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Between Einstein’s enthusiasm for the Hebrew University and equivocation before the Jewish state lay the catastrophe of the Holocaust, and this event too had its Prague resonances for him. Initially, the fate of the Jews in Bohemia seemed optimistic as the new country of Czechoslovakia was carved out of the carcass of the Habsburg Empire in 1918. After extensive consultation and lobbying of its new president, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, by representatives of Jewish groups in the country, including Max Brod, the constitution of 1920 made Czechoslovakia the only state in Central Europe to recognize Jews as a separate nationality, granting them the rights and privileges of any other national minority. There was no numerus clausus in Czechoslovakia or legal discrimination against Jews, and Masaryk made efforts to combat anti-Semitism—dating back to his opposition to the Hilsner case—which gained him broad recognition among Zionist advocates across the continent. He even visited Palestine in 1927 and was guided by Hugo Bergmann.77 (Both had been students of Franz Brentano, albeit in different generations.)
Einstein was one of those strongly impressed by the new Czechoslovak president. In 1921, before he himself had been so honored in physics, Einstein wrote to Norway nominating Masaryk for a Nobel Peace Prize: “Having been made aware by some friends about the petition of the Czech parliament to confer the 1921 Peace Prize to President Masaryk, I take the liberty of endorsing this petition most warmly.… Masaryk has earned the greatest merit as a protector of oppressed nationalities, especially the Czechs and the Jews.”78 Masaryk did not win, but Einstein’s admiration continued. In 1930, he sent public congratulations on the statesman’s eightieth birthday—Masaryk remained in office until 1935, when he resigned due to ill health, dying two years later—which were printed in the local newspapers: “Professor Masaryk is the living example of how one’s love for one’s own people can indeed be in perfect harmony with the outlook of a world citizen.”79
Although Einstein was drawn to Masaryk’s public persona because of his stance on questions related to Jewish identification, the Czech president also appealed to him because of his approach to topics related to pacifism, which should not be surprising given how intrinsically intertwined both issues were in Einstein’s thought. On 13 April 1931, after receiving information from Prague pacifists Pavel Moudrý and Heinrich Tutsch, Einstein pled the case of an imprisoned conscientious objector directly to Masaryk: “The superior court of Brünn in your country has sentenced to a long prison term Mr. Přemysl Pitter, a man of high moral character who shares the antiwar sentiments just described.… I feel impelled to suggest that you exercise your powers of executive clemency in this case.”80 He received only a standard, boilerplate response on this instance, but something about the letter clearly nagged at Masaryk, and over a year later, on 22 July 1932, he penned a four-page, handwritten missive to Einstein revisiting the philosophical issues behind the case. The letter is worth quoting at length:
During the war in England I had the opportunity to observe the conduct of these Conscientious objectors: in many cases since then I have analyzed such Objectors. As president and commander in chief of the armed forces (formally of course) I must from time to time also here at home examine similar cases and rule on them. To put it briefly, in many cases they decide to openly refuse service not for any of the religious conclusions about moral motives, but rather because of anarchism, etc. Military courts are thus suspicious in advance and each individual case is painstakingly reviewed. So was Pitter’s case. According to the investigation this man is not without faults in his motives to refuse military service!
I consider it fair that conscientious objectors perform some sort of other public service instead of military service, as long as we still have some kind of army; and I also deem it fair that the commander of the army does not tolerate any anarchist propaganda against military service.
Guided by this point of view I judge all the circumstances in which I must decide. Esteemed professor, there are two kinds of pacifism; be assured that we try hard, especially me, to see true pacifists not only in principle, but also in tactics.81
Einstein’s admiration only deepened at this response, though his own views on conscientious objection were not swayed:
It is indicative of your deep feeling for humanity that you were good enough to write me on the subject at such length in your own hand. If all countries enjoyed the leadership of men such as yourself, the movement to abolish war would not appear as hopeless as, alas! it does today.
