Einstein in Bohemia

by Michael D. Gordin

  He also policed countervailing efforts to undercut relativity theory. In 1920 a 65-page booklet was published by Jindřich Skokan entitled Einstein’s Principle of Relativity: A Critical Study. Záviška’s scathing review of this work began with a punch and did not relent: “In this critical study there is rather a lot of criticism but rather little study.”43 But rather than simply dismissing the book as not worth reading, he took the opportunity to explain inertial reference frames and the significance of Einstein’s insights about clock coordination. In his conclusion, though, he made it clear that readers should not pay attention to the critiques from this sort of author:

  It is impossible to enumerate all the mistakes and illogic which the author has amassed in these few pages of his study. About the principle of relativity the reader learns very little, and what he or she does learn is perhaps all bad. The author does not know even the simplest things about Einstein’s theory and his polemic gives the impression in many places of Don Quixote’s battle against the windmills; that which the author smears with such vehemence is not Einstein’s principle of relativity, but something totally different.44

  Skokan was easy; Bohuslav Hostinský was another matter altogether. Hostinský was a professor of mathematics at the Czech University, and thus Záviška’s close colleague, and a specialist in differential geometry (a field in which he published roughly 140 works over his career, typically in Czech)—the counterpart to Einstein’s former colleague Georg Pick at the German University. Hostinský’s first exposure to relativity was reading Einstein’s 1916 popularization when it came out in German. He was unimpressed. Especially with regard to general relativity, he believed that until the conceptual details were expanded upon, “it will not be possible to assume that the general principle of relativity was exactly formulated or clearly affirmed, that it was established with reliable observations.”45 He continued his attack when Einstein published his 1921 Princeton lectures as The Meaning of Relativity. No one could accuse Hostinský of selecting a simplified popular presentation for his criticism: these lectures were for physicists, and again he found their reasoning sloppy. “Briefly said: the concept of kinetic energy does not lend itself to relativization. Likewise, the difference between real and apparent forces do not lend themselves to be cleared away by meditations about tensors, invariants, equivalent systems of coordinates, light rays in four-dimensional space time etc.,” he fumed. “Mach and Einstein’s wish to understand centrifugal forces as an effect of all matter in the universe remains a wish and the physical significance of inertial systems remains invariant toward all relativistic efforts.”46

  Záviška pushed back against his senior colleague. He cited recent findings from the Mount Wilson Observatory in California that provided the strongest evidence to date for general relativity, and he also pointed out that arguments similar to Hostinský’s had been produced by members of the völkisch anti-Einstein crowd like Lenard and Ernst Gehrcke.47 Given the anti-German tenor of Czechoslovak public discourse at this time, these critiques smarted. Hostinský defended himself in print, only to be rebutted rather decisively again by Záviška, after which Hostinský, bruised, left the field.48 As a capstone to these efforts, Záviška published a clear and straightforward introduction to relativity in 1925 that synthesized the expositions and defenses he had been developing over the previous 20 years.49

  After Záviška’s book, debates over relativity seem to have faded in Czechoslovakia, which again puts it on a similar timeline to that found in the rest of Europe—except for the dwindling number of diehards we encountered in an earlier chapter, relativity was by the 1920s simply an accepted part of physics. Záviška continued to research and teach in Prague, always in Czech. This came at significant cost to his professional standing outside the country, but it was a choice that many academics in his position also favored. His own story did not end as happily as the relativity debates. Under the Nazi occupation of Prague, he was suspected of being part of the resistance and arrested on the evening of 21 January 1944 at his apartment. He died from illness and maltreatment just before the end of the war and was buried on 17 April 1945 at a cemetery in Gifhorn, Germany; at the time of his death, he had been on his way back home from a liberated concentration camp. In the 1960s, his body was exhumed and cremated.50 As this melancholy aftermath suggests, Záviška, like the rest of his countrymen, was swept up in the nihilistic maelstrom that engulfed Masaryk’s First Republic. In its wake everything about Czechoslovakia was changed.

