Vienna Blood

88

Liebermannfound his mind occupied by thoughts of Miss Lydgate. The image of her seated, reading her book in the Natural History Museum, returned to interrupt his concentration throughout the day: a vaporous impression of her flame hair, burning like a beacon. While undertaking his medical duties, he had silently acknowledged his need to see her, and resolved to visit the university. He suspected that he was more likely to find her there than at home. His decision to see her was not without a convenient justification.

I must tell her that her microscopy results were correct. Yes, it is only right that she should know.

But even as the justification presented itself, Liebermann found it unconvincing. The words were hollow and the sentiment disingenuous. The undercurrent of desire was too strong to ignore. It flowed through his being like an electric charge, thrilling his nerves and heightening his senses.

The memory of Olbricht's blade still exerted a ghostly pressure over his heart, reminding him that nothing in life should be taken for granted and no opportunity should be ignored. It would be unforgivable, he mused, to die harboring regrets.

Liebermann promptly placed his case files in his drawer, turned the key, and left the hospital.

The fohn was still having its curious effect on the climate. It wasn't like a winter's evening at all. Indeed, it was more like early spring. Chairs and tables had been put out in front of the coffeehouses, most of which were already decked with seasonal lights and decorations. The streets vibrated with laughter and conversation. On Alserstrasse a group of singers were caroling, accompanied by cymbolom and a rustic violin. The air was fragrant with an intoxicating heady mixture of roast chestnuts, honey, and cigar smoke. The whole city seemed to be in a festive mood: middle-aged men with short gray beards, women in long dresses and feathered hats, soldiers, street vendors, artists- fashionably wearing their coats loosely draped over their shoulders- students, businessmen, bohemians-with thick hair and purposeful, glowing eyes-light-footed teachers from the dancing academy, priests, lawyers, and chorus girls. Liebermann inhaled the air and felt a thrill of excitement. It was wonderful to be alive.

Outside the university he stopped under a streetlamp and waited. As the students began to spill out beneath the massive triple-arched entrance and descend the wide stone stairs, he willed Miss Lydgate to be among them. She would be easy to identify-a woman, among so many men.

The streetcar to the Kahlenberg was pulling away, its overhead cables flashing like lightning. When it had passed, he could see Miss Lydgate standing beneath the central arch, investigating the contents of her reticule. It seemed to Liebermann that although she was surrounded by people, she was somehow alone. A hazy light seemed to collect around her, making her stand out from the crowd.

“Miss Lydgate!”

The Englishwoman raised her head and peered down the stairs. Something of the cable flashes seemed to have inexplicably remained in her eyes. It made her look wild, elemental-almost mythic. For a moment she showed no sign of recognition, but then, quite suddenly, her features softened, and she smiled.

I would like to thank Hannah Black and Oliver Johnson, and my agent, Clare Alexander, for their editorial comments, interest, and enthusiasm; Nick Austin for a thoughtful copyedit; Paul Taunton, Jennifer Rodriguez, and Bara MacNeill for their assistance in preparing the U.S. edition. Steve Mathews for the loan of his invaluable critical faculties; and Raymond Coffer for pointing me in the right direction with respect to numerous obscure issues pertinent for my research. Martin Cherry of the Library and Museum of Freemasonry, London, for being so very helpful with respect to my questions concerning the history of Freemasonry and Masonic symbols, and Dr. Otto Fritsch of the Grand Lodge of Austria for his scholarly letter concerning the practice of Freemasonry in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Helmut Portele of the Tram Museum, for answers to questions concerning the electrification of the Viennese streetcar system, Frauke Kreutzler of the Wien Museum for finding out where the Mozart monument was in 1902, and Mirko Herzog of the Technisches Museum for alerting me to the existence of the Illustrierte Kronen-Zeitung. Nathalie Ferrier and Luitgard Hammerer for invaluable help with translations (and Bernardo for being patient while said translations were being undertaken). Clive Baldwin, for being generally knowledgeable on all things Austro-Hungarian, Dr. Julie Fox for advising me on the precipitin test and the symptoms and course of congenital syphilis. Finally, Nicola Fox, for accommodating Max into our lives since 2003-and for so much more. I quote directly from Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) and an article from The Lancet written in 1886. Foch's open letter to the Zeitung is a bowdlerization of Science Proves Women Inferior by Dr. Charles H. Heydemann, from Ives Scrapbook. All of these can be found in the excellent anthology 1900 (edited by Mike Jay and Michael Neve), published by Penguin in 1999. I also quote directly from Rituals of the Masonic Grand Lodge of the Sun, Bayreuth, translated from the German by Art deHoyos. All of Guido (von) List's works are real, with the exception of the pamphlet On the Secret of the Runes-A Preliminary Communication, which is loosely based on his book The Secret of the Runes (1907/1908). Frank Tallis London, December 2005

