Einstein in Kafkaland: How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up with the Universe. By Ken Krimstein. New York: Bloomsbury, 2024. 214pp, $32.00
Guest review by Paul Buhle
What a great subject for a comic! Back in 2016—it seems a long and grim century ago—the artist team Corinne Maier and Anne Simon offered a biographical GN treatment of the same totemic figure, titled simply Einstein, after similarly lively treatments of Freud and Marx. In their version, Einstein’s early life as a secularized Jew in Germany, a rebellious kid, then reluctant member of the family electronics firm, makes for a lively beginning. Soon, in this pretty carefully factual version, comes his amorous adventures and then emigration…and scientific triumph, to say the least.
Ken Krimstein’s Einstein is a very different creature, perhaps first understood by a quick look at the artist himself. Known better as a prolific cartoonist than graphic novelist, Krimstein has reached readers from the lofty New Yorker to the oddball midwestern Puzzler. His premier GN on Hannah Arendt gained him a handful of prizes. When I Grow Up, based on the hitherto lost essays of six Yiddish-writing teenagers from the prewar years, is perhaps closest to the work under review. This is the lost world of Judeo-Europa.
The comic art of Einstein in Kafkaland is as far from the comic art of Carl Barks’ Donald Duck or, say, the newer world of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, as one could imagine. His characters, language and bodies, do not stay in one place. Instead, they spill across the page, with a pallette of colors ever changing if mostly muted. Krimstein wants to let us know on every page that he is also a painter of software sorts, doing comic art in the very particular way that he chooses. He has no obligtion to offer a straight biographical account, and the larger facts of Einstein’s life, ongoing, do not seem to interest him very much.
One might say that this effort is closer to Logicomix (2008) a best-selling, fictionalized account of Betrand Russell, but less about scientific theory and more about Krimstein’s own artistic expression. Science and math continue to get comic treatments of various kinds in other books, but rarely if ever by the methods adopted here.
If we wish to establish further that Einstein in Kafkaland is not an Einstein biography, we notice that it ends long before his global renown. The reviewer regrets that we will never get to Einstein the saddened A-Bomb scientist, the major peacenik or the ardent socialist whose famous essay “Why Socialism?” appears, early 1949, in the very first issue of Monthly Review, where I happen to have been writing since 1970 (we didn’t overlap!). Or the Einstein who is offered the presidency of the young state of Israel, and turns down the offer, having already made clear that he opposed an ethnic state and its military apparatus.
No matter. What Krimstein does offer us, in narrative as well as visual text, is sufficently intriguing.
A struggling member of the lower-middle class in Zurich, desperate to prove his own scientific theories against arguments that they have already been disproved, Einstein, the impoverished family, man struggles. He wants to explain gravity to his son as they take a train ride to Prague. In this highly imaginative version of theoretical discovery, he falls down a sort of metaphorical rabbit hole before the train arrives at its destination.
There, in Prague, he engages with a series of typically Eastern European Jewish intellectuals, above all his nemesis, a physicist named Max Abraham who is urgent to disprove Einstein and thereby discredit his accomplishments. As he teaches for a living, Einstein also experiences the life of the avant-garde.
Prague is, to our modern view, inevitably the land of Franz Kafka. I did not mention the book’s fictive narrator, a skeleton in the famous clock in the city square of Prague, or that Kafka is introduced, in the first pages, with Einstein. The then erstwhile patent clerk, Einstein, meets or does not actually meet the minor insurance executive, Kafka. Something is about to happen to both of them, although in real life, we do not know anything about what may have passed between them.
Fictively, perhaps it already did. In the train ride, with the train entering a tunnel, Einstein has an experience that replicates Alice falling down the famed rabbit hole and brings him—this is both highly imaginative and not too convincing—a basis for his evolving theories. A bit Kafkaesque.
His engagements with the (mostly male) intellectuals of Prague leads him inevitably to the famed salons, where he even plays his violin, and more important, is said to have met Kafka himself. Krimstein admits he is making up everything about the two famed characters’ rendezvous. Their dialogue, stretching over ten pages, may be the high point of the book’s narrative. Or not.
Still, the Kafka interlude does definitely resonate, in other ways. with what other comic artists have sought to do. Peter Kuper’s Metamorphosis (2004) is gripping in its own way, carefully piling detail upon detail. Robert Crumb’s Kafka for Beginners (1993) marked the famed underground artist’s shift toward adaptation, a shift completed with his later-life masterpiece Genesis, early in the new century.
Krimstein’s Kafka, meanwhile, has taken Einstein on a walking tour in Prague, mainly talking insurance, also grappling with gravity. Einstein needs to prove how gravity relates to acceleration, among other mysteries. Dealing with his growing family, including his wife properly demanding him taking a bath to rid himself of bedbugs, he approaches the “bending of light.” He is reaching for a thesis: “If mass bends light, gravity is the same thing as acceleration.” (p.99) With this brilliant theoretical stroke, the family can, maybe, gets out of Prague, where the historical presence of anti-Semitism coexists with something more personally ominous: a mild but not entirely harmless sort of military induction, complete with soldiers’ uniform. Does Einstein guess at his future role in a war even more horriffic than the one rapidly approaching?
Whatever his personal troubles, Einstein is going to get to his not-quite-stated goal: relativity. Which is to say, also: “the shape of the cosmos, the architecture of time, the unified theory of totality…” (p.146) An accidental meeting with Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest, seems to be crucial to Einstein, but several years after the theorem takes shape.
The artist concludes that Einstein leads us, guides us, to a modern world “where science is art, art is science, and everything is way, way different as it ever has been—a new universe we’re all struggling to catch up to.” (p.196)
One might as well say, of course, that the calamitous war just ahead for Einstein has been decisive in raising doubts about Europe, also about the future of European Jewry, and for that matter the future of human civilization at large. The mechanized mega-death around Franz Kafka will bring Hitler and the Holocaust. Judeo-Europe, in the old and collectively self-confident sense—for middle class German Jews, at least—will cease to exist. Science will advance, but for what end? In a society of global warming with a constantly accelerating arms’ race to boot, we are hard-pressed to offer any positive conclusion.
The art of Einstein in Kafkaland is not literally describable, the fast-shifting dynamism of Krimstein’s accomplishment beyond the realm of what this reviewer has previously considered to be comic art. But so what?
Paul Buhle
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