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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
'Astonishing... In the American journalist Andrew Nagorski this tale has found its ideal narrator' SEBASTIAN FAULKS, Sunday Times '[A] thrilling book, as edge-of-your-seat gripping as any heist movie' Kathryn Hughes, Guardian Book of the Day 'A gripping masterpiece' BRETT KAHR, Freud Museum London March 1938: German soldiers are massing on the Austrian border, on the cusp of fulfilling Hitler's dream of absorbing the country into the Third Reich. Many Jews make frantic plans to flee to safety. But one of the most famous men in the world, unable to contemplate leaving his beloved Vienna, is not among them. His name is Sigmund Freud. Saving Freud is the story of a great man's life, and of the extraordinary people who managed to prolong it, by convincing him to escape to London: the Welsh physician who brought psychoanalysis to Britain; Napoleon's great-grandniece; an American ambassador; Freud's devoted daughter, Anna; and the doctor who risked his own life by staying at Freud's side. In examining the histories of both Freud and his closest circle, Andrew Nagorski brilliantly evokes the story of Europe in the first half of the Twentieth Century. This is a tale of a great city, a collapsing empire, a rising terror -and of a man who would change the way we think.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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For Isabel,
And, as always,
For Krysia
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“It is an iron law of history that those who will be caught up in the great movements determining the course of their own times always fail to recognize them in their early stages.”
—Stefan Zweig,The World of Yesterday
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CONTENTS
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1.
“TO DIE IN FREEDOM”
On March 15, 1938, three days after German troops had crossed into Austria, about 250,000 people greeted Adolf Hitler when he appeared on the balcony of the Hofburg, Vienna’s imperial palace, to announce the elimination of a separate Austrian state. “The oldest eastern province of the German nation shall from now on be the youngest bulwark of the German nation,” he declared. The Anschluss, his oft-proclaimed dream of incorporating the country of his birth into the Third Reich, was now a reality—and the crowd appeared deliriously happy. From the moment Hitler’s troops had marched across the border, most Austrians had responded with similar outbursts of jubilation.
But not all. The new arrivals launched mass arrests of anyone categorized by the Gestapo as anti-Nazi, while simultaneously triggering a wave of anti-Semitic violence. Jews were beaten and killed, their stores looted, and dozens committed suicide. According to German playwright Carl Zuckmayer, who was in Vienna at the time, “The city was transformed into a nightmare painting by Hieronymus Bosch … What was unleashed upon Vienna was a torrent of envy, jealousy, bitterness, 2blind, malignant craving for revenge … It was the witch’s Sabbath of the mob. All that makes for human dignity was buried.”
Ensconced in his longtime residence and office at Berggasse 19, Sigmund Freud had written a terse note in his diary as soon as the German takeover began: “Finis Austriae” (the end of Austria). For all but the first four years of his life, the founder of psychoanalysis had lived in the Austrian capital—and now, as he was approaching his eighty-second birthday, he found himself right in the middle of the unfolding nightmare. As a Jew, he was automatically in danger; as the undisputed public face of what most Nazi officials denounced as a Jewish pseudoscience, there was no telling what the new masters had in store for him.
Freud was an immediate target. On the same day that Hitler delivered his speech nearby, Nazi thugs invaded both Freud’s apartment and the International Psychoanalytic Press, the publishing house for the works of Freud and his colleagues, which was situated just up the street at Berggasse 7. At the apartment, Freud’s wife, Martha, had the presence of mind to throw the “visitors” off balance by playing the polite hostess. She pulled out the cash she had on hand and asked, “Won’t the gentlemen help themselves?” Anna, the couple’s youngest daughter, then took their “guests” to another room where she emptied the safe of 6,000 shillings, the equivalent of about $840, offering that sum to them as well.
The stern figure of Sigmund Freud suddenly appeared, glaring at the intruders without saying anything. Visibly intimidated, they addressed him as “Herr Professor” and backed out of the apartment with their loot, announcing they would return another time. After they left, Freud inquired how much money they had seized. Taking the answer in stride, he wryly remarked, “I have never taken so much for a single visit.”
But there was nothing amusing about the unfolding drama there or, nearby, at the site of the International Psychoanalytic Press, where 3Martin, the Freuds’ oldest son, had gone to destroy documents that the Nazis could use against his father. When about a dozen “shabbily dressed” thugs burst into the premises, as Martin recalled, they pressed their rifles against his stomach and held him prisoner for several hours. One of the men ostentatiously pulled out a pistol and shouted, “Why not shoot him and be finished with him? We should shoot him on the spot.”
During that chaotic first day, the invaders looked confused about their mission and it was unclear who was giving them orders. They missed several documents that Martin, while pleading a stomach ailment, managed to flush down the toilet. By the end of the afternoon, all of the Nazis retreated, promising a full investigation later.
Back at the apartment, where Martin joined his parents and sister, there was little sense of relief. Anna was especially despondent. “Wouldn’t it be better if we all killed ourselves?” she asked her father. Freud’s pointed response indicated that he was not about to contemplate anything of the sort. “Why? Because they would like us to?” he said.
But his predicament—with its very uncertain outcome—raised troubling questions: Why had Freud allowed himself to be trapped in this extremely perilous situation? Why had he failed to leave Vienna earlier when it would have been relatively easy for him to do so?
And why, even after the Nazi raiders left his premises on March 15, vowing to return soon, was Freud still reluctant to act? Once Martin was released from the publishing house, he had immediately gone home to check on his parents. “In spite of this trying ordeal, I do not think father had yet any thought of leaving Austria,” Martin wrote. Instead, he hoped “to ride out the storm,” expecting “that a normal rhythm would be restored and honest men permitted to go on their ways without fear.”
The irony was that Freud should have been uniquely qualified to understand the dark forces propelling his world to mass murder and 4destruction. In his famed 1930 essay “Civilization and Its Discontents,” he discussed man’s “aggressive cruelty,” which “manifests itself spontaneously and reveals men as savage beasts to whom the thought of sparing their own kind is alien.” He specifically noted how often Jews had “rendered services” to others by serving as the outlet for such primal impulses.
