Einstein in Bohemia

by Michael D. Gordin

  His work was a success, from the party’s point of view. Since the 1920s, the Communist Party had been a fixture in Czechoslovak politics, operating with a certain degree of distance from Moscow. After the Second Republic banned the Czechoslovak Communist Party and the Protectorate police hounded its members, the leadership fled to the Soviet Union, where linkages between the two groups became extremely tight. As the Communists won parliamentary elections in the postwar republic, the restored president Edvard Beneš was forced to deal with their leader, Klement Gottwald. With the onset of a frigid Cold War between Stalin and the Western allies and the defeat of Communist forces at the polls in Italy, Moscow pushed for a nonparliamentary path to power. Fearing they would lose in the upcoming May 1948 elections, Gottwald and his deputy, Rudolf Slánský, maneuvered Beneš into a corner, and he capitulated on 25 February 1948. The coup was complete, and the Communists began over four decades of rule.

  Kolman, buoyed by this victory, continued to propagandize without clearing his views with Gottwald and especially Slánský. In September 1948, the philosopher published an article in the weekly journal Tvorba that warned that Czechoslovakia ran the risk of straying from the Stalinist line and leading the country into a revisionist nationalism analogous to that installed in Yugoslavia by Josip Broz (aka Tito).100 Slánský was not amused. He called Moscow, and the secret police arrested Kolman in Prague on 26 September. He was whisked back to Moscow, where he spent over three years imprisoned in the Lubianka, the fearsome NKVD headquarters. Western Prague-watchers noted Kolman’s disappearance but did not know what had happened to him.101 His family feared the worst. And then, just like that, in 1952 things changed. Stalin decided to purge the Czechoslovak Party and make an example out of Slánský for being … a revisionist nationalist like Tito. Slánský was hanged in December 1952, and Kolman was free.

  He was also unemployed. He soon got a job teaching mathematics at an automechanical institute, but he wanted more: a position at the Academy of Sciences working on dialectical materialism or a return to Prague. In April 1953, a month after Stalin’s death, Kolman turned to his former boss in Moscow Communist politics: Nikita Khrushchev, now chair of the Central Committee. The problem, as Mikhail Suslov, Khrushchev’s advisor, told the general secretary, was that nobody in Prague wanted him back. (The philosophers at the Academy were equally adamant.) Instead, Khrushchev found another sinecure for him, as a historian and philosopher of mathematics at the Institute of the History of Science in Moscow.102 From this position, he wrote biographies of Nikolai Lobachevskii, one of the creators of non-Euclidean geometry, and of Bernard Bolzano, the Bohemian philosopher and mathematician, and spearheaded a successful campaign to rehabilitate the new field of cybernetics from its purdah as a bourgeois pseudoscience incompatible with dialectical materialism.103 He also continued to publish, as always, about relativity and Einstein, hitting the same themes he had worked out during the Stalinist 1930s.104

  After once again airing his views about relativity for six years, Kolman got his wish: a return ticket to Prague. He was appointed director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, as well as the editor-in-chief of the new journal Filosofický časopis. Here, though, he was not insulated from critiques of his views—including his interpretation of relative motion—to the same degree he had been in Moscow.105 He encountered resistance both from the Stalinist old guard, who resented the returned prodigal, and from younger Marxists, who were experimenting with what would come to be called “revisionism,” which blossomed in the 1960s into a reformist trend within Czechoslovak communism. However, Kolman’s views concerning politics and Stalin had adapted to the changing winds of the moment, and he was closer to this new generation than its members had anticipated. (It seemed only his positions on relativity held firm.) In December 1962, he gave a lecture to the Union of Writers in Prague, ostensibly about current developments in science and technology and how they necessitated a reevaluation of older views, but he quickly shifted to a criticism of bureaucratism:

  Despotism, tyranny as the catalyst of the mold of bureaucratism penetrated into all social institutions in art, in literature, the same as in science. Bureaucratism manifests primarily in that bureaucratic centralism established control of the positions of democratic centralism, that it created a closed, privileged civil service which strove for the heartless regimentation of cultural life. The bureaucratization of culture, science, and art had also as a consequence the disarming of an array of cultural workers by careerists, people who are alien to the interests of literature, art, and science.106