Freud, Repression, and the Dark Beginnings of National Socialism

Freud was rather fond of sphinxes. He was an avid collector of antiquities, and his rooms were crammed with statuettes, steles, and artifacts. Among this vast collection were numerous representations of Sphinxes: a seated Sphinx on a fragment of first-century Roman wall painting; another on a Greek water jar from the classical period; another in the form of a terra-cotta figurine; another in the form of a faience amulet. Hanging on the wall was a reproduction of a painting, Oedipus and the Sphinx, by Ingres. Freud's apartment was not the only place in Vienna you could find a Sphinx.

Vienna is full of Sphinxes: you can find them in the art history museum, in the public gardens of the Belvedere Palace, or more subtly, as molded cast-iron supports at the foot of streetlamps. Their presence suggests that Vienna is a city of secrets-a haven for conspirators, cabals, and secret societies.

Freud's psychoanalytic movement started as a kind of secret society. He gathered around himself a small number of followers who would meet every Wednesday evening in the waiting room of his apartment, Bergasse 19. Beneath banks of cigar smoke, under the watchful, silent stare of his statuettes, they would discuss dreams and the mysterious workings of the human mind.

Max Graf, one of Freud's early acolytes, provides us with the following firsthand description: The gatherings followed a definite ritual. First, one of the members would present a paper… After a social quarter of an hour, the discussion would begin. The last and decisive word was always spoken by Freud himself. There was an atmosphere of the foundation of a religion in that room. Freud himself was its new prophet who made the heretofore prevailing methods of psychological investigation appear superficial… Freud's pupils-he was always addressed as “The Professor”-were his apostles…

At first, Freud's secret society had only a few members: himself, Alfred Adler, Max Kahane, Rudolf Reitler, and Wilhelm Stekel. However, over the next few years, the circle grew-welcoming names such as Otto Rank (in 1906) and Sandor Ferenczi and Viktor Tausk (in 1908). Among the early “guests” of the society were C. G. Jung and L. Binswanger, 6 April 1907; Karl Abraham, 8 December 1907; A. A. Brill (an Austrian emigre to the United States from the age of thirteen) and Ernest Jones, 6 May 1908; and M. Karpas of New York, 4 April 1909.

In the spring of 1908, the burgeoning psychoanalytic society had begun to assemble a library. This had grown, Ernest Jones tells us, “to impressive proportions” by 1938. Unfortunately, the early arcana of the psychoanalytic movement did not survive that year, which marked the arrival of the Nazis and the library's subsequent destruction.

The description that Graf gives us of the gatherings at Bergasse 19 (with their sacramental atmosphere) is usually taken out of context, particularly by critics of Freud, who use it to create an impression that psychoanalysis is-and always has been-a pseudoreligion rather than a scientific project. However, in Freud's Vienna, secret gatherings were thick on the ground. There was nothing unusual about Freud's group. Behind closed doors, the city was overburdened with earnest men, hunched around tables beneath flickering gaslights, united by common beliefs and convinced that they might change the world. Unfortunately, not all of these societies were benign.

From about 1900, a number of secret societies began to coalesce around the sinister figure of Guido von List-a successful journalist and writer, beloved of the German literati. Eventually these disparate societies united under the banner of a single mystical association: Armanenschaft. The term Arman refers to a mythical tribe of pre-Christian nobles.

The Arman fraternities used a special sign by which they could recognize one another: the eighteenth rune, the fyrfos, or hooked cross. We would all know it by its other name: the swastika. Von List was obsessed with the superiority of the German-speaking peoples and preserving the purity of German bloodlines. He divided humanity into two groups: the Aryan masters, and the “herd people,” by which he mostly meant the Jews and southern races. He wrote of the coming of a German Messiah-The Invincible, the strong one from above, a Wagnerian hero, who would establish a great northern alliance and reign as a god-man, subject to no law but his own.