I find it hard to understand why so few people seem to regard it as shameful and unworthy of governments to coerce people into performing the very acts which the religions, taught and professed by those same governments, consider most evil—acts, moreover, that seriously imperil the very survival of world civilization.
Your letter was a rewarding experience and I thank you for it.82
As it happened, Einstein again participated in the mid-1930s in a multiyear campaign for Masaryk to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his maintenance of Czechoslovakia as the only remaining democratic island in the fascist sea of Central Europe. The major competition was Carl von Ossietzky, an imprisoned German pacifist. Despite Einstein’s support for Masaryk, he worried that if he won, it might distract attention from Ossietzky’s case, which he believed was more crucial to highlight in the current political climate as a way to signal the barbarity of Nazi Germany. After many machinations in which Einstein tried (and failed) to stay in the background, Ossietzky won the 1935 prize. Masaryk died before his candidacy could be considered again.83
The collapse of democracies into fascism across Europe was obviously a matter that touched Einstein intimately, as he chose to leave the continent in 1932 for a visiting professorship at Caltech and then assumed a post at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, instead of going back to a newly National Socialist Germany that displayed a particular obsession with demonizing him personally. The flood of Jewish refugees tormented Einstein, and he advocated as much as he could—he worried about expending his political capital and thereby hurting all the cases—to bring those fired, displaced, and threatened to the United States. He was especially successful with younger physicists. As he wrote to his lifelong friend Michele Besso from Princeton in 1937: “The beautiful thing here is that I can work together with young colleagues. It is noteworthy that in this long life I have exclusively collaborated with Jews.”84 The beauty of the moment would not last long, as Hitler’s terrorizing of Jews would unfurl into slaughter on an unprecedented scale. Among the millions of victims, many touched Einstein personally. One of those recalled an awkward relationship from the German University in Prague and picks out from the vast catalogue of suffering a single story.
The man’s name was Emil Nohel. He was born on 3 January 1886 to Heinrich and Julie (née Kallen) in the Bohemian village of Mcely, a moderate distance northeast of Prague, and his birth certificate bears the star of David stamp of the Jewish Community.85 His farmer parents harbored ambitions for the boy and sent him to a gymnasium in the New Town of Prague on the Graben (Na Příkopě in Czech). He did well there and subsequently enrolled for seven semesters of physics and mathematics study at the philosophical faculty in the German University in 1904, supplemented by a single semester in the law faculty. He took courses from Ferdinand Lippich and Georg Pick, as one might expect, but also with Anton Marty in Brentanist philosophy. He began working on a mathematical dissertation under Pick’s supervision entitled “On the Natural Geometry of Even Transformation Groups,” which he would defend in 1913, and in the meantime was hired in 1911 as a research assistant at the Institute of Theoretical Physics.86 He was immediately assigned to work with the new professor of physics just arrived from Zurich, Albert Einstein.
It is not entirely clear from surviving documents what the relationship between the two men was like, but we know that it ended quickly. Understandably, given what came afterward, Nohel’s family and Einstein’s friends and biographe
rs have painted a picture of affectionate interchange.87 Nohel’s son Yeshayahu would later recall that “the many hours Einstein and my father spent together in Einstein’s study, his world view and character left a lasting impression on my father.… He was fond of Einstein’s first wife and regretted their separation.”88 (His son also believed that Nohel had remained Einstein’s assistant for all three semesters the latter was in Prague, which was definitely not the case.)89 Nohel had large shoes to fill. He had been hired to replace Einstein’s highly productive assistant and sometime collaborator Ludwig Hopf, who had accompanied Einstein from Zurich but soon left Prague for a Privatdozent position in Aachen. Nohel and Einstein never managed to forge a harmonious working relationship, and after a few months Einstein replaced him with Otto Stern, fresh from a doctorate in physical chemistry in Breslau, starting on Easter 1912. (Stern would follow Einstein back to Zurich and embark on his own glorious career, marked along the way by the 1943 Nobel Prize in Physics.)90
“After their ways parted the connection between them did not last. My father was too modest (or too proud?) to bother the famous man. It may be that from a professional point Einstein’s influence on father was even negative,” noted Yeshayahu Nohel. “I have heard it said that other students and physicists, too, were so overwhelmed by his sheer brilliance and his originality of thought, that they did not dare to measure themselves against such a model and gave up scientific research. I assume that the break in that connection saddened my father. His affection for Einstein the man, however, stayed with him till the end.”91 Nohel continued to teach and research in Prague for a few years but soon moved to Vienna as a teacher in physics and mathematics at the Handelsakademie, a business-oriented secondary school. There he stayed and raised his family until March 1938, when Hitler’s troops marched peacefully into Austria and the Anschluss with Nazi Germany placed Nohel in grave peril.