  These statements were immediately denounced, and Kolman was summoned back to the Soviet Union.107 This time he was not placed under arrest. He left full of bitterness that he, an actual comrade of Lenin, had been so slighted by the Czech apparat. As he put it in his memoirs: “So I left Prague and yet did not have any illusions that it would be better for me in Moscow.”108

  Indeed it was not. The comments he had made at the writers’ meeting obviously percolated back to the Soviet leadership, and he was tarred as a “revisionist” himself, an identification that was reinforced by the involvement of his daughter Ada and his son-in-law, the physicist František Janouch, who were living in Prague with Kolman’s grandchildren, in the moderate socialism of what was coming to be called the “Prague Spring.” He continued to publish articles in Czech that invoked special relativity as an example of proper philosophy, railing against the “dogmatism” of the older guard.109 He was occasionally allowed to travel back to Prague, but in 1968 that became much more difficult.

  On the night of 20–21 August 1968, the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev—who had succeded Kolman’s patron Khrushchev in a 1964 coup—sent Warsaw Pact tanks into Prague to end the reforms pursued by the regime of Alexander Dubček. The rollback, led by the increasingly hardline Gustáv Husák, was called “normalization” (normalizace).110 Within a few years, Ada and František Janouch would emigrate to Stockholm. Before then, Kolman began to notice that his right to travel within Eastern Europe had become restricted. He last traveled to Prague in May 1971, a privilege he attributed to an oversight by the regime.111 After he was denied permission to visit his grandchildren in Sweden, he and his daughter petitioned the regime aggressively to let him go, corralling a pantheon of foreign supporters who had met Kolman during his decades of philosophical jetsetting.112 Intriguingly, one of his most frequently cited complaints about the Soviet Union was that it refused to publish an article he had written about relativity theory.113 A plea to Brezhnev from Sweden’s socialist prime minister Olof Palme—about Kolman’s desire to visit his family, not Einsteinian physics—eventuated in an exit visa for Kolman and his wife.

  If the Soviet regime expected the Kolmans to return, it was rudely disappointed. Kolman resigned from the party (after 58 years), filed for political asylum, and announced his apostasy in an open letter to Brezhnev reprinted around the world, including the 13 October 1976 op-ed page of the New York Times. For a man who had built his entire life around the interpretation of universal science, the letter to Brezhnev emphasized his Czechness. “However, 1968 was the real turning point for me, when I had occasion to observe the ‘Prague Spring’ and see with my own eyes with what enthusiasm the united people of Czechoslovakia backed the strivings of the party to rekindle the Socialist ideals and the fight for Socialism with a human face,” he wrote. “When your tanks and armies occupied Czechoslovakia, subjecting it to your political diktat and merciless economic exploitation—in short, into your colony—I lost any illusions I may have had about the nature of your regime.”114 That said, he remained a Marxist, a determined critic of religion and also of capitalism.115 He continued to write, almost obsessively, about relativity.

  He was panicked about the fact that the article that he had written about relativity—the one that the Soviet journals had censored—remained unpublished. He wrote again and again to his longtime friend Dirk Struik, a mathematician (and former Dutch com
munist activist) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Robert S. Cohen, a Marxist philosopher of science at Boston University, asking them to publish his piece: “During the last six years I have troubles with the publishing of all what I write, here and in my native land. This article was accepted by the editorial board of ‘Voprossy filossofii’ two years ago, three times it was inserted in the current number and three times taken off by an intervention from outward.”116 In November 1976, Cohen wrote him that the paper would be forthcoming in 1977 in a series he edited, because there was simply no other place that might take it: the English was bad (Cohen tried his best to fix it), it was too focused on science to be of interest to general leftist magazines, and the philosophy in it was too elementary for professional venues.117 Even while in the hospital in 1978, however, Kolman had his wife inquire about whether the piece had appeared and whether he could get an offprint.118

  It is not clear that he ever saw it. On 22 January 1979, Arnošt Kolman died in Stockholm. Obituaries for him, focusing on his transformation into a dissident, did not neglect to emphasize one of his own favorite ways of describing himself: as a “confidant of Lenin and pupil of Einstein.”119 A long life that had been intertwined with the history of twentieth-century Czechoslovakia, international Marxism, and the philosophical interpretation of relativity theory had come to a close. He was also one of the last people who could have claimed (however dubiously) to have met Einstein in Prague.

