod’s Kepler is that the novel is not really about Kepler at all: as the title indicates, Tycho Brahe dominates the narrative. Today, when telling the grand drama of the development of heliocentric astronomy, it seems obvious that Kepler should be the central figure, but this narrative did not come into its own until the publication of Arthur Koestler’s immensely popular The Sleepwalkers in 1959, itself based on Max Caspar’s detailed biography of Kepler from 1948.41 None of Caspar’s work was available to Brod when he crafted his novel—but he did have access to a host of sources on the historical Tycho and his final two years in Prague, sources that (despite the nitpicking of a few later historians at Brod’s poetic license) he used quite thoroughly.

  Chief among these was John Lewis Emil Dreyer’s 1890 biography Tycho Brahe: A Picture of Scientific Life and Work in the Sixteenth Century, which came out in a corrected and expanded German translation in 1894.42 By contrast, the only biography of Kepler available to Brod was an 1871 Latin account. Brod could have consulted it—he knew Latin well enough to translate some Catullus into German—but the novel hews so closely to Dreyer’s outlines that it seems he did not.43 We even know how Brod became aware of Dreyer’s work: Gerhard Kowalewski, the mathematician who frequented the same Fanta gatherings as Einstein, was an enthusiast of the history of mathematics and mentioned Dreyer’s biography to the novelist.44 Numerous other late-nineteenth-century sources on Tycho (and more rarely on Kepler) would have been accessible to Brod in Prague.45

  But even beyond the available sources, it was overdetermined that for someone in Brod’s place and time, the hero of this story must be Tycho. An 1872 source on the Kepler–Tycho relationship explained this most clearly: “Tycho’s name is still popular today in Prague, although he barely lived 2 years there; everyone knows his grave in the Týn Church, and Ferdinand’s pleasure castle is shown to every newcomer as Tycho’s observatory. But as for Kepler, who lived for 12 uninterrupted years in Prague and also later was in constant communication with it, the vast majority here scarcely know his name, and many fewer his relations with Bohemia.”46 The fact that Kepler could be identified as “German” while Tycho was neutrally “Danish,” as well as the convenient symbol of Tycho’s grave in the famous Utraquist church on the Old Town Square, no doubt cemented his importance for Czech nationalists.47 (Even among Germans, however, the name “Johannes Kepler” was so obscure that one reviewer of Brod’s novel consistently referred to him as “Keßler.”)48 Brod wrote within a relatively recent but robust tradition of historical novels about Tycho in Prague. In 1908, Julius Kraus’s novel Prag featured Tycho as a character, and in 1916—the same year that Tycho Brahe’s Path to God appeared—Auguste Hauschner published Der Tod des Löwen (The Death of the Lion), in which Tycho played a prominent role.49

  The obsession with tying Brod’s book’s secondary character Kepler to Einstein has torn the work not only out of the rich history of astronomy in Prague, but from its immediate context of Germanophone writers. The problem stems from thinking of it as a book about science. The amount of astronomy in the novel is quite meager, and the dominant themes stand out as religious and interpersonal. Contemporary readers did not understand the novel to focus on science at all. Instead, it became the center of heated discussion as a work of literature and as a commentary on literary politics.

  * * *

  Obscure today except among literature specialists or Einstein biographers, Tycho Brahe’s Path to God was one of the sensations of the season when it first appeared, sparking intensive commentary across the Germanophone public sphere far beyond Bohemia, as well as the Czechophone sphere within the central city of Prague. From the start, the book sold exceptionally well, even given wartime conditions in Austria-Hungary and Germany, the two major markets. The first print run was 4,000 in 1915, which sold out quickly. The following year an additional 5,000 to 8,000 copies were sold, and by 1917 between 26,000 and 32,000 copies were in circulation. In 1920 the publisher, Kurt Wolff, counted more than 52,000 texts in print. Translations followed apace: Czech in 1917, English in 1928 (translated by Felix Warren Crosse under the misleading title The Redemption of Tycho Brahe), Italian in 1933, Hebrew in 1935, and Danish in 1950.50

  Brod was ecstatic. He wrote breathlessly to Kurt Wolff in February 1916:

  About my work:—I believe that you are mistaken if you see no possibility for success for Tycho Brahe during the war. I need no longer argue about it, because the facts have already proven me correct. Unfortunately I have no direct news from Mr. Meyer; but I learn from his advertisement in the last issue of the “Jüdische Rundschau” that Tycho Brahe (the first and second thousand copies) have already sold out and are no longer in stores, that one must now already be referred to a reprinting which is announced as “appearing soon.” The three largest booksellers in Prague tell me that the demand here is entirely extraordinary. There is already a dearth of copies,
orders from the field can no longer be fulfilled, etc.… [T]o date none of my books has found such a unanimously enthusiastic reception as this one.… Also all of my earlier works are unimportant to me set against Tycho Brahe. Only this book can achieve success for me and, what is more, an effect on mankind.51

  (Ironically but characteristically, his metric for his international success appears to have relied on chatting with Prague locals.) Brod told Wolff that he was even getting unsolicited praise from people he did not know, including a young Berlin critic named Rudolf Kayser, who asked permission to publish an analysis of the book.52 (Kayser, coincidentally, would marry Ilse Löwenthal within the decade, making him the son-in-law of Albert Einstein.) As late as 1968, Brod remained proud of this novel: “I stand firm (I am so vain) to my Tycho Brahe and do not hold it against anyone if he praises this book. Even if he knows nothing else by me besides Tycho, written more than half a century ago.”53

  The response of the contemporary German-language literary press justified Brod’s excitement. For the most part, the reviews were glowing, although it must be stated for the record that several of the early reviews were written by his close friends, who were deeply embedded in the Prague milieu that birthed the novel. Brod’s Zionist colleague and intimate Hugo Bergmann, for example, reviewed the book in a Jewish journal immediately upon its appearance, stating that “Tycho’s path to God is like the staggering of a drunkard, he hurtles from one eruption to another,” and emphasizing the symbolic significance of the epigraph about Jacob wrestling with the angel.54 Lifelong comrade Felix Weltsch in 1917 recognized the important theological awakening that strikes Tycho but continued to analyze the secondary characters as well. “Kepler will indeed go further on his path to God,” he wrote, “he will meanwhile still find his great ‘laws’; but he will never attain this nearness to God in which Tycho spent the happy unraveling of his entire moral journey.”55 Likewise, Otto Pick, part of Brod’s close “Prague Circle,” offered a detailed and intelligent reading of the work in the influential Die neue Rundschau, combining his analysis with a literary biography of Brod to date, a portrait of the artist as a thirtysomething growing out of indifferentism.56 Many reviews from those further removed from Brod’s immediate milieu likewise praised the work.57