Einstein in Bohemia

by Michael D. Gordin

  In its aftermath, Czechoslovak politics was reoriented away from what had always been its polestar of nationality-baiting and confronted a new organizing principle: engagement with global communism. The Czechoslovak Communist Party had been founded in 1921, and at the time was the only party in the country that had both Germans and Czechs in its ranks.78 During its few months of existence, the Second Republic criminalized the Communist Party, proscribing its publications in one of its first acts in October 1938 and then banning it altogether in December. That, and the dominant role the Red Army played in liberating the Protectorate, boosted the popularity of the party in 1945, making it a force to contend with at the polls. In May 1945, there were roughly 50,000 Communists in the country, who worked hard building a network of cells; two months later the party boasted 597,000 members. That size was extraordinary, even compared to Russia. By January 1948, despite a purge the previous year to thin out the ranks, membership had reached 1.31 million, making it the largest communist party in the world on a per capita basis.79 In the 1946 elections, the Communist Party won 38 percent of the vote.80 Edvard Beneš, who was again serving as president, was forced to move in the Communists’ political landscape.

  The coming of Soviet-style Marxism-Leninism to Czechoslovakia would change just about everything in Czechoslovak life and culture. Some of those transformations had to do with the party and the state it transformed. Others were consequences of the trauma of the war and the expulsions. Rather than the ebullient cosmopolitanism that had accompanied the optimistic Masaryk, the coming years would see an inward turn in many areas of Czechoslovak culture. One way to track the reverberations of this new world is to return to the image of the physicist who had once taught at a now-defunct university in the capital city in 1911–1912, a Habsburg moment that seemed so far distant as to be almost in the Pleistocene, although it was recent enough that there were living individuals who remembered Einstein and tried to invoke and shape his legacy for the Marxist future. Rather than reaching outward to the world of learning, this Communist-era invocation of Einstein and his relativity theory faced inward, closing off Prague from the non-Soviet world. Its main propagandist was a native of the city named Arnošt Kolman.

  * * *

  In 1892, Jaromír Kolman, a nonobservant Jew who worked as a postal official, and his wife Julie had a son they named Arnošt. Precocious and good at school, he advanced quickly through his courses—as it happened, at the same gymnasium that Oskar Kraus had attended two decades earlier—and in 1910 enrolled in the Czech Polytechnic to study electrical engineering. Drawn to politics, his first love was Zionism, which he would later claim was triggered by outrage at the anti-Semitic Hilsner affair.81 He studied Hebrew in courses offered by the Bar Kochba student group, and he was the translator into Czech of Martin Buber’s Three Lectures on Jewry that had so galvanized Hugo Bergmann and the rest of the Prague Zionists.82 Over his parents’ objections (they wanted him to have a practical education) he transferred to the Czech University in 1911 to study mathematics. Upon graduation, he took a job as a calculator at the observatory.

  Kolman enters our story because of an incident he related in his memoirs, originally a 720-page typescript written in Moscow beginning in 1970 and only published posthumously, first in an abridged German translation, and then a few years later in a longer, but still abridged, Russian version.83 The story takes place in 1911, when Kolman’s friend Růžek, a fellow math student, persuaded him to attend lectures being given by the new professor at the German University, Albert Einstein:

  As is customary at the inaugural lecture of a new professor, the rector introduced Einstein. Einstein was a medium-sized, rather sturdy, still very young man with wildly curly hair, somewhat carelessly dressed for a professor and for this ceremonial moment. And without beating about the bush he began at a rapid pace to expound the principles of the special theory of relativity. That was supposed to be only the introduction to his lectures about general relativity, on which he was then working, especially on its application to cosmology. Already in this first lecture it was obvious to see that the majority of the audience were hardly in a position to follow the special “dry” physical-mathematical presentation of the speaker, and that Einstein—at least this time—would not offer those generally philosophical reflections on behalf of which the audience most of all came—when they weren’t there just to see this Coryphaeus, or because it was good form to be here.

  Already after the second lecture the auditorium began to noticeably thin out. My friend Růžek and I remained, and it happened in a decreasing geometric progression until it had shriveled up into a stable little cluster of something more than ten enthusiasts. Einstein was not particularly struck by this. Apparently he held to the same principle as one of my mathematics professors, Sobotka, who liked to say: “That doesn’t matter, tres faciunt collegium—three make a society—God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are always present, and therefore I will also lecture when none of you, gentlemen, shows up.”

