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Although they were written largely before COVID-19 hit, the eleven essays in this collection resonate uncannily with our experience of the pandemic: safety feels precarious, mourning is insufficient, the dead are uncountable, and the loss of everything known is overwhelming. Confronted by a similar cascade of loss in Vienna during the mid- to late 1930s, the psychoanalysts and other intellectuals expelled to Britain found comfort in their proximity to the ultimate Austrian exilee, Sigmund Freud. ‘For these cultural producers,’ writes the co-editor Elana Shapira, ‘psychoanalysis was a “humanizing” language and mode of expression, and as such can be understood as a methodology by which they processed experiences of exile’ (p. 7). As we know from the title Freud and the Émigré and the 2018 conference which inspired it, what nurtured the book's protagonists in exile was more the unifying meaning they attributed to Freud than the man himself. Elana Shapira, a cultural and design historian, and Daniela Finzi, historian of culture and literature, have now given voice to the complexity of this cultural identification. Just as the conference crossed both national and disciplinary boundaries, so too the book's chapters range across theory and methodology in history and psychoanalysis, but also in human memory and its repression, modernism, Sigmund and other Freuds of note, art and architecture, language, violence, the persistence of anti-Semitism within and outside of Austria, material culture and dispossession, fantasy and nostalgia, identity, gender and marginalization.
Their community shaped by forced emigration - as Hilde Spiel remembered it, ‘Hitler hat uns zu Juden gemacht’ (Hitler turned us into Jews) (p. 223) - the refugees found purpose in psychoanalysis and culture, and strength in networks and in Freud. To what extent did Freud ‘really go into exile’, asks Liliane Weissberg, as she elegantly suggests that two ideas of exile can exist side by side, one physical and t