Einstein in Bohemia by Michael D. Gordin

Author:Michael D. Gordin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2019-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

The illness affecting Austrian higher education was again diagnosed as von Stürgkh, whose hostility to the Jews—in contrast to his Prussian equivalent Friedrich Althoff’s efforts to expand official quotas in order to attract stronger faculty—deprived Austria-Hungary of a leading cultural position.

Both articles are tendentious and polemical. They are also significant. It is important to remember that this was not 1919, when the eclipse expedition to confirm general relativity catapulted Einstein to global superstardom. This was seven years earlier, when general relativity did not even exist and Einstein was a physicist who was well-regarded by his peers for matters that the general public did not interest itself in. Had these stories appeared after the eclipse, the deployment of Einstein as a rhetorical cudgel against a politician would have been humdrum, even banal. This early, however, the tactic should direct our focus to von Stürgkh and Habsburg politics with respect to the Jews. Einstein was the most recent Jewish professor to leave the German University, and so his story was weaponized. The incident had the effect, however, of elevating the konfessionslos anecdote into one of the defining features of Einstein’s time in Prague: that was where he was made into a Jew. As we have seen, this association was not necessarily Einstein’s own understanding of events, but the mythology was available for hagiographers and journalists to turn to when they needed to find information about the suddenly celebrated creator of relativity. Looking through their archives, they found this story, and a narrative was created.

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