During a life that spanned the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, World War I, and the interwar period, Freud was no stranger to political turmoil and anti-Semitism, which was less of an undercurrent than a regular feature of his immediate surroundings. On one level, he knew that this made for a combustible mix that could explode at any time, threatening him and his family. But on another level, he was in denial. He was struggling with the cancer that had developed in his jaw as a result of his long addiction to cigar smoking, and he was acutely aware that his allotted time was running out, prompting him to hope desperately that he could spend whatever was left of it in relative peace, without the upheaval of settling elsewhere.
It was more than the combination of old age and illness that was holding him back, however. Freud felt a deep attachment to the Vienna that had been a major center of cultural—and Jewish—life in Europe for centuries. Its thriving Jewish community included composers like Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg, writers like Stefan Zweig, Franz Werfel, and Joseph Roth, along with physicists, physicians, and, of course, many of the other leading psychologists of the era. Freud knew or had at least encountered most of them.
The center of Freud’s universe was Berggasse 19, where he and Martha had raised six children. It was also where he saw his patients, wrote his essays and books, and met on Wednesday evenings with the members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association. He was wedded to rituals like his evening walks on the Ringstrasse and visits to the city’s 5famed cafes, where he would smoke his cigars and read newspapers. In short, he was a revolutionary thinker who also subscribed to the German saying “Ordnung muss sein,” which roughly translates as “There must be order.” In the Third Reich, those words would take on a much more sinister meaning, but in prewar Vienna they could coexist with generally tolerant social norms—and Freud’s relentless exploration of once taboo subjects.
Vienna was also the stage where Freud had transformed himself from a self-described outsider who was often scorned by the medical establishment into the city’s widely acclaimed practitioner of his new science. He was the king of his realm, attracting apostles and patients from all across Europe and the United States. By the 1920s and 1930s, he was Vienna’s most famous resident, and his appearance anywhere drew immediate attention.
John Gunther, a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News and subsequently the author of Inside Europe and a string of other popular histories, penned a novel about Vienna called The Lost City. Loosely based on his experiences in the Austrian capital in the early 1930s, the book includes a description of a diplomatic party thrown by the Polish embassy where Freud shows up. It demonstrates Freud’s already mythic stature.
A guest spots the celebrity and exclaims: “Now, ah, we have a true rarity. Enters Freud!” Gunther then writes:
And indeed Dr. Sigmund Freud, no less, with his gleaming violet eyes, his hard carved beard, his note of tense and even exasperated superiority, was advancing gravely to host and hostess. A hush came over the room as he moved forward like a boat through bulrushes; guests crammed to watch, but were bent back by the force of his slow, majestic passage. “Freud!” people whispered. The whole assembly became silent in awe. 6
That kind of fame could have meant ruination or salvation for Freud. Once the Anschluss was completed, the Nazi overlords could have decided to demonstrate that no Jew, no matter how prominent, was safe from their wrath. Or they could have calculated that, at this early stage of Hitler’s triumphs, it would be better to allow Freud out of the trap he had, to a large extent, set for himself. In reality, though, they had made no firm decision about what to do with Freud when they took over. His fate was still in play, and it would take the concerted efforts of an ad hoc rescue squad to arrange his escape from Vienna.
Those rescuers were an improbable mix of colorful personalities of divergent backgrounds and nationalities. What they had in common was their devotion to Freud and his theories and, in the tense final period, their determination, first of all, to overcome his remaining reluctance to leave Vienna. Then, when he finally bowed to the necessity of doing so, they took on the task of making the frantic arrangements to convince the Nazi authorities to let him go. And at a time when Jewish emigrants were finding it increasingly difficult to find a country to accept them, they were charged with convincing the British government to accept Freud and his large entourage, a total of sixteen people, including family members, in-laws, and his doctor and family. It was a complex operation, with no guarantee of success—and no possibility of success at all if the rescue squad had not risen to the occasion.
The main members of that team:
Ernest Jones, a Welsh physician who first met Freud in 1908 and learned German to study his works. Jones became his most fervent disciple in the English-speaking world. He served as president of the British Psychoanalytical Society and the International Psychoanalytical Association, which propagated Freudian ideas. He would play a key role both in convincing Freud to leave Vienna and in convincing the British government to grant entry to him and his party. 7
Anna Freud had five older siblings but developed the closest personal and professional relationship with her father, devoting herself to his care until the end of his life. During most of that time, she was involved in what she called a “precious relationship” with Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham, the American granddaughter of Charles Tiffany, the founder of Tiffany & Co. Anna became a leading child psychoanalyst, applying her father’s theories as she treated her young patients.
William Bullitt, the U.S. ambassador to France and earlier the Soviet Union, was Freud’s patient in 1926, when his marriage was falling apart and he was possibly contemplating suicide. Their sessions did not save his marriage but did help him with his depression and led to an unexpected collaboration between the two men on a biography of a statesman they both despised, President Woodrow Wilson.
Marie Bonaparte represented Europe’s high society. She was Napoleon’s great-grandniece and was married to Prince George of Greece and Denmark. Although she conducted a long-running affair with the prime minister of France, Aristide Briand, she started her analysis with Freud in 1925 to overcome her “frigidity” and soon became an analyst in her own right. Like Jones and Bullitt, Bonaparte was a gentile.
Max Schur specialized in internal medicine but, even in his student days, he was fascinated by Freud and underwent analysis himself. During Marie Bonaparte’s stays in Vienna, she was one of his patients. Intrigued by this “psychoanalytically oriented internist,” Bonaparte introduced him to Freud, who took him on as his physician in 1929. Schur, who like Freud was Jewish, was far more alarmed by the looming Nazi threat than his patient. Although he had made arrangements for his family to emigrate to the United States, he stayed on in Austria to care for Freud right up until his departure—and then made sure he had proper care in London as well.
Anton Sauerwald was the member of Freud’s rescue squad who was totally out of place. No one would have predicted that a Nazi 8bureaucrat, who was assigned the task of overseeing the extortion of Freud’s assets, would play a critical role in the final chapter of his life in Vienna. But that was exactly what happened.
The famous old man in Vienna had to rely on all these people—along with others who helped them—to make it possible for him to spend the final fifteen months of his life in London, granting him his wish “to die in freedom.”
