I must now however also recall that … especially in recent years I have been systematically persecuted in the right-wing press without anyone having taken the trouble to intercede for me. Now however the war of annihilation against my defenseless Jewish brothers has compelled me to place the influence that I have in the world on the scales for their benefit. In order that you better comprehend this, I ask you to imagine yourself for a moment in the following position. You are a University professor in Prague. A regime comes to power there that robs the Czech Germans of their means of existence and that simultaneously forcibly prevents them from leaving the country. They have posted guards at the border who are supposed to shoot at those who seek to leave without permission the country whose regime is conducting a bloodless war of annihilation against them. Would you then find it correct to take this silently, not to speak out for them? Isn’t the annihilation of German Jews through starvation the official program of the current German regime?104
This is a fascinating passage, not least because, despite its subjunctive mood, the circumstances being described were not actually hypothetical, at least not for Einstein. He in fact had been a professor at the German University in Prague, and he had been exposed to the anxieties of colleagues like Lampa and Lippich that Czech chauvinism would make life intolerable for the Germans. The Nazi-affiliated Sudeten German Party headed by Konrad Henlein had painted precisely such a fantasy of anti-German discrimination to stoke anti-Czech resentment among the substantial German-identified minority within Czechoslovakia. Einstein was here not only using Henlein-style scenarios to make the situation of the Jews more understandable to Planck, but was also himself filtering his understanding of the persecution of the Jews through his own identification as a German. As we have repeatedly seen, whenever Einstein approached topics or people connected with the Jewish experience in Prague, the notion of Germanness was never far from hand. The conflation was intrinsic to Einstein’s understanding of both categories, and it was a conflation born in Bohemia.105
A final example brings us back to Martin Buber, whose words opened this chapter and whose speeches helped ignite the active community of Prague Zionists that provided Einstein’s first exposure to the movement. In the logs of phone conversations held during his final years with Hanna Fantova, herself originally from Brno but then living in Princeton, she recounts Einstein’s reaction to a story she had told him about a Prague family during the Holocaust. “Your story of the young man whose whole family was murdered in Prague has moved me deeply,” she noted Einstein as responding. “The German Jews are indeed terrible; they are traveling again to Germany. Even Martin Buber himself traveled to Germany and allowed himself to be celebrated with a Goethe Prize. People are simply vain. I have declined everything and given them a kick in the backside.”106 A story about Prague immediately triggered a refusal to ever return to Germany. He never did.
CHAPTER 7
From Revolution to Normalization
Also theories have a large influence on the formation of modern society; certain scientific systems and certain facts have indeed become the leading ideas of their eras, as Galilei’s science about the orbit of the earth around the sun is the landmark of a new era; Newton gave character to the seventeenth century with his theory of gravity; Darwin is the characteristic man of the nineteenth century, just as Einstein is distinctive of today’s era.
—Emanuel Rádl1
While he lived there, Albert Einstein’s Prague was unquestionably German. All of his interactions took place in the German language—they could not have really happened in any other—and he repeatedly referred to the German University where he worked as connected with the web of other Germanophone institutions across Germany, Switzerland, and Austria-Hungary. When Czechs appeared in his correspondence, it was always as an aside, and he did not flesh out his superficial impressions of the vast majority of the local population (if he even realized it was so large) with any substantial qualities. Prague was a German space, but not one that he particularly enjoyed.
After he left, however, on the few occasions that he reflected on Prague it was often as a Czech metropolis, with his sympathies extended to a marginalized population striving for political independence. In October 1918, during what would turn out to be the final weeks of World War I, the “Washington Declaration”—drafted in the American capital—proclaimed the independence of a new entity, “Czechoslovakia,” an amalgamation of the Czech-dominated Bohemia and Moravia with the Slovak-dominated regions of northern Hungary (and some other parcels of land at the edges) to produce a state where the once-regnant Germans (constituting just shy of a third of the population) and Hungarians were now national minorities. Einstein had a soft spot for Czechoslovakia and for its long-serving president, former Czech University philosophy professor Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. His political admiration of the new state tended to color his memories of Prague in his later invocations of the country.