  Einstein came to the following lectures dressed informally, sometimes in a sweater, often without a tie. Once though he came in two ties! At that time people wore knickers, the legs of which were fastened underneath with ribbons. These ribbons were in his case often open, hanging about loosely, and were soiled from the mud of the Prague streets. He understood that we students counted Einstein among the oddballs. But the odd thing was something entirely different—the content of his lectures, the form of his presentation and his relation to the audience. Almost every one of his lectures was comparable to a creative act. He talked about what was occupying him at that moment, partly arguing with himself and encouraging us to participate in this confrontation. He wrote an equation on the board, and sometimes he did this with gigantic symbols, often however in small, almost illegibly small, script. And then he suddenly stopped, thought about it, and said completely excitedly: “Gentlemen, why didn’t you say anything? This is all wrong, this is a mistake!” He wiped everything off and wrote something else on the board.

  Sometimes he would postpone continuing and explain: “We must first think more about this.” What a difference between Einstein and the infallible, godlike politicians who want to recognize nothing in the world as a mistake which they have committed! Einstein liked it when he was interrupted—that would have been unthinkable with other professors—when one posed the most devious questions to him. He loved long discussions with the audience. Often—even during rainy weather, which is often the case in Prague—a small crowd of students would accompany him on the walk home after the lecture. And when the interesting discussion had not yet come to an end, then he would be—notwithstanding his world fame—quite capable of turning around and accompanying his accompaniers back to the university dining hall.

  But Einstein’s popularity also already then had its flip side. Nationalist, anti-Semitic German students who belonged to various dueling societies tried to spoil his time in Prague using every means. Perhaps then there awoke in Einstein—partly as a form of internal protest—the consciousness of his belonging to the Jewish people, or at least it was intensified by this. He began to associate with the Prague Jewish-nationalist and Zionist intelligentsia. And although he was not an Orthodox Jew, he began to play his beloved violin in the synagogue on the Jewish high holy days.

  As you know, Einstein went from Prague to Berlin [sic], where he was offered extraordinarily favorable conditions for his work, until the horrifying wave of National Socialism flooded Germany.

  Without any embarrassment I confess that it was very difficult for me to understand Einstein’s lectures. One had to learn a new apparatus of special tensor analysis for this. But I persisted, together with Růžek, to whom I owe my meeting with the greatest physicist of our time, the first of the many remarkable people I have met in my life (which has not in other parts been all sunny). This seems to me a small compensation for that. I remained one of the few audience members until the end.84

  This could never h
ave happened. First, Einstein had not yet developed his theory of general relativity while he was in Prague, so he could not have lectured on it in 1911. Second, the only public lecture he did give, on special relativity, took place on one evening in the spring and was devoid of mathematical detail. Third, Kolman’s name does not show up on the list of auditors of Einstein’s courses. (The business about him playing violin in the synagogue is a complete fabrication.) However vivid the description—and the prose is characteristic of Kolman’s memoirs—the account of this episode is unreliable.

  Unreliability is something of a theme of Kolman’s career. Despite the apocryphal nature of this first encounter, it is worth following Kolman’s relationship with Einstein closely; even if it was a conscious fabrication (which is by no means clear), Kolman’s fascination with relativity theory is amply confirmable, and he seems to have believed his own story. Commentators often referred to him as a “one-time student of Albert Einstein.”85 Perhaps nobody played a larger role in shaping the popular understanding of special relativity in the Soviet bloc, which represented at its height the largest scientific community in the world. From these inauspicious beginnings, Kolman’s career encapsulated in miniature the tumultuous career of Czech communism, and his obsession with Einstein runs like a red thread through it.86

  First, he had to leave Zionism and find communism. When the Great War broke out in 1914, Kolman was immediately drafted into the Habsburg army. He was not a lucky soldier. Sent to the eastern front, he was wounded, and after recuperation he was sent back and wounded again, this time falling into Russian hands and interned in a prisoner of war camp. Gifted in languages, he worked as a translator, and when the Bolsheviks arrived in 1918 to free the prisoners and declare the advent of the Marxist revolution, Kolman—who had dabbled in social-democratic politics back in Prague—was all for it.87 He joined the Communist Party and threw himself into a variety of roles: property expropriation, undercover work in Germany, organizing in Moscow, and more. According to his memoirs, while on a Comintern mission to Düsseldorf, he ran into Einstein again and asked the physicist to give a talk to raise funds to help provide relief for a famine in the Soviet Union. “He greeted me, and it even seemed to me as though he still dimly remembered me from Prague,” he recalled.88

  By the beginning of the 1930s, after a motley collection of experiences, Kolman had returned to his earlier love of mathematics and science and resolved to become a philosopher of science, earning his doctorate in the subject in 1934 after working for several years at the leading ideological journal of the Soviet Union, Under the Banner of Marxism. It was during this decade and in this periodical that he began his career as a prominent exponent of relativity theory within the framework of dialectical materialism, the Soviet Union’s official philosophy of science. This turns out to have been a crowded and quite cutthroat field.