During the 1980s and 1990s, I served as Newsweek’s bureau chief in Moscow, Rome, Bonn, Berlin, and Warsaw. Vienna was often part of my beat. I had first visited the city as a teenager, and I was delighted to return there again and again. It is a place drenched in history, magnificent art, architecture, music, and literature, and it still offers many of the same views and pleasures as it did in Freud’s time.
You can replicate his regular walks around the Ringstrasse, the horseshoe-shaped grand boulevard that was constructed on orders from the Habsburg emperor Franz Josef in the second half of the nineteenth century. As it takes you around the town center, you can admire the Vienna State Opera, the Parliament, City Hall, the university, and other stately buildings and gardens.
Like Freud, you can stop at any number of cafés, including his favorite, Café Landtmann, which is situated next to the Burgtheater. There, you can sit on the velvet banquettes or original Thonet chairs from the imperial era while gazing at the mirrors from the 1920s and exquisite inlays on the wooden walls. Before I fully appreciated this Belle Époque ambience, I discovered that almost everyone I wanted to meet in Vienna—political scientists, sociologists, writers, artists—would suggest that we meet there.
But for anyone who lives in Vienna for any length of time, or even visits often, the city arouses strong conflicting emotions. John Gunther 9described it as a city that is “so seductive, so oppressive, but possessed of an enigmatic charm.”
Some of that charm was noticed even by the victims of the Nazi era. In the early days of the German occupation of Poland, sixteen-year-old Weronika Kowalska was among a large group of teenage girls in Czestochowa who were abruptly ripped away from their families and dispatched to Vienna as forced laborers. They spent most of the war working in an Ericsson factory producing field telephones for the German army while living in an austere barracks nearby. Much later, when I knew her as my mother-in-law, Kowalska never minimized the hardships she and the others endured. But she also vividly remembered the occasional glimpses she caught of a city that looked completely dazzling to her.
The stories I covered on my trips to Vienna frequently involved explorations of the same sinister past. I often visited the famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, who was based in the Austrian capital, to report on his efforts to bring the criminals to justice. During the early postwar period, many Austrians successfully portrayed themselves as the first victims of the Third Reich, a sanitized version of events that was bolstered in the popular imagination by the immense success of the movie The Sound of Music. The fact that Austrians were among Hitler’s most fervent supporters—and, as Wiesenthal repeatedly pointed out, were disproportionately represented as commandants and other functionaries in the death camps—was largely overlooked.
It wasn’t until former United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim emerged as the leading candidate in the 1986 Austrian presidential election that the country began a long overdue reckoning with its recent past. In official biographies, he had acknowledged his early wartime service on the Eastern Front, but “forgot” to mention his subsequent tour of duty in the Balkans on the staff of General Alexander Löhr, who was later convicted and hanged in Yugoslavia as a war 10criminal. When Waldheim’s omissions were exposed, the schadenfreude of some of my German friends was all too evident. “The Austrians have convinced the world that Beethoven was an Austrian and Hitler was a German,” they joked. (Hitler was born in Upper Austria, while Beethoven was born in Bonn.)
While I was reporting on this story, I found Waldheim’s reaction to the allegations about his wartime role as disturbing as anything he may have done as an intelligence officer at the time. Seizing on the fact that the World Jewish Congress was in the forefront of those accusing him of war crimes, he resorted to barely veiled anti-Semitic rhetoric to mobilize his supporters, who rewarded him with a bitter victory. Austria’s reputation had been tarred again, but a new generation of Austrian educators took advantage of the controversy to try to introduce more honest programs about history into the schools and public forums.
I have continued to return to Vienna whenever possible. I find the pull of the city to be strong, its appeal hard to resist, no matter what shadows it continues to cast. Perhaps for that reason, Freud’s attachment to it feels completely understandable to me, despite his increasingly fractured emotions. It was an ambivalence he held on to right up until he lapsed into his final sleep in London.
2.
“LABORATORY OF THE APOCALYPSE”
During the final period of its existence, which spanned the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth until the cataclysm of World War I, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was home to fifty million people who represented at least nine major nationalities and numerous minorities. Vienna was the glittering imperial capital for everyone, but the Habsburg rulers granted their diverse subjects and regions limited yet impressive autonomy, allowing them to set many of their own rules while trading and traveling freely. By and large, this looked like a recipe for political and economic success.
But it was a recipe that also depended on a built-in willingness, by rulers and subjects alike, to tolerate the ambiguities, contradictions, and tensions inherent in such a relatively enlightened multinational, multicultural arrangement. This was particularly true for that somewhat amorphous group of people who identified as Austrians—and not simply as Germans who happened to live in Vienna or elsewhere.
Dorothy Thompson, the famed American newspaper correspondent who reported from Vienna, Berlin, and the rest of Central Europe 12in the 1920s and 1930s, pinpointed what that meant in practice. “Insofar as a man thought nationally in the old Empire, he thought of himself as a Hungarian, a Pole, a Czech, an Italian, a Croat, or a German,” she wrote. “When he thought of himself as an Austrian, he thought of something quite different: allegiance to a monarch; a certain form of life; a curious culture, compounded of many clashing and complementing elements.”
Although Sigmund Freud rarely thought of himself in terms of national identity, he almost perfectly fit that description of an Austrian. Depending on an observer’s perspective and prejudices, his Jewish roots were “clashing” or “complementing.” Either way, this did not alter the fact that he was a product of an empire that was both dying and still vibrant right up until World War I and the subsequent Treaty of Versailles that decreed its demise. Freud’s personality, drive, and contradictions were forged in the era when “Golden Vienna” reigned supreme. This was the Vienna that shaped his Weltanschauung, his world view, and this was the Vienna that he refused to leave until it was almost too late.
Appropriately enough, Vienna could look and feel schizophrenic at times—showcasing its dazzling displays of high culture, artistic verve, and scientific accomplishment; alternatively, it could reveal its dark side of sordid hostels for the homeless, abject poverty, and widespread prostitution, along with the political intrigues and unrest that inevitably flourished in such conditions. It could feel like the peak of cosmopolitan sophistication or like a provincial backwater suffocating in its staid, bureaucratic ways. This divide roughly defined what could be called Freud’s Vienna and Hitler’s Vienna.
