Volume 3, Issue 5: The Untold Months of Einstein

 The Untold Months of Einstein

 

Michael D. Gordin: Einstein in Bohemia. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2020, pp. xi + 343. Hardcover 978-0-691-17737-3. $29.95.

 

 

You probably heard already that Einstein moved between different places, worked here and there—he is mainly known, though, as a Berlin- and Princeton-based physicist. Although he was a German by born, he was a Swiss citizen, who spent a lot of time in Zurich. It is also quite known that he attended Prague as well, developed some ideas there, but it was just a quick, transitory phase towards the bigger and meaningful periods.

            But things turn out to be quite different, of course, if you see them from a different angle. Michael D. Gordin has written recently an already well-quoted and notorious book about Einstein’s tiny time in Prague, situated in Bohemia. Einstein spent there only sixteen months between, April 1911 and July 1912. At that time he was a professor of theoretical physics at the German University of Prague, lecturing on relativity and related issues to a su
rprisingly modest audience. None of these sounds extraordinarily relevant or significant, especially given what happened before 1911 and after 1912. Prague was a transitory moment in the long life of seventy-six years; but when it happened, it was just real and significant. Here is Gordin’s methodological credo, from which many recent historical studies (written, and not-yet written) could benefit a lot:

 

Besides missing out on the intellectual interest of seeing a person simultaneously adapting to and resisting a foreign place, overlooking Einstein’s time in Prague does not make much sense from the physicist’s own point of view. When he moved there from Zurich in 1911, he did not know that he would decamp back to the Swiss city three semesters later. He thought he was moving his family to settle for quite some time. It is only after one knows that the Prague period was (relatively) brief that it can be dismissed as a diversion from the ostensibly “ordinary” trajectory of this extraordinary life. What if we did not read the past through the future, or through Einstein’s own retrospective haze? Let us take his time in Prague the way he initially did: seriously. (p. 3.)

 

This is not simple counterfactual historiography, “what if Prague would have been significant”, but a portion of actual history, seen through the eyes of Einstein and his contemporaries.

            When Einstein arrived in Prague in April 1911 (after some initial, cultural-political frictions around his appointment, see Ch. 1), he was to fill the chair in a university where explicit lines were drawn back to the famous Ernst Mach (who was teaching there for three decades, playing an important role in the institutional history of the University as its rector), Christian Doppler, and even to Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. By 1911, Einstein has published numerous important papers, including his Annus mirabilis papers in 1905 on the photoelectric effect (that was cited in his Nobel Prize laudation), on Brownian motion, and the theory of special relativity. He was well-known, his theory was already criticized and popularized, but he was not that international star that he would become in 1919, after the experimental confirmation of his theories by Sir Arthur Eddington.

            In Gordin’s book, we got a fairly detailed story about Einstein’s Prague-time: what did he teach, do, research, and how he lived there. But the book is not a usual Einstein-book: he is just one hero among many key figures, one of which is the city of Prague itself. Relying on countless materials (written in a couple of different languages), Gordin takes the hand of the reader and guides her/him through the history of Bohemia from the 14th century to the Nazi and Soviet occupations. The history of Prague (the surrounding regions are called Bohemia) is filled with magic, myths, unique creations, sadness and amusement, nationalism, and internationalism. The various ethnic, religious, and linguistic tensions did not leave the city and its region without a lasting effect, and Einstein himself experienced many of them.

            He was considered to be a German professor at the German University, though he had only Swiss citizenship, claimed to be non-religious, but true, he spoke German and met mainly Germans in the city. Nonetheless, Germans formed only a minority in the Czech lands, while they had the most important privileges thanks to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy of which Bohemia was part. Einstein’s wife, Mileva, was a catholic Serbian, who found herself in the controversial relationship between Serbians and Czech, thus she was left alone in the city for that sixteen months. Culture and tension, what characterized Prague at that time, and in fact, Eastern Europe in its entirety.

            But Gordin spends many chapters to discuss the acquaintances of Einstein—people who influenced the physicists, and people he influenced and helped in various ways. We got to know Max Brod, a Jewish writer, and journalist, a leading cultural figure in Prague, a good friend of Kafka, who helped the publication of his work until Kafka’s death. There was the philosopher and Zionist Hugo Bergmann, and Berta Fanta who run an important salon, a cultural meeting point for the intelligentsia in Prague. According to certain stories, Kafka and Einstein both attended the salon; the latter rather regularly played his violin there. Prague was a huge holistic organism, where everyone knew everyone, got acquainted in salons, coffee houses, and seminar rooms, and gave to each other long-standing intellectual impetus. 

            Next to Brod and Einstein, the third hero of the book is Philipp Frank, the physicists-turned-philosopher who took Einstein’s chair as his recommended successor in 1912. Frank was a member of the internationally known Vienna Circle, a logical positivist, who became one of the first general biographers of Einstein, and definitely the one who knew Einstein personally for decades. While Frank was an accomplished physicist—though not on the level of Einstein—and philosopher in his own right, he is mainly known for his Einstein-biography. As a sign of it, many of what we know about Einstein’s Prague-period came from Frank’s recollections and stories, but Gordin shows convincingly that Frank’s descriptions are everything but accurate. But Frank could be taken as a fighter for Einstein, carrying his torch in Prague for twenty-six years, jumping vehemently into the popularization of relativity, debating Soviets and Nazis as well.

            Speaking of Soviets, Gordin shows also how impactful Einstein was on Arnost Kolman, one of the leading philosopher-physicists of the Easter-bloc, dealing with relativity in Prague, Moscow, and interment camps-prisons as well.

            Einstein in Bohemia is not an easy reading: Gordin included a lot in the book but he did it well. There are man actors, much hidden information, explanatory cultural materials, and a whole world, as attractive to tourists as to historians of science. While it is a biographical book of Einstein in a sense, the book is rather a biography of an era, of a city, and a circle of intelligentsia that transformed the whole of the known Western world of literature, science, religion, politics, and history. 

            Gordin’s book is refreshing, engaging, sucks you into Eastern Europe where all the magic happened in the 1910s. Historians of science and philosophy shall also experience now the challenging fact that the world did not end in Vienna; oh not at all!

 

Adam Tamas Tuboly

Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre for the Humanities, ELRN

Supported by the MTA Lendulet Morals and Science Research group and by the MTA Premium Postdoctoral Scholarship.