* * *
The First Republic’s story is often told through the lens of the Czech majority and its Slovak allies and is particularly embodied in the person of Tomáš Masaryk, who was promoted as the personification of a nation-state instead of what was in reality a multiethnic country: Czechs just barely made up the majority with 51 percent of the population, followed by Germans, Slovaks, Hungarians, Ukrainians (Ruthenians), Jews, Poles, and Roma in significant numbers. Excellent recent scholarship has dispelled some of the romance of this period, a product of the later identification of Czechoslovakia in the 1930s as a hopeful island that successfully resisted much of the right-wing politics that dominated Central Europe.17 What was at the time for many both inside and outside the country a vindication of a kind of cosmopolitan nationalism—a benign variant of patriotic ethnic self-identification that provided a universalizing model for a peaceful path to a post-imperial continent—could seem to those who identified as Germans inside the country something rather different.
The formal transition in the status of these Czechoslovak “Germans” was striking. They had always been a minority in Bohemia and for several generations (at least) a minority in Prague, dwindling by the early twentieth century to percentages in the single digits, but they had also been subjects of a Habsburg monarch who ruled over an empire that was conceptualized as Germanophone and where those who identified as Germans enjoyed dominance. When the new states of Czechoslovakia and Austria signed the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1919, Masaryk’s government explicitly committed itself to protecting the rights of German-identified citizens as minorities. The rights of Germans were protected in the state’s constitution in the same way the Jews’ rights were. This was, in terms of status, an amazing victory for the latter and a severe shock to the former.
The drama played out on a smaller stage at the bifurcated universities of the capital city. On 19 February 1920, the government proclaimed the Lex Mareš. Gone was the fiction that both universities, carved in 1882 out of the Charles-Ferdinand University, were equal heirs of its legacy. Now the Czech University would be called the “Česká Univerzita Karlova,” the Czech Charles University, and the German University became simply the “Deutsche Universität Prag,” or German University of Prague. The law explicitly stated that the German University—denuded of reference to Charles IV in its name—was new. It was a school for minorities, just as the Czech University had been conceptualized earlier by the Habsburgs.18 Other reforms swept through higher education: a university was established in Brno in late January 1919, while the philosophy faculty of both universities in Prague, where physics and other natural sciences had been ensconced and where Einstein had taught, was broken into separate philosophy and natural sciences faculties. A consequence of the former change was to diminish the uniqueness of the Czech University as the only institution teaching in the Czech language; a consequence of the latter was a striking boom in the natural sciences in both institutions.19
The status of the German University would remain a major point of dispute during the two decades of the First Republic. Amid claims emanating from newly National Socialist Germany that the German University was discriminated against in favor of the Czech, defenders in 1934 argued that retaining the former at all was “a concession made to the Germans” and reminded observers about the earlier financial asymmetries between the twin institutions that had meant that “for a long time the Czech University was treated as a Cinderella.”20 Looking at the numbers, it seems that independence was a boon for Einstein’s former employer. It had become harder for German-identified Czechoslovak citizens to study in Vienna—where the now-foreign university used a different currency in an age of wild monetary instability—and this was the only Germanophone institution in their country. Before the war, the German University had enrolled 2,295 students in the winter semester and 2,067 in the summer, while by 1918 (before the Lex Mareš) the average had grown to 3,000, and by academic year 1930–1931 it had risen higher than 5,000.21
The changes were even more striking for the Jews, who did not have to suffer the imposition of the numerus clausus imposing low quotas for their admission, common in so many Habsburg successor states. Not that this prevented discrimination in higher education. On 17 February 1922 an anti-Semitic scandal concerning the physiologist Armin Tschermak-Seysseneg rocked the German University, followed by another concerning the election of the Jewish medievalist and papal historian Samuel Steinherz to the position of rector. In 1929 German and Czech students at both universities ineffectually protested in favor of the introduction of a numerus clausus. The continued open status of the institution led to some educational immigration by Jews from across Central and Eastern Europe who could get an education in Prague in German without suffering an imposed penalty for their ethnicity or confession.22
Of course, the Jewish-identified professors at the German University remained in their positions, including Philipp Frank, Einstein’s successor as professor of theoretical physics and mainstay of the philosophical movement of logical empiricism identified with the Vienna Circle. He was joined, at various points over this period, by Erwin Finlay Freundlich in astronomy, the first person who had abortively attempted to verify the bending of light rays around the sun during an eclipse as predicted by Einstein’s Prague theory of general relativity; Leo Wenzel Pollak in geophysics, who had made the connection between Freundlich and Einstein; and, initially at least, Anton Lampa in experimental physics, the man who had been most responsible for bringing Einstein to Prague in the first place.
