The prospect of attending the next Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association in Germany in July, 1985 compels many of us to confront our feelings about Germany and our German colleagues. The issue is concretized for me at the moment by several considerations: first, the publication of Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Göring Institute, by the historian Geoffrey Cocks (Oxford University Press); second, a recent exchange of letters in a distinguished German psychoanalytic journal, Psyche, dealing with issues of the behavior of German psychoanalysts during the Nazi era; and finally, the need to formulate a position toward the Hamburg Congress as Americans.
Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Göring Institute was published by Oxford University Press in January, 1985. Those of us who have not taken much interest in the subject will be surprised to learn that psychotherapy not only survived, but in a way actually flourished during the Nazi era in Germany. Cocks' book can be recommended as a kind of archival history of the psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic movement of that time. The author provides a full and well documented account of the events and of the many interacting influences that brought them about. He describes the personal backgrounds and professional views of the important actors in the drama.
To summarize very briefly, in 1926 Robert Summer and Wladimir Eliasberg founded the German Medical Society for Psychotherapy whose members included Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Frieda Fromm-Reichman, Georg Groddeck, Kurt Lewin, and Ernst Simmel. In 1933, as the Nazi era began, all Jews were excluded from the boards of scientific organizations. Three Jews, Eitingon, Fenichel, and Simmel stepped down from the Board of the German Psychoanalytic Society, leaving only Felix Boehm and Carl Müller-Braunschweig. In an attempt to limit Nazi control over their profession, psychotherapists reorganized to form an International Medical Society for Psychotherapy which was headed by Carl Jung. The German Society then became merely a component of the international organization. Mathias Heinrich Göring, an Adlerian psychotherapist, who was protected by his cousin Hermann Göring, took charge of and assumed responsibility for this German component.
In 1935, because the Nazis indicated that they would accept the survival of psychoanalysis if all Jews were excluded from the movement, the Jewish members, eighteen in number (half of the total membership of the German Psychoanalytic Society) resigned.
In 1936 Felix Boehm, with the approval of Sigmund and Anna Freud, arranged to bring the German Psychoanalytic Society into a working relation with Göring's group, thereafter known as the Göring Institute. This institute functioned with the support of government agencies which became especially generous after the beginning of the war in 1939. It drew this support for a variety of practical and ideologic reasons.
It provided psychotherapeutic services to state welfare agencies, to the Nazi party, and to individual members of the Nazi hierarchy. It provided research for specific projects of military and government agencies.
The idea of psychologic assistance to facilitate the integration of the individual into the racial community and the state appealed to Nazi ideology. Though confronted with challenges, it was fairly consistently defended and promoted by Herman Göring. Under its aegis, both psychotherapy and psychoanalysis were taught, practiced (to whatever extent analysis really could be practiced under such circumstances) and promoted, though psychoanalytic concepts were disguised in Aesopian language. It is from the membership of the Göring Institute that the German Society for Psychotherapy and Depth Psychology, and its component psychoanalytic societies were established after the war.
In 1946, Carl Müller-Braunschweig, who many German psychoanalysts believe functioned honorably as an analyst throughout the Nazi era—offering as little support to the regime as he possibly could—reconstituted the German Psychoanalytic Society (Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft).
However, the Society was troubled by conflict between Müller-Braunschweig and his followers, representing an orthodox position, and Harald Schultz-Hencke, who led a deviant group that promoted “neo-analysis.” There followed a split in the society and the establishment of the German Psychoanalytic Association (Vereinigung) led by Müller-Braunschweig. It is the Association that is recognized by the International Psycho-analytic Association.
Professor Cocks provides all the facts, in adequate detail, together with the appropriate documentation. He discusses the social and philosophic background that favored the developments. He describes many of the conflicting and interacting forces; for example, he documents struggles among the medical psychotherapists and the psychoanalysts, the nonmedical psychotherapists and the analysts, the nonpsychologic psychiatrists and the university trained academic psychologists. Such struggles are familiar to American psychoanalysts.
I suppose it may be a reflection of the limitation of my own personal experience that this is the first book about Nazi Germany that I have read that does little more than mention the Holocaust. The absence of serious consideration of the eradication of Jews is little less than startling. There is also little comment on whatever conflicts and concerns the psychoanalysts and psychotherapists whom he discusses might have been experiencing.
To be fair to the author, his reportage may indeed accurately reflect the relative indifference of at least some of the actors in the drama to the concurrent dehumanization and murder of their fellow professionals and fellow citizens. Fifteen psychoanalysts died in the concentration camps. Cocks mentions the name of only one, Karl Landauer. We really do not obtain any kind of picture of what it was like to be a psychotherapist or psychoanalyst in Hitler Germany.
The absence of serious consideration of the eradication of Jews is little less than startling. There is also little comment on whatever conflicts and concerns the psychoanalysts and psychotherapists whom Prof. Cocks discusses might have been experiencing.
A second and related issue is a polemic that has appeared in the pages of Psyche, the German psychoanalytic journal. The polemic was initiated by some essays published in November, 1982 and December, 1983 under the general heading of “Psychoanalysis Under Hitler.” One, contributed by Helmut Dahmer, one of the editors of Psyche, raised questions about the propriety of Müller-Braunschweig's accommodation to the Nazi regime. A second by Lohmann and another editor, Rosenkötter, accused those analysts who remained in Germany during the Nazi era of opportunism. They should have emigrated as the Sterbas did, or accepted execution.