  * * *

  Almost exactly two months after Kolman’s death, the world would celebrate the centenary of Albert Einstein’s birth. This would turn into an important moment for Husák’s regime to commemorate Einstein’s time in Prague, but it was a commemoration very different from the celebrations of cosmopolitanism found in the tributes by František Záviška or even—after a fashion—Kolman. This would be a commemoration of a local Einstein for a city mired in the doldrums of normalization.

  The state had shut down the cultural and political efflorescence of the Prague Spring of the 1960s in a process that swept through every sector of Czechoslovak life, muzzling intellectuals, freezing their children out of education and opportunity, and attempting to tamp down any signs of dissent. These harsh measures were supplemented by officially sanctioned celebrations, and anniversaries fit the bill nicely. You could always find one. In 1970, Lenin’s centenary was commemorated everywhere. The following year, the Czechoslovak Communist Party marked its fiftieth birthday. In 1973, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia was observed, attended by Brezhnev—who had ordered the invasion only five years earlier. Then followed the thirtieth anniversary of liberation from the Nazis in 1975, what would have been Gottwald’s eightieth birthday in 1976, and so on.120

  On 18 April 1969, nine months after tanks had rolled through Wenceslaus Square in the center of Prague, an article appeared on the front page of the youth newspaper Mladá fronta entitled “Prague Forgets Einstein.” Although there had been a few obituaries and historical articles in Czech physics journals since the scientist’s death in 1955, the author argued, there was insufficient acknowledgment of his time in Prague: “It is not necessary to discuss here his contribution to science and to humanity. As yet there is in Prague no memorial plaque to this scientist; to honor his memory with the issuing of a single sign is not an extreme demand.”121 There were streets named after Einstein around the world, as well as countless memorial plaques. Why not in Prague, where he had lived from April 1911 to August 1912?

  Articles about Einstein in Prague began to appear in popular science journals throughout the 1970s, including one that included a rare interview with Einstein’s eldest son, Hans Albert.122 Yet it was not entirely true that there was no memorial to the physicist in the city. In 1974 Hugo Bergmann, then in Israel, was consulted about a commemorative plaque to Einstein that had been unveiled in 1966 at the physics institute on Viničná ulice, which the authorities now proposed to move from an inside wall to the outside of the building so it would be visible to the public. (Bergmann told none other than Arnošt Kolman, with whom he had reconnected after several decades, about it in a letter.)123 The impending arrival of the hundredth anniversary of Einstein’s birth on 14 March 1979 provided another opportunity to fête the physicist.

  On the eve of that date, a statue was unveiled on the outside of Einstein’s former apartment on Lesnická ulice (figure 4). J. Kilián, of the mayor’s office, and Jaroslav Kožešník, chair of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, presented the statue designed by academic sculptor Milan Benda and engineer Ivan Hněvkovský.124 The event capped a series of celebrations that had begun in February when Kožešník and Zdeněk Česka, rector of the university, presided over a symposium at the main hall of the Carolinum, where Einstein had taught. The featured speakers were John Archibald Wheeler, a distinguished physicist from Princeton University who had known Einstein personally, Einstein’s former assistant and collaborator at the Institute for Advanced Study (and onetime Frank student at the German University) Peter Gabriel Bergmann, and Czechoslovak gravitational physicist Jiří Bičák.125 Bičák also published a slim, 60-page booklet entitled Einstein and Prague, which included his own historical introduction, heavily shaped by Philipp Frank’s biographical treatment of Einstein’s time in the capital, and the German original and Czech translation of the paper on starlight bending around the sun, the chief scientific fruit of Einstein’s Bohemian year.126

  FIGURE 4. The memorial bust of Einstein outside his apartment at Lesnická ulice 7, in the Prague neighborhood of Smíchov a few steps from the Vltava River. The lettering reads: “Here lived and worked in the years 1911 and 1912 Albert Einstein.” Source: Author’s photograph.

