Authors: Eric Weiner
Vienna also provided Freud with the raw materials he needed to forge his theories. A seemingly endless flow of the worried wealthy washed up on Freud’s overstuffed couch, for the City of Dreams was also the City of Lies. Here was a city where everyone was having sex but nobody talked about it. Here was a city that invented a word,
Wienerschmäh
, for the art of telling beautiful lies. The city had become, in the words of journalist Karl Kraus, a “moral sewer called Vienna, where nothing and no one was honest, where everything was a charade.”
Consider the case of Felix Salten, a young writer best known as the author of
Bambi: A Life in the Woods
, the inspiration for the Disney movie. Salten is also the author of
Josephine Mutzenbacher: Memoirs of a Viennese Prostitute.
Here is a snippet from the very first paragraph: “I became a whore at an early age and experienced everything a woman can—in bed, on chairs, across tables, over benches, standing against walls, lying on the grass, in dark hallways, in private bedchambers, on railroad cars, in lodging houses, in jail; in fact, in every conceivable place where it was possible—but I have no regrets.” Let’s examine exactly what we’re dealing with here. The creator of
Bambi—Bambi!—
was secretly writing pornographic novels
on the side. This single fact tells you everything you need to know about life in turn-of-the-century Vienna, and why it was the perfect place for Sigmund Freud and his far-fetched theories about the human psyche. “It is difficult to envision [Freud’s] own scholarly career and output having taken place in a radically different environment,” concludes Gardner.
Yet Freud’s ideas were not bound by place and time. That is the way brilliant ideas work. They sprout only under certain specific circumstances yet are universally relevant. Ideas are like bananas. That bananas grow only in tropical regions doesn’t make them any less delicious in Scandinavia.
Freud saw himself as “an adventurer . . . with all the inquisitiveness, daring and tenacity of such a man.” If Freud was Don Quixote, then he needed a Sancho Panza. Every genius does. Picasso had Georges Braque; Martha Graham had Louis Horst; Stravinsky, Sergey Diaghilev. Who was Freud’s Sancho?
I find myself staring at a faded photograph of two bearded men. One is Freud, not the professorial and stooped Freud of later years but a young and feral Freud, with a linebacker build, fulsome beard, and a glint of recklessness in his eyes. The man standing next to him is slighter in stature. Both are staring into the distance, as if they see something that has piqued their interest.
The second man is Wilhelm Fliess, a brilliant but eccentric physician and numerologist. The two men, both adrift in their otherness, met at a conference and became fast friends, corresponding for a decade. “I am pretty much alone here with the clearing up of the neurosis,” Freud wrote to Fliess in 1894, shortly after they met. “They pretty much consider me a monomaniac.”
Fliess read Freud’s manuscripts, offering critiques and suggestions, and Freud provided an audience for Fliess’s strange ideas. They seemed like a natural fit. A classic case of compensatory genius. Here were two “highly trained professional physicians working at, or beyond, the frontiers of acceptable medical inquiry,” as Peter Gay writes. What’s more, they were both Jewish and therefore “propelled into intimacy with the ease of brothers in a persecuted tribe.”
Fliess had some
very
odd ideas. He believed that all health problems, especially sexual ones, could be traced to the nose. He recommended cocaine for treatment of this “nasal reflex neurosis” and, failing that, surgery. He performed such surgery on several patients, including his new friend Sigmund Freud. We don’t know if Freud believed any of Fliess’s wild ideas, but Fliess “was precisely the intimate he needed: audience, confidant, stimulus, cheerleader, fellow speculator shocked at nothing,” says Gay. In one letter, writing in the full bloom of their bromance, Freud says to Fliess, “You are the only Other.” Freud’s choice of words is telling. What did the great Sigmund Freud see in this Other, this strange little man with a nasal fixation?
We have to keep in mind that at the time Fliess’s ideas were no more outlandish than Freud’s. Both men teetered on the edge of respectability, so they propped up each other. “You have taught me,” a grateful Freud wrote, “that a bit of truth lurks behind every popular lunacy.”
Sometimes, though, what lurks behind lunacy is more lunacy, and Freud eventually reached that sad but unavoidable conclusion about Fliess. They began to argue constantly. By the summer of 1901, Freud informed his erstwhile friend that “you have reached the limits of your perspicacity.” The bromance was over.
