By the spring of 1938 everyone in Sigmund Freud’s circle, apart from the great man, could see that the game was up. In March, the Nazis had annexed Austria, putting the founder of psychoanalysis – known to them as “a Jewish pseudoscience” – at enormous risk. By now Freud was 82, terminally ill and determined not to panic. Five years earlier, when the Nazis had made a public bonfire of his books in Germany, he had breezily declared: “What progress we are making. In the middle ages they would have burnt me; nowadays they are content with burning my books.” If only that had been the case.
Why was Freud so convinced that he didn’t need to worry? Partly because he had spent a lifetime claiming that he didn’t do politics, apparently unaware that politics might still insist on doing something to him. The sturm and drang of Bolshevism and nazism and everything in between struck him merely as a noisy sideshow, the outward manifestation of various individuals’ ragged inner lives. Sort out the oedipal complex, the death drive and other bits and pieces, and international common sense would return. So the old man clung on in Vienna, the city where he had lived for all but the first three years of his life, convinced that things would come right in the end.
