In March 1938, after the annexation of Austria (
Anschluss
) by the Third Reich, Sigmund Freud's admirers and friends realized that his life was in danger in Vienna. But the professor, about to turn 82 years old, felt unable to leave his home and his office at Bergasse 19. Convincing him and resolving all the problems that this move represented—including the exit permit from the Nazi authorities—was made possible by the efforts of half a dozen people, some barely known. In
Saving Freud,
Andrew Nagorski draws an essential portrait of each of them, while investigating the life of the famous neurologist in Vienna in the years before the cataclysm, when he was already an internationally admired personality. American and European billionaires sought his treatment and patients eager to psychoanalyze with him and students eager to become psychoanalysts poured in from all sides. He was the high priest of a new religion, psychoanalysis that, despite his modest therapeutic achievements, was to make him an unfading name in the history of world culture.
The group of saviors is led by the Welsh psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, who obtained entry visas to the United Kingdom for the Freuds (an entourage of 16 people plus a dog), and is completed by Anna, the great man's little daughter; Marie Bonaparte, Napoleon's great-niece and billionaire aristocrat; the American diplomat William Bullitt; Freud's family doctor, Max Schur, and Nazi official Anton Sauerwald. A bureaucrat who was of great help in making the “rescue operation” go well. In the book, some chapters stand out for their interest, such as the one dedicated to Schur, who wrote about the final days of his famous patient, and about his long and painful fight against jaw cancer, which forced him to undergo more than thirty of surgical interventions. Schur was in charge of administering to him, at his own request, the doses of morphine that would end his life in the early morning of September 23, 1939. Freud was convinced that accepting death was an essential requirement for living fully.
The book tries not to fall into hagiography and shows us a flesh-and-blood Freud not exempt from manias and contradictions. Although psychoanalysis triumphed in the United States, its creator did not stop hating that country. He also did not sympathize with the Bolshevik revolution. “The cost of communism to intellectual freedom is too great,” he pointed out to a young patient enthusiastic about the Soviets. Capitalism, on the other hand, seemed “quite satisfactory” to him and he considered the invention of money “a great cultural advance.” And although the Nazi persecutions reinforced his Jewish identity, he was reticent about Zionism. Proof of this is the negative response he sent in 1930 to Chaim Koffler, representative in Vienna of the Kerezt Hayesod, a group that raised funds for Jews emigrating to Palestine, who wrote to him requesting his support for the Zionist cause, after a series of confrontations. between Arabs and Jews that had resulted in 130 Jewish deaths. Although Freud sympathized with the victims, he wrote: “The unfounded fanaticism of our people is, in part, responsible for the awakening of Arab distrust.” Palestine did not seem like an ideal choice either. “For me it would have been more sensible to found a Jewish homeland in a new territory, without historical obstacles, but I know that such a rational point of view would never have won the enthusiasm of the masses and the financial support of the rich.” This letter, Nagorski tells us, which is kept in the National Library of Israel, remained unpublished for 60 years.
Save Freud. A life in Vienna and his escape to London
Andrew Nagorski
Translation by Yolanda Fontal Rueda
Crítica, 2024
368 pages. 22.90 euros
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