  * * *

  The war arrived in Prague long before it started. In 1933, democracy ended in both Germany and Austria as Adolf Hitler and Engelbert Dollfuss abolished legislatures and tightened dictatorial control over their respective countries. Dollfuss did not last long: he was assassinated the following year as Nazi agents attempted to enact a coup; his successor Kurt Schuschnigg intensified what some would later call the “Austrofascist” regime until 1938. In that year, the dilemma Czechoslovakia faced in being sandwiched between two oppressive dictatorships ended on 12 March when Austria was annexed by the German Reich in the Anschluss. Now there was just the one fascist state. More than ever, Czechoslovakia was isolated and vulnerable in the heart of Europe. For most of the 1930s, it bordered on Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania, and Poland—all of them right-wing dictatorships.

  The refugees had been flooding in for years. After the Bolshevik takeover of the Russian state in November 1917 and the ensuing civil war, thousands of displaced Russians and Ukrainians, including many intellectuals, were welcomed by Masaryk into Czechoslovakia, where the government subsidized their existence in the hopes that the communist fever sweeping the eastern reaches of the continent would burn itself out and then these individuals could return to rebuild the political, legal, and academic infrastructures of their states. Months stretched to years stretched to decades, and these refugees were soon joined by those fleeing oppressive regimes, especially that of the National Socialists in Germany. Jews, antifascist leaders, and artists all swarmed into the First Republic. There were 1,100 by the middle of 1933, and the numbers only grew.51 As literature and culture were heavily censored in the states they fled, refugees like Bertolt Brecht and Heinrich Mann participated in the flourishing of Germanophone letters in Prague.52 Philipp Frank tired himself out helping displaced scientists find positions in the city.53

  In 1936, despite the worrying encirclement of Czechoslovakia, Frank remained optimistic. Masaryk, who had maintained largely unquestioned leadership of the country from independence until 1935, retired, but his deputy Edvard Beneš easily slipped into control of the First Republic. “In Prague it is still relatively pleasant,” Frank wrote to Einstein. “The presidential election has happened peaceably. Masaryk has installed his favorite Beneš as his successor. This was truly an effect of Hitler. For this election was only possible because for the first time the Catholics and the Communists joined together to prevent the election of a Nazi-friendly candidate.”54 Frank had continued his cordial—and exceptional—relations with his counterparts in both physics and philosophy at the Czech University, including the philosopher Albína Dratvová, one of the first women to habilitate in the new Czechoslovakia.55 He kept her in his thoughts as he prepared to leave Prague for a scheduled lecture series in the United States. He left for London in August to work a bit on his English before undertaking the long oceanic passage. His trip to America was supposed to last from 10 October to 10 December. The year was 1938.

  Frank was fortuitously absent during Czechoslovakia’s fateful hour. He kept close watch on events. “But the Czechoslovak republic is now monstrously popular,” he wrote to Dratvová on 1 September. “In a tea house my waitress asked where I came from. I said ‘from Czechoslovakia.’ She said ‘I admire Czechoslovakia.’ I ask ‘Why?’ She answers: ‘Because they resist Hitler.’ ”56 The government in Prague had for some time been caught in a new iteration of a demagogic movement centered around the grievances of the German-identified citizens of the republic,
who had adopted the designation “Sudeten Germans.” These individuals comprised almost a quarter of the population of the country, concentrated heavily in the regions bordering Germany and Austria, and in 1933 an enterprising gymnastics teacher named Konrad Henlein had founded the Sudeten German Party to give them a voice. The timing was not a coincidence. Capitalizing on Hitler’s success in Germany, Henlein stirred up right-wing sentiment amid allegations of systematic discrimination against the Sudetenlanders, demanding autonomy.

  Seeing an opportunity to capitalize on the movement in order to gain access to the industry- and resource-rich border regions, Hitler—in some ways manipulating Henlein, in others manipulated by him—intervened diplomatically, threatening to invade Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1938 (in the wake of the Anschluss) to liberate the Sudeten Germans from ostensible Czechoslovak oppression.57 Eager to avoid (or at least postpone) a military engagement with Germany, the leaders of France and Britain met with Hitler in Munich to broker a settlement, which was inked on 29 September 1938. Now an infamous synonym for “appeasement” of aggression, the deal permitted Nazi Germany to annex the so-called “Sudetenland” to the expanding Reich in exchange for guarantees to preserve the sovereignty of the rest of Beneš’s country, now known as the Second Republic or Czecho-Slovakia. As a result, the land lost a third of its population, and the demographic balance of its ethnicities shifted dramatically. Almost all heavy industry was incorporated into Germany, and unemployment skyrocketed. More refugees—this time citizens of the very state they were fleeing to—poured in.58 It was an unquestioned victory for Hitler and a catastrophe for everyone else.