In May 1919, before the Lex Mareš, Frank wrote to Einstein with some information and a request for assistance. The information was to assure Einstein that rumors of decay at the now-minority university in Czechoslovakia were entirely false. “The University here works exactly as well and as poorly as it had worked earlier. I have heard that people in Germany often believe that our University is dissolved or transformed into a Czech one or that something of the sort is planned,” Frank stated. “That is all entirely incorrect. So far nothing essential has changed in it besides the professors receiving a considerable raise. Though scientific activity in the past months has very much suffered because of the ongoing uncertainty.”23 Things were looking so good that the university was seeking to fill a new position: Lampa’s.
Frank had never much enjoyed Lampa’s company or esteemed his talents. As he wrote in his postwar biography of Einstein: “There was a considerable gap between [Lampa’s] high aspirations and his scientific capacities … and as a result he was animated by an ambition he could not satisfy. Since he was a man of high ethical ideals, he consciously sought to suppress this ambition, but the result was that it played an even greater role in his subconscious life.”24 There was also the fact that Lampa—who had been dean of the philosophy faculty in the last year of the Great War—remained a committed German chauvinist and, despite his Budapest birth and Bohemian upbringing, continually suspicious of the Slavs who resided in his city. In 1919, Lampa found he was unable in good conscience to swear loyalty to Czechoslovakia and resigned. He moved to Vienna, where he served as head of public education.25
In that capacity he even maintained some contact with Einstein. In 1920 he wrote his former colleague, now in Berlin, asking for his views about the controversial Viennese physicist Felix Ehrenhaft. He did not mention Prague.26 In Einstein’s supportive response (now lost), he must have recalled their time together at the German University, for Lampa exulted: “That you also think with pleasant feelings about your time in Prague is for me a true satisfaction. Although you belonged to Austria only a short while, yet the cultural history of that country can be proud of the fine fact of having offered you your first full professorship.”27 (Telling here is the geography Lampa uses: Prague is Austria.) A few months later, as an afterthought, Lampa wrote that he regretted they had not developed a working relationship in 1911–1912, a time that, as described earlier, Einstein had found himself rather isolated from his physicist c
olleagues. “I am very sorry that I do not have the opportunity to be able to occasionally be with you, one is also not likely to appear. You will now perhaps think that I should have used the opportunity in Prague better. But that was unfortunately not possible,” he wrote in May. “The extraordinary significance of your ideas was already clear to me then. Your call to Prague is an experimental proof of that. But I was then not yet entirely clear on your thoughts and I wrestled with how to incorporate them into my epistemological thoughts or style of thinking—what perhaps seems almost full of contradictions for someone whose style of thinking is oriented toward Mach. But it is the case.”28 As far as we know, Einstein never followed up. Lampa continued his career within the fledgling nation-state of Austria, serving as president of the Vienna Urania from 1927 to 1934, and dying in January 1938, a few days before his seventieth birthday. That would be a fatal year for Czechoslovakia too; one wonders what Lampa would have made of that.
All this, however, lay in the future as Philipp Frank attempted to preserve the high quality of physics instruction and research at the German University. He continued his correspondence with Einstein throughout the First Republic, and when fascism turned Prague into an oasis where refugees could study unmolested, Frank sent some of his best students to Einstein at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, including Einstein’s future close collaborator Peter Gabriel Bergmann.29 In 1932, Frank also managed to bring the preeminent philosopher Rudolf Carnap to the German University in a position within the natural sciences faculty, an end-run around Frank’s former sparring partner Oskar Kraus, who disdained Carnap’s philosophy of language from his perch in the parallel philosophy faculty. (Carnap’s appointment was specifically supported by Masaryk.)30 If physics at the German University muddled through pretty much as it had under the Habsburgs, however, the transformation in science at the Czech University and in the Czechophone public sphere was something else entirely.