While the future ruler of the Third Reich spent only about five years in the Austrian capital, they constituted a critical chapter in his young life. It is no exaggeration to say that Vienna shaped both Freud and Hitler. Nor was it an exaggeration when Karl Kraus, a popular 13turn-of-the-century writer and editor of the magazine Die Fackel (The Torch), declared: “Vienna is the laboratory of the apocalypse.”
It was also Freud’s laboratory where he invented the term “psychoanalysis” and developed the theories and practices that still largely define it today. Just as Copernicus and Darwin shocked their contemporaries with their startling discoveries, Freud shocked his world with what biographer Peter Gay called “his portrait of man, the insatiable animal pushed and pulled by unrespectable, largely unconscious, desires and aversions.” Heavily emphasizing the role of childhood sexuality, repressed memories, dreams, fantasies, and narcissism, he offered what appeared to be a bewildering glimpse into the previously uncharted subconscious territory of the human mind.
Yet Freud boldly asserted: “Psychoanalysis simplifies life. Psychoanalysis supplies the thread that leads a man out of the labyrinth.” Coining novel concepts, he explained the interplay among them: the id, which is driven by inherent instincts; the ego, which tries to control the instincts for the sake of avoiding what he called “unpleasure”; the superego, which is shaped by parental and other early influences on a person’s development that extend into adulthood. The psychoanalyst’s task, he explained, was to discover the often deeply buried reasons for a patient’s behavior and neuroses.
Freud was not born in that Vienna laboratory; in fact, he would frequently express diametrically opposite feelings about the city that would become his home for almost all his life. He was born on May 6, 1856, in the Moravian town of Freiberg situated 175 miles northeast of Vienna. (Today called Pribor, it is now in the Czech Republic.) His father, Jacob Freud, was a forty-year-old wool merchant who had been married twice before he wed Amalia Nathansohn, who was half his age, in 1855. By then, he had two grown sons from his first marriage, along with a one-year-old grandson. Sigmund was technically the grandson’s uncle, but they played together as if they were brothers. 14
Amalia favored her first child, calling him “mein goldener Sigi,” but she had little time to dote on him. She soon gave birth to a second son, who died at seven months, and then to five daughters followed by another son. The family struggled financially and, as Sigmund recalled later, his father was “always hopefully expecting something to turn up.” Vienna was a magnet for many Jews of the empire seeking to improve their lot, and Jacob moved the family there when Sigmund was almost four, settling in the heavily Jewish quarter of Leopoldstadt. But initially he did not find much more success as a merchant there, and the family name was tainted by a scandal involving one of Jacob’s brothers who was jailed for dealing in counterfeit rubles.
Not surprisingly, Sigmund, who would become a prolific writer, was hardly eager to dwell on the tribulations of his family in Vienna. “Then came long hard years,” he noted tersely. “I think nothing of them was worth remembering.” As for the young boy who had left the overwhelmingly Catholic town with less than five thousand inhabitants surrounded by woods and meadows for the sprawling capital of a multicultural empire, he added, “I never felt really comfortable in the city.”
That discomfort only reinforced the rosy memories Sigmund claimed to have of the first years of his life. So did his first trip back to Freiberg at the age of sixteen. He stayed with the Fluss family, who had been friendly with his parents; he quickly struck up a friendship with the son Emil and was briefly infatuated with the daughter Gisela, who was a year younger than him. Upon his return to Vienna, Freud wrote to Emil that the city was “disgusting to me,” complained about “the abominable steeple” of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, and insisted that his spirits lifted only whenever he could travel elsewhere.
Some of those feelings remained with him even after he had achieved fame and, to a degree, fortune. In 1931, when the mayor of Pribor unveiled a bronze tablet marking the place where Freud was 15born seventy-five years earlier, the honoree waxed poetic in his letter of thanks. “Deep within me, covered over, there still lives the happy child from Freiberg, the first-born son of a youthful mother, who had received the first indelible impressions from this air, from this soil,” he wrote. This was no pro forma letter; it expressed his long-held idyllic view of his earliest years.
Despite his frequent complaints about Vienna, Freud flourished there. The city attracted Jews who, unlike many of their counterparts in small towns and villages, assimilated quickly. Under Emperor Franz Josef, who ascended to the throne in 1848—the year that popular revolutions challenged old regimes across the continent—Austria eliminated special taxes on Jews and other restrictions, including on what jobs they could hold, as well as such measures as a ban on Jewish households employing gentiles as servants. By 1867, Jews were granted full citizenship. Although anti-Semitism hardly disappeared, Vienna’s Jews, who amounted to about 10 percent of the city’s population by 1880, were leaders in the arts, science, medicine, publishing, and other fields. For talented Jews like Freud who were coming of age there, Vienna offered tremendous opportunities.
At his Gymnasium, or secondary school, as Freud proudly noted, “I was at the top of my class for seven years; I enjoyed special privileges there, and had scarcely ever to be examined in class.” His father left it to him to decide what studies—and what career—he would pursue afterward. At that point, he had no interest in becoming a doctor. Influenced by an older schoolmate who later became a politician, he decided he wanted “to study law like him and engage in social activities.” As Freud noted, such a career seemed like a reasonable aspiration at the time, since “every diligent Jewish schoolboy carried a ministerial portfolio in his satchel.” But he was also fascinated by Charles Darwin’s theories and, following a lecture by a popular professor on the natural world, he decided to study medicine instead. 16
When Freud enrolled at the University of Vienna in 1873, he suddenly was confronted by “appreciable disappointments,” which were the product of pervasive prejudices. “Above all, I found that I was expected to feel myself inferior and an alien because I was a Jew,” he recalled, adding that he “refused absolutely” to do so. “I have never been able to see why I should feel ashamed of my descent or, as people were beginning to say, of my ‘race.’”
Freud was able to successfully continue his studies, but he believed those early brushes with anti-Semitism taught him a valuable lesson. “I was made familiar with the fate of being in the Opposition … The foundations were thus laid for a certain degree of independence of judgement,” he wrote in An Autobiographical Study.
