Freud and the Nazis: Maintaining the Proprieties

The wife of Sigmund Freud, receiving unwelcome visitors in their Vienna apartment, maintains the bourgeois proprieties:

When the Nazis arrived at the door, Martha, having asked them to deposit their rifles in the umbrella stand, asked if they might care to sit down. This too, they refused. As they began to search the house, Martha went off, fetched the household money, and placed it on the dining room table. “Won’t the gentlemen help themselves?” she suggested, and this time, the gentlemen complied.

—Mark Edmundson The Death of Sigmund Freud ,
As read on the BBC Book of the Week

Meditation on the Failure of Liberalism

Item : Sigmund Freud fashioned psychoanalysis and Theodor Herzl, Zionism, each because he was dismayed at the obstructions facing the advance of liberalism in Europe.

* * *

We—by which I mean “I”—have come to take the world of secular liberalism as a kind of a norm from which any sidetrack is just an aberration. But I’ve been boning up on some 19^th Century history lately, particularly of the Austria-Hungarian Empire, and it is a useful reminder of just how tender this plant really is—how easy it has been over the last couple of centuries for liberal aspirations to get themselves sidetracked by one or another of the multifarious varieties of populism that have so beset us on so many occasions.

Particularly in the 19^th Century, we see dictators or near-dictators learning how to whip up mass aspirations for illiberal purposes. A good place to begin is with the Revolution of 1848—the “Springtime of Nations,” but also the graveyard of so many generous hopes. A pivotal figure here is Louis Napoleon, Napoleon III, nephew (except maybe not even that) and pale imitation of the great man. It was he how benefited, intentionally or otherwise, from the anxiety and the paranoia that swept over France in the wake of the 1848 revolutionary explosion—he who discovered that it is only a half step from popular enthusiasm to despotic rule.

You get another version in Austria-Hungary where the liberals, after the briefest flowering, found themselves up against 68 years of Franz Joseph’s autocratic rule; it took another and far more disastrous war to bring them back to the line of scrimmage. Next perhaps to the Tsars of Russia, Franz Joseph may stand as the most visible reactionary of his time, but it was populist support which, time after time, shored up his power—think of cheerful proto-fascists like Karl Lueger who, as mayor of Vienna, made himself almost as much of a fixture as the Emperor himself. It is hard to find consolation in the fact that Franz Joseph himself loathed Lueger, any more than that the Prussian officer corps came to detest Hitler.

The Tsars themselves were less troubled by liberal madness, but they seem to have known to manage a Pogrom in service of the larger good.

From Otto von Bismark in Germany you get a version of populist conservatism that is, perhaps ironically, more benign—less tainted with anti-semitism, and coupled with an elaborate welfare agenda. But Bismark even more than his peers made his way by outthinking and outplaying the liberals at their own game. In Britain, with Benjamin Disraeli, you get a figure whom American audiences are likely to find more appealing. Yet it was Disraeli more than anyone who learned to turn World Imperialism into a popular cause.

Against a background like this, figures like Hitler and Stalin may stand in a class by themselves, but they can hardly be understood as a discontinuity. t may not be much consolation, but it perhaps adds perspective to recognize that this sort of thing has been going on for a long time.

Item : In coming to found Zionism, Herzl was particularly inspired by Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser

"But Doctor, Is It Curable?"

We’ve come a long way towards believing that the doctor ain’t god, and also that some patients are just not going to get well. You can find an interesting contrast to that attitude in an instructive, but perhaps obscure, source: Stefan Zweig’s novel, Beware of Pity, where Dr. Condor (who seems pretty clearly a mouthpiece for the author), unburdens himself on the concept of “incurable” in medicine.

Zweig is a provocative source for this sort of thing because he is writing about Vienna, his home and a city he understood well. Vienna is interesting because (in the early 20^th Century) it was a society in decay with a lot of attention to sickness and death—yet at the same time a center for explosive growth in knowledge, not least medical knowledge. It’s no accident that Vienna produced, along with Stefan Zweig, Dr. Sigmund Freud, whose great paper Analysis Terminable and Interminable, on the concept of cure, was published almost simultaneous with Zweig’s novel (link). In any event, I wonder what Freud would have thought of Zweig’s Dr. Condor:

You’ll never get me to utter the word “incurable.” Never! I know that it is to the most brilliant man of the last century, Nietzsche, that we owe the horrible aphorism: a doctor should never try to cure the incurable. But that is about the most fallacious proposition of all the paradoxical and dangerous propositions he propounded. The exact opposite is the truth. I maintain that it is precisely the incurable that one should try to cure, and, what is more, that it is only in so-called incurable cases that a doctor shows his mettle. A doctor who from the outset accepts the concept “incurable” is funking his job, capitulating before the battle begins. Of course I know that it is easier, more convenient to pronounce certain cases “incurable” after pocketing one’s fee, to turn one’s back on them with a sigh of resignation—indeed, extremely convenient and profitable to concern oneself exclusively with those cases that have been shown to be curable, in which one can turn up page so-and-so of the medical text-book and find the whole treatment set out for one in black and white. Ah well, those that care to can go in for that sort of witch-doctoring. As for me, it seems to me as pitiable a thing as if a writer were only to attempt to say what had already been said, instead of trying to force into the medium of the spoken word the unsaid, nay, the unsayable; as though a philosopher were to expatiate for the ninety-ninth time on what has long been known instead of tackling the unknown, the unknowable.

--Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity 139
(NRB Classsics paperback ed. 2006)

When Condor/Zweig speaks of philosophers, I wonder if he is thinking of another famous Viennese—the one who said “"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (link).

"I Can Recommend Them to Everyone"

Reflecting on the British sailors and there testimonials to their hosts in Iran, I remembered the story about Freud trying to extricate himself from Nazi-dominated Vienna just before World War II. Peter Gay provides particulars:

Just before the authorities let the Freuds go, they insisted he sign a statement that they had not ill-treated him. Freud signed, adding the comment, “I can most highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone”—Ich kann die Gestapo jedermann auf das beste empfehlen.

Gay is puzzled:

It is a curious act inviting some speculation. Freud was lucky the S.S. men reading his commendation did not perceive the heavy sarcasm lurking in it. Nothing would have been more natural than to find his words offensive. Why, then, at the moment of liberation, take such a deadly risk? Was there something at work in Freud making him want to stay, and die, in Vienna? Whatever the deeper reason, his “praise” of the Gestapo was Freud’s last act of defiance on Austrian soil.

--Peter Gay, Freud: A Life For Our Time 628 (Anchor Books ed. 1989)

Fun fact: I can’t document this, but I swear it is true: in one issue of The Economist about 25 years ago, there was an ad for Lufthansa Airlines, bearing the subscript: “I can recommend Lufthansa to everyone--Sigmund Freud.”

Wish I had kept it. Never saw it again. I would love to meet the guy who wrote it, and to ask him how he enjoyed his new career, scraping the gum off the bottom of bus seats.