The two trajectories—of Einstein and of Bohemia—had sharply diverged, though each would supply ample material for posters in college dormitories, especially as tourists began to discover the charms of the now-accessible Prague. Einstein stood in more than ever for the quintessential genius, an increasingly disembodied icon who represented abstract ideas ostensibly deracinated from physical location and historical epochs, even as they were fundamentally about space and time. Prague became a synecdoche, first for political liberation and then for artistic ferment and experimentation. The links that had bound individual and city together, forged as they had been by personal connections, had evaporated when the people who had sustained them were no more.
It is the goal of history to make such bonds visible anew. The Einstein who has emerged on these pages, viewed through the filter of his ties to Habsburg Prague, does not appear as precisely the same individual who can be found in his many biographies, the dominant genre in which we have treated this most charismatic of scientists. Our Einstein was an intensely social being, was not always in the right politically, philosophically, or scientifically, and was not always the main character of the story. (One intrinsic feature of biographies as a genre is that the titular character rarely yields the stage.) He was a human being, defined as all human beings are by how he interacted with the world around him. Prague, too, is different: a city shot through with a scientific sensibility, one where Germanophones and the Czech-identified repeatedly interacted over intellectual topics, and one where the memory of the past was a constant resource for the present. Those aspects of Habsburg Prague, of the capital of what was once known as Bohemia, have been altered beyond recognition with the transformations of the city. (To be clear: there is still plenty of scientific activity in Prague; its links with the international system have, however, been entirely reformatted.)
While the emphasis on the city of Prague and Einstein himself has enabled us to see all of these resonances, it has also shunted to the side those stories about Einstein and Bohemia that unfolded much later and far outside the geographic bounds of the Czech lands. In conclusion, I will briefly visit two of those other far-flung locations—Princeton, New Jersey, and Tel Aviv, Israel—before returning briefly to the metropolis that has animated this book.
* * *
In the Rare Books and Special Collections Department of Firestone Library at Princeton University, you can call up a surprising coffee-table book. The volume itself is not that extraordinary: a German-language work by Karel Plicka from 1953, entitled Prague: A Photographic Picture Book, it contains gorgeous black-and-white photographs of the classic vistas of the city on the Vltava. There are many such books. What makes this one special is a German inscription inside:
To dear Hanne
for mutual homesickness
A. Einstein. 54.3
The book was one of two inscribed by Einstein and given to Hanna Fantova—the other being (somewhat vainly) a copy of Carl Seelig’s biography of the physicist, Albert Einstein und die Schweiz—both of which she donated to Firestone Library, where she worked for many years as the first librarian dedicated to collecting maps.4 That Einstein gave Fantova gifts is not that peculiar: they had formed a close relationship in the several years before his death, speaking on the phone almost every evening (Fantova kept an invaluable log paraphrasing these discussions, also deposited in the archives at Firestone), and taking frequent sailing trips (figure 5). She was younger and vivacious, clearly admired the distinguished scientist, and was someone with whom he could speak German without triggering the anger he felt toward the German people.5 The inscription seems a bit of a puzzle. “Homesickness” for Prague? That, too, makes sense when we trace Fantova’s life to the point at which she got to stand on a sailboat in Lake Carnegie.
Hanna Fantova was born Johanna Bobasch in Brünn (today Brno), the capital city of Moravia, the Habsburg province just to the east of Bohemia, on either 6 or 9 April 1901.6 She was 10 years old when Einstein arrived in Prague, and they did not meet then. She went to gymnasium in Varnsdorf, at the very northern edge of what would later be called the Sudetenland on the border with Germany, and at some point settled in Prague, where she met the man she would eventually marry: Otto Fanta. After the creation of Czechoslovakia, it became commonplace for citizenship documents for Germanophone citizens to include their name written in the Czech style, so Johanna Bobasch became Johanna Fantová (somewhere in her travels, the accent was lost). It was through Otto Fanta that she came into Einstein’s orbit. Given his personal connections to the physicist, it would have been hard for her not to.
FIGURE 5. Albert Einstein and Hanna Fantova preparing to sail on Lake Carnegie, an activity they undertook often (though she seems overdressed on this particular occasion).
Source: Hanna Fantova Collection of Albert Einstein, Rare Books and Special Collections, C0703, Princeton University Library, Box 2.