That independence included his refusal to deny his Jewish background. “My parents were Jews, and I have remained a Jew myself,” he wrote. Yet he was neither religious nor observant. According to his sister Anna, “He grew up devoid of any belief in God. He had no need of it.” She recalled that their father Jacob’s motto was “to think morally, and to act ethically,” but that none of her siblings received any religious instruction. Nonetheless, Jacob kept a family Bible and wrote Sigmund’s name in it when he was born (he did not write the names of his subsequent children). Like Amalia, he was unabashedly partial to their talented first-born son.
Sigmund had little patience for those ultra-Orthodox Jews whose appearance and demeanor stood in such stark contrast to his own. In a letter to his Freiberg friend Emil Fluss, Freud described how “intolerable” he found the sight of one family on the train ride back to Vienna. The father was a “highly honorable old Jew,” he wrote sarcastically, who was discussing religion with his “impudent, promising son.” The boy, he concluded, “was of the kind of wood from which fate carves the 17swindler when the time is ripe: crafty, mendacious, encouraged by his dear relatives to think that he has talent, but without principles or a view of life.” As Peter Gay pointed out, “A professional Jew-baiter could hardly have expressed it more forcefully.”
It was not uncommon for successful secular Jews in Vienna, or Berlin for that matter, to resent their openly religious, visibly unassimilated brethren, most of whom came from more traditional Jewish enclaves in Eastern Europe. These secular Jews had devoted their energies to fitting into Austrian and German society, and the latter part of the nineteenth century appeared to offer them the chance to do so more fully than ever. Arthur Schnitzler, the popular Austrian-Jewish playwright and novelist of that era, wrote: “In those days—the late blossoming period of liberalism—anti-Semitism existed, as it had always done, as an emotion in the numerous hearts so inclined and an idea with great possibilities of development, but it did not play an important role politically or socially. The word hadn’t even been invented.”
But if the young Freud shared the condescension that many secular Jews felt toward the new arrivals from more “backward” regions, he was not at all ambivalent about the anti-Semitism of others. When he was twelve, his father told him about a disturbing incident. A gentile had knocked off his fur cap, sending it flying into the mud, and commanded: “Jew, get off the pavement.” Sigmund asked his father how he had reacted. “I stepped into the gutter and picked up my cap,” he said. Shocked and disappointed, the younger Freud decided he would never allow himself to be humiliated like that.
As he matured, the young Freud recognized that, such anti-Semitism notwithstanding, he had every reason to aim high. Vienna offered the setting for him to pursue his goals, and his mother had instilled him with the necessary self-confidence to achieve them. “A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for 18life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success,” he wrote later.
In the summer of 1875, Freud visited his half brothers in Manchester, England. He had been studying British literature for years, obsessively trying to soak up the atmosphere of this foreign land that fired his imagination. In a letter two years earlier to his friend Eduard Silberstein, he wrote, only half-jokingly, that he might catch the “English disease.” During his seven-week stay with his half brother Emmanuel and his family, who greeted him warmly, he became even more of an Anglophile.
Sigmund was struck by the “sober industriousness” of the English, along with “their sensitive feeling of justice” and much greater commitment to tolerance than he had experienced in Vienna, as exemplified by the fact that Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli was a Jew. Some of that tolerance must have rubbed off on Emmanuel, who prevailed on him to soften his harsh view of their father’s meek behavior when he was humiliated by the gentile who threw his cap in the mud.
Writing to Silberstein after his return to Vienna, Sigmund declared: “I would sooner live there than here, rain, fog, drunkenness and conservatism notwithstanding. Many peculiarities of the English character and country that other continentals might find intolerable agree very well with my own nature.” He then added: “Who knows dear friend, but that after I have completed my studies a friendly wind might not blow me across to England and allow me to practice my hand there.” It would take almost a full lifetime before that prophecy was fulfilled, but the seed was planted during that first visit.
A year later, Freud was chosen by one of his professors to travel to Trieste for a research project in the laboratory of the university’s experimental marine biology station there. His assignment was to check on the claim of Polish scientist Simone de Syrski that he had solved the mystery of how eels reproduce by locating their gonads. Freud 19dissected more than four hundred eels before coming up with the evidence he was looking for: traces of the testes that indicated Syrski was right. It seemed fitting that one of the first achievements of the student who would later become famous for his theories about repressed sexual memories involved locating the elusive reproductive organs of eels.
Any young man visiting an Adriatic port city like Trieste in that era would have also noticed its other attractions—and Freud was no exception. Writing again to Silberstein, he mentioned the “Italian goddesses” he came across on his walks around town. But he kept his distance. “Since it is not permitted to dissect humans, I have in fact nothing to do with them,” he wrote, attempting to make light of his bashfulness. The split between his private behavior and his daring future psychological theories was already apparent.
Back in Vienna, Freud ensconced himself in the laboratory of physiologist Ernst Brücke, where he “found rest and full satisfaction,” as he put it, studying the nervous system. He admitted that he was “decidedly negligent” with his studies, which were interrupted for a year of obligatory military service, passing his medical exams for his doctorate only in 1881. He finally seemed set to embark on a career that would allow him to slowly climb the academic ladder. That is, until one afternoon in April 1882, when he returned home from the laboratory and met Martha Bernays, a twenty-one-year-old, slim, attractive visitor from northern Germany. It was an encounter that radically altered his life’s trajectory.
Sigmund and Martha’s meeting that day was not as much a product of serendipity as it might first appear. Although Martha was living with her widowed mother in Wandsbek, near Hamburg, the family had resided in Vienna earlier, and her older brother, Eli Bernays, was engaged to Sigmund’s sister Anna. When Martha and her younger 20sister Minna returned to Vienna for a visit, they came to see the Freuds at their apartment. Since Sigmund was still living there, it was only natural that they should run into each other. By his own effusive accounts, Sigmund was drawn to Martha from the first moment he laid eyes on her, and he immediately set out to woo her. Two months later, they were engaged, on their way to a marriage that would produce six children and last for fifty-three years, until the end of his life.
