Einstein in Bohemia

by Michael D. Gordin

  To his fiancée, Felice Bauer, he gave a different interpretation. “We (for the sake of certainty once again: Max and I) are no longer so close due to my fault. He does not feel it so much in his innocence,” he wrote two months after his grateful acknowledgment to Brod, “and for example has also dedicated to me his new novel, Tycho Brahes Weg zu Gott, his most personal book, in fact a torturous self-tormenting story.”90 The aesthetic criticism is not too surprising. Kafka had already begun to diverge strongly from Brod a few years earlier; in his diary he was quite critical of the latter’s 1911 novel Jüdinnen, a sentimental Bildungsroman that marked Brod’s shift to Jewish themes.91 Nonetheless, he assured Bauer a year later that “the new novel from Max is very dear to me.”92 Franz Werfel had been castigated for spurning Brod’s affection; the other Franz would be the beneficiary. (All this has not prevented some from insisting that Kepler was actually Kafka.93 In that case, the dedication would have been rather gauche.)

  Given the documentary evidence supporting the identification of Kepler with Werfel, not to mention the literary resonances it gives to the historical novel, the persistence of the Einstein–Kepler association is somewhat remarkable. The most it has going for it, aside from what Frank records Nernst reputedly saying, is that the book concerns astronomers, and Einstein is one scientist whom we know Brod met. But Brod was familiar with many scientists—he was seemingly acquainted with most of the compact Germanophone intellectual community in Prague, in addition to the Czech-identified scientists in his circles—and he could have modeled a scientist character on any one of them as easily as (or more easily than) the violin-playing physicist he had met on half a dozen occasions.

  For his part, Brod was horrified by Frank’s claim that the Kepler character in Tycho was a thinly concealed portrait of Einstein. That allegation was made in 1947, when Einstein was still alive, and Brod would work before and after the physicist’s death in 1955 to dispel the association. He devoted several pages to the question in Streitbares Leben, his memoir. First, he wanted to stress how much he admired Einstein specifically as a well-rounded individual, who enjoyed Kant and music as well as physics: “Einstein was open-minded to all stimulations, his paths of thought sometimes took completely surprising, in certain circumstances pro-Kantian, directions. In general one had the impression of standing opposite a great man without prejudices.”94 But to admit a connection between his Kepler and the real Einstein, he argued, would do violence to the characters in his novel. He began by observing how Einstein “would experimentally change his point of view in discussion, knowing how to position himself to test also the the opposing viewpoint, and would then consider the entire situation in a wholly new way from a changed angle.… He never locked himself in, he did not run off in a bunch of different directions and therefore, jokingly and with virtuosity, remained always securely and creatively on task.” According to Brod, it was this “characteristic of his of scientific courage and always beginning anew I modeled in my novel about Tycho Brahe in the figure of my Kepler, while in Tycho Brahe himself I wanted to depict a more rigid scholar, insistent upon his system.” (Of course, in the actual book Kepler is quite inflexible and Brahe more willing to compromise on hypotheses, but no matter.) Brod insisted that the “decent Professor Frank misunderstood” his intention “and later published somewhere that I had wanted to present in my Kepler a certain egocentric drive that was (supposedly) made evident in Einstein’s person. I have never noted such an egocentric drive in Einstein; on the contrary, I always found him kind, helpful, and astonishingly open-minded. I also wrote about this to Einstein in America when Frank’s interpretation appeared and excited a certain stir. Einstein accepted my explanation with a cheerful joke—and thus the matter was resolved between us.”95

  In the end, Brod reiterated that “my friend Werfel, as already hinted, had contributed many more essential and more painful points to the figure of Kepler than had Einstein, who was after all only a fleeting guest on the path of my fate.”96 Brod and Werfel had drifted far apart after their initial quarrels over Kraus. The former ended up in Tel Aviv, escaping World War II and the Holocaust to become a mainstay of the Germanophone émigré community in Israel. Werfel had headed west, settling in the United States with his glamorous wife Alma, who had previously been married to composer Gustav Mahler and architect Walter Gropius. He settled in California, but in a trip to New York in 1945, shortly before his death, he happened to meet the most famous Germanophone émigré of all: Albert Einstein.97

