From award-winning New Yorker cartoonist Ken Krimstein, a brilliant graphic narrative revealing the pivotal year in Prague when Einstein became “Einstein,” Kafka became “Kafka,” and everything changed forever.
During the year spent in Prague by both Albert Einstein and Franz Kafka from 1911-1912, the men shared in a desire to tackle big questions in Europe’s strangest city—and the trajectory of their lives there wove together in uncanny ways. By tracking Einstein’s public statements, papers, lectures, and letters from this period, as well as the events of a planet electrifying itself into modernity, and aligning them with Kafka’s very thorough diary, Krimstein brings those questions to life with stunning artwork in his signature graphic style.
The lost time that Einstein spent in Prague became a critical bridge that connected months of failure and frustration, almost led him to “blow up” his greatest insights, and then led to the breakthrough thinking that set him on the path to what has been described as “the greatest scientific discovery of all time.” Bringing the time and place and both men to vivid life, Krimstein tracks the surprising connections between Einstein and Kafka as they battle God for truth in a comic universe while weaving in and out of Prague’s intricate and mystifying streets. Einstein in Kafkaland shows how, by the time Einstein left Prague after many false starts and blind alleys, he had finally uncovered the way to his General Theory of Relativity, and how, after many similar false starts and blind alleys, Kafka produced his first masterpiece, The Judgment—the two man casting an irrevocable spell that would define the way things really are for modernity.
