The Viennese Psychoanalytic Society and its Executive Decision of March 13, 1938

Already formed in 1908, the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society (WPV) was the first psychoanalytic organization in the world. In 1910, it was officially established as an association. From the start, the WPV attracted social democrats and other individuals from the political left due to the cultural criticism inherent in psychoanalysis.

With the invasion of Austria by German troops on March 12, 1938, it seemed inevitable that the WPV would be dissolved, at least temporarily. Here in Berggasse, in the waiting room, a board meeting was called on March 13, chaired by Anna Freud. Two resolutions were passed and then communicated to Sigmund Freud. 1) All members are to leave the country as soon as possible; and 2) the seat of the Viennese Society is to be relocated to Freud’s future residence.

The political events did not strike the Viennese group without previous warning signs. After Hitler’s appointment as »Reichskanzler« [Chancellor of the Reich] in January 1933, many of the psychoanalysts residing in Germany were forced to leave the country. Already with the suspension of the Austrian parliament and the establishment of the authoritarian Austro-fascist regime, which started in March 1933, it was no longer possible for socialist-oriented psychoanalysts like Siegfried Bernfeld, Josef Karl Friedjung, Helene and Felix Deutsch, or Edith Buxbaum to stay in Vienna.

“When Freud entered, Anna told him of the board’s decision that the seat of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society would be wherever Freud would settle and of the intention of its members to leave Austria. Freud remarked. ‘After the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem by Titus, Rabbi Jochanan ben Sakkai asked for permission to open a school at Jabneh for the study of the Torah. We are going to do the same. We are, after all, used to persecution by our history, tradition, and some of us by personal experience ….”

Richard F. Sterba, 1982

Richard Sterba

Richard Sterba was born into a Catholic family in Vienna on May 6, 1898. Even before his Matura (school leaving examination), he was conscripted for military service; later he studied medicine and received a doctorate at the University of Vienna in 1923. In 1924, he began his training analysis with Eduard Hitschmann, in 1926 he married Editha von Radanovicz-Hartmann, who later also trained as a psychoanalyst. A full member of the WPV as of 1928, he started working as a training analyst in 1929.

After the »Anschluss,« only five WPV members were not subject to the Nuremberg Race Laws. To avoid being appointed to an official function as the only medical professional and non-Jew – which would seriously have handicapped his own emigration –, Sterba already left the country for Switzerland on March 16, 1938. Obtaining visas for the United States proved to be difficult: The American authorities regarded Editha, who was born in Budapest, as a Hungarian citizen, the quota for visas for Hungarians, however, was already met. In June 1938, Sterba travelled to London to ask Ernest Jones for his assistance. Jones and Anna advised emigration to Johannesburg, but the South African authorities denied them entry. Finally, Sterba was able to obtain an »affidavit of support« for his wife through the mediation of a former patient and thus they eventually emigrated to the USA. On February 2, 1939, the Sterba family with their two daughters Monika (5 years) and Verena (2 years) travelled to the States on the SS Normandie and settled in Detroit.

In 1940, Richard Sterba founded the Detroit Psychoanalytic Society, which he directed from 1946 to 1952. He organized it in the spirit of Freudian psychoanalysis – and as a »one-man-institute« according to his Detroit colleagues’ criticism. Internal tensions escalated, culminating in the institute’s dissolution in 1953. As a result, Richard and Editha Sterba lost their teaching licenses. When analytical training in Detroit was re-established in 1957 under the direction of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and with participation of former WPV members, the Sterbas were not involved. Later, Sterba continued to teach as a professor of psychiatry at the Wayne State University.

Sterba, who was an active psychoanalyst into advanced old age, died in Grosse Pointe, a suburb of Detroit, on October 24, 1989.

Registry form for Richard Sterba, “neurologist”, with entries on his wife Editha and daughters Monika and Verena (facsimile). The official deregistration only happened on November 11, 1939, with a note attached: “Departure for Switzerland after the change”.

WStLA [Vienna Municipal and Regional Archives]

Excerpt from Richard Sterba’s three-page typescript “When we have lost someone“, with handwritten corrections (facsimile). In it, he describes his last encounter with Sigmund Freud during the board meeting on March 13, 1938, and the latter’s words: “Then he said, just before he left us: ‘Hold fast to the truth.’”

