Einstein in Bohemia
Page 20
There were, to be sure, also negative evaluations. Jesa d’Ouckh panned the novel in Das Reich in 1916–1917, charging that Brod was simply incapable of persuasively presenting psychological states. This had the ironic effect of making Kepler a more compelling character than Tycho, precisely because Brod did not try to supply him with any rich interiority. “These are not the artistic qualities that make this book worthy of notice,” d’Ouckh continued. “On the contrary: through an expansiveness of psychological foundation and development of character, bordering on artistic tactlessness, through a widely distributed exhibiting of side characters and their fates distant from the guiding idea, the reader must work his way through painfully mediocre language to the essential.”58 Wolfgang Schumann the year before had likewise found little to praise in the prose: “Peculiarities and disharmonies of language, inner turmoil of the colorful story are the consequences; I read the book with excited involvement, but it soon faded in memory, since this noble metal is only half forged and hurriedly so.”59
These criticisms were overwhelmed by the positive assessments in the Germanophone press and dwarfed in their acidity by the largely negative evaluation that Czech-language authors gave to both the German original and its Czech translation of 1917 by Adolf Wenig, available at a price of 4 crowns and 29 heller. The speed with which Wenig’s translation came out, preceding as it did any other rendition by a decade, is not especially surprising given Brod’s close connection with and patronage of Czech literary circles. The Czech edition featured a lengthy foreword by Wenig that articulated the significance of both the author and the book for Czech readers—including a specific connection of Tycho with Brod’s novella Ein tschechisches Dienstmädchen, which indicates this was the most likely touchstone for readers in Czech—and included a substantial statement by Brod himself about his motivation for writing the novel. Brod carefully framed the work in a Bohemian context, stating that he had long been obsessed with two Prague stories: the Tycho narrative, and the Goetheborg episode in the life of Bedřich Smetana, which had led to his creation of Czech nationalists’ talismanic opera, The Bartered Bride.60 Despite the amount of research we know that Brod put into Tycho, in his letter to Wenig he downplayed his erudition:
Of all the symbols of spiritual oppression which had impressed me in the various epochs of life, the symbol of Tycho Brahe finally gained the greatest power over me and called for representation.—Here I can now actually reveal a surprising fact: I built the entire core of the Tycho novel only from my superficial schoolboy knowledge, I created in my own mind the character and life course of Tycho Brahe before I went into the literature. And now my great amazement came! When I was so distant and saw before me in crude outlines the course of the history I wanted to create—when I finally resorted to the scholarly books which afterwards proclaimed the events, environment, and biography of its hero—I gathered that actually everything agreed down to the least remarkable details with the image that I had created without any kind of real foundation other than intuitive feeling.61
Brod clearly wanted to emphasize his intuitive genius, the way that he (and the local legends he had been raised on as a child) contained an artistic truth that was deeper than historical research and could only be buttressed, not supplanted, by the latter. “Even today, three years after finishing the novel,” he continued, “it happens that I got hold of a collection of Tycho Brahe’s letters which I did not know about, and in them I found expressions and views on certain subjects in exactly the manner in which I had composed them.”62
If Brod believed that these confessions would endear his novel to Czech critics, he was mistaken. Most of their reviews were negative. Perhaps the most salient critique—predictably, given the intensification of the separatist movements within Bohemia during the war that would soon culminate in independence—was a nakedly nationalist one that appeared in the journal Zvon in 1918. The main flaw of the work, the author K. M. argued, did not have to do with its major character Tycho Brahe or even his foil Johannes Kepler but rather concerned a minor character who appeared in the first scene and doddered onstage periodically: referred to always as Hagecius in the novel, the reviewer called him Hájek, and we have already met him. Observing that Dreyer’s biography of Tycho was the main source that Brod had followed closely and that this work included much laudatory material on the close intellectual friendship between Hájek and Tycho, K. M. fumed that Brod had manipulated Dreyer’s account to the disfavor of a historical personage solely with this character—“the only Czech who plays a large role in the novel! If one were to compare it with the truth—so be it!” He went on:
