The Deal With The Devil To “Save” Psychoanalysis in Nazi Germany

Perhaps one of the most complex sociocultural phenomena in the history of Western civilization is the mysterious symbiosis between the Jews and the Germans. The national German poet of Jewish origin Heinrich Heine and the German judge Daniel Paul Schreber both underscored this fact. In 1838 Heine wrote of the “‘deep affinity that prevails between these two ethical nations, Jew and Germans’ who were jointly destined to create a new Jerusalem in Germany, ‘a modern Palestine,’ which would emerge as ‘the home of philosophy, the mother soil of prophecy, and the citadel of pure spirituality’” (Grunfeld, 1979). According to Paul Schreber's religious system, as described in his immortal Memoirs, “the Germans, possibly since the Reformation, were God's chosen people whose language God preferred to use,” a people chosen “as the most moral,” like for example, “the old Jews” (Schreber, 1903, original pp. 14-15). Heine, who died in 1856, the year Freud was born, could not foresee how the New Palestine would materialize in the Figures of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx. The former's brainchild, Freudianism, would become a defining ideology of the twentieth century alongside Marxism, created by the other, converted Jew who disturbed the peace of the world, Karl Marx. In their scariest dreams, neither of these men could have imagined the Nazi Holocaust or Europe lying in ruins at the end of World War II. Yet those two cataclysms half a century away are intertwined with the prewar, wartime, and postwar history of psychoanalysis, now a century old, on both sides of the Atlantic, and particularly in Germany.

Freud was a proud secular Jew, a child of the Enlightenment and its philosophy of humanism and rationalism. But having