Otto Fanta was the son of Bertha Fanta, the woman who ran the salon where Einstein made so many connections to persons, like Brod and Bergmann, who would be prominent representatives of Prague in his later life (as well as those, like Franz Kafka, whom he would forget). Otto was born on 26 October 1890 in Prague, which meant he was of university age during Einstein’s tenure at the German University. He audited a physics course during the physicist’s last semester in summer 1912, though Fanta was officially enrolled at the University of Berlin.7 (Later, Philipp Frank would serve on Fanta’s doctoral committee.) He also met with Einstein frequently during the discussion evenings at his mother’s house, where he became especially close to the mathematician Gerhard Kowalewski, himself an astute observer of Einstein.8 In October 1915, Otto Fanta began teaching chemistry at a Staatsrealgymnasium in Prague, retiring from that position in April 1930. In subsequent years, he moonlighted as an unpaid handwriting analyst for the Prague Police Department.9
Just before leaving his teaching job, Otto took his young bride to Berlin, where he wanted to take in the theatrical season. He renewed his acquaintance with Albert Einstein, now at the pinnacle of his career in the German capital. Einstein definitely remembered Otto Fanta, although perhaps not from the salon or from a course audited almost 20 years earlier. In the early 1920s, Fanta had collaborated with Otto Buek, Rudolf Laemmel, and Georg Nicolai on a screenplay for a movie entitled The Foundations of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity that had been intended to popularize the relativity of motion and simultaneity for a mass audience using clever animations. Einstein had been aware of the venture—when he had traveled to Prague in 1921 for his visit with Philipp Frank and debate with Oskar Kraus, he had shared his train ride with what he called “the filmmaker Fanta.”10 When the movie had finally been produced by the Colonna Filmgesellschaft in Berlin, he had registered his displeasure at the media campaign surrounding it: “The reason for this lies in the fact that people called the film the ‘Einstein Film’ rather than the ‘Relativity Film.’ I would like herewith to urgently request you to do me the favor to select in the future such a title for your film which obviates such misconceptions”11 (figure 6). Indeed, Ernst Gehrcke specifically attacked the film as part of his anti-Einstein campaign in these years.12 A review in Die Umschau in 1922 mostly complained that two hours was far too long for sustained thought by the average viewer.13
FIGURE 6. Poster for the popular film about relativity theory for which Otto Fanta co-wrote the screenplay. As Einstein himself had objected, the film was misleadingly advertised as being about him, and not about the theory. Source: “Quellen zur Filmgeschichte 1922: Daten zum Einstein-Film,” https://www.kinematographie.de/einstein.htm.
This, then, was the person who showed up at Einstein’s apartment in 1929 with his new wife. Hanna and Albert hit it off. As she recalled the meeting in the preface to her record of Einstein’s phone conversations: “My husband had displayed great interest in the scientist’s unique collection of books, and on his suggestion, and with Einstein’s consent, I began to classify the library that was rather chaot
ically scattered throughout the house. I gave the catalog to Einstein on his 50th birthday.”14 They returned to Prague, and she enrolled at the German University, earning her bachelor of arts degree there in 1934. This interaction fixed her in his memory when politics in Europe turned dark. In late October 1938, Einstein sent her a letter, written in English:
Dear Frau Fanta:
I am glad to hear that there is a prospect that you will come to America. I hereby extend you a friendly invitation to visit me in Princeton.
My daughter, who has recently undergone a serious operation, will be especially glad to be able to chat about old times with you.
Very cordially yours,
A. Einstein15
A month and a half later, he sent a supplementary testimonial: “I hereby confirm that a few years ago Frau Hanne Fanta performed for me the great service of composing a catalogue of my library and to put it in thorough order.”16 For unknown reasons, the couple delayed their exit (accompanied by Otto’s sister Else, now divorced from Hugo Bergmann) until March 1939, almost the last feasible moment.
They made it to Great Britain, but that was for some time the only good news in their lives. By this time they had lost all their money. In the hopes of being able to transfer some assets out of Czecho-Slovakia, Fanta sold his house in Prague and then gave the money to someone who claimed to be selling the couple an apartment in New York City. The apartment did not exist; the confidence scheme annihilated their savings.17 Then Otto Fanta was interned by British authorities, a common enough occurrence for refugees fleeing from Central Europe. While still in custody of the state, he died in a hospital in Aylesbury, County of Buckingham. Fantova had to leave for the United States alone.
The first person she turned to was Einstein. As she recounted their conversation, he said to her: “I am so glad you are here, but what are you going to do now? You know, you’ll have to work in America.”18 Together, they hit on an idea that recalled their previous meeting in Berlin. She enrolled in the Library School of the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill in 1939 and graduated in 1941. Knowledgeable in English, French, German, Dutch, Czech, Polish, and Italian, she was highly employable in the war years, taking a job as senior cataloguer at Oberlin College from February 1942 until the end of August 1944. Then the position of inaugural curator of maps at the Princeton University Library opened up, and she was hired. Upon her retirement, university president Robert F. Goheen noted that she had expanded the maps collection 18-fold, and also “recall[ed] [her] helpful assistance to Einstein in the early 1930’s in cataloguing his personal library.”19
Einstein’s relationship with Fantova was important for both of them, as their almost daily sailing trips attested. Fantova recalled that Einstein “quite frequently revived old mutual memories of Prague.”20 They were certainly old memories, but they were not mutual. The link between them, Otto Fanta, had died in Britain, and the memories they now shared were largely of Berlin and Princeton. So what was this “mutual homesickness” about? It was not a concept that Einstein had a high opinion of in general. In 1938, he raged in a letter to his close Swiss friend Michele Besso about the state of European politics, digressing with a commentary about the situation in New Jersey:
However I like it here quite well, and one rarely finds someone who would rather go back to refined Europe. I know that you have an incurable weakness for your Italy, like most German Jews have for Germany. This form of sentimental weakness comes from our longing to be led back to a solid home on this unstable Earth, in which we fall prey to the fallacious illusion that the goyim have such a home and we don’t. But I think that a home in which a rational person cannot open his or her mouth is not a proper home. A German jurist and goy, married to a Jew, who survived here only with terrible trouble, answered my question about whether he ever suffered homesickness: “But I am not a Jew!” The man got it right.21
The feeling of homesickness he invoked with Fantova may have partly been a recognition that, as discussed in the introduction to this book, the notion of belonging to a place was not something that Einstein fully grasped. His sickness was not having a home in the first place. Perhaps it also matters that he was writing about Prague, and not only when trying to charm his lady friend.22 (She too, recall, was not from there.) The city was still shaping his everyday life, even when he was half a world and 40 years distant from it.