The Ellis Island Passenger Manifests

Each manifest consists of two pages with a total of 37 fields for various data. The left page contains central data such as name, age, gender, marital status (fields 1-6), or place of birth (field 11) and last place of residence (field 15), but also information about reading, language, and writing skills (field 8). The right-hand side contains more in-depth information about the passenger: In addition to the planned length of stay (field 24) and destination, the next of kin or friend in the country of origin had to be indicated (fields 17-18), as well as who paid for the passage and whether the person entering the country had $50 or less (fields 20-21). Attitudes toward anarchy and polygamy were also inquired and any plans to overthrow the government also had to be indicated (fields 26-28). Height, weight, color of skin and hair, and physical and mental health were also recorded (fields 32-36). Source: The Statue of Liberty – Ellis Island Foundation

Letters and Lists: Ernest Jones and Anna Freud

From 1933, Anna Freud and her British colleague Ernest Jones corresponded on the best ways to support psychoanalysts who were at risk in the »German Reich.« Jones, at the time the president of the British Psychoanalytic Society (BPS) and, as of 1934, of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), maintained excellent contacts to different embassies in London and with the British Home Office and Foreign Ministry. He monitored the events in Germany and Austria, in Paris, Italy, South Africa,
and the United States.

With the »Anschluss« of Austria, the focus moved to saving the WPV members. Anna Freud kept Jones updated on the document status, financial assets, and professional qualifications of each individual colleague. Jones, on the other hand, organized financial support as well as employment including the necessary (country-specific) licenses.

Especially the 20-page list from the archives of the BPS allows an insight into Ernest Jones’s and Anna Freud’s indefatigable efforts to save their threatened colleagues. The document contains 90 names of WPV members and candidates, the majority of whom were living in Vienna in 1938 although some were also abroad, as well extensive information regarding visas, financial assets, addresses, etc.

“Our meeting today is marked by another terrible blow to psychoanalysis, the dissolution of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society … That psychoanalysis should no longer be practiced in Vienna of all places in the world is a breathtaking thought.”

Ernest Jones, August 1, 1938

Another list from the London archive carries the names of altogether 38 WPV members living in Vienna as well as some further names. Handwritten additions next to the names particularly refer to medical specializations.

The British Psychoanalytical Society Archive, London

Otto Isakower

Otto Isakower was born on June 2, 1899, as the son of a Viennese Jewish family. After graduating in medicine in 1923, he worked at the General Hospital in Vienna and trained as a psychiatrist. In 1925, he began a training analysis with Paul Federn and became an associate member of the WPV, and a full member in 1928.

In spring 1938, he married psychoanalyst Salomea Gutmann – which meant the two WPV members only needed one sponsorship document instead of two. The correspondence between Anna Freud and Ernest Jones, which comprises 220 letters concerning the emigration and professional perspectives of WPV members, refers to this situation: »2 analysts will surely survive more easily in a place than one. Are you thinking of a specific city for him? Could Liverpool maybe be an option for these two?,« thus Anna Freud to Jones on April 28, 1938. In a letter in May 1938, Isakower asked Ernest Jones for help with his application to the British Home Office to be licensed as a medical doctor in Great Britain. Jones also procured a loan of 200 pounds to pay for the associated costs. At the end of June 1938, the couple was able to leave for Great Britain. Otto and Salomea settled in Liverpool and became members of the British Psychoanalytic Society (BPS). With two other analysts who emigrated from Budapest and Berlin, they headed a psychoanalytic working group that was recognized by the training committee of the BPS as »North of England« training group in March 1940.

The professional situation, however, remained challenging; the threat of internment as »enemy aliens« was a daily reality for emigrants from Germany and Austria. The Isakowers therefore decided to settle in the United States. After a first entry by Isakower alone on November 1, 1938, the couple arrived in New York on May 4, 1940, and subsequently became members of the New York Psychoanalytic Society. In the 1950s and 1960s, Isakower was active in key functions there. After emigrating, his scientific interests continued to be dreams and dream work; the »Isakower phenomenon« named after him describes regressive sensations while falling asleep.

Otto Isakower remained professionally active until shortly before his death in New York on May 10, 1972.