  Einstein, watching the situation as closely as he could from Princeton, was outraged. “You have confidence in the English and in particular in Chamberlain? O sancta simpl …!,” he wrote to his closest friend Michele Besso, who resided in Switzerland. “He is sacrificing Eastern Europe in the hope that Hitler will tire himself out against Russia. But we will see that here too cleverness has short legs.… Now he has at the last moment saved Hitler in that he has placed the wreath of peace-lovingness and brought France into betraying the Czechs.… I no longer give a farthing for Europe’s future.”59 He warned another friend from his Bern days, Maurice Solovine, that this concession to Germany would not assuage Hitler’s appetite for long. “It is awful that France has betrayed Spain and Czechoslovakia. The worst thing about it is that it will be bitterly avenged.”60 War was inevitable.

  Philipp Frank and his wife were on board a steamer in the middle of the Atlantic when the news of the agreement broke. He reported to Dratvová from Chicago in late October, after the carving up of Czechoslovakia had already taken place, that the French and British passengers had celebrated: there would be no war. The Czechs on board, by contrast, had been crestfallen. So had the Franks. “For us ourselves, my wife and I, we were suddenly also personally put into a difficult position,” he wrote. “First difficult in a financial sense and second even more difficult in a moral sense.”61 He still intended to return to Prague in either December or January, but he was sure “I will find an entirely changed position. Our university, at which I worked for 25 years, will scarcely exist any longer and I do not at all know for sure how I will then start over. One naturally learns here very little about all the details of what happened.”62 He wrote much the same to Jaroslav Heyrovský, the leading chemist at the Czech University: “If there were any possible work, I would gladly remain in Prague and my wife especially is very attached to Prague. I can however not imagine in what a difficult position public instruction is in Prague and I am quite certain that it must today do many things that it does not do gladly.”63 He never returned. His colleagues Reinhold Fürth and Leo Pollak emigrated to Britain and Ireland in early 1939. The generation of Einstein’s successors had abandoned the German University.

  More to the point, it had abandoned them. As geopolitics brought Germany and Czechoslovakia into conflict, something analogous happened on a miniature scale between the German University and the Czech Charles University. Many of the faculty of the former (Frank was an exception) had never entirely reconciled with the Lex Mareš’s ostensible diminution of its status as the—or at least a—legitimate heir of the institution Charles IV had founded in 1348. Students at the German University, many from the Sudetenland, pushed the local politics of the institution rightward, beginning with an explosion of student disorder in 1934 in response to the Nazi takeover in Germany. In reaction, the state transferred the university insignia from the German University to the Czech one, severing the last symbolic connection to the medieval ancestor.64 In December 1934 the minister of education insisted that “the crown of Bohemia, however, never belonged to Germany and the university founded in Prague was not, therefore, established in Germany. The Charles University is the oldest university in central Europe but it is not a university of Germany. The simple fact is that there was a university in Bohemia at a time when the German lands did not possess such a seat of learning.”65 The status of the two universities would become a bellwether of the changing fortunes of Czechoslovakia. Running up to the Munich negotiations, a series of histories were published that argued, in contrast to the minister’s stance, that the university had always been German.66

  It would certainly become so. On Einstein’s sixtieth birthday, 14 March 1939, Slovakia broke away from the Second Republic to form a separate client state of the Third Reich; the following day, Hitler’s troops violated the Munich Accords and invaded. Two days later, Hugo Bergmann, writing in Jerusalem, recorded in his diary a meeting with Prague émigré and Bar Kochba stalwart Robert Weltsch: “Hitler in Prague yesterday evening. I was earlier at Robert’s and found him entirely broken. He cannot imagine the swastika flags on the Hradschin.”67 Germany created the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Not only did the invasion make European war now inevitable, but it marked a turning point for the Reich by incorporating millions of non-Germans under its rule for the first time, creating a host of problems for Nazi racial laws as well as linguistic problems related to managing the region.68 The Protectorate proved to be a testing ground for Hitler’s empire and a storehouse of conscripted labor to power the war machine.