Due to anti-Semitic racial laws, he lost his job. Surprisingly, he found another one, teaching at the Zvi Perez Chajes gymnasium, a Jewish school that remained open. He was assigned to teach physics again; when the Gestapo arrested the Latin teacher, he took over that subject as well. What little we know about this period comes from an admiring memoir piece written by a physics student he inspired named Walter Kohn. Kohn was one of the lucky ones. After leaving Vienna on the Kindertransport, he ended up in England and then Canada, where he was interned for two years as a refugee. After his release he embarked on a stellar career in physics, developing the extremely important density-functional theory for modeling complex quantum mechanical systems, which was eventually recognized by the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He continued to harken back gratefully to his teacher.92
Nohel was one of the unlucky ones. His son Heinrich (later Yeshayahu) had been sent to Palestine, but Nohel could not bring himself to make that move. He recognized, however, the need to get out of Central Europe if he could, and he began writing widely to employers in the United States offering his services in exchange for an affidavit and a visa to emigrate. Naturally, in describing his qualifications, he mentioned his former position as Einstein’s assistant in Prague, and this is how Emil Nohel’s name, after several decades, again crossed the physicist’s desk in Princeton. Einstein, who signed so many affidavits of his own, responded to Nohel quickly in May 1939 to confirm the latter’s story: “I gladly confirm for you that you were my assistant in Prague during 1910–1912 [sic]. I would gladly be of assistance you besides this, if you would allow me the opportunity.”93
Einstein had to attest to Nohel’s bona fides to several of his correspondents as well, who were themselves flooded with requests and did not know how to evaluate his story. Arthur Ruark, a physicist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, wrote Einstein in July 1939 inquiring as to both the veracity of Nohel’s account and the nature of an affidavit. Einstein was optimistic about Nohel’s chances and told Ruark to wait. “There is some prospect to get an affidavit for Professor Nohel from other sources. If you don’t hear from me in the contrary about this you may assume that the matter of the affidavit has been settled,” he responded. “The issuing of an affidavit does not involve any real financial obligation. It is rather a matter of form to satisfy the immigration-laws.”94 The same week, he assured Isidor Rabinovitz of R. & M. Industrial Laboratories that “it is perfectly true that Dr. Emil Nohel was mine and Professor Pick’s assistant in Prague. He is a fine and reliable person both as personality and in his work. In my opinion it would be highly justified to give him an affidavit.” Given immigration restrictions, however, possession of the document would not necessarily allow Nohel to enter the United States, but it might enable him to go elsewhere in Europe. “I should have sen[t] Mr. Nohel my own affidavit if I could have done it without endangering the ones I have already given to other people,” Einstein wrote in another letter.95 He sent two other letters in this vein in August.96 It seems that Einstein’s confidence was unjustified, however, and he lost track of his former assistant.