* * *
Czech-speaking and -writing physicists had been excited about relativity theory years before Einstein arrived in the Bohemian capital. František Záviška gave a summary account of the special theory as a lecture in 1905, the same year it was formulated, and published the text of the lecture two years later.31 A popularization of the theory intended for high school teachers and the scientifically literate lay public appeared in 1911—the author, Augustin Žáček, noted that Einstein was “now professor of physics at the German university here”32—in the periodical Živa, a mainstay of Czech-language popular science that had been founded in 1853 by Jan Evangelista Purkyně (1787–1869), the renowned physiologist and Prague professor. Further popularizing articles penned by Prague’s leading physicists from the Czech University continued to appear until the demise of the Habsburg Empire.33
In the new nation of Czechoslovakia, interest in relativity on both the popular and the research fronts grew. The first full book on relativity theory appeared in 1921 under the byline of František Nachtikal—a surname that indicates Czechified Germanic origins (Nachtigall means “nightingale”)—a professor of physics at the Czech Polytechnic in Brno, the twin institution to the one where Gustav Jaumann taught. Nachtikal’s primer, The Principle of Relativity, was steeped both in local Bohemian and Moravian references and in the current events of the physics world. On the one hand, he embedded several references to Tycho Brahe, “the celebrated Prague astronomer,” in the text; on the other, he noted the emergent anti-Einstein movement promoted by Philipp Lenard and the controversy it caused at the Bad Nauheim physics meeting.34 The book could be read, even today, as a serviceable popular introduction to the theory, as could its successor, Arnošt Dittrich’s On the Principle of Relativity, published in Slovakia the following year. Dittrich was a careful writer, and he took pains to distance relativity theory from philosophical and moral relativism on the very first pages before explaining the Galilean relativity principle using the example of a boat trip up the Vltava. Striking in Dittrich’s account is the emphasis on Hermann Minkowski’s spacetime formalism; Einstein only becomes the protagonist halfway through the book.35
Both books preceded the Czech edition of Einstein’s own popularization and thus conditioned the reception of the theory among Czech readers who were unable to access the German version. Since they had thus not been exposed to the buzzing confusion of the antirelativity writings by individuals such as Oskar Kraus that saturated the Germanophone press, monolingual Czechs were blessed with a fair and thorough introduction to Einstein’s work. It is thus not surprising that Prague philosophers like Emanuel Rádl would in 1926 write intelligently about relativity, in Rádl’s case with a judicious weighing of both the German and the Czech sources.36 Almost all Czech physicists were also bullish on general relativity. As Nachtikal noted in a short letter to a physics journal in 1924 about the solar spectrum: “Today one can now summarize the judgment of the general theory of relativity: the theory is warranted up to those levels where it has been generally accessible to experimental examination. The viewpoint of physicists is now clear: Natura locuta, lis finita [Nature has spoken, the matter is closed].”37
The most dedicated exponent of Einsteinian relativity, as well as one of the most talented theoretical physicists working in Czechoslovakia, was František Záviška. Born on 18 November 1879—eight months and four days after Albert Einstein—in the Moravian town of Velké Meziříčí (Großmeseritsch), he was the eldest of three children of a small farmer who died just before Záviška turned 12. (His mother, who remarried, died in 1911.) Educated at the state gymnasium in Třebíč (Trebitsch) until fifth grade, and then at the Czech higher gymnasium in Brno until eighth grade, he passed his secondary school completion examination on 12 July 1898 and subsequently enrolled as an ordinary student at the Czech University in mathematics and physics. (This was something of a disappointment for his mother and stepfather, who had hoped he would be a priest.) There he fell under the sway of František Koláček, a professor of theoretical physics. Koláček smoothed the path for his protégé in all respects.
In 1906 Záviška spent a year at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, as a research student working on the influence of X-rays on the condensation of water droplets in cloud chambers. It was an excellent education, but the pull of theoretical physics and Prague proved stronger. At age 27 he habilitated at the Prague Polytechnic in theoretical physics with a dissertation “On the Polarization of Limiting Lines of Total Reflection”; he had wanted to habilitate at Vienna, but Ludwig Boltzmann’s suicide the previous year scotched that plan. Like all of his publications, including his important articles on electromagnetic waves, his dissertation was written in Czech, which accounts for his total obscurity outside of Czechoslovakia.38 In 1908 he was appointed an assistant in theoretical physics at the Czech University, assuming his mentor Koláček’s position when the latter fell ill in 1910 and receiving a permanent appointment in 1913 upon Koláček’s death. This meant that Záviška was Einstein’s precise counterpart at the Czech University during his time in Prague. They never met.39
The absence of a personal connection did not deter Záviška from pursuing research on the electromagnetic aspects of relativity and popularizing the theory in the decades to come. In fact, in the winter semester of 1910, before Einstein’s arrival at the German University, Záviška had already directed a course “On the Principle of Relativity.” He kept teaching about relativity, both special and general, in 1914 and 1916, in courses that were in many ways similar to what Philipp Frank was offering at the German University.40 These two scientists in parallel faculties did develop a professional relationship. Záviška translated some of Frank’s articles into Czech, and Frank was thanked in Záviška’s 1925 book on relativity for helpful conversations.41 Given that Frank, despite his long commitment to the city, never seems to have learned much Czech, one must presume that the dialogue happened in German (although both did speak English).
Záviška’s most widely referenced work on relativity falls easil
y under the rubric of “popularization,” which is indeed how I have so far referred to it. Today, this label is often considered somewhat derogatory, as indicating a lesser scientific genre. In the case of relativity, however, it is important to keep in mind how difficult the theory was for practicing scientists in the early twentieth century. The most obvious audience for books like Záviška’s—or even Einstein’s—was other scientists who were looking for a guide to orient themselves before delving into the more specialized literature.42 In both his articles and his book-length publications, Záviška served as a mediator for this cosmopolitan new theory from a cosmopolitan scientist; by providing an explanation of relativity in Czech, he helped bring an otherwise marginal, nationally focused readership into a transnational intellectual conversation.
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