  * * *

  While Brod’s engagement with Einstein is not recorded—at least not in any straightforward manner—in Tycho Brahe’s Path to God, the book does capture the aftermath of an important conflict in Austrian letters. Yet because so many have wished to see Brod’s relationship to Einstein encoded in the 1915 novel, they have missed the more obvious point: the two men who had once played music together in Bertha Fanta’s salon on the Old Town Square maintained an epistolary intellectual exchange for decades after Einstein left the city. Brod’s views about Einstein (and Einstein’s about Brod) are to be found not in novelistic metaphors and allusions, but in a forthright philosophical exchange about the place of ideas and intellectuals in the modern world.

  This conversation would play out in a different world, a world that had emerged over two decades after the publication of Tycho, after the foundation of the First Republic of Czechoslovakia in 1918, and after the rise of the National Socialist Party to power in Germany in 1933. In this new world, we find the two men confronting a Europe that had abandoned democracy and plunged into fascism. Albert Einstein had settled at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a quiet oasis in a quiet town from which he observed the distant European cataclysm. He was also exerting himself strenuously on behalf of displaced refugees, writing affidavits himself or connecting the unfortunate who appealed to him with those who could help. His reputation as a lifeline for asylum-seekers in the United States had spread broadly, and it was with this in mind that Max Brod wrote to the former Prague professor on 30 November 1938.

  The date is telling: this was not a pleasant time to be in Prague as a German-speaking Jewish intellectual identified as a fervent supporter of the liberal regime of Tomáš Masaryk. (Masaryk had stepped down in 1935, succeeded by his deputy Edvard Beneš, and died two years later.) A month before Brod’s letter to Einstein, the leaders of France and the United Kingdom had negotiated a pact in Munich with Adolf Hitler, ceding substantial territory around the rim of Czechoslovakia to the German Reich. The truncated remnants of what was now known as Czecho-Slovakia (or the Second Republic) shifted under the new leadership of President Emil Hácha toward closer alignment with its National Socialist neighbor, which had incorporated Austria into its bulk earlier that year. Czech-identified residents of Prague spurned German-speakers, German-identified residents anticipated future dominance, and both sides lashed out at Jews. For the first time, Max Brod felt vulnerable in the only home he had ever known.

  “My position here becomes more intolerable from day to day. I can no longer write what I think.… I also feel myself immediately threatened,” he told Einstein. “So, e.g., yesterday the Völkischer Beobachter”—the newspaper of the Nazi Party—“carried a large open attack on me, with a photograph. The occasion was offered by certain erotic passages from my youthful works written decades ago. But the Völkischer Beobachter is now in Prague one of the most widely circulated newspapers and the reflexes will not fail to materialize.” Perhaps surprisingly for someone who had been considered one of the most visible Jewish nationalists in Prague and who had repeatedly advocated on behalf of Zionist causes, Brod was unwilling to depart for Palestine, where many of his close friends from the Fanta circle had already emigrated. “I have decided to emigrate to America while there is still time,” he informed Einstein.98 He had enough money to establish himself; what he needed was a visitor visa. He asked Einstein’s help to secure an invitation from an American university so he could immigrate above th
e U.S. government’s meager quota. Brod insisted that he was a good catch: he could lecture on a large number of topics, including Czech politics, Czech music (especially Janáček), Jewish matters, and his own work. Besides, he declared, “I would bring all of the still unpublished manuscripts of Franz Kafka with me, edit them there, and establish a Kafka archive.”99 (One can only imagine the alternative future for American-based Kafka scholars.) These would be the only Kafka manuscripts to survive, with Camill Hoffmann unable to save those in Berlin from Gestapo destruction.100

