Obituary

The author of the article “The Venus of Willendorf,” published in No. 4 of the last volume of the AMERICAN IMAGO, Max Kohen, worked alone and unaided his way toward psychoanalytic knowledge and insight. He had to give up his studies which he had begun at the University of his birthplace, Cologne, and continued in Switzerland, after the death of his father since he felt obliged to enter a business career in order to support his mother and his younger siblings. In spite of this occupation he retained his interest in scientific pursuits and became specially attracted by psychoanalysis. When he was driven out of his country by the terror of the Hitler regime he settled in Belgium and turned to research work concerning the psychoanalytical aspects of archaeological and related subjects. One of the fruits of his work was an article on the interpretation of a Sumerian seal cylinder, published in the Int. Zeitscheift u. Imago in London. Several others have not yet been published. In May 1940 he was arrested by the Belgian authorities as a German citizen and later transferred to France where he was interned in different concentration camps. He fell in the hands of the invaders and in November 1942 communications from him to his wife—to whose information these data are due—ceased entirely. He was deported to Poland and perished there as one of the numberless victims of the German attempt to extinguish truth and thought at the cost of millions of human lives. This promising scientific career was thus closed too soon after it had been started.

The Editor