Einstein in Bohemia

Michael D. Gordin

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780691203829, 9780691177373
• eBook ISBN: 9780691199849
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Biographies
• Index: History

A finely drawn portrait of Einstein's sixteen months in Prague

In the spring of 1911, Albert Einstein moved with his wife and two sons to Prague, the capital of Bohemia, where he accepted a post as a professor of theoretical physics. Though he intended to make Prague his home, he lived there for just sixteen months, an interlude that his biographies typically dismiss as a brief and inconsequential episode. Einstein in Bohemia is a spellbinding portrait of the city that touched Einstein's life in unexpected ways—and of the gifted young scientist who left his mark on the science, literature, and politics of Prague.

Michael Gordin's narrative is a masterfully crafted account of a person encountering a particular place at a specific moment in time. Despite being heir to almost a millennium of history, Einstein's Prague was a relatively marginal city within the sprawling Austro-Hungarian Empire. Yet Prague, its history, and its multifaceted culture changed the trajectories of Einstein's personal and scientific life. It was here that his marriage unraveled, where he first began thinking seriously about his Jewish identity, and where he embarked on the project of general relativity. Prague was also where he formed lasting friendships with novelist Max Brod, Zionist intellectual Hugo Bergmann, physicist Philipp Frank, and other important figures.

Einstein in Bohemia sheds light on this transformative period of Einstein's life and career, and brings vividly to life a beguiling city in the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

CHAPTER 1

First and Second Place

I … was so physically and psychically spent from life in Prague that I greeted the return to orderly and calm circumstances as a kind of salvation. People both in Vienna and among us in Germany had then no proper conception of how the Germans in Prague felt.

—Carl Stumpf¹

It can be easier to venture to a place unknown than to return to something familiar. In the new place, you do not know the stories, the scripts, the patterns that provide the loose rubric by which the locals shape their days. This helps account for that feeling of liberation when you encounter the unfamiliar: here, you have the opportunity to reinvent yourself, unconstrained by the norms and expectations that bound you in a place laden with overfamiliarity. This ease breeds two illusions: the first, that in this new place there are no barriers or taboos; the second, that those barriers that do exist do not also apply to you.

Albert Einstein knew very little about Prague before he arrived, with that little itself cobbled out of general knowledge, hearsay, perhaps a guidebook or two, and prior epistolary interactions with resident faculty and Viennese bureaucrats. His ignorance did not prevent him from becoming enveloped in a complex cultural environment, although it did hinder him from noticing how total his immersion was. History shapes you whether or not you are aware of it, and you sometimes have lines and a role allotted to you without your ken. Einstein walked into a play in Prague—one that was neither a tragedy nor a comedy, though it had elements of both—that had been running for centuries, and he would perform his part in various ways, first by virtue of his position alone, and later, as he came to appreciate some of the specifics of the story, somewhat according to his choices.

In this chapter we follow the story before the story, on several scales. For Einstein to arrive at Prague, he needed to be offered a position, and this involved its own drama, some of which Einstein knew about and some of which he did not. The minor controversies that attended his hiring as an ordinary professor of mathematical physics at the German University in Prague conditioned his reaction to the city before he accepted the position. The position itself occupied a minor role in a larger narrative, that of why there was a German University in Prague in the first place. To get a sense of the full depth of that story, one needs to appreciate the very long history of the university in Prague, founded in 1348, the oldest university in Central Europe. All of Einstein’s interactions with Prague, from before he arrived until his death, were in some way mediated by this university, and its history looms large in these pages. One cannot understand why the faculty of philosophy offered a position to Einstein, what he encountered when he accepted, nor what transpired afterward without some fairly deep background about that institution.

The university in Prague was founded in 1348, and we could take that date as the creation of the German University as well—there are those who do—although more properly, the latter was created in 1882, when the preceding institution split into a German and a Czech university, separate and not quite equal. As philosopher Carl Stumpf’s words at the beginning of this chapter indicate, one dominant way of viewing the history of Prague is through the lens of a constant conflict between Czechs and Germans—setting aside for the moment the Jews, who will be addressed in a later chapter—reaching all the way back to the medieval period and the rise of the city as Bohemia’s metropolis. I, too, will follow this strand of tension, as it was central for many of the people in the pages that follow, especially those who identified as “German.” It is, however, important not to overstate the clash. While there were periodic conflagrations, for most of the population, most of the time, residents managed to live and work side by side. Historian Tara Zahra calls this “national indifference”: the deep bonds of connection across groups that are often obscured by the flames of nationalism fanned by intellectuals.² This is all very true, and I will flag that indifference in this chapter and the ones that follow when it appears.

