Karl Landauer and the South West German Psychoanalytic Study Group1

Karl Landauer (1885-1945) was an important and gifted psychoanalyst among the names later to become illustrious in the early developmental stages of the psychoanalytic movement in South West Germany; in the subsequent havoc of the Third Reich he was persecuted in Bergen-Belsen and later perished. He was trained by Freud and accepted as a member of the Viennese Psychoanalytical Society in 1913. After the First World War he settled in Frankfurt am Main and started a Study Group to which such prominent analysts as Georg Groddeck in Baden-Baden, Heinrich Meng in Stuttgart, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and Erich Fromm in Heidelberg and Frankfurt were associated. In 1929 this Study Group founded the Frankfurt Psychoanalytical Institute under the same roof as the Institute for Social Research and under the auspices of the Social Philosopher Max Horkheimer. There were mutual and manifold influences between the research fields of Psychoanalysis and Social Sciences. Landauer specialised in affect theory. Both Institutes were compelled to close at the hands of the National Socialists; Landauer's subsequent fate is moving and exemplary.