  I found no record of a response from Einstein, or from the other influential Americans Brod must have contacted. On the night of 14–15 March 1939, with the Kafka manuscripts tucked in a briefcase, Max Brod fled Prague as German forces invaded the Second Republic. He was on the last train to leave the city before the Nazi occupation, and he was able to see German troop movements from the window of his carriage as he hurtled toward the Black Sea. There he boarded a Romanian ship to travel through the Dardenelles and arrived in Tel Aviv.101 He was finally in Palestine, a member of the Jewish settlement of the Yishuv, together with other colleagues from Prague like Hugo Bergmann. For all his professed Zionism, however, he was not content. In June 1940 he again wrote to Einstein—on the stationery of Habima, the Yishuv’s theater company, where he worked as a dramaturg—to reactivate an invitation that the famous author (and now Princeton resident) Thomas Mann had arranged for him from Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati.102 Again, there is no record of a response from Einstein.

  The nine years following the Munich pact constituted a period of intense suffering for Brod, and the prodigiously prolific writer went silent. His wife of 30 years died in 1942 in Tel Aviv. He was shocked by the suicide of his friend, the writer Stefan Zweig—who had penned a foreword for a reissue of Tycho Brahe’s Path to God—that same year. In 1944 he learned that his brother and collaborator Otto, who had stayed behind in Europe, had been murdered in Auschwitz along with his family. His close Prague friends Oskar Baum, Ludwig Winder, and Franz Werfel—estranged though they might be—were sick or in exile, and soon many were dead. The only writing he committed to paper in this period was an unpublished Hebrew drama titled Shaul. (Brod never published a major work in Hebrew.)103 His first significant publication after the war was the two-volume philosophical work Diesseits und Jenseits (This Life and What Lies Beyond), in which he engaged heavily with Philipp Frank’s theories of causality and repeatedly discussed Einstein’s controversial position on quantum theory: “There is thus, taken strictly, no unified modern physics today at all. But rather there are two physicses, in which one (Einstein) holds to the causal explanation of the world in the midst of all revolutionariness, while the other, the theory of discontinuity and of essential indeterminacy, pretends to no longer think causally.”104

  After the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948, however, Brod apparently found his fictional muse again. That year he published a new novel, Galilei in Gefangenschaft (Galilei in Captivity). It was the first novel he ever wrote that was not set principally in Prague.105 “For me Prague is my home,” he had written to a Czech newspaper in 1930. “And I do not have any other real home. My family, as far as I can determine from its past history on my father’s side, lived in Prague. And Prague is not only in some, but in all of my novels the main scene of the story.”106 Like Brod himself, his fiction had become homeless.

  In an afterword to the novel, Brod proclaimed Galilei to be the conclusion of a trilogy of historical novels that he called “The Battle for Truth.” Galilei’s immediate predecessor was Rëubeni, Prince of the Jews (1925), a chronicle of a historically documentable ostensible Jewish messiah in the Renaissance who hailed, in Brod’s invented account, from the Prague ghetto. The work won the Czechoslovak State Prize in 1930—a rare honor (although two years earlier the laurels had gone to none other than Franz Werfel, for Barbara, the first German-language work to win).107 A decade earlier than Rëubeni the first book in the trilogy had appeared: Tycho Brahe’s Path to God.

