Review: Einstein in Kafkaland: How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up with the Universe
By Albert Stern / BJV Editor
I’m a science ignoramus who appreciates any writer who can frame complex concepts of physics in layman’s terms. In his historical graphic novel Einstein in Kafkaland, New Yorker cartoonist Ken Krimstein manages to do that by centering his story on Albert Einstein’s angst at a point in his career where he knows that his early work and intuition about how the universe works must be correct, but is oppressed by his sense that proving it will overthrow the received order of Newtonian physics. Moreover, Einstein – at the time a young professor with a growing family that is beset by financial woes – is nervously aware that he may not have the chops as a mathematician to work everything out in order to finish the job. What’s a genius to do?
Krimstein plays with the synchrony of Einstein being in Prague during the same years – 1911 to 1912 – that Franz Kafka is working towards a similar breakthrough as a literary artist, imagining a dialogue in which the writer asserts that he and the physicist are working toward the same thing: “The True Truth.” Krimstein’s intricate and witty drawings of Prague as an incarnation of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland gives the story a phantasmagoric setting wholly fitting to the cosmically outrageous ideas that both Einstein and Kafka were birthing.
My favorite moment in the book is when Einstein is asked by a university grandee to cut to the chase and explain, in layman’s terms, the ultimate goal of his work. “I want to know,” Einstein replies, “what God was thinking when he made the world.” The next panel captures the grandee’s reflexive mercenary question – “Do you think that might have a military application?” – and a sheepish Einstein’s response – “Gulp.” For surely Einstein always understood the horror that the true truth he was working towards might unleash into the world. Kafka, as Krimstein portrays him, also had a prescient sense of how the menacing world alive in his imagination might become manifest in the 20th century – unlike Einstein, Kafka didn’t live long enough to see what would unfold, but his three sisters (Elli, Valli, and Ottla) lived long enough to be murdered in German death camps during the Holocaust. It is wholly appropriate that Krimstein’s narrator is the skeletal figure of Death from the astronomical clock of 1410 attached to Prague’s Old Town Hall.
Einstein in Kafkaland is a magical book, a sophisticated (and deeply researched) entertainment that relates big ideas in an accessible way. Consider this (as well as Krimstein’s other books When I Grow Up and the magnificently titled Kvetch as Kvetch Can) as a Chanukah gift to anyone who enjoys science, literature, 20th century history, or comic books.