Today, while Freud’s ideas may be out of fashion, he still stands alongside history’s greatest minds, while Wilhelm Fliess is a forgotten crank with some strange ideas about the nose. But would Freud have succeeded, overcome his isolation, without Fliess, his Sancho Panza, by his side? Remember: exposure to dissenting views boosts creative thinking
even if those dissenting views are dead wrong.
Freud needed Fliess. He needed him as a sounding board, for his ear, not his nose. In their correspondence (only Freud’s letters survived), you can hear the good doctor wrestling with despair (“Gloomy times, unbelievably gloomy”), and testing his newfangled ideas on a receptive, yet also critical, friend.
The case of Wilhelm Fliess reminds us that places of genius are not only magnets but also colanders. They separate the wacky but brilliant ideas from the plain wacky. Vienna rejected Fliess’s ideas but, eventually, accepted Freud’s. That is the genius of the colander.
Freud may have dumped Fliess, but he remained a conquistador, one in need of fellow travelers. This time, though, he wouldn’t put all his eggs in one crazy basket.
I’m staring at another photograph. The half dozen or so men depicted are posing stiffly, even by the stiff standards of the day. Staring into the camera intently, as if thinking deeply, or perhaps constipated, a few manage a quarter smile. Not Freud. He is seated in the middle, signaling his primacy, his beard now sufficiently tamed, hat resting on his knee, his expression revealing nothing, à la Socrates. I look more closely and see that all the men, including Freud, are wearing identical gold rings. These are the founding members of the Wednesday Circle. Begun in the fall of 1902, its members included young physicians “with the declared intention of learning, practicing, and disseminating psychoanalysis.”
The Wednesday Circle met at Freud’s house at 8:30 p.m. after dinner. The meetings followed a strict routine, as one of the founding members, Max Graf, recounts: “First, one of the members would present a paper. Then, black coffee and cakes were served; cigars and cigarettes were on the table and were consumed in great quantities. After a social quarter of an hour, the discussion would begin. The last and the decisive word was always spoken by Freud himself.”
It was a heady time. All in that room sensed that they were present at the creation of something akin to a new religion. “We were like pioneers in a newly discovered land, and Freud was the leader,” recalled Wilhelm Stekel, another founding member. “A spark seemed to jump from one mind to another, and every evening was like a revelation.”
Freud needed the Wednesday Circle. He was in uncharted waters. His theories about human sexuality were radical and subversive. He needed not only collaboration but also confirmation of his sanity, lest he suffer the fate of many a budding genius: a nervous breakdown. Howard Gardner believes that support is needed on the verge of a creative breakthrough “more so than at any time in life since early infancy.” He says the budding genius most of all needs conversation, “often inarticulate and struggling,” but which “represents a way for the creator to test that he or she is still sane, still understandable to a sympathetic member of the species.”
I am about to leave Freud’s office, but I’m curious about something. Whatever happened to Freud’s beloved artifacts? By the end of his life, the collection had mushroomed to some three thousand items, occupying every spare inch of space of Berggasse 19. Most of them accompanied Freud when, in 1938, he fled Vienna, an escape engineered by Marie Bonaparte, his most faithful, and powerful, disciple. He settled in London, where, surrounded by his beloved artifacts, he told a visitor, “I’m home again, as you see.”
Home among his objects but not his city. To the very end, Freud was ambivalent about Vienna. Should we be surprised? Not really. That’s the way it is with geniuses and their cities; the fit is never perfect; there’s always an element of friction, of discord. Socrates loved Athens like a brother, and the city repaid him with a death sentence. Su Tungpo’s beloved Hangzhou sent him into exile, not once but twice. Leonardo blossomed in Florence, but when rivals circled, and the Duke of Milan beckoned, he decamped. Freud and Vienna were not always a happy fit, but they were a
productive
fit. They brought out the best in each other. Perhaps, I think, as I linger in Freud’s study, that explains the geography of genius. Yes, I feel that I’m on the verge of a breakthrough, some deep insight into not only the nature of creative genius but also my own lifelong search for fulfillment. Yes, it’s all coming together. All that’s missing is . . .
“I’m sorry but that’s all the time we have today,” the Voice informs me.
Typical, I think, stepping out onto the street and finding a slate-gray sky. As I walk east, toward the Ringstrasse and the Hotel Adagio, I can’t help but smile. Even in death, Freud continues to illuminate and frustrate, in more or less equal measure.