In many ways, the two were an improbable match. Martha, who was five years younger than Sigmund, was born into a prominent Orthodox Jewish family. Her grandfather, Isaac Bernays, had been the chief rabbi of Hamburg, who vigorously opposed the Jewish reform movement. Both Martha’s and Sigmund’s fathers were merchants, but she grew up in a much more strictly observant household than he did. When Martha’s father died in 1879, her mother was even more determined to maintain those rules. Sigmund had little patience for what he called Martha’s “foolish superstitions” produced by her religious upbringing. For fear of antagonizing both her observant mother and brother, she initially kept their engagement a secret.
The most serious obstacle to their marriage, however, was their meager finances. As a widow, Martha’s mother could not help them in any significant way, and Sigmund was not in a position to take on the responsibilities of a husband and, presumably, father. During his studies, Freud had relied on modest support from his father and the small grants and fees he collected for his publications. But he would not have had enough to live on if not for the occasional gifts disguised as “loans” from the physician Josef Breuer, his mentor, who treated Freud as his protégé and later was seen as his forerunner in what became known as the field of psychoanalysis. As a bachelor still living at home, Freud could make do with that irregular trickle of funding. As the head of a family, that would no longer be the case.
As much as he appreciated Freud’s work in his laboratory, the 21physiologist Ernst Brücke had foreseen this problem earlier. Shortly before Sigmund met Martha, he had “corrected my father’s improvidence by strongly advising me, in view of my bad financial situation, to abandon my theoretical career,” Freud recalled. At first, he had ignored that advice. But once he met Martha, he reconsidered. He left his post in Brücke’s laboratory and took a job as a junior physician in the General Hospital. He did not plan to remain there for long, but he needed to get the clinical experience that would allow him to open a private practice. This would offer him the prospect of earning a respectable living, which was what the couple needed before they could marry.
That day would not come until four years later. During their long separation, broken up only by extremely rare visits between Martha’s home on the Baltic coast and Sigmund’s home on the Danube, the couple wrote to each other almost daily. Sigmund penned more than nine hundred letters, offering insights into both their fast-blossoming relationship and his often-mercurial personality. In photos and drawings, Freud invariably appears as a stern, intensely serious figure, which is the image embedded in popular culture. In those missives, however, he comes across as an almost unbridled romantic, a young man carried away by the first truly passionate, still chaste relationship of his life. He addressed Martha as “My sweet Princess,” “My beloved treasure,” and “Fair mistress, sweet love,” all part of a stream of his affectionate salutations.
They became engaged in Vienna on June 17, 1882, and the next day Martha was on her way back to Wandsbek. On June 19, Sigmund wrote a gushing letter expressing his conflicted feelings. “I knew it was only after you had gone that I would realize the full extent of my happiness and, alas! the degree of my loss as well … It must be true. Martha is mine, the sweet girl of whom everyone speaks with admiration, who despite all my resistance captivated my heart at our first 22meeting, the girl I feared to court and who came toward me with high-minded confidence, who strengthened my faith in my own value …”
As with his mother, Sigmund was seeking someone who would offer him unequivocal support for whatever endeavors he would pursue, which was a frequent refrain of his subsequent letters. “It is your doing that I have become a self-confident, courageous man,” he wrote. He also left no doubt that he felt unabashedly possessive about Martha from the very beginning. “From now on you are but a guest in your family, like a jewel that I have pawned and that I am going to redeem as soon as I am rich.”
In those early days of their engagement, he made an effort to sound conciliatory about their differences, particularly about religion. Referring to the generation of their parents and grandparents, he wrote: “Even if the form wherein the old Jews were happy no longer offers us any shelter, something of the core, of the essence of this meaningful and life-affirming Judaism will not be absent from our home.”
Nonetheless, he also could be prickly, almost brutally so. At first, Martha was reluctant to write to him on the Sabbath—and, if she did, tried to hide what she was doing from her mother and brother. Sigmund reacted angrily to such concessions to their sensibilities. “If you can’t be fond enough of me to renounce your family then you must lose me, wreck my life, and not get much yourself out of your family,” he declared.
Despite such occasional outbursts, the couple’s correspondence demonstrated their rapidly growing attachment to each other, how they both were anxiously waiting for that still distant day when they could cement their union, ending their separation. Sigmund made that point by quoting Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night:
Journeys end in lovers meeting,
Every wise man’s son doth know. 23
At the same time, he made no secret about his “old ways,” especially when it came to the role he expected Martha to play in their marriage. He considered it “a completely unrealistic notion to send women into the struggle for existence in the same way as men.” He would do everything to keep Martha out of that struggle and “into the quiet, undisturbed activity of my home.” While conceding that women were acquiring new rights, he insisted that “the position of [a] woman cannot be other than what it is: to be an adored sweetheart in youth, and a beloved wife in maturity.”
Martha willingly accepted that view, but she would rule the combined house and office with a sure hand, handling all the logistics and acting as its manager. And she knew how to maneuver to get what she wanted when the stakes were high enough. When Freud was able to quit his hospital job to set up his private practice in the spring of 1886, they could finally plan their wedding. This could have sparked a major conflict: Martha did not want to disappoint her mother, who was expecting an Orthodox ceremony, but she knew Sigmund dreaded such a prospect.
Proving herself to be a skilled diplomat, Martha pointed out that while Germany did not require religious weddings, Austria did. Thus, if they only had a civil ceremony in Wandsbek, their marriage would not be recognized as legal once they returned to Vienna. Sigmund reluctantly bowed to the inevitable, but Martha made sure that the Jewish wedding on September 14, 1886, at her mother’s house was a low-key affair. It was held during the day, which eliminated the requirement of formal evening dress, and she limited the number of friends who could attend. Still, it was the religious ceremony that her family desperately wanted.
In his letters, Sigmund freely discussed his ambitions. As was so often the case, he could appear ambivalent at times. A year into their engagement, 24he affected a casual indifference to whether or not he would achieve a degree of fame. “I never was one of those people who can’t bear the thought of being washed away by death before they scratched their names on the rock amidst the waves,” he wrote. This was a classic case of protesting too much. When he wove in phrases like “what with all the work, chasing after money, position, and reputation, all of which hardly allows me to drop you an affectionate line,” he was not signaling his irritation with that chase. In reality, he was saying one thing while meaning the opposite. In a candid moment, he wrote: “A man must get himself talked about.”