* * *
The story in Tel Aviv is briefer, in large part because every character is familiar. Hugo Bergmann, as we have seen, emigrated to Palestine, eventually assuming a prominent position at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as a philosopher and academic administrator. Shuttling back and forth from the Israeli capital to the city on the coast, he was also a link for the community of those displaced from Prague and the Bohemia of the Habsburg era. His letters and diaries, especially from the 1960s and early 1970s, read like a reprise of the account of characters in this book. It was almost as though Bergmann had reconstituted the Fanta salon on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. More to the point, he had unwittingly re-created Einstein’s Bohemia.
Bergmann traveled back to Prague occasionally, including immediately after World War II, although the journey was surely depressing. Prague itself was not badly damaged by the conflict that had left so many other cities in ruins, but the people who had brought that city to life, the people he had known, were gone. The lucky ones he still saw regularly—they had also made it to Palestine during the interwar period. The unlucky ones had been murdered, with many now lying in unmarked graves at extermination camps. And then there were those who had fallen between lucky and unlucky.
On 8 November 1946, the eve of the anniversary of Kristallnacht, Bergmann was in Prague again, and he ran into someone he had not thought about in years: “Remarkably, the Communist professor of philosophy here, who is the preacher of materialism in the Czech philosophical movement, is an old Bar Kochba member from my days, Kolmann [sic], who returned here from Russia.”23 Arnošt Kolman was back in Prague as a Stalinist philosopher of science, a great conceptual distance from his role as translator of Martin Buber’s Prague lectures into Czech. He and Bergmann enjoyed reconnecting, and they hoped to stay in touch. Then Kolman dropped out of contact. In 1949 Bergmann heard a rumor that the philosopher had been recalled to the Soviet Union.24 These were Kolman’s years in the Lubianka.
After his release, their correspondence resumed. Kolman sent the biography he had written of the early-nineteenth-century Bohemian philosopher Bernard Bolzano—about whom Bergmann had written his dissertation—to Israel, adorned with a dedication in Hebrew (to Bergmann’s astonishment).25 Bergmann continued his own work, including an article extolling the philosophical writings of Philipp Frank, which was published in November 1966. He only later found out that the subject of the piece had passed away before it appeared.26 (In 1969, Bergmann was even reading a work by Frank’s old nemesis Oskar Kraus again: his biography of their mutual teacher Franz Brentano, of course.)27 Throughout this decade he continued to publish variations of his reminiscences about Albert Einstein, a topic in increasing demand both in Israel and abroad. In the midst of all this work, out of the blue, he received a note in 1967 from Kolman stating that he was in Cyprus and planned to pop over to Israel. Here is how Bergmann described the reunion to Robert Weltsch, another shipwreck from Bar Kochba and the Fanta circle: “It is a very beautiful and uncommonly cordial reunion. When we saw each other in Prague in 1946 it was more polite than cordial, as when two men from different sides of the barricade reach out a hand to each other. This time it is entirely cordial; perhaps the air of the Land of Israel is a factor, perhaps also his cordial goyish wife, who is an author for children. She speaks only Russian, but she understands Czech and some German.”28 Not everyone was so delighted. Max Brod was incensed that Bergmann kept in touch with Kolman, resenting everything from his politics to his ideas about art and literature.29
Bergmann’s Tel Aviv was another resonance of Einstein and Bohemia. Of cours
e it was not merely that, but the conversations that occurred among Brod, Bergmann, Kolman, and the other Prague émigrés would again and again drift back to Einstein, a national hero in the new Jewish state. Their image of Einstein was different from the ones current in Berlin, London, Paris, or New York. They had all known him very well for a brief period of time, and every time they heard of him again, the news would be filtered through the lens of those Prague memories. Brod, Bergmann, and Kolman, each in his own way, as Philipp Frank had in his, contributed a Bohemian tinge to the Einstein that was passed down to later generations. Bohemia was still present for them.
* * *
What, in the end, about Prague itself? As the personal connections between Einstein and the city began to weaken—whether because people had died or because they no longer lived in Prague—broader consciousness of the physicist’s former presence in the city diminished as well. Before the run-up to the centenary discussed in the last chapter, Einstein’s name only appeared as a universal signifier, not as a plausible local memory.
Einstein in Bohemia Page 31