I have blogged about Sigmund Freud’s (1856-1939) escape from Vienna before, and have visited Freud’s homes in Vienna and in London. Now let's read Andrew Nagorski’s new book, Saving Freud (2022).
Freud's house museum, Vienna
Wiki
Austria was led by Catholic politicians who imposed their own Fascism but tried to limit Hitler. Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss banned the Nazi Party, only to be assassinated by local Nazis in Jul 1934. Still Freud desperately wanted to believe Dollfuss’ successor that he would continue a policy of independence. He believed Austria’s government was basically decent.
Dr Freud’s revolutionary insights into the uncharted subconscious territory of the human mind SHOULD have prepared him for the dark forces moving towards tyranny and mass murder. In his earlier essay Civilisation and its Discontents, he had reflected on the aggressive cruelty that transformed men into savages. After Hitler took power in Germany in 1933, Freud concluded the world was becoming an enormous prison. Yet as much as he recognised these trends, Freud was reluctant to apply them to his own situation. Even when the Nazis created a 1933 bonfire of books by hated authors, including Freud!
Dr Freud’s revolutionary insights into the uncharted subconscious territory of the human mind SHOULD have prepared him for the dark forces moving towards tyranny and mass murder. In his earlier essay Civilisation and its Discontents, he had reflected on the aggressive cruelty that transformed men into savages. After Hitler took power in Germany in 1933, Freud concluded the world was becoming an enormous prison. Yet as much as he recognised these trends, Freud was reluctant to apply them to his own situation. Even when the Nazis created a 1933 bonfire of books by hated authors, including Freud!
book burning by the Nazis, May 1933
celebrated by 70,000 people at Opernplatz Berlin
The Australian
He supported his sons, Oliver (1891–1969) and Ernst (1892–1970), to leave Berlin and to move to London in 1933. Life in Germany was clearly impossible, but Sigmund still believed Austria was different. He said it was very unlikely that Austria would ever come under German rule; and even if it did, Austria wouldn’t treat Jews as brutally as the Germans did!
Early in 1938, German soldiers were massing on the Austrian border, about to annex Austria into the Third Reich. Many Jews urgently planned to flee to safety, yet Freud still couldn’t even contemplate leaving home. He was 81 years old and very ill with cancer, plus U.K migration quotas remained inflexibly tight.
Dr Freud should have been uniquely qualified to understand the dark forces propelling his world to mass murder and destruction. Why had he failed to leave Vienna when it would have been relatively easy to do so? Partly because he had spent his life claiming he was a-political. Nazi sturm and drang struck him merely as noise, the outward manifestation of messy inner lives. Deal with the death drive, he said, and insight would return. So Freud stuck to his beloved cultured Vienna, convinced Europe would soon come right.
In mid March 1938, Hitler appeared on the balcony of Vienna’s imperial Hofburg Palace to announce the Anschluss i.e incorporation of Austria into the Third Reich. With Vienna’s streets filled with jubilant Nazi supporters, thugs looted Jewish stores, defaced synagogues and attacked individuals. Then thugs plundered Freud’s publishing house, International Psychoanalytic Press.
Welsh physician-neurologist Ernest Jones (1879-1958) was a tireless promoter of Freud’s ideas across Europe. When he heard of the threat to Freud, Jones flew to Vienna and used his connections to bend British immigration rules.
American ambassador to France William Bullitt Jr (1891-1967) had been Freud’s patient in the 1920s. Their friendship developed later, through their collaboration on a psycho-biography of Pres Woodrow Wilson. Bullitt stated the U.S required Freud’s safe release.
Max Schur was Freud’s doctor who cared for the cigar-smoker with jaw cancer. Max’s loyalty was clear since he had to delay his own family’s exit, waiting for Freud.
Marie Bonaparte, Sigmund Freud, William Bullitt,
Paris, June 1938.
The Guardian
Marie Bonaparte (1882-1962), great-grandniece of Napoleon and wife of Prince George of Greece and Denmark, had been Freud’s patient before she herself became a psychoanalyst and a dedicated member of his inner circle. She too rushed to Vienna to be with Freud, paying the steep flight tax the Nazis demanded of anyone leaving the Reich.
Anton Sauerwald was the Nazi bureaucrat charged with tracking and seizing all of Freud’s assets. The anti-Semitic Sauerwald did NOT reveal to his Nazi bosses that he’d found evidence of the Freud family’s foreign holdings; he quietly signed their exit visas.
Britain was good for Freud. In July 1938 the family bought a Hampstead house with a mortgage but by then Freud was too ill to work; a year later he died. Of Freud’s children, Anna and Martin had been taken by the Gestapo, but lived. Freud’s 4 sisters stayed in Austria and were exterminated.
Freud's house in Hampstead was turned into a museum in 1986. Well worth visiting.
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Anton Sauerwald was the Nazi bureaucrat charged with tracking and seizing all of Freud’s assets. The anti-Semitic Sauerwald did NOT reveal to his Nazi bosses that he’d found evidence of the Freud family’s foreign holdings; he quietly signed their exit visas.
They boarded the Orient Express and as the train rolled through Germany via Munich and Dachau, tension intensified. At 3AM the train approached the frontier where the German border guards only glanced at the documents. The train then crossed the Rhine, entering France with Marie Bonaparte before continuing to London. Free at last!
Britain was good for Freud. In July 1938 the family bought a Hampstead house with a mortgage but by then Freud was too ill to work; a year later he died. Of Freud’s children, Anna and Martin had been taken by the Gestapo, but lived. Freud’s 4 sisters stayed in Austria and were exterminated.
Freud's house in Hampstead was turned into a museum in 1986. Well worth visiting.
Freud's home museum in Hampstead, London,
1938
The reader knows that Freud had been the world’s most famous therapist using psychoanalytic insight. Nagorski created a group portrait in a psycho-biographical suspense story about the limits of genius. He told a dramatic true story about Freud’s last-minute escape to London, with the supportive friends. It was the tale of a great city, a falling empire and rising terror.
But it was not only his physical frailty that had Freud’s trapped inside the Vienna home. So the reader has to ask: was Freud’s blindness a form of political ignorance? Or psychological incompetence eg denial or narcissism? It was Freud’s good fortune that his most trusted intimates perceived the extreme dangers he couldn’t acknowledge. Plus they had the political clout to pull off the intervention, arriving arrived safely in London in June 1938.
Sigmund's sisters Rosa, Marie, Pauline, Adolfine
all exterminated in 1942
Holocaust Historical Society