National indifference was not, however, Einstein’s experience of Prague, largely because he experienced the city, at least consciously, almost entirely through interactions with “Germans”—from hereon in I will dispense with the scare quotes unless necessary—and often highly politicized nationalist Germans at that. On one important level, Einstein came to understand Prague through the lens of national (and personal) conflict, and the locus of that conflict was the German University.

---

One of the first things he thought to do when it came to Prague was tell his mother. In April 1910, while still settling in after the honeymoon period of his arrival from Bern as the new extraordinary professor of physics at the University of Zurich, Einstein wrote her with exciting news, presented as an aside: “In addition there is something else interesting. I will, most probably, as an ordinary professor with significantly better salary than I now have, be called to a large university. Where it is I am not yet allowed to say.”³ This would have been a notable step up for the former patent clerk who had been unable to secure a job after his graduation from the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. (Einstein had worked at the patent office in Bern from 1902 until 1909.) He had just turned 32 years old, remarkably young for consideration for an ordinary professor post, and after just a year into a term as an extraordinary professor. (A word about terminology: in the university system of the German states, including Austria-Hungary and eastern Switzerland, an extraordinary professor occupied a status similar to an untenured assistant professor; the ordinary professorship was the highest position, “ordinary” because it was part of the statutes of the university and could not be dispensed with.⁴) Discretion—perhaps also a hint of nervous superstition?—prevented him from stating that the call might come from the German University in Prague.

As with most such openings, this one was the consequence of a retirement, that of Ferdinand Lippich, who had occupied the chair of mathematical physics since 1874 (five years before Einstein was born) and retired on 1 October 1910, three days shy of turning 72. The physicists were members of the faculty of philosophy, and the faculty made the decision to conduct a search to replace Lippich. Not that they had much choice: physics was an important field, and it seemed hard (Lippich’s case notwithstanding) to hold on to talented faculty for long. In 1909 Ernst Lecher, who had succeeded the towering experimentalist and philosopher of science Ernst Mach in 1895 when the latter decamped for Vienna, himself absconded to that city after a relatively short tenure. This had become a usual affair. Prague was broadly perceived by the German professoriate as, if not quite a hardship post, certainly less desirable than positions in Berlin, Munich, or Vienna, and it was a penultimate way station in the musical chairs of Germanophone academia across both the German and Habsburg empires as talent looked for its final resting place. Lippich was a man of the old school, and the German University began seeking someone new, in multiple senses of that term, to replace him.⁵

The search committee consisted of Anton Lampa (Lecher’s successor), Georg Pick (a senior mathematician who had spent his entire career at Prague), and Viktor Rothmund (a physical chemist).⁶ The composition of the committee already reveals something important about the search process: it was fundamentally conservative. No institution could cover all of physics, so most chose to concentrate in a few areas in which they were already strong or had the necessary equipment to attract their top choice. The members of the committee were those already there—and often the person retiring hired his (always “his”) own successor—so the choice of where to concentrate was based on these entrenched interests. As the committee empaneled in 1910 stated in its report, the choice of focus was clear: “Modern theoretical physics has experienced its most powerful stimulus from the study of electricity.”⁷ This would not have been the decision everywhere, as quantum theory and especially its applications to thermodynamics were hot topics (excuse the pun) at many leading faculties. But because of its members’ own backgrounds and concerns, the committee decided “to recommend to the faculty only such researchers to occupy the proposed post who have assumed a position in their works on this most important problem of modern theoretical physics and thus to guarantee that our university will remain secure of a share, corresponding to its tradition, in the further development of theoretical physics.”⁸ Each member of the committee had his own reasons to prefer this topic. Pick had been the research assistant of Ernst Mach upon his hire at the university; Lampa was an admirer of Mach’s, all of which encouraged them to look for someone who would be consistent with Mach’s empiricist philosophical views; and Rothmund, the most junior of the three, was drawn to related questions of atomic physics. Like all hiring committees, the trio was to come up with a ranked list of three names, filtered by the institution’s preferences.

