Freud's escape: Nazi Vienna->London 1938

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!

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.

Everyone in Freud’s circle began a coordinated effort to persuade him to leave Vienna. Especially since these fol­low­ers risked their OWN political capital, personal income and physic­al safety to save him. Anna Freud (1894-1982) had ministered to all her father’s needs while man­aging her own pioneering child psychoanalyst pract­ice. She was dealing with the new Nazi overlords, who were intent on extort­ing as much money as possible from important Jews seeking to emig­rate. She would never have left her dad.

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. 

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