As I walk back to my hotel, it occurs to me that while Freud may have been an outlier, a self-proclaimed conquistador and philistine, he shared at least one obvious trait with the literati of Vienna: his Jewishness. This was one of the defining characteristics of Vienna’s golden age. While Jews constituted only 10 percent of Vienna’s population, they accounted for more than half of its doctors and lawyers, and nearly two-thirds of its
journalists, as well as a disproportionately high number of the city’s creative geniuses, from the writer Arthur Schnitzler to the composer Arnold Schoenberg to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. It is, writes Steven Beller in
Vienna and the Jews
, a number “so large it cannot be ignored.”
Why were so many of the city’s greatest minds Jewish? Does the answer lie in genetics—did Jews, as Francis Galton would have it, “introduce a valuable strain of blood”? Of course not. The explanation is cultural. For starters, Jews enjoyed a centuries-old tradition of literacy, one they maintained even when sequestered in the shtetlach of Europe. By studying the Talmud and other religious texts, Jews kept their minds sharp, nurtured their love of ideas, and reveled in that particularly Jewish pastime: the joy of argumentation.
This studiousness explains some, but not all, of their success. Jewish ambition was bridled for so long that, when it was finally unleashed in the “emancipation of 1867,” the result was dramatic. Thousands of Jews flocked from the countryside to Vienna, which had become “the prime escape route from the ghetto,” says Beller.
These new arrivals settled in the neighborhood of Leopoldstadt, on the northern bank of the Danube Canal. Today, in the wake of the Holocaust, it is home to a much smaller Jewish community, and I have come here looking for answers.
I step into the Georgian café that my lunch partner had recommended and quickly spot him, in glasses and a sweater, looking relaxed and writerly. Doron Rabinovici, a novelist, is a longtime resident of Vienna and an expert on the city’s Jewish past.
We order lunch, and soon after I dive into my questions. Why were so many of the geniuses of fin de siècle Vienna Jewish?
Pent-up demand, he says. Certain professions, such as the military and most government jobs, remained closed to Jews, so they channeled their energies into those that were open: law, medicine, and journalism.
“Okay, this might explain why Jews succeeded in these fields,” I reply, “but success is not the same as creative genius. How did the Jewishness of a Freud or a Karl Kraus explain the creative leaps they made?”
“Let’s look at Freud. As a Jew, he was an outsider from the beginning.
So he was not so afraid to be an outsider with his ideas. He had nothing to lose.”
I have an aha moment, right there in a Georgian café in the Jewish quarter of Vienna. If you were an insider—say, a member of the ruling Hapsburg family—you’re not about to rock the boat. But if you are a Jew in Vienna in 1900, the boat is already rocking, so why not make a few more waves? It’s the blessing of the outsider, and it explains not only why Jews excelled in Vienna but why other marginalized peoples do as well. In the United States, for instance, Unitarians, per capita, account for a hundred times more notable scientists than do Methodists, Baptists, and Roman Catholics. Geniuses are also statistically more likely to come from religiously mixed marriages. Marie Curie’s father was an atheist, her mother a Catholic. (Marie grew up in devoutly Catholic Poland.)
For the Jews of Vienna, it wasn’t their religious beliefs that propelled them to greatness (most were secular), but their marginality, the precarious station they occupied. In a big city such as Vienna, continues Doron, “everybody had their place, except for the Jews, and therefore some of them developed really interesting new and avant-garde ideas.”
“And one of them is Freud’s theory of the unconscious?”
“Yes,” says Doron, and that is no coincidence. A Jewish thinker such as Freud was perfectly positioned to come up with a theory of the irrational because he faced an irrational situation every day. “If you wanted to be an Austrian, you were told, okay, then you have to assimilate. And if you assimilated, they would say you never will really succeed because in your inner, inner soul you are still a Jew. I mean, if you are a Jew in Vienna, irrationality is on your mind because it is irrational how they behave towards you.”
This makes sense. As we’ve seen, creative people have an especially higher tolerance for ambiguity, and nothing was more ambiguous than the life of a Jew in the Vienna of 1900. You were simultaneously an insider and an outsider, one of us and one of them, accepted and shunned. This is not a comfortable position—the psychic equivalent of Freud splayed across his reading chair—but it is, I think, the perfect configuration for creative genius. As outsiders, Jews were able to see the world around
them with fresh eyes; as insiders, they were able to propagate these fresh insights, to make the invisible visible. For a while. The precarious position they occupied didn’t last long and ended disastrously.