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.