In 1923, the Borový publishing house in Prague issued a translation of Einstein’s slim 1916 book, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, which had been written with an educated lay audience in mind. It is worth noting that he wrote this before the 1919 eclipse expedition had turbocharged demand for such a book; when confirmation came, this volume was near to hand. Translations appeared in a host of languages, and so a Czech one was to be expected. Unlike so many of the new editions, however, this one was not simply a rendering of Einstein’s engaging German text in a new language: the physicist penned a new foreword to the book, one that tied the creation of general relativity to his time in Bohemia. The one-page foreword began:
I am happy that this small booklet, in which the chief thoughts of relativity are presented without their mathematical realization, now appears in the national language of that country in which I found the necessary composure to gradually give a more definite form to the fundamental thoughts of the general relativity theory, which had been gathering already since 1908. In the quiet rooms of the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the German University in Prague on Viničná ulice, I came in 1911 to the discovery that the equivalence principle required an observable degree of bending of light beams by the sun, without knowing that more than a hundred years earlier a similar consequence had been drawn from Newtonian mechanics in connection with Newton’s emission theory of light. In Prague I also discovered the result, still not definitely established, of the redshift of spectral lines.2
(Directly afterward, he confessed that though he began the work in Prague, he did not hit on the path to a full solution until he returned to Zurich.) For all his nostalgia about his time in what was now the capital of the First Republic of Czechoslovakia, there is something odd—one might almost say tone-deaf—about this tribute to the Institute, the location of which he gave with its Czech address: it was written, and published, in German. (A Czech rendition immediately followed.) This was probably the press’s decision, not the scientist’s, but it does point to Einstein not quite understanding the delicate position of the resentful German minority or the feeling of Czech elites toward it.
Einstein was still a reference point for that German minority, a symbol to conjure with when prominent intellectuals proclaimed the continued cultural importance of German-speakers in Prague even as their political significance declined precipitously. After the eclipse expedition, he continued to be cited as a beacon of German intellectual leadership—though admittedly sometimes with tongue in cheek. For example, on 19 December 1919, dramatist and theater critic Heinrich Teweles penned a feuilleton in the Prager Tagblatt, the country’s leading German daily, which he had edited from 1900 to 1910, recalling Einstein:
But what do I really know about Einstein? When he taught at the German University in Prague there were rumors: This is a great guy! But nothing came from the rumors. Those that knew something about him thought it was entirely right that the Huns called him to Berlin, where he received an institute and a salary in order to research without the obligation to share hi
s knowledge with young people, who besides had not yet begun to understand a thing.
Einstein intrigued me. Suddenly, during the war, the English dispatched an expedition to study the solar corona in order to test Einstein’s thesis or hypothesis and Triumph! Einstein wins. God knows what Clemenceau will make Germany pay for that.3
Einstein found the piece so hilarious he wrote Teweles a fan letter.4 He also penned a note of congratulations on the tenth anniversary in 1927 of the Prague Urania, the German-led astronomy and physics showcase, which was lovingly printed in their newsletter.5 If a man like Einstein bestowed his favor on these German institutions in a Czechoslovak state, then they might borrow some of his international celebrity to bolster their significance. Einstein was a talisman that could dispel accusations of provinciality and instill in the German community of Bohemia the spirit of cosmopolitanism. Because he had once lived and worked for 16 months in Prague, the Czech metropolis, he was also available for such use by Czech scientists and intellectuals. He deprovincialized Bohemia.