  As the Bolsheviks began to reconstruct the scientific system they had inherited from imperial Russia, they both needed new cadres to replace those that had either fled or been removed from their positions and wanted to enforce ideological conformity to the philosophy of science developed by Vladimir Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism and earlier by Friedrich Engels in Anti-Dühring and The Dialectics of Nature. The last had been posthumously published in 1925 in both Russian and German editions, a process that Kolman was intimately involved with (he would also help prepare the Czech translation in 1952 and write the preface for the Czech translation of Anti-Dühring in 1947).89 Strangely enough, Einstein himself was consulted in 1924 about whether Dialectics of Nature should be published at all and provided this assessment: “If this manuscript came from an author who was not interesting as a historical personality, I would not advise publication because the content is not of especial interest either from the standpoint of today’s physics nor also for the history of physics. On the other hand I can imagine that this text would come into consideration for publication insofar as it forms an interesting contribution to the illumination of Engels’s intellectual personality.”90 Obviously, the curators of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow went ahead with it.

  During the 1920s, as with so much else in early Soviet culture, there was a wide degree of experimentation in dialectical materialism, but by 1930 Joseph Stalin had intervened and forced both of the warring camps of so-called “mechanists” and “Deborinites” into line. The emphasis would no longer be interpreting the philosophy, but deciding which sciences were compatible with it—and so much the worse for those that were not. All cutting-edge developments in modern science were up for discussion: psychoanalysis, genetics, quantum theory, and relativity.91

  The positions on relativity ranged from those that denied that Einstein’s theories (special or general) had any validity at all and demanded a return to Newtonian physics to those—espoused by a subset of the physicists—that considered the philosophy irrelevant to the science. Arnošt Kolman appeared in the middle of these pitched debates, widely considered both at the time and by later commentators as one of the few philosophers who fully understood the technical issues and tried to find a way to preserve the theory in the face of the hardening Stalinist line.92 Throughout the rest of his career, which displayed what can charitably only be called significant ideological flexibility, Kolman continually wrestled with how to interpret both relativity and its creator.

  Kolman maintained throughout his life two main positions on these questions: one about Einstein and another about relativity. He did not have much patience for Einstein’s philosophical views, which he contended “stand on Machian and simply idealist positions,” positions that Lenin had devoted the bulk of his writings on science to excoriating. That did not mean that a good Marxist should dismiss him: “However he is not just a bad philosopher, but is still above all a great physicist. He cannot therefore reconcile himself to the rotting of physics through such a theoretical direction, which in effect would mean the liquidation of the science.”93 Not only was his philosophy bad, but his politics were also disappointing: “Einstein always was in politics the same kind of unreliable fellow traveler as in philosophy, and together with all of the ‘left’-radical bourgeois intelligentsia of Western Europe preached a mix of pacifism, Zionism, humanism, and other cheap democratic liberal nonsense.”94 He wasn’t anti-Soviet, but he wasn’t pro-Soviet either. This need not be a problem, Kolman contended: by separating the science Einstein did from his philosophical interpretation of that science, Soviet physicists could continue to work on relativity without fear of ideological apostasy.

  And a good thing, too, since relativity—especially the gravitational theory of general relativity—was a boon to dialectical materialism. As Kolman told a group of Columbia University students visiting Moscow State University on 5 August 1935: “Relativity theory has proven that spacetime is one form of existence of matter, that our relative knowledge is knowledge of the absolute material world, it has affirmed once again the Engels and Lenin thesis of the asymptotic, spiraling approach of knowledge to reality.”95 Once one neutralized the allegations of philosophical relativism, which was distinctly un-Marxist, there was nothing that demanded censure. Kolman used this position, buttressed by his continued reading of the state of the art in gravitational physics, to defend the theory against even more hard-line Stalinists—he himself was no saint and had orchestrated purges within the Moscow mathematical community—who were on the warpath.96 To maintain this balance, he repeatedly attacked Philipp Frank as a Machian shill who attempted to pervert the theory with bourgeois window-dressing.97

  During World War II, Kolman headed the department of dialectical materialism at the Institute of Philosophy at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. His brusque manner ruffled some feathers, and the leadership soon needed to find something else for him to do. Fortunately, the perfect opportunity arose, and they decided to send him to Prague to advise the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Several Soviet professors were also being sent to the Charles University to teach subjects like Soviet literature an
d history, and Kolman was assigned to teach Soviet philosophy. (There was a dearth of trained philosophers among Communist Party cadres in Prague.) There were some difficulties in obtaining the post (Kolman had not habilitated and retained his Soviet citizenship), but they were smoothed over thanks to the enormous good feeling toward the Soviets. Also, Kolman, unlike several of these new professors, spoke fluent Czech, although it was by now studded with Russianisms, which actually gave him an additional appeal.98 He was quite popular among students. In the meantime, he ran agitation and propaganda efforts for the Communists.99