Nohel left Vienna, hoping to avoid confrontation with the authorities if he resided in the countryside. He moved to Hradec Králové in Eastern Bohemia to live with his sister, Otilie Mahlerová. For roughly three years, Nohel resided in the Nazi-occupied Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, keeping a low profile. These were very lonely years for him, although he put on a brave face in the letters he periodically managed to send to his son in Palestine. The letters make for heartbreaking reading, and they are suffused with regret and despair. “You know that, unfortunately, before 1938 I was not an organized Zionist for reasons that were not dishonorable. I managed all the normal achievements of a Zionist, probably to a higher degree than the majority of organized Zionists,” he wrote in the summer or fall of 1941, “but I had not yet gone so far that I wanted to dedicate my whole life to this goal—that is, diligently learn Hebrew, make myself familiar with the culture of our people, and if possible myself emigrate to the Land of Israel.”97 When an opportunity to be smuggled out came his way, he demurred out of fear of betrayal and retreated farther into the countryside. “My life, that indeed for the most part was built on false foundations, is already behind me; I would like only to earn my bread through the work of my own hands.”98 Sorting through the rumors that rushed around Bohemia in those days, he understood that deportation almost certainly meant death.
In late 1941, he wrote another letter to his son—trusting that eventually it might reach its destination—explaining that deportations from his region ended up in Theresienstadt (Terezín), a fortress named after Joseph II’s mother Maria Theresa, “where a large camp for Jews is erected. No news at all comes from there.”99 He had no illusions about what would happen next: “We must also reckon with the fact that soon we will also be interned. How it will be then, no one knows; but in any case the sole—and for me modest—postal connection with you will be interrupted.”100 Incredibly, he remained free one more year, a year in which he managed to send a few more lengthy letters, chronicling his disappointment in himself for not committing to Bar Kochba or following the guidance of Bergmann, Brod, and Robert Weltsch (all of whom he mentioned by name).101 The letters convey the sickening sense of an apocalypse rolling across the countryside, the feeling that one day he would no longer be able to escape.
That day was 21 December 1942, when he was transported to Theresienstadt. His mentor Georg Pick had preceded him by a few months and passed away in late July. Nohel stayed at the camp for almost two years. On 16 October 1944 the Nazi guards put him on a train to Oświęcim, where he disembarked at Auschwitz and was murdered.102 In February 1946, a man from Newark named Fred Schwarz wrote to Albert Einstein in Princeton to pass along the news of Nohel’s death. Einstein, not inured to the barbarity of what had transpired, wrote back sadly: “Our efforts to bring him to safety have unfortunately foundered upon the onrush of well-known events.”103
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Einstein seems to have barely ever set foot in Josefov, preferring to take his long walks in the woods
surrounding the city. By the time he lived in Prague, the former ghetto had been radically transformed so that it no longer resembled the city of Jews from legend and lore. When reflecting on his complex and erratic identification with Jewishness—whether as a religious faith, a Zionist philosophy, or a series of interpersonal relationships—Einstein never brought up his time in Prague. Yet at every corner, there was a Bohemian tinge to his later ruminations on the subject. When he left Prague, Einstein was comprehended as a German and a Jew by certain elites who wanted to score political points against Vienna, and from then on the question of Einstein’s Jewishness always bore some mark of his potential Germanness, identifications imposed upon him that he sometimes, fitfully, embraced. The blend of German and Jew was characteristic of a man of his time and place: a former professor of the German University in Prague.
At the very moment that Einstein was beginning to be troubled by the course that Zionism had taken in Palestine, he was also becoming ever more vocal on behalf of Jews being persecuted by Hitler’s National Socialist regime that seized power in Germany in 1933. From the most famous German scientist, overnight Einstein had become the world’s most prominent Jewish refugee. From his position on the other side of the Atlantic, Einstein issued blistering denunciations of anti-Semitic measures taken within Germany, and it was clear that these attacks further enraged the Nazi hierarchy, who had a virtual mania about Einstein. Back in Berlin, Max Planck wrote his former colleague asking for a moderation of his rhetoric so that those at home opposed to the racial policies would have more room to maneuver. On 6 April 1933, two weeks after the Enabling Act essentially granted Hitler a free hand in running the country, Einstein responded rejecting Planck’s position:
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