  It is hard to overstate how unusual this monument was in Czechoslovakia, a country where monuments were, both before and after the Communist coup, taken very seriously as ways of narrating public history.127 It appears that this monument from 1979 was the only public bust erected that commemorated a professor from the German University. (Later, monuments to Ernst Mach and others would be unveiled.) Einstein was, in many ways, an excellent subject. He was world famous and so would lend some luster to Prague and its scientific legacy. True, he had not been a Czech, but he also had not been a “German,” not really. He certainly had not been a Prague German, a member of the city’s long-standing Germanophone community, which had been largely expelled in the wake of World War II. He had also not been a Habsburg German imported from Vienna. He had barely even been a German German: a Swiss citizen, he had renounced his affiliation with the Kaiserreich and was widely celebrated as one of the great opponents of the Third Reich. His Jewishness also mattered: lionizing Einstein was another way to castigate the bygone political menace of the Nazis, always useful in public propaganda.

  These were all internal justifications within the idiom of Czechoslovak communism. Focusing on them, as the discourse around the plaque outside his apartment did, required muffling the other symbolic resonances that surrounded the physicist, including the many that had emanated from his time in Prague and that have been explored in the earlier chapters of this book. The motto underneath the bust was a prime example of this closed-off vision of Einstein: “Here lived and worked in the years 1911 and 1912 Albert Einstein.” That should definitely not be the last word.

  CONCLUSION

  Princeton, Tel Aviv, Prague

  My circle of Prague attractions is different, indeed rather difficult to define—I want to say that I love something in Prague that occupies the middle between “historic” and “everyday,” an unmodern Prague: things that are neither especially worth seeing nor especially new—somewhat half-old things, that also when they were still new were not exactly worth seeing—that yet even in this modesty and unobtrusiveness, yes, unpretentiousness of their entire essence convey so much more of their own spirit of times past as the historically important parade pieces. A past in plainclothes, in a weekday suit …

  —Max Brod1

  By
1979, the year of the Einstein centenary, just about everyone who had known Albert Einstein during his 16 months in Bohemia was dead. Many of them had passed away before Einstein did on 18 April 1955, which only stands to reason given that he had been appointed ordinary professor at the German University at an extremely young age. Those who had stayed in Prague had been culled by two world wars, the Nazi occupation and genocide during the Protectorate, the economic and political ravages of communism, the Soviet-led invasion of 1968, and normalization—as well as the passage of 67 years. Most of Einstein’s interlocutors whom we have followed in the preceding pages did not die in Prague but outside of it, displaced by those same events. Einstein watched many of them go: Ernst Mach in 1916, Bertha Fanta in 1918, Max Abraham in 1922, Gustav Jaumann in 1924, Anton Lampa in 1938, Georg Pick and Oskar Kraus in 1942, Mileva Marić-Einstein (whom I have called, during her Prague period, Einsteinová) in 1948, and Gerhard Kowalewski in 1950. Those who have featured most prominently in this book died after him: Philipp Frank in 1966, Max Brod in 1968, and Hugo Bergmann (then called Schmuel Hugo Bergman) in 1975. Arnošt Kolman passed away in January 1979, a few months before the centenary celebrations, which he most certainly would have enjoyed. The eyewitnesses were gone, but the birth of the Einstein industry has made it possible to preserve their traces and follow the ramifications of Einstein’s Bohemian moment.

  The year 1979 was also a cusp for Prague, if not for the Bohemia that had passed into oblivion decades before. The changes were hard to see in Czechoslovakia—blocking change was the whole point of Gustáv Husák’s policy of normalization—but they were there. In January 1977 a group of artists, writers, philosophers, and citizens released a document they called Charter 77, drafted the previous year and signed in December. It called for respecting human rights and political freedoms; its promulgation was considered a political crime by the regime. At first, the repression seemed to work. In May 1979 one of the most visible of what had come to be called (in particular by the foreign press) “dissidents,” a blacklisted playwright named Václav Havel, was once again imprisoned, this time for his longest term. (He was released in February 1983.) Cracks were showing in the Eastern Bloc, ranging from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, to the revolving funeral cortege of geriatric leaders of the Soviet Union, to economic and political protests in Poland and elsewhere. By 1989 the lid had blown off the region, and former prisoner Havel had become the front man for a sweeping political movement. On 29 December 1989, he was unanimously elected president of Czechoslovakia by the Federal Assembly. In 1993, Czechoslovakia was dead, split into two states, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.2 Prague was still the capital of the former, but it had traveled quite a long way from the Habsburg Empire.