Chapter VII. The War Years (1914-1919)

In his judgement of political events Freud was neither more nor less perspicacious than another man. He followed them, but had no special interest in them unless they impinged on the progress of his own work. 1914 was the first time they did so.

To understand Freud's attitude towards what older people still call the Great War it is necessary to recall the main circumstances of its outbreak, and for the sake of a younger generation I will do so, however briefly. The Croats had long been oppressed by their Hungarian masters, who were bent on Magyarizing them. Many of them looked yearningly towards their Southern Slav brothers, or cousins, who lived in an independent state over the frontier. That state, then called Servia, was at the moment flushed with her successful victories in the two recent Balkan wars and her nationalist feeling, at a high pitch, strongly sympathized with her oppressed relatives. The Austrian Government had for some time been alarmed at this mutual attraction, fearing that if it went further it might portend the beginning of the dissolution of the ancient Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, to which indeed, in a way they could not foresee, it presently led. Freud himself seemed to share this opinion. As early as December 8, 1912, he wrote to me that the political situation in Austria was stormy and that they must be prepared for bad times ahead. I knew he was referring to the relations with Servia, and perhaps also Russia—always the bugbear, then as now, of the Austrians. But he presumably took the conventional Viennese view of the difficulties, for I recollect his saying to me a little later ‘The Servians are so impudent’.1 Since I had just been studying the history of Croatia I found the remark rather one-sided.

On June 28 the world was startled by the news that the heir to the throne, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, had been assassinated by an Austrian subject, a Bosnian who had been inspired