There were at the Rudolfine court enough vile schemers that a novelist could utilize. But he did not even settle on an inaccurate misrepresentation at large; when the matter came to a Czech he settled in the end on the figure of a completely extraordinary character, on the Czech scientist Tadeáš Hájek z Hájku! The personality of this great scholar and glorious Czech is little known today and is consistently undervalued; still, however, from the sources it is clear that he was not only the greatest Czech scientist of his era but also the most ingenious of all Czech astronomers of past centuries. He was known as a first-rate scholar to all contemporary scientists, he was forward-looking, he crushed superstition and mistaken prejudice when it was a matter of prognostication from celestial phenomena, and also was thus accused of wizardry; and he was persecuted because he worked on the scientific improvement of the calendar, so that he could remove senseless mistakes from it; he lived with Brahe in equitable friendship for twenty-five years but surpassed him in progressive views, adopting the Copernican system that Brahe rejected.63
Instead of the real scientific hero, Brod generated “a monster of the court, a two-faced schemer, a double-dealer toward Brahe, a smooth courtier, a scientist of dismissive impertinence, a vapid pseudohumanistic aesthete, a harmful scoffer and hypocrite, a scientific amateur (!!—p. 110), a Catholic-clerical spy, a garrulous ‘manikin’—in brief a person comical and without character in every situation. So here Max Brod, whose sympathy to Czechs is emphasized, simple-mindedly, dishonestly, plainly crookedly made from a glorious figure of Czech cultural history” a travesty.64 This was not the only review to focus on Hájek in particular and the depiction of Bohemian astronomy in general.65
Other reviews were less acerbic in tone and engaged more thoughtfully with the implications of the whole work than had the German-language reviews. The most important literary critic writing in Czech, František Xaver Šalda, perceptively homed in on the Jewish themes in the novel, linking it to Gustav Meyrink’s Golem, as did many other Czech reviewers. While he considered it “first a good, artistic work,” he also noted that it was a “Prague novel,” like Meyrink’s, only in a very limited sense: “In Brod’s work Prague is not a subject of interest, but background like theatrical scenery: it is the exiled soul which lost its direction, that unconscious confession in God’s world, and contributes substantially to its suffering.”66 (Another review noted that most of the novel took place at the Benatek/Benátky palace; when Prague did appear, it was mostly as a force for the good, as in the scene with Rabbi Löw.67) Instead of advancing the nationalist vision put forward by the Zvon review, Šalda exonerated Brod of the main vice that reviewer had accused him of: “Here is the key to Tycho Brahe. It is not a German novel, it is a Jewish novel in its symbolic fateful power.… And this Jewish central essence is so beautiful in Brod’s book, and at the end of the day it is rather close and comprehensible to serious Czechness.”68
F. Marek’s review in Cesta in 1919 concentrated even more closely on the plot, as opposed to symbolism, and oriented its discussion around the Tycho–Kepler conflict over what to do about the treacherous Ursus. Tycho’s need for a defense against Ursus’s slanderous work, Marek noted, made him even more dependent on Kepler than he had been when he summoned him to make use of his mathematical virtuosity. Likewise, his dependency on imperial patronage required Tycho to engage in astrological
forecasting, in which he did not believe. He was a person compromised by his vanity and desire for high position, and this produced intellectual shortcomings: “The clearest thing that emerges is his faint-heartedness in the argument with Kepler: when his views touch on the composition of the heavens, and on neither one side nor the other is there anything certain—Brahe keeps to his system because Copernicus allegedly contradicts the Bible and does not want to offend the majesty of his emperor, where Kepler stands only for the truth.”69 At every stage, Tycho is blocked from achieving full realization as a character, unlike the secondary figures in the novel. Only a turn to relations with God can save such a character. If the events of the novel were to happen in our present, they would stimulate our sympathy.