The Ellis Island Passenger Manifests

Each manifest consists of two pages with a total of 37 fields for various data. The left page contains central data such as name, age, gender, marital status (fields 1-6), or place of birth (field 11) and last place of residence (field 15), but also information about reading, language, and writing skills (field 8). The right-hand side contains more in-depth information about the passenger: In addition to the planned length of stay (field 24) and destination, the next of kin or friend in the country of origin had to be indicated (fields 17-18), as well as who paid for the passage and whether the person entering the country had $50 or less (fields 20-21). Attitudes toward anarchy and polygamy were also inquired and any plans to overthrow the government also had to be indicated (fields 26-28). Height, weight, color of skin and hair, and physical and mental health were also recorded (fields 32-36). Source: The Statue of Liberty – Ellis Island Foundation

Psychoanalysis in Vienna after the »Anschluss«

After the »Anschluss,« the destiny of Viennese psychoanalysis was closely linked to the Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft (DPG) [German Psychoanalytic Society], which had been submitted to a process of »Aryanization« since 1933. In 1936, the DPG was incorporated into the »Deutsche Institut für Psychologie und Psychotherapie e. V.,« headed by Matthias H. Göring, a cousin of Hermann Göring. The »Working Group Vienna of the German Institute« was founded in March 1938. It was directed by
the Viennese psychotherapist and member of the NSDAP Heinrich von Kogerer, a decided enemy of psychoanalysis. The working group never practiced a real exchange of ideas.

Initially without any connection to the Working Group of the German Institute, August Aichhorn taught a class of psychoanalytic theory and practice to a small group of students in his apartment from the winter of 1938-39. Three of the five participants in this first illegal seminar – Ella Lingens, Kurt Lingens, and Karl Motesiczky – were arrested by the Gestapo in October 1942 for helping two Jewish couples flee the country. Karl Motesiczky died from typhoid fever in Auschwitz on June 25, 1943.

In the autumn of 1941, the seminar was recognized by the German Institute, some members of the Vienna Working Group of the German Institute now attended, too. Even after the official recognition, Aichhorn remained true to his commitment to teach unadulterated psychoanalysis in theory and practice.

 “I still have very clear memories of these days in March 38 … before the German invasion … on Friday; when I had to avoid the jeering crowds in Währingerstraße on my way home, I still had no idea what terrible things were to come.“

August Aichhorn, 1946

Which psychoanalytic terms were accepted in the Third Reich, which were objectionable? Aichhorn’s manuscript Kategorien der Verwahrlosung [Categories of Neglect] was examined for “admissible” terms by Werner Kemper, Head of the Outpatient Clinic of the “German Institute” – Kemper for instance wants to replace “anal phase” with “phase of defiance”; next to some terms, like “Oedipus complex”, the Latin word “cave!” [beware!] expresses categorical rejection.

Thomas Aichhorn Archive, Vienna

Letter from August Aichhorn to Heinz Kohut, dated July 23, 1939, on the stationery of a Budapest hotel (facsimile). “My dear Heinz! / After a long pause again a sign of life from me. […] / I have not had any news from London for some time. Do you know anything more of Dr. Hoffer? […] / I for my part don’t see all of our futures in such grey tones. / Please write soon. / Most cordially / A. Aichhorn. / Don’t forget your address!”

Heinz Kohut Papers, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.

August Aichhorn

August Aichhorn was born in Vienna on July 27, 1878. After his training as a teacher, he worked in elementary schools and vocational colleges. In 1907, as a reaction to the establishment of military facilities in Vienna, he founded a boy’s day-care center. Aichhorn aimed to base his education for youth on citizenship, not patriotism. In 1914, he was awarded the title of »Imperial Counsellor.« In 1919, the municipal authorities of Vienna commissioned him to establish an educational center for disadvantaged children and youths in Hollabrunn (50 km to the north of Vienna).

Through Willi Hoffer, Anna Freud became aware of Aichhorn, who eventually started a training analysis with Paul Federn and became a member of the WPV in 1922. From 1924, he held courses for educators and social workers at the WPV outpatient clinic, from 1925, he worked with adults and youths in his private practice and as a training and control analyst. He taught at Dorothy Burlingham’s school in the Viennese district of Hietzing and, with his close colleagues Anna Freud, Willi Hoffer, and Siegfried Bernfeld, was among the lecturers of the pedagogical program, which the WPV introduced in 1933-34. Already in 1925, he published his main work Wayward Youth. For the development of psychoanalysis – until then a form of treatment for people with inhibited drives – Aichhorn’s expertise with disinhibited and aggressive individuals was a valuable addition.

