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In 1936 I was thirty-two-years old, a physician and analyst (a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association since March 1936), and an assistant at the University Clinic for Neuropsychiatry in Berlin. Born in Berlin I was a fourthgeneration physician. Married to another medical doctor. We had a one-year-old son.
I realised it was impossible for us to live under a fascist regime. My situation was complicated by my marriage to a woman who, according to the Nazi rule, was partJewish (and according to Israeli law was gentile). As the son of my socialist father I was also politically suspect. Through unbelievably good luck I was given the chance to emigrate to the United States, specifically to the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas.
I remember how I was overwhelmed by a tidal wave of anxiety when I saw the Statue of Liberty as we approached New York Harbour. I expected to be arrested, separated from wife and infant son, not allowed to leave the boat, and brought back in chains as a deserter. This was partly a realistic fear but mostly an irrational anxiety: I had been brought up in a humanitarian environment but still in the outspoken Prussian tradition. One did not leave one's fatherland. One did not change one's mother tongue. My brother stayed and was killed in the war, as was my mother. Both they and I were what the racists would call ‘pure Aryan’.
My father had told me from earliest childhood: ‘Don't bother with Latin and Greek, French or English. Try to express yourself as well as you possibly can in German. That was good enough for Luther and Goethe; do not spoil it by learning a foreign language’. I obeyed him - one could not do otherwise with a Prussian father. It made my school career extremely difficult and did not facilitate my learning to speak English.
One of the conflicts to be solved by my interminable self-analysis concerned my grief and mourning about my younger brother, Peter. I felt his loss long before I learned (after the end of World War II)