The chief antagonist is Ulrich Ehebald who rises to Müller-Braunschweig's defense and protests against the suggestions of Lohmann and Rosenkötter.
The arguments are complicated by the fact that Dahmer is not a practicing psychoanalyst, but a sociologist who employs psychoanalysis in his study of sociologic issues. Moreover he is a Marxist, and some of his correspondents contend that he is using the issue of resistance to the Nazis to support his Marxist political position. It is not simply that anti-Nazis are attacking crypto-Nazis and antisemites. Some of Dahmer's opponents possess impeccable credentials, and the accusations against Müller-Braunschweig seem to rest upon fairly weak foundations.
The struggle seems to have achieved little in the way of resolving guilt and ambivalence. The bitterness of the exchange betrays the fact that some of the antagonists are bringing concealed baggage to the conflict.
What I find most interesting is that some of these individuals, while proclaiming themselves free of Nazi taint and of antisemitism, use, perhaps automatically, antisemitic locutions. Ehebald, calls Dahmer a “Pharisee.” Dahmer, defending himself against the accusations of being a Nazi-hunter, contemptuously disparages Simon Wiesenthal. Antisemitism dies hard—if at all.
As a Jew, and one who is especially interested in the dynamic mechanisms of antisemitism, I was especially struck by this comment from a letter by Rolf Vogt, one of the contributors to the polemic: “Although I was just six years old when the war ended and although my family was clearly opposed to National Socialism and hence I am in this respect not under a particular pressure of family identification, the plain fact that I grew up as a German in the Federal Republic of Germany may perhaps suffice to explain what I want to report now. When the massacres in the two Palestinian camps in Beirut that were not prevented by the Israeli Army became known, I felt, in addition to the horror, simultaneously a just barely perceptible sense of relief. I followed this up and heard myself inside, ‘The Jews are not better than we are either.’ The fact that it had been so spontaneously natural for me to place myself via that ‘we’, close to the Nazis, was shocking to me and I began slowly to understand that I had, hitherto unconscious, specific feelings of guilt referring to the Nazi period, and that it was for this reason that I had felt relieved when I had in my mind, made murderers of the Israelis. Since then I have experienced many an object lesson in this way of my own person as well as others. I am convinced that these unconscious feelings of guilt concern a specific syndrome that must not be regarded simply as a displacement substitute for something else. This syndrome produces that most tenacious resistance to truly facing the Nazi past and its effects that even today still determine our thinking and feeling.”
That brings me to the final issue, namely, what should be the proper attitude
of an American psychoanalyst toward attending a Congress in Germany, and establishing professional and even personal contact with his German colleagues? Obviously, in our community there are several different views. There are those who consider it a betrayal of the victims who died in the Holocaust even to set foot in Germany. There are others who consider a continuing shunning of such contact unconstructive and no longer appropriate.
In the last issue of this Newsletter (Fall, 1984) Leo Rangell wrote a moving and conciliatory essay describing his experience with our German colleagues at their 1983 annual meeting in Wiesbaden. Although he recognized that strains of hatred and bigotry are still to be found in Germany, he was nevertheless impressed that the psychoanalysts, at least, were eager to face the tragic facts of the past and to become reconciled to their heritage with respect to the Holocaust.
I spent two weeks on each of three occasions in West Berlin during the past two years, and my impressions were not that different from Rangell's, although my contacts were mostly with nonanalysts and mostly within the Jewish community of West Berlin. The psychic and social residues of the Holocaust and the war and the reactive attempts to undo them and to return to a normal society make present day Germany a veritable sociologic laboratory in which one finds personal ambivalences, intragroup discords, and intergroup conflicts.
Antisemitism is not dead, but it is no longer respectable. The Jewish community and its institutions are generously supported by the government, but they require police protection from terrorists. The older German gentiles do not publicly acknowledge antisemitism while the younger ones disavow it completely. The press denounces antisemitic incidents, but there are incidents to denounce. Many Germans are trying to move closer to the Jews, to participate in their religious activities in a kind of restitutive ecumenism that we do not see here, and to visit and support Israel. Some of them seem genuinely eager to become reconciled with the Jews; others seem to be eager to conciliate only their own consciences.
I was pleased to have been invited to address the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute in what was formerly the apartment of Carl Müller-Braunschweig on the subject of antisemitism. The meeting was well attended, and the discussion struck me as earnest and thoughtful. However, it was called to my attention that the older analysts had stayed away; the audience consisted mostly of young analysts. Presumably the former did not welcome that topic while the latter clearly did.
I do not hold myself up as a doyen of moral issues, and I suspect that my own decisions on such ambiguous issues are no less self-serving than those of others. Since I was not a victim, I am not in a position to forgive. Nor can I ever forget. However, I would suggest that our conduct be governed by our answers to such questions as: To whom do we owe a duty? To the victims of Nazism? To the survivors? To future generations? To the psychoanalytic movement? To civilization as we know it? To our own country, without which few of us would have survived? How will that duty be fulfilled most effectively? What are the constructive and destructive potentials of the various attitudes?
Will our attendance at the Hamburg Congress be interpreted as legitimation of West German society and its government? If so, do we wish to withhold such legitimation? Until when? Among other considerations I would encourage using the Nazi experience to inquire into the subject of how psychoanalysts can be expected to behave in iniquitous and dangerous circumstances, and also to inquire into the psychodynamics and developmental basis of antisemitism. A cost-free self-righteousness, it seems to me, is not a very helpful position.