  On 29 April, Hitler gave a speech in Prague declaring the city an ancient core of the German Empire—a standard German translation of the “Holy Roman Empire”—and asserting that its university had been the first university in Europe where Germans had been able to study in German.69 (This was of course not true; Charles IV’s university had functioned in Latin for over four centuries.) If the university had not originally been “German” in a Nazi sense, Protectorate policies quickly made it so. As a 1943 propaganda volume about Prague intoned:

  What German spirit and German industry has built over centuries in Bohemia was smashed in a few decades, and a dismal red cloud of embers, issued from Prague, hovered over German history. Prague University indeed was made desolate, decayed, and became for a long time entirely insignificant for Europe because it stood under the spell of a confining, Czech nationalist intolerance. Only in our times is it successfully again in the full possession of its rights and its value. After its renewal as the Charles-Ferdinand University during the time of the Counterreformation and after the tragic interlude of its gagging by the Czechoslovak Republic the events of 1939 have given it back its freedom and its old honorable name. It is now again called by the name its founder gave it—Charles University—and it has arisen to a new flourishing as a bulwark of the German spirit and German science.70

  The Czech University had been affected even before the invasion: under the presidency of Emil Hácha (who had succeeded the exiled Beneš), the state had purged Jews from the employment rolls on 27 January 1939, a process that had begun at the university in the fall and winter of the previous year, when 77 teachers had been furloughed or dismissed. (Since most of them had been part of the medical faculty, this produced a crisis in health care.)71 It was not long for this brave new world. On 28 October demonstrations b
urst out at the Czech University and were brutally suppressed leading to some student deaths. At the funeral of one of them on 15 November, protests resumed, and the Protectorate responded two days later by closing down all Czech institutions of higher education, including the universities in Prague and Brno, and sending 1,200 students to prison camps.72 Two weeks earlier it had renamed the German University the “German Charles University.” The Lex Mareš was no more, and there was only one university in Prague.73 Packed with professors from other Reich universities, it was explicitly a German university.74

  The tragedies that followed struck down so many lives: of soldiers, of slaves, of victims of starvation and state brutality, of Jews. The Nazis murdered more than 78,000 “Jews” (as defined by the Nuremburg Laws) in the Protectorate; only 14,045 survived. Prewar Bohemia and Moravia had been home to 6,500 Roma; a mere 583 returned at war’s end. By this time, all of the populations of Europe had been devastated. That of a reconstituted Czechoslovakia—reincorporating the wartime puppet state of Slovakia into a polity with somewhat changed borders (at the insistence of the Soviet Union, which annexed the far eastern portion by the Carpathians)—was among the most dramatically different. The Jews and Roma had been devastated. The Ukrainians now lived in the Soviet Union. And the Germans … well, the Germans were gone. Before 1939 roughly a third of Czechoslovakia’s population had considered themselves German and somewhat over half had identified as Czechs and Slovaks; in the 1950 census the Czechs and Slovaks comprised 94 percent of the postwar country.75

  What happened to the Germans has become one of the most persistent unresolved legacies of World War II. What was at first euphemistically labeled a “transfer” (odsun in Czech) has now generally been more accurately labeled an “expulsion” (vyhnání in Czech, Vertreibung in German). Millions of German-identified citizens of Poland and Czechoslovakia were deported to occupied Germany in the years immediately following the war, predominantly to the American sector in the case of the latter. First proposed by Beneš and then vigorously supported by the Soviets and the local Communists, this plan to remove “Germans” (and, to a lesser extent, Hungarians) from Czechoslovakia as a form of retribution for the role Sudeten Germans had played in the onset of the conflict was condoned by the Allies. In the first quasi-spontaneous waves of the “wild transfer,” thousands of citizens of Czechoslovakia who had been identified as Germans were murdered; in the end, millions were displaced and forced to make a new life outside of the country where their families had lived for centuries. The population of Czechoslovakia after the expulsion was 12.4 million. It would take over 30 years for it to return to its 1935 level.76 The new postwar Czechoslovakia faced a different reality than it had ever confronted: essentially, a land without Germans. A symbolic marker of the change was the abolition of the German University on 18 October 1945 and the reopening of the Czech institution as the only Charles University.77 After a millennium, Bohemia was gone.