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projects, all of which would have resisted Nazism. The historian
Martin Kitchen evaluated the destruction of the Social Democratic
Party and its institutions as follows :
Dollfuss was cutting off the branch on which he was sitting. Only
with the help of the Social Democrats could the independence
and domestic peace of Austria be preserved . The alternatives
were democracy or Nazism . A fascist Austria would not prevent
an Anschluss. ... On 12 February 1934 democracy was finally
destroyed in Austria, and the way to the Nazi Anschluss was left
wide open . .. . The actions of the Dollfuss government were
both morally indefensible and politically inept. The government
lost its strongest supporters in the struggle against National
Socialism in an act of mindless vindictiveness. 12 February 1934
led directly to 12 February 1938 when Schuschnigg capitulated
to Hitler at Berchtesgaden and the fate of the "Christian, Ger–
man, authoritarian Austria based on the estates" was sealed.
A week after the Socialist rising Freud, writing to Marie
Bonaparte, thought that the homegrown variety of fascism would be
less severe than the German:
If
the Nazis come here and make one stateless, as they have in
Germany, then of course we shall have to leave . I am rather in–
clined to believe, however, that we shall get a fascism of an
Austrian kind , which with all its discomforts would be much
easier to endure, so that one could stay.
Max Schur interpreted Freud's belief, that the Austrians were not
quite as brutal as the Germans, as denial. With the prospect of a
Nazi triumph in Austria Freud was facing the impending banish–
ment of his movement there, which would also mean the death of
psychoanalysis in the Germanophone world (Switzerland excepted)
which had spawned and nurtured it .
In the parallel text,
Moses and Monotheism,
which Freud was also
writing and revising in the late 1930s, we find him at his most am–
bivalent. The anguish of the time obtruded everywhere. Freud was
anxious, he "held back," he felt his work was "dangerous." Freud
wrote three separate prefaces to Part III, "Moses, His People and
Monotheist Religion ." When he first wrote it he "did not think it
would be possible to publish it." He tells of his "torment" and his
decision not to publish, lest it endanger psychoanalysis in Austria.