Their choice for primo loco, or first position, was clear: “Einstein’s research on the electrodynamics of moving bodies has made a new era.”⁹ This assessment came with the highest of imprimaturs, that of Max Planck, the leader of German theoretical physics, from his post in Berlin. When writing to leading colleagues from other institutions about whom they should consider, Planck—who had published all of Einstein’s 1905 “miracle year” papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and relativity theory in the Annalen der Physik, which he edited—lauded the work of the young Zurich professor:

It surpasses in boldness everything that has been achieved so far in speculative natural science, indeed in philosophical epistemology, so that non-Euclidean geometry is child’s play by comparison. And in fact the relativity principle, in contrast to non-Euclidean geometry—which up to now has only seriously come into use in pure mathematics—claims with full justification a real physical significance. With the extent and depth of the revolution in the domain of the physical worldview summoned by this principle one can only compare that caused by the introduction of the Copernican world system.¹⁰

It was somewhat unusual to propose for such a chair an extraordinary professor of such recent vintage, but the committee members were convinced that the only reason Einstein had not yet received an ordinarius post was his youth. Prague could get in early on a good thing. “Without a doubt Einstein has had the deepest influence on the development of modern theoretical physics,” they wrote, “and there is no doubt that theoretical research in the coming years will entirely follow the path that he has blazed.”¹¹

It remained to fill out the other two positions on the list. The second was equally easy: Gustav Jaumann, ordinary professor of physics at the polytechnic in Brno (known in German as Brünn), who had been an extraordinary professor at the German University in Prague before being promoted to the chair in Moravia. Jaumann was thus more familiar to the locals, but for that reason also a bit riskier, as the committee noted: “Jaumann’s position in contemporary physics is an isolated one; this is connected on the one hand with the fact that his entire mode of thinking diverges from the mode of thinking of the dominant theory, on the other hand it is however also not characteristic of his mode of presentation to attract those who think differently to a closer engagement with his theory.”¹² Although they provided a list of honors for Jaumann—which they had not done for Einstein—and noted that he was more senior in age, there was a distinct lack of enthusiasm for this familiar face. Hence, secondo loco. If Einstein turned them down, they would settle for Jaumann.

The committee named Emil Kohl to the third position on the list. There was little to say about Kohl, and the committee included all of it in their report. He was from Vienna, where he had received his doctorate in 1890—15 years before Einstein had earned his—and had then taught in secondary school while working on his habilitation, the second doctorate required for a professorship at a German university. He received this in 1903 also from Vienna and had been named as tertio loco for a post in Czernowitz (in the far eastern reaches of the Habsburg Empire) only recently. Needless to say, the job went to someone higher on the list, and he remained as an instructor (Privatdozent) in Vienna, working on fluid dynamics and waves in matter, including seismic phenomena.¹³ This was not someone working at the cutting edge of electromagnetism, nor someone who had strong connections to Mach, as did Jaumann and—as we shall see in a later chapter—Einstein.

Had he been granted the opportunity to read the report when it was sent off to the Ministry of Education, Planck would have been pleased, as would any of the leading theoretical physicists in German space. This was a list designed to hire one and only one outstanding candidate: Albert Einstein. The ministry, however, had other plans. In July 1910, as a postscript to a letter to Arnold Sommerfeld, professor of theoretical physics in Munich, Einstein related the bad news: “I am not going to Prague. The Ministry has—as I learn from Prague—made difficulties.”¹⁴ The minister of education, Karl von Stürgkh, as was his prerogative, had inverted the order of the first and second positions. Jaumann received the call.

To make sense of this decision, it is essential to ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Frontispiece
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Note to the Reader
• Introduction. A Spacetime Interval
• Chapter 1. First and Second Place
• Chapter 2. The Speed of Light
• Chapter 3. Anti-Prague
• Chapter 4. Einstein Positive and Einstein Negative
• Chapter 5. The Hidden Kepler
• Chapter 6. Out of Josefov
• Chapter 7. From Revolution to Normalization
• Conclusion. Princeton, Tel Aviv, Prague
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index