On March 11, 1938, Aichhorn’s elder son August junior, an employee of the Fatherland Front, was arrested while trying to flee and transferred to the Dachau concentration camp in May 1938. Even after his release in September 1938, Aichhorn junior was further surveilled by the Gestapo. Aichhorn’s decision to stay in Vienna and collaborate in the »Vienna Working Group of the German Institute« was decisively influenced by his son’s fate. From here, he hoped, he would best be able to support him.

In the war years, Aichhorn regularly visited his Hungarian colleagues in Budapest – a kind of substitute home for him. Jewish analysts were able to continue working in the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society, albeit with great difficulty.

In 1946, August Aichhorn reopened the WPV. Early in 1948, there was a reunion with Anna Freud in Lausanne.

August Aichhorn died in his apartment in Rathausstraße 20 in Vienna on October 13, 1949.

A Committee for the Case of Absolute Emergency

On March 13, 1938, – only one day after the »Anschluss« – the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) established an »Emergency Committee on Relief and Immigration,« chaired by Lawrence S. Kubie, a psychoanalyst practicing in New York, and psychiatrist Bettina Warburg. Aiming to provide far-reaching support for European psychoanalysts trying to emigrate to the United States and to develop guidelines for their professional integration, the Emergency Committee regularly communicated with Ernest Jones and his London colleague Edward Glover. While Kubie mostly dealt with international affairs, maintained relations with embassies, and obtained visas, Warburg made herself available to new arrivals as a contact for all sorts of concerns and attended to procuring job offers. A foundation directed by Bertram D. Lewin supported individual immigrants with grants, loans, or stipends.

A memorandum for the European psychoanalysts describes the living and working conditions in the United States as well as in individual states: the »Bulletin of Information to Be Supplied Only to Psychoanalysts Who Desire to Emigrate to the U.S.A.« A key issue here emphasized the medical license as a precondition for practicing psychoanalysis.

Letter from Heinz Hartmann to Ernst Kris, dated August 10, 1940, in which he asks about the requirements and necessary documents for entering the United States via Canada: “All this is desperately urgent for me.”

Papers of Ernst Kris, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.

Heinz Hartmann

Heinz Hartmann was born in Vienna on November 4, 1894, without a religious denomination; he studied medicine in Vienna. Subsequently, he worked as a junior doctor at Julius Wagner-Jauregg’s Neurologic-Psychiatric University Clinic. In 1925, he became an associate member of the WPV, and in 1927 a full member.

His wife Dora, who would later complete her psychoanalytic training in the United States, was Jewish, which is why the Hartmanns’ decision was clear: »I wouldn’t have lived in a country where she and the children would be looked down upon,« Hartmann said in an interview in 1963. At the invitation of Marie Bonaparte, both were able to leave for Paris on May 19, 1938, where Hartmann became a member and teaching analyst at the Société psychanalytique de Paris. Building on his work in Vienna, Hartmann published the essay »Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation« in 1939 – today Hartmann, with Ernst Kris and Rudolph M. Loewenstein, with whom he would later collaborate closely in New York, is considered one of the founders of ego psychology. Until the 1960s, when so-called self psychology began to become accepted, ego psychology dominated psychoanalysis across the world.

Given the increasing deterioration of the situation in France, Hartmann, who held a Swiss passport by birth, left for Geneva and Lausanne in September 1939 with his family. They applied for entry visas for the USA, where they arrived on board the SS Excalibur on January 14, 1941. In New York, they reunited with many of their colleagues who had arrived in the States from Great Britain in the meantime. The Emergency Committee established the »Hartmann Scholarship Fund« as a remuneration for Hartmann’s teaching at the Bank Street School.

Hartmann established himself in New York as a teaching analyst for the New York Psychoanalytic Society, where he – as well as in the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) – held leading positions. With Anna Freud in London and Ernst Kris in New York, he was one of the managing editors of the journal The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. Together with Willi Hoffer, this group – in spite of their physical separation – was to succeed in continuing and asserting Freudian strategies.

