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Sigmund Freud was born at 6.30 p.m. on the sixth of May,1 1856, in House Nr. 117, Schlossergasse, Freiberg, in Moravia, and died on the twenty-third of September, 1939, at 20, Maresfield Gardens, London. That Schlossergasse has since been re-named Freudova ulice in his honour.
In his short autobiography (1925) Freud wrote: ‘I have reason to believe that my father's family were settled for a long period in the Rhineland (at Cologne), that in the fourteenth or fifteenth century they fled to the east from an anti-semitic persecution, and that in the course of the nineteenth century they retraced their steps from Lithuania through Galicia to German Austria.’2 When the Nazis promulgated their ‘racial’ doctrines he would, half-jestingly, half-sorrowfully, complain that the Jews had at least as much right to be on the Rhine as the Germans, having settled there in Roman days when the Germans were still engaged in pressing the Celts westward.
As a young man Freud was interested in his family history, but it is not known now what evidence he had for the Rhineland story, or for his choice of Cologne, beyond the historical knowledge of a Jewish Settlement there in Roman times. It appeared to be curiously confirmed by the discovery in 1910 of a fresco, signed ‘Freud of Cologne’, in the Cathedral of Brixen, now Bressanone, in the South Tirol. Freud and his brother went there to inspect it, but whether the painter was an ancestor, or indeed a Jew at all, has not been established.
The earliest one knows of the family is at Buczacz,3 a town a