As their marriage date drew closer, Freud wrote with visible pride about a conversation he had with Breuer, the physician who was like a godfather to him. “He told me he had discovered that hidden under the surface of timidity there lay in me an extremely daring and fearless human being,” he reported. “I had always thought so, but never told anyone.” And in an even more grandiose vein, he added: “I have often felt as though I had inherited all the defiance and all the passions with which our ancestors defended their Temple and could gladly sacrifice my life for one great moment in history.”
But for a long time, Freud was far from certain where and how he could seek such a moment. In 1884, two years before their marriage, he wrote to Martha about one of his professors who had expounded on the difficulties of launching a career in Vienna and suggested that he could help Freud with contacts in Buenos Aires or Madrid, where it might be easier. Freud told him he was open to the idea of emigrating, but he wanted to try to make a go of it in Vienna first. “I have the capacity for work, and I am tied here by other things than the proximity of these beautiful buildings,” he explained.
The more fundamental question was what Freud’s specialty should be, how he could distinguish himself in the medical field. While he was still working at the General Hospital, he continued to be a voracious 25reader, and he was fascinated by Incan myths about the healing qualities of the coca leaf and subsequent accounts of European travelers in South America echoing those claims. In 1801, for instance, the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt described how Indian messengers in Peru survived on lime and coca, which suppressed their appetite while providing them with strength and endurance. But it was the suffering of Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, a close colleague in the laboratory, that prompted Freud to experiment with cocaine directly. Soon, he convinced himself that he had not only found salvation for his friend but also a path to glory for himself.
Fleischl-Marxow had cut his thumb while working on a cadaver; instead of proving a minor annoyance, this accident led to a major infection, the amputation of the thumb, and his growing addiction to morphine. Seeing how the morphine was devastating him physically and emotionally, Freud offered to treat him with cocaine. Fleischl-Marxow was only too happy to try anything by then, and the initial results of this “cocaine therapy” looked almost miraculous. In reality, he was substituting one addictive substance for another. At that point, Freud did not recognize the dangers of what he described as the “magical drug” in Über Coca (On Cocaine), his first major scientific paper, which he hoped would help launch his career.
As part of his experimentation, Freud tried cocaine numerous times himself, reporting how quickly “one experiences a sudden exhilaration and feeling of lightness.” He was so enthused by the results that he even sent small doses to Martha, urging her to try them. But Fleischl-Marxow’s condition quickly deteriorated, turning him into a cocaine addict while not weaning him off morphine either. The combination of the two powerful drugs produced, as Freud described it after rushing to his apartment one evening, “delirium tremens with white snakes creeping over his skin.” After years of agony, Fleischl-Marxow died at age forty-five in 1891, never freed of his addictions. 26
During the period when he was still pinning great hope on cocaine’s potential as a wonder drug, Freud explored other avenues for healing as well. From October 1885 to February 1886, with the help of a modest travel grant, he studied and worked in Paris with the celebrity neurologist and pathologist Jean-Martin Charcot. The Frenchman’s lectures at the Salpêtrière, a teaching hospital of the Sorbonne, and his examinations of patients with immediate commentary for the benefit of his acolytes, made a huge impression on Freud. On November 24, he wrote to Martha: “Charcot, who is one of the greatest physicians and a man whose common sense borders on genius, is simply wrecking all my aims and opinions. I sometimes come out of his lectures as from out of Notre Dame, with an entirely new idea about perfection.”
Freud was particularly impressed by Charcot’s explanations of hysteria in patients and his use of hypnosis to cure them. As with his early theories about cocaine, Freud was still on his quest for breakthrough treatments, and he was delighted when Charcot told him he would like him to translate some of his writings into German. Soon, he was also invited to dinner parties at his house. “I am now the only foreigner at Charcot’s,” he proudly reported to Martha, although he confessed nervousness about the adequacy of his French on such occasions. To steady himself, he reached for his drug of choice. In another letter, he fretted that “the bit of cocaine” he took may have made him too talkative.
Whether it was the cocaine or the stimulation of his surroundings, Freud sounded unusually emotional and playful in many of his letters from Paris. After meeting Charcot’s daughter at one of his parties, he wrote to Martha that she was “small, rather buxom, and of an almost ridiculous resemblance to her great father, as a result so interesting that one doesn’t ask oneself whether she is pretty or not. She is about twenty, very natural and amiable.” In an almost teasing tone, he added: “Now just suppose I were not in love already and were something of an 27adventurer; it would be a strong temptation to court her, for nothing is more dangerous than a young girl bearing the features of a man whom one admires.”
As much as Freud was excited by his entrée to Charcot’s social circle, he had a hard time sorting out his feelings about Paris. As in the case of Vienna, he could sound completely contradictory notes. “What a magic city this Paris is!” he wrote, describing the plays he saw at the Comédie Française and other Parisian theaters—and marveling at the performances of Sarah Bernhardt. He also was fascinated by the collections of antiquities at the Louvre, especially the Greek and Roman statues. In a letter to Martha’s sister Minna, whom he corresponded with frequently as well, he wrote that he was under “the full impact” of Paris. But he noted that the city was like “a vast overdressed Sphinx who gobbles up every foreigner unable to solve her riddles.” As for Parisians, he viewed them as “a different species from ourselves; I feel they are all possessed of a thousand demons … I don’t think they know the meaning of shame or fear.” He concluded that “Paris is simply one long confused dream, and I shall be very glad to wake up.”
His sojourn in the French capital had made him appreciate Vienna more than ever. And, despite his teasing talk of possible alternative romances, he was anxious to assure Martha that he could only envisage his future with her. Still writing from Paris, he reminded her of the first compliment he ever paid to her, saying “that roses and pearls fall from your lips as with the princess of a fairy tale.” Which was why, he added, she was his “Little Princess.” Both Sigmund and Martha were more than ready to start their life together.