It is noteworthy that the writings of Von List and his disciples are rarely referenced in twentieth-century histories. When they are referred to, they are usually dismissed as something of a joke, with accompanying remarks to the effect that Von List was not taken very seriously by his contemporaries.

Although we can be fairly sure that the liberal patrons of Vienna's coffeehouses-the likes of Schnitzler, Mahler, Klimt, or Freud-would have had little time for Von List's posturing, we can be absolutely certain that one person at least took Von List's writings very seriously indeed.

Little of Hitler's personal library remains, but some fragments and books have survived. One of these, a book on nationalism, contains a longhand dedication:

To Mr. Adolf Hitler, my dear Arman brother, B. Steininger.

The word Arman might have been employed here as a term of respect or honor, but it's far more likely that Hitler was associated with Von List's Armanenschaft-or a related organization called the High Armanic Order. Hitler would have first encountered Von List's ideas when he was a poverty-stricken artist in Vienna. We know that these ideas made a deep impression on him, because after his rise to power, Hitler incorporated whole passages of Von List's writings into his speeches.

Von List's closest disciple was Josef Adolf Lanz-now better known as Lanz von Liebenfels (a completely fabricated identity that allowed him to claim noble descent). Von Liebenfels proposed the revival of the Knights Templar as an Aryan order, and on Christmas day 1907, he unfurled a flag bearing the swastika on the summit of Burg Werfenstein-their intended seat of power. Liebenfels's most famous work, rejoicing in the extraordinary title Theozoology, or the News about the Little Sodom Monkeys and the Gods’ Electron, envisaged a future society guided by Von List-inspired ideals of racial purity. Liebenfels insisted that a blond heroic race should be raised in secret cloisters, and that Aryans should be trained to exterminate “impure races” by castration and sterilization.

Like Von List's Armanenschaft, Von Liebenfels's cult has always been regarded as something of a joke. Contemporary intellectuals were convinced that he and his followers posed no threat to the established order; however, once again, twentieth-century history reminds us that one can never be too complacent when it comes to secret societies and prophetic visionaries.

Between 1905 and 1931, Von Liebenfels published a journal in Vienna called Ostara (the German goddess of dawn). One of his readers was so keen that he visited Von Liebenfels in 1909 to collect some back issues. In 1951, the aged Von Liebenfels remembered the enthusiastic nineteen-year-old fondly. Indeed, he was pleased to give Hitler the copies he wanted, and because the young man looked “quite poor,” he was moved to give him two kronen to help him get back home in comfort.

The influence of Von Liebenfels on Hitler was not merely ideological (although that would have been bad enough). Of all the Pan-German writers and race theorists around at the time, Von Liebenfels was the most florid. His language was fierce and garishfebrile with maniacal evangelism. Experts claim that Von Liebenfels's cadences are clearly evident in Hitler's Mein Kampf: With satanic joy on his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate.

All of the above begs the question: Why were there so many secret societies and cults in Vienna around 1900? Vienna was the most civilized city in Europe, enjoying a cultural renaissance and producing unprecedented advances in the arts, science, and philosophy. The alarming answer might be a simple piece of legislation: article 18 of the postrevolutionary “Law on Associations” of 1867.

In a sense, the city was dramatizing the principles of Freudian repression. Essentially, psychoanalysis tells us that if you push something down (for example, a memory), it'll pop up somewhere else (perhaps as a symptom). Article 18 of the “Law on Associations” was all about pushing things down.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire was undoubtedly repressive with respect to the formation of societies and associations. A license to convene was required and this was granted only by a specially appointed commissioner. These licenses were not easily obtained and were often given with strings attached. The Freemasons, for example, could meet in Vienna under the auspices of a friendly society-but they were forbidden to work their rituals. The “Law on Associations” was extremely counterproductive, driving subversives underground and “infecting” the body politic in the process. One could argue- perhaps controversially-that the social illness that eventually emerged was National Socialism, and so virulent was this illness, it took a world war to treat it.

In these troubled times, there is still much to learn from events in Vienna in 1900 and the principles of psychoanalysis. Freedom of speech is sacred and should never be compromised. When we consign demons to the unconscious, they do not go away, they simply become more powerful.

Frank Tallis

London 2007