This final chapter turns to a question that has lingered in the background from the outset: What was the Czech—understood both as a language and as a personal identification—version of Einstein? Einstein’s Prague was roughly 7 percent German-identified and 93 percent Czech-identified, and yet Czech voices have been sparse in the preceding pages. This is not because Prague lacked a significant Czech-speaking and -writing physics community, but rather because the literatures of the two groups were segregated. Czech-identified scientists had to engage with the Germanophone literature—and the French and English literatures, like every other scientist—but the reciprocal relationship did not hold. When a physicist chose to write in Czech, he or she (although female physicists were rare in Czechoslovakia in this era) was making a zero-sum choice about audiences: local engagement at the cost of the international community completely ignoring the work. (For writers in the three dominant languages, writing for a local readership did not mean the sacrifice of foreign attention.)6 Going back to 1911 and Einstein’s arrival in Prague, if one reads the Czech periodicals, one sees a world that he lived in but of which he was unaware.
What follows traces the ways in which Einstein and relativity theory were invoked and deployed against the background of the brutal shocks that transformed Czechoslovakia across most of the twentieth century, stopping in 1979, the year of the centenary of Einstein’s birth (and 14 years before the country ceased to exist). The dividing line in this story—as with so much of twentieth-century history—is the Second World War. Before that point, Czech writers under the Habsburg Empire and the First Republic (1918–1938) engaged with relativity and its creator as a token of their cosmopolitanism. They were writing in a so-called “minor language” from the capital of a small European country, but their facility with the new physics made them citizens of the world. Theirs was a bilingual vision that faced outward, reaching across the language barrier to incorporate Philipp Frank’s German University as well. After the dismemberment, occupation, genocide, and reconstruction of the state, Czechoslovakia (now with slightly different borders) was a changed place intellectually. Brought into the Soviet political orbit and then, after a coup in 1948, under a Communist regime, the new Czechoslovaks continued to discuss the theory of relativity, but this time as a marker of distinction from global trends. Einstein had been domesticated: rather than serving as a ticket to the world, he became a monument to Prague’s apartness.
* * *
The story of the development of a scientific infrastructure in the Czech language cannot be told without the surrounding context of the largely Germanophone institutions that represented Bohemian distinctness. The Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences, founded in 1784 without the royal imprimatur (which came six years later), formed a major outlet in which scholars who identified as Czechs were able to communicate to a broader European readership. They were required to make a linguistic compromise: the cultural charge of the moment was that the journal not be in Latin, and so the Society published its Abhandlungen in German, even though many of the early articles needed to be translated into that language to be published.7 Only in 1873 did the organization’s meetings become officially “utraquist,” allowing Czech to serve as an official language. By midcentury, the Abhandlungen published articles in Czech, but it also published in French, Italian, English, and other Slavic languages. As with the university in Prague, utraquism led to a final division along linguistic lines, with the Royal Bohemian Society splitting in 1890 into the Czech Academy and the Society for the Promotion of German Science, Art, and Literature: “From an utraquist institute with a German character a Czech institute was created.”8
This pattern was repeated across the cultural landscape. Where there had once been a general “Bohemian” institution, either functioning entirely in German or nominally bilingual or utraquist, parallel organizations cropped up in domain after domain that proclaimed their explicit goal of building institutions that worked exclusively in Czech. Quite successful from their earliest years, these new establishments cast the Bohemian institutions, which conceived of themselves as nonnational in theory if not always in practice, as “German” redoubts. The Union of Czech Mathematicians was created in 1862, motivated by the poor state of instruction in the discipline; by the 1870s, German-speaking teachers had begun to drop out, citing feelings of exclusion. Founded in 1866, the Association of Architects and Engineers in Bohemia, which published a quarterly in both languages, met a similar fate as German-identified members felt forced out for nationalist reasons after only three years. (They formed the German Polytechnic Association instead.) In the mid-1880s the association changed its statutes to become purely Czech.9
The various groups that dotted the landscape of civil society presaged the much larger transformation that followed the division of the university in 1882. As the Czech University and Polytechnic were the only Czech-language institutions of higher education in the world, it stands to reason that they established Prague as the epicenter of a Czechophone community of physicists, essentially all of whom passed through their halls at one time or another. When the university had been unified and Ernst Mach—who spoke Czech—had been the major luminary in the science, he had trained a large number of students, overseeing 17 doctoral theses in all. Just about the entire first generation of modern Czech physicists attended his classes.10
After the split in 1882, August Seydler was appointed an extraordinary professor of physics in the Czech University and elevated to ordinary professor six years later. When he died in 1891, the position was divided into a chair in astronomy, held by Gustav Gruss, and one in mathematical physics, occupied by František Koláček. Koláček in turn held the chair until his death in 1913, with the exception of a brief sojourn to Brno. The chair then passed to a student of Koláček’s, František Záviška, whom we will encounter in greater detail later. (A second chair in theoretical physics opened up in 1922.) In experimental physics, a similar succession pattern of teacher to student took place, with Čeněk Strouhal, Mach’s prize student, forming the stem of that tree.11 Although their pedigrees—and the nationalist historiography—emphasize their training in Prague, many of these leading figures conducted part of their studies in Germany, working in a language they knew but outside the constricting embrace of Habsburg Vienna.