* * *
Maybe they were happening in the readers’ present, the Prague of the second decade of the twentieth century. As the later enthusiasm for Philipp Frank’s invocation of the novel in his biography of Einstein indicates, and as was hinted in several of the reviews and commentaries about it, there was an abiding sense that this historical novel about astronomy in the age of Rudolf II was a roman à clef, a (perhaps thinly) veiled exposé of various actual people that could be understood if one decoded it correctly. The magnetic quality of Kepler’s character—his seeming modernity, his abstraction from the world around him—as well as his increasing salience in the narratives of the “scientific revolution” that began to proliferate after the Second World War understandably trained attention on him. Who was Brod’s Kepler? But what if, on the other hand, we postponed that question for a moment and instead tried to uncover the real personage who might be lying behind the villain who never actually appears in his own right: Ursus.
Answering this question unfolds one of the central interpersonal dramas in Austrian literature at the dawn of the twentieth century and along the way will also unscramble the Kepler riddle. To many of the Germanophone reviewers who knew Brod personally, the true identity of the scurrilous Ursus was easy enough to parse. Paul Adler stated it baldly: “This spirit of the Fackel is in Tycho de Brahe’s world the pamphleteer ‘Ursus.’ ”70 When searching for someone in contemporary Austrian letters who printed slanders and provoked geniuses into a frenzy, there was only one place to look: the Viennese writer and critic Karl Kraus (no relation to the Prague philosopher Oskar Kraus), whose journal Die Fackel (The Torch) was a mainstay of fiery (and hilarious) mockery of the mores of the day and their main defenders.
Max Brod loathed Kraus.71 The feud had begun in 1911—incidentally, during the first months of Einstein’s professorship at the German University in Prague—in Berlin, where the two writers were engaged in a proxy war between feuding journals: Brod was involved with Frank Pfempfert’s Die Aktion and Kraus patronized Herwath Walden’s Der Sturm. Though fully aware of Kraus’s barbed pen and superhuman ability to hold a grudge, Brod picked a fight with the critic 10 years his senior. Most writers would have avoided a tangle with Kraus or would have not responded to snipes from his direction, but Brod issued an ad hominem comment that compelled Kraus to engage in hostilities. Kraus retaliated in a punningly devastating salvo in the 8 July issue of Die Fackel:
The esteemed Max Brod in Prague is something different. He writes a polemical essay in order to establish why he considers the polemical essay to be a lower form of art. He remains correct. He complains that I call him “Mr.” He is right. He cites bad jokes I have made; truly, they are bad when they are quoted by Brod. Because a word arrives through the air in which it is breathed, and in bad air even those of Shakespeare are snuffed out. Spirit spread on Brod’s bread turns into lard [Geist auf Brod geschmiert ist Schmalz]. “The simplest similarity of words becomes for him a great experience,” says this Brodcrumb and doesn’t know how right he is.72
Things escalated from there. Two years later, Brod wearily recounted “that I once badly criticized a book by Karl Kraus in the Literarisches Echo and that since then he has poked fun at me at every opportunity.”73 But he would not stand down. Kraus stood for everything Brod did not (and vice versa). Where Brod represented a pluricentric Germanophone literature from provincial Prague, Kraus represented the haughtiness of Habsburg Vienna. Where Brod was an increasingly active Zionist, Kraus, though of Jewish birth, was an anti-Dreyfusard and (unbeknownst to the public at the time, including Brod) a recently baptized Catholic. “Thus I feel put off by such types of my race as Karl Kraus as the most repellent,” Brod wrote to his friend Richard Dehmel in the same 1913 letter, “because I see embodied in them what has degraded my people for millennia. There exists thus an implacable enmity between me and Karl Kraus, of whose oh-so-clever and entirely unrepentant satires I also battled in a personal essay in the Aktion.”74 He refused Dehmel’s subsequent offer to broker a peace, “because I see very well that between him and me hostilities must reign because of principle.”75 Kraus harbored identical feelings, threatening to pull his work from Kurt Wolff’s publishing house on the grounds that Wolff was now printing work by Brod—“one of the most unfortunate hysterics that has ever tarnished me in love and hate.”76 Kraus died in 1936, but that did not stop Brod’s sallies. Even in the late 1940s, he was still lobbing Janus-faced assessments at the Viennese critic: “Karl Kraus admittedly attacked and made fun of much evil and many bad authors, but without discrimination also did so of great poets like Heine, Werfel, Hofmannsthal, George, or Kafka.”77
