In the opening pages of his new book on Albert Einstein's sixteen-month sojourn in Prague, Michael Gordin relates the story of the scientist's May 1911 encounter with Franz Kafka at a salon frequented by the writer. It's one of those meetings that seizes the imagination because it seems so pregnant with significance. What did these two towering figures of modern science and culture talk about? Were Kafka's literary innovations in some way shaped by relativity theory? Or, conversely, did Einstein learn from Kafka? As it turns out, nothing much came of this intersection. Kafka barely said anything and, given the opportunity to spend more time with the physicist the following evening, he chose to stay home instead. Einstein appears not to have registered the encounter at all. So much for a meeting of minds.
The story is nonetheless important for Gordin because it exposes the gap between expectations about such interactions and their often more prosaic reality. The same dynamic is at work in the relationship between place and thought. When an artist or, in this case, a scientist spends time in a singular location in their formative or productive years, it's only natural to wonder about the impact of that place on their creative output. Historians in particular are committed to the proposition that context matters, and so by writing about Einstein in Bohemia, Gordin is inquiring into the relationship between this locale and Einstein's life and labor. As a Jew taking up a position at Prague's German University in the early years of the twentieth century, the physicist could not have failed to note the raging Czech-German national conflict and the awkward position of Jews straddling these groups. Might there be a link, then, between Einstein's experience of Prague's national tensions and, say, relativity theory?
Reality, alas, does not always conform to such expectations or desires. Just as the meeting between Einstein and Kafka fizzled, so too did the Bohemian context play a marginal role in Einstein's theoretical innovations. It's not that Einstein did no important work in Prague; on the contrary, Gordin persuasively demonstrates that his efforts in regard to static theory, which he labored over while at the German University in 1911–12, was a key waystation on route to general relativity theory. But the Bohemian context does not appear to have transformed his thinking in any specific manner. Gordin suggests that Einstein would likely have achieved his breakthroughs whether in Prague, Zurich, or Berlin. The context in which he moved, in other words, was a backdrop for his insights, not their stage.
It is to Gordin's credit to admit as much. Other historians might have pushed the contextual argument beyond what the evidence can bear, but Gordin remains firmly bound by it, and the book is excellent despite the absence of any spectacular link between Einstein's work and the Bohemian locale. Written with style and sympathy, it recounts the convoluted tale of his appointment to Prague and the tortuous politics of the Austrian university system. It describes his initiation into the Czech-German conflict, and shows that he identified overwhelmingly with the German community, adopting many of its prejudices about the Czech population. His Prague was German Prague and especially German-Jewish Prague, where he was warmly embraced. It was his wife, Mileva Marić, who experienced Prague's national tensions more vividly and uncomfortably. Of Serbian descent, born in Hungary, and educated in German, she had no ready-made community: the Czechs considered her German and the Germans considered her a Slav. By all accounts she was deeply unhappy.
One lasting mark that Prague left on Einstein has to do with Zionism and his hopes for a new state for Jews. It was at the same German-Jewish salon where he met Kafka that he received his first serious introduction to Zionism. Although Einstein only became sympathetic to the movement while in Berlin during World War I, the form of Zionism that appealed to him was strongly influenced by Prague Jews Hugo Bergmann and Hans Kohn and modeled in part on their experience in Bohemia. He believed that only a binational, bilingual entity of Jews and Arabs would ensure lasting peace in Palestine. When it became clear that this was not the form of Zionism that would prevail, Einstein became deeply disillusioned. He never visited Israel.
One state that he did admire, and visit, was interwar Czechoslovakia. He held its president, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, in particularly high regard because of his condemnation of antisemitism, his commitment to ensuring the civil rights of Jews, and his opposition to fascism. Whereas during his residence in Bohemia Einstein had displayed little sympathy for the Czech national cause, in the 1920s and 1930s he looked upon the Czech-dominated state much more favorably. Whatever the changed circumstances and the diminution in status of the German University, Prague still seemed to constitute a haven for German-Jewish life and culture. It may be for this reason that many years later, after the horrors of World War II and the complete destruction of this world, Einstein would pronounce his “homesickness” for Prague.