Heinz Hartmann died in New York on May 17, 1970.

The Ellis Island Passenger Manifests

Each manifest consists of two pages with a total of 37 fields for various data. The left page contains central data such as name, age, gender, marital status (fields 1-6), or place of birth (field 11) and last place of residence (field 15), but also information about reading, language, and writing skills (field 8). The right-hand side contains more in-depth information about the passenger: In addition to the planned length of stay (field 24) and destination, the next of kin or friend in the country of origin had to be indicated (fields 17-18), as well as who paid for the passage and whether the person entering the country had $50 or less (fields 20-21). Attitudes toward anarchy and polygamy were also inquired and any plans to overthrow the government also had to be indicated (fields 26-28). Height, weight, color of skin and hair, and physical and mental health were also recorded (fields 32-36). Source: The Statue of Liberty – Ellis Island Foundation

In London, where People Write in »Melanesian«

In May 1938, Great Britain enacted a visa requirement for »Reich-German« citizens in order to curb immigration. Most Austrians entered British soil as transit refugees, and thus only with a limited residence permit. Among the Viennese psychoanalysts there were also only a few who managed to stay in London or Great Britain permanently. The couples Bibring, Hartmann, Isakower, Kris, and Wälder all emigrated to the USA after a short stay.

The first years in London exile were fraught with tension for the Viennese psychoanalysts – most prominently for Anna Freud, who lost the status of an undisputed authority she had held in Vienna. Collaboration with the British association was marked by fierce conflict: The Viennese analysts also experienced the substantial differences in opinion between British and continental psychoanalysts as a loss of their spiritual home. »People said the English colleagues didn’t write in English but in ›Melanesian‹. This meant to say that Melanie Klein was regarded as the greatest analyst there and as the one who completed Freud’s work,« WPV member Otto Fenichel already remarked in 1934.

“You are asking for our working relationship with the English group. ... As far as the Kleinian school is concerned, the differences are so great that, while one can talk about the differences, a real collaboration is impossible. This causes many problems in detail, which are masked by the fact that the group has behaved particularly well with regard to the whole emigration issue.”

Anna Freud to Ernst Simmel, 1939

Willi Hoffer

Willi Hoffer was born in Žlutice/Luditz near Karlovy Vary/ Karlsbad in today’s Czech Republic on September 12, 1897. He studied in Vienna, became a member of the Zionist youth movement, and received a doctorate in pedagogy in 1922 and one in medicine in 1929. From 1923, he was a member of the WPV with a focus on child analysis and education. He was a close friend and collaborator of Anna Freud and August Aichhorn.

On May 16, 1938, Willi Hoffer and his wife Hedwig Hoffer- Schaxel emigrated to London, where they were accepted as members and training analysts by the British Psychoanalytical Society (BPS). Hoffer was one of the most active members of the Viennese group in London. He supported Anna Freud in her confrontations with the group around Melanie Klein. After receiving his medical license in 1943, he worked as a doctor in the Hampstead War Nurseries headed by Anna Freud. He also documented the work there as a photographer, as well as subsequently in the Hampstead Clinic.

Besides Anna Freud and Edward Glover, Hoffer was a London representative of the editors’ team of the journal The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child (published since 1945), one of the key media of post-war analysis. The Anglo-American venture was started with the aim to strengthen child and youth analysis and additionally, by building on the theoretical and practical legacy of pre-war analysis, to give its authors and readers a sense of continuity and connection to a community. He was also co-opted by Anna Freud, together with Otto Isakower, who had by then arrived in New York, into the editors’ committee of Freud’s Collected Works.

After the war, Hoffer played a key role in revitalizing psychoanalysis in Europe. As a diplomatic traveler in the cause of psychoanalysis, he was a vital support in establishing the Deutsche Psychoanalytische Vereinigung (DPV) [German Psychoanalytic Society] in Germany and in resuscitating the WPV. He created the foundations for the European Psychoanalytic Federation (EPF) and the reinstatement of German as official language of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA).

Willi Hoffer died in London on October 25, 1970.