The duration of this antagonism indicates that its primary audience was not the deceased writer but others who were still alive, rather closer to (Brod’s) home. Though Kraus was inextricably identified with Vienna in the popular mind, he actually traveled widely in search of talent. A large number of Prague authors published in the Fackel, and Kraus himself gave many readings in the city. Of the roughly 700 lectures Kraus gave in his lifetime, 95 (or about 13 percent) were in Bohemia, of which 57 were in Prague itself.78 Kraus also patronized many Prague writers whom Brod considered his own clients and discoveries. The most famous of these triggered Brod’s starkest statement of his animus toward Kraus and explains the 1911 onset of their conflict and its Berlin setting. As Brod described it in 1937, a year after Kraus’s death: “Thus Karl Kraus shortly after the publication of Weltfreund came out effusively for Werfel (yes, that’s how it was before the verdict flipped) in an article, using the moment to speak out against me.”79 Franz Werfel, one of the greatest German-language poets of his day, had famously been unveiled as a major talent when Brod read some of his protégé’s poems from his forthcoming debut collection Der Weltfreund during an appearance in the German capital.80 Werfel reciprocated Kraus’s overtures of friendship, hopping from Brod’s small pond to Kraus’s larger one.81 Betrayal by poaching one’s star pupil? Yes, Kraus was Ursus.
This could mean only that Kepler was none other than Franz Werfel. (As with the abortive Kepler–Ursus relationship, Werfel and Kraus later fell out.)82 Brod was obsessed with Werfel from the moment he learned of the younger poet’s gifts. Brod’s memoirs, penned 20 years after Werfel’s 1945 death in exile in Beverly Hills, begin not with the story of his own childhood, but with Werfel. After recounting the course of their friendship, Brod added: “A few years later I took this remarkable relationship as the basic motivation in my novel Tycho Brahe’s Path to God.”83 This was something Brod had been saying for years. In the same 1937 article where he described the conflict with Kraus over Werfel’s soul, he confessed that “for me from the experiences around the discovery of the young Werfel, about a few of which I have only hinted at here, and from the conflicts that I then and later survived, there arose my book, that I consider my most painful and that many consider my best: Tycho Brahe’s Path to God.”84 Those in the know in Prague, like Paul Adler, saw the novel as an explicit rebuke to Kraus not only personally, but aesthetically, in its abandonment of trivial barbs in favor of high-minded philosophy.85 Brod claimed in his memoirs that he came to realize how transparent the code was only later. He now recognized that “Werfel” and “Kepler” contain the same
number of letters, the same vowels, and the same intonation. More than that, “Brod” begins with the same consonant cluster as the name of Kepler’s patron “Brahe,” and, he added, the unusual letter “x” in his first name was paralleled by the “y” in “Tycho.”86 (He might have added to this list the assonance between “Ursus” and “Kraus.”)
Once one reads Tycho this way, the identifications seem overdetermined. The clues are there in the very dedication of the book: “To my friend Franz Kafka”—which happens to be one of the earliest mentions of the reluctant writer’s name in print.87 The novel is, at root, a book about loyalty and friendship; this is why Tycho insists that Kepler defend his honor and why he later intercedes for him with Rudolf II. Kafka understood such messages clearly: he had dedicated his first collection of stories, Betrachtung (Contemplation, 1913), to “M.B.,” and Brod was delighted that he “was able to return thanks by dedicating my novel Tycho Brahe’s Redemption to him.”88 Kafka understood the gesture well enough, but he was not necessarily happy about it. For one, it put him under an even stronger obligation to Brod, who had nurtured his literary ambitions for many years. “That you want to dedicate Tycho to me is the first happiness immediately touching me for a long time. Do you know what such a dedication means?” Kafka wrote Brod in February 1914. “That I (and even if it is only an illusion, some side rays of this illusion do in reality indeed warm me) will be lifted up and included in Tycho, so much more alive than I. How little will I encompass this story! But how I will favor it as my ostensible property! You are doing me an undeserved good turn, Max, as always.”89