In many ways, Vienna lived up to the young couple’s expectations. Between 1887 and 1895, Martha gave birth to all six of their children. In 1891, they settled into Berggasse 19, which would be their home and 28Sigmund’s office until their departure for London in 1938. As Martin, the oldest son, recalled, “My mother ruled her household with great kindness and with an equally great firmness. She believed in punctuality in all things, something then unknown in leisurely Vienna.” In 1896, Minna—whose fiancé, the Sanskrit scholar Ignaz Schönberg, had died from tuberculosis a decade earlier—moved in permanently with them, expanding the family further.
But in terms of his professional development, Sigmund often felt frustrated. Upon his return from Paris, he delivered papers and talks based on what he had learned from Charcot about treating patients with nervous diseases. An early presentation to the Society of Medicine “met with a bad reception,” he noted. When he raised the subject of male hysteria, an older surgeon accused him of talking “nonsense,” arguing that hysteria was by definition a woman’s disease. “So how can a man be hysterical?” he demanded. While Freud won plaudits on other occasions, “the impression that the high authorities had rejected my innovations remained unshaken,” he wrote.
Freud’s “innovations,” such as his early use of cocaine and experiments with electrotherapy, ultimately did not meet his own expectations either. Like Charcot, he was also fascinated by the possibilities of hypnosis, increasingly using “hypnotic suggestion” on his patients. In the summer of 1889, he visited the French city of Nancy, hoping to learn more from physicians there so that he could improve his technique. But it did not take long for him to begin to doubt the efficacy of hypnosis as well. “So I abandoned hypnotism, only retaining my practice of requiring the patient to lie upon a sofa while I sat behind him, seeing him, but not seen myself,” he recalled.
In the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth, Freud found a much clearer focus than before, discovering or introducing many of the concepts that came to define Freudian analysis. For years he had discussed cases of hysteria with Josef 29Breuer, particularly the older physician’s patient who was identified as “Anna O.” Together, they published Studies on Hysteria in 1895. While Breuer had used hypnosis on his patient, it was his use of “the talking cure” that produced the breakthrough in her deeply troubled mental state. It wasn’t until 1896 that Freud came up with a better term for that process: psychoanalysis. A year later, as he became increasingly convinced that repressed sexual memories were at the heart of most neuroses, he also first spelled out the idea of the Oedipus complex, which posited that young boys are sexually attracted to their mothers and view their fathers as rivals.
In retrospect, the work that most spectacularly catapulted Freud into the stratosphere of fame was The Interpretation of Dreams, which appeared in November 1899, although the publisher dated it 1900 so it would coincide with the dawn of the new century. But it was not the immediate sensation that Freud had hoped for. During the first six years on the market, it sold only 351 copies. Freud complained that it was “scarcely reviewed in the technical journals.”
Freud’s emphasis on repressed sexual memories and fantasies was hardly to everyone’s liking—and it contributed to his split with Breuer after they coauthored their study of hysteria. More than a decade later, in 1907, the older physician wrote to a Swiss colleague that Freud’s “immersion in the sexual in theory and practice is not to my taste.” He also offered a more sweeping complaint that suggested how far the two men had drifted apart. “Freud is a man given to absolute and exclusive formulations,” Breuer added. “This is a psychical need, which in my opinion, leads to excessive generalization.”
For much of this period, Freud’s closest friend, although mostly at a distance, was Wilhelm Fliess, an ear, nose, and throat specialist in Berlin. Fliess had met Freud in 1887, when he attended one of Freud’s neurology lectures in Vienna. At that point, Freud was only beginning to explore the theories that would make him famous later, even 30if some of them were dismissed as eccentric at first. Meanwhile, Fliess promulgated his own theories, especially about sexuality, that earned him a reputation for even greater eccentricity—and would largely be discredited over time. He argued that the nose was the dominant organ that influenced human health and behavior, and that both men and women were subject to biorhythmic sexual cycles of twenty-three and twenty-eight days respectively. When they met in Vienna, Freud was delighted by Fliess’s interest in his work, writing to him after his return to Berlin that he hoped they could continue their relationship since Fliess had left “a deep impression” on him.
In their extensive correspondence, Freud left no doubt that he was seeking a receptive audience for his ideas, someone who would applaud and stimulate his efforts. Fliess was only too happy to oblige, providing a steady stream of encouragement. “You are the only Other, the alter,” Freud told him in 1894. He shared details about his personal life, including his worries about his heart condition and his relations with Martha. After the birth of their fifth child in 1893, he confided that Martha was able to take a break for a year since, as he put it, “We are now living in abstinence.” Their sixth and last child, Anna, was born two years later.
The two men had no inhibitions discussing almost any idea that came to mind. In 1896, Freud told Fliess: “You have taught me that a bit of truth lurks behind every popular lunacy.” But their relationship soured as Freud began to recognize that his “Other” was prone to bizarre theories that could not be reconciled with his more logical ones. Freud no longer saw Fliess as a worthy reviewer of his works and thoughts. In 1901, he bluntly told him: “You have reached the limits of your perspicacity.”
All of which contributed to Freud’s sense that he was alone and adrift. Describing the period after he broke with Breuer, he wrote: “I had no followers. I was completely isolated. In Vienna I was shunned; 31abroad no notice was taken of me.” He was somewhat overstating the case, but not by much.
Freud was acutely aware of his status as a Jew, as were so many of his contemporaries who similarly considered themselves both secular and assimilated. “It was not possible, especially not for a Jew in public life, to ignore the fact that he was a Jew,” the popular writer Arthur Schnitzler pointed out. “Nobody else was doing so, not the Gentiles, and even less the Jews.” But Schnitzler, who was six years younger than Freud, recalled that he “scarcely felt” any anti-Semitism during his school years, although that would change once he began his studies at the University of Vienna. Despite his subsequent literary success, “a certain separation of Gentiles and Jews into groups which were not kept strictly apart … could be felt always and everywhere.”
This was the classical Viennese ambivalence, which incorporated so many of the contradictions of the city in that era. Amos Elon, the Vienna-born Israeli journalist and author, described the Austrian capital in the late nineteenth century as “a showpiece of intensive creativity brought about by cultural diversity.” As for the specific issue of anti-Semitism, he explained, “At least until the early 1890s, when anti-Semitism of a particularly rabid form made its way through the streets and universities of Vienna, the position of Jews was also continually improving.”
