EDITH KURZWEIL
55
political events." Freud's attitude to his Jewishness, once more, was
on the agenda, but this time by the Viennese Kenneth Thau-who
focused on the pervasive anti-Semitism among the Viennese medical
faculty and its effect on Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo v. Hoffmansthal,
and Theodor Herzl as well as on Freud. Citing a number of Freud's
contradictory views of himself as a Jew, Thau, by going through the
major literature of the turn of the century, implicitly equated the
results of anti-Semitism in Vienna (linked to its intellectuals' politi–
cal non-involvement) to the current "nuclear danger." Unfortu–
nately, this leap from the past to the present detracted from an other–
wise excellent account, bowing as so many academics do to the idea
that any paper worth its salt must end with a lesson for the future.
The psychoanalyst Harald Leupold-Lowenthal [whose docu–
mentation of the emigration of Freud's family follows this article] is
one of the few German-speaking analysts not to reduce the fact that
even if the perpetrators of the Holocaust and all men at war or plan–
ning war are giving vent to their aggressive and self-destructive
drives, historical conditions cannot be equated. This theme was ad–
dressed more thoroughly at the meeting in Paris. Yet similarly here,
during the discussions, one person or another argued that Freud,
along with the majority of Jews, had not paid enough heed to the
anti-Semitism around him; that they all had been prisoners of their
assimilationism; that they could have left if only they had wanted to.
But as Leupold-Lowenthal demonstrates with the help of previously
unavailable documents, the fate of Freud's relatives, the "legalized"
expropriation ofJewish property, which preceded by a few years the
systematic extermination of the Jews, was organized by the state, ex–
ecuted by eager bureaucrats - and unstoppable.
Leupold-Lowenthal's chronicle of the fate of Freud's sisters, as
we know, is an example of what the Nazis did to all old people. Thus
it
was distressing to hear one of the participants argue that Anna
Freud could have saved her four old aunts if only she had done for
them what she did for so many others, if only she had pushed Jones
to help them as she had to help her favorite colleagues and students
get out. It is true that J ones was instrumental in saving most of the
Viennese analysts who, in comparison to other Viennese Jews in
1938, thus appeared "privileged." But does the fact that neither
Freud nor Anna Freud foresaw the
Anschluss,
or that Anna Freud,
aware of the conflicting transferences, friendships and competition
among the would-be emigrants, did not want her role as Jones's ad-
