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PARTISAN REVIEW
mission to a totalitarian ideology and the loss of personal freedom?
Freud reassures us that the answer is, not at all. This heavy anxiety
(bedruckende Sorge)
is relieved by considering the case of Nazi Ger–
many, whose primitive barbaric ideology bears no redeeming quali–
ties whatsoever. And the conservative capitalist lands are the
keepers of what is valuable in Western culture.
Psychoanalysis was banished from Germany shortly after Hit–
ler's accession to power on January 30, 1933 . Freud initially tried to
reassure himself and his followers that all would be well in Austria.
He wrote to Marie Bonaparte on March 16, 1933 :
In our circles there is always a great deal of trepidation . People
fear that the nationalistic extravagances in Germany may extend
to our little country. I have even been advised to flee already to
Switzerland or France. That is nonsense; I don't believe there is
any danger here and if it should come I am firmly resolved to
await it here.
Austria was torn into three political camps, each with its own
paramilitary army. The Austrian Reich's Germans and Nazis looked
toward fusion with Hitler's Germany as the realization ·of the long–
cherished dream of
Anschluss.
Their private army was the SA. The
Social Democrats who controlled "Red Vienna," which they had
made into a model of social reform, public housing, and child care,
were beleaguered in the country as a whole. They organized a
Republican Schutzbund. The ruling Christian Socials were conser–
vative, Roman Catholic, and anti-Semitic. Their paramilitary units,
known as the Heimwehr, were founded in post-World War One
border conflicts with the new Yugoslavia.
In the political context of Austria of the mid-1930s Freud, who
was fundamentally a nineteenth-century liberal, viewed the clerico–
fascist Dollfuss-Schuschnigg regime without enthusiasm as the best
hope for order and the continuation of his work in Central Europe.
In March 1933 the Christian-Social Chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss
prorogued the parliament and suspended the Austrian Constitution.
On February 12, 1934, civil war broke out as the Socialist Schutz–
bund rose to defend its last positions of strength in Austria's in–
dustrial areas and Vienna's housing projects.
Freud was skeptical of the claims to righteousness by both the
Austrofascist government and the Socialists. Alluding to Otto Bauer,
the leader of the Social Democratic Party and the brother of his pa-