  Brod wanted the opinion of the world’s most famous scientist on his new creation. He sent a copy to Einstein in June 1949. “I would be very much delighted if you were to like my Galilei as much as you did my Tycho Brahe in its day,” he wrote. (Alas, I could not locate any trace of what Einstein said about that work to Brod.) “It seems to me personally an artistic and conceptual advance over my youthful work, it also happens that—unfortunately—its theme, freedom of thought, is today because of threatening totalitarian systems more timely than ever. If you found the time to read the book, your judgment would be very important to me.”108

  Galilei in Captivity is a sprawling work, longer than either Tycho and Rëubeni by a substantial margin, though it focuses on a very narrow period of time: the early 1630s, when the astronomer attempted to secure papal sanction for the heliocentric theories of Copernicus, despite the fact that he was proscribed from defending those theories by the terms of an Inquisitorial decree of 1616.109 In many ways, the book intensified the approach to historical fiction first seen in Tycho. Galileo Galilei has not one foil, like Tycho’s Kepler, but several: the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the Jewish astronomer Simon Delmedigo (Galileo always refers to him with the non-Jewish moniker “Giuseppe”), and Galileo’s daughter, the cloistered nun Maria Celeste. All of the significant characters in the book, including the pope, deliver verbose monologues about philosophical topics, often touching on theological concerns about this world and the next. Stylistically, though, the novel is a departure: chapters alternate between an omniscient third-person narrator and Galileo’s increasingly frantic first-person voice. The climax of the book comes when the pope—angered that the strawman Simplicio in Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems utters some of his own arguments against Copernicus—arranges to have Galileo censured and placed under house arrest. In the midst of these machinations, in the last quarter of the novel, Delmedigo interjects a fantastical plan, led by Jews and inspired by the legacy of Rëubeni, to help Galileo escape.110 The whole bizarre episode seems a reflection of Brod’s romanticization of Irgun and Haganah paramilitary operations in the British Mandate of Palestine. Thankfully for the credibility of the novel (and historical accuracy), Galileo declines to participate. He ends a broken man, but one who draws inspiration from his daughter’s tranquility, while Delmedigo carries his master’s manuscripts to Amsterdam to continue the pursuit of truth. Most notable in Brod’s account of Galileo’s resignation is his adherence to Catholic faith and his acceptance of his punishment, a contrast to the arrogance and cravenness he oscillates between earlier in the text.

  This time, Einstein’s detailed and fairly critical response to Brod has been preserved in the archives. The letter of 4 July 1949 reads, in full:

  Finally the much announced books have arrived. I have already read about a third of Galilei. To me it is entirely incomprehensible how one can achieve such a deep look into the bustle of people that composes what one usually calls history. When it is a case of the distant past, the effect is indeed all the more improbable and more senseless.

  In what pertains to Galilei himself, I had in fact imagined him rather differently. One can have no doubt that he was eager to know the truth in a manner that was rare. But it seems to me difficult to think that he as a mature person found it worth the effort to attempt, against so much opposition, to assimilate the truth he found to the consciousness of the superficial and petty interests of the surrounding masses. Was this effort really so important to him that he wasted his last years for it? His coerced recantation was indeed actually unimportant, because Galilei’s arguments were after all accessible to anyone seeking knowledge, and every somewhat initiated person must have known that the official recantation could only have been coerced.

  Though it does not suit my view of the contrarian inner independence of the old Galilei if he really went without urgent necessity to the lion’s den of Rome in order to scuffle there with clerics and other politicians.
Certainly I cannot imagine that I would have undertaken such a thing in defense of relativity theory. I would think: the truth is incomparably stronger than I, and it seems to me laughable and quixotic to want to defend it with a sword and Rocinante. It will also be difficult for me to believe that Galilei internally heeded Catholicism and the Church. But you will of course know why you presented him that way.

  The description of the milieu made a big impression on me. It must take extraordinary energy to form out of sparse information the bustle of people in so lively and convincing a manner.111

  Most telling about this reaction is how little it was actually about the novel on its own terms, and how much it represented Einstein interpreting his own experiences with hostility to relativity theory (addressed in the last chapter) and his relationship to religion (coming in the next). When Einstein claimed he imagined Galileo differently, what he really meant was that he imagined himself differently; he referenced nothing specific about Galileo that Brod had misrepresented and in fact praised the vividness of the historical reconstruction.