Over the late Habsburg period, Czech-speaking intellectuals focused especially on promoting linguistic purism in scholarly communication and scientific terminology. Although of course these scholars continued to maintain polyglot intellectual contacts across Austria-Hungary and beyond, for political and cultural reasons there was a marked turn after 1880 toward Slavic engagements and away from the German language.12 For many within the empire and its successor states—and this partly applies even to the Hungarians, who are exceptions to many of these generalizations—German formed the obvious “vehicular language” to reach outside of their national(ist) intelligentsia, one that any educated Slav or Magyar would have bee
n exposed to from an early age.13 The nature of the dilemma for the Czech scientist was well expressed by Vilém Mathesius, the founder of the resolutely polyglot and internationally acclaimed Prague Linguistic Circle, in 1925:
That very fact carries weight that a really independent and still today to a certain extent self-sufficient Czech scientific world has developed. On the one hand, the Czech scientific worker was more strongly inclined to the obligations of building a Czech cultural and political life. This took from him time and energy needed for the struggle for scientific knowledge. On the other hand, by means of this work threads were unraveled and weakened which had earlier bound every scientifically working Czech to the broad domain of German science. Papers written in Czech were left almost exclusively restricted to Czech readership and Czech scientific knowledge remained as before merely a publication in itself, not a living article of international scientific circulation. Czech scientific life became a cloistered creation of the Czech scientific world. But everything has moved beyond this point, necessary to establish contributions to an independent Czech scientific tradition in the sense that there are independent English, French, German, and Russian scientific traditions. And all those disadvantages and all those obstacles would have been very insignificant for Czech scientific production if it were not the case that the modern Czech scientific atmosphere is not the natural patron for the growth of scientific creators.14
With strenuous effort, a Czech physics terminology was built using foreign (largely German) templates, fueling the proliferation of Czech-language scientific publications.15
As impressive as this was, it remained the case that very few non-Czech-identified scientists had Mach’s facility with the language. The solution was to publish abroad in one of the three dominant vehicular languages of international science of that era. Because of the specific valences of nationalist politics, German was discouraged, though it would have been the easiest choice. Chemist Bohuslav Brauner, son of an important nationalist lawyer and the first chair of inorganic chemistry at the Czech University, chose to run his laboratory in English—the command of which he had perfected while a postdoctoral researcher in Henry Roscoe’s laboratory in Manchester—rather than resort to German. (He did publish occasionally in that language when necessary.) Brauner made a point of befriending the most famous Russian chemist of his day, Dmitrii I. Mendeleev, and learning Russian proved another path out of the dominant Germanism of his discipline. The Anglophone tradition would be continued by Jaroslav Heyrovský, the only Czech Nobelist in the sciences (1959), who co-edited the Collection of Czechoslovak Chemical Communications—including translations into English and French as well as original articles composed in those languages—as an important outlet during the First Republic.16
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