Willi Hoffer kept the wine and spirit bottle labels in this exhibition view – testimony to convivial gatherings – in his country house Anchorlea in Walberswick, Suffolk. He bought the property in 1949, probably through the mediation of Anna Freud, who had owned the next-door house since 1946 together with Dorothy Burlingham. After Hoffer’s death, the house was passed on to Anna Freud’s nephew, W. Ernest Freud. the labels are a loan by Esther Freud.

In the Land of (Un)limited Opportunity

The majority of Viennese members and candidates of the WPV emigrated to the USA, in particular to New York, but also to Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles, the locations of the four leading psychoanalytic institutes of the country. All those without medical training entered the US with an enormous disadvantage: Unlike in Austria, lay analysts were not accepted as members of psychoanalytical chapters and were barred from practicing as psychoanalysts. They had to turn to other professional fields like education or social work.

In contrast to Europe where the science of the unconscious had always been met with resistance at the universities, psychoanalysis had been well-established in the USA since the 1930s. Therefore, for some Viennese emigrants, opportunities opened up in exile that would probably not have been accessible elsewhere. At the New York Psychoanalytic Society, the most influential and largest psychoanalytic association of the USA, the Viennese emigrants not only formed the largest group by numbers in the
post-war years. Some important positions, too, for instance in the training committee, on the board, or in the outpatient clinic, were increasingly held by former WPV members. Those who had been close to Freud personally in Vienna, who had completed their training or control analysis with him, enjoyed – and perhaps also expected – particular esteem. It was inevitable that this constellation in which established members were upstaged led to conflicts and disputes within the institute.

“When we came to this country, it was in 1938, we found here in the United States everything we were looking for in Austria and could not find there … it would have been impossible to take a critical attitude and to continue the opposition in which we lived in Austria, … So that the immigrant analysts stopped their revolutionary attitude. … There was only one reaction possible, … of greatest gratitude, to Roosevelt and to the country in which you were accepted with such friendliness and had the opportunity to survive.

Kurt Eissler, 1984

Grete L. Bibring

Grete L. Bibring, née Lehner, was born as the youngest child of an intellectual Jewish family in Vienna on January 11, 1899. Already at school, she discovered Freud’s writings. During her medical studies, she met Otto Fenichel, a WPV member, who called her attention to the »Vienna student seminar for sexology« which she soon organized herself together with Wilhelm Reich and her later husband Edward Bibring. During her studies, she completed a training analysis with Hermann Nunberg; after receiving her doctorate in 1924, she trained as a specialist in psychiatry and neurology. In 1925, she became a member of the WPV. At the end of the 1920s, she opened a private practice with her husband besides working at the outpatient clinic and, from 1934, in the training committee of the WPV.

On May 15, 1938, she emigrated to London with her husband, their two sons Georg (9 years) and Thomas (7), and her mother. She was soon accepted as a training analyst by the British Psychoanalytical Society (BPS) but the professional situation in London remained difficult for newly arrived analysts during the war years. On board the MV Georgic on February 11, 1941, the family emigrated via New York to Boston, where their former colleagues Helene and Felix Deutsch were already working. Both Grete and Edward Bibring became members and training analysts of the Boston Psychoanalytical Association. Already six months after her arrival, Bibring resumed a tradition she had already cultivated in Vienna: regular dinner parties for colleagues and friends, the menus of which she meticulously recorded.

Grete L. Bibring’s professional career in the States was varied and successful – not least thanks to her training as a psychiatrist and the dominant reform-oriented psychiatric movement in the US. In 1946, she took over as head of the psychiatric department of the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, and, in 1961, as the first woman ever, she received a professorship of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School. In the 1950s and 1960s, she held numerous leading positions in psychoanalytic societies. Even after her retirement, she held seminars on female education and professional careers for women at the Radcliff College.

Grete L. Bibring died in Cambridge, Mass., on August 10, 1977.

The Ellis Island Passenger Manifests

Each manifest consists of two pages with a total of 37 fields for various data. The left page contains central data such as name, age, gender, marital status (fields 1-6), or place of birth (field 11) and last place of residence (field 15), but also information about reading, language, and writing skills (field 8). The right-hand side contains more in-depth information about the passenger: In addition to the planned length of stay (field 24) and destination, the next of kin or friend in the country of origin had to be indicated (fields 17-18), as well as who paid for the passage and whether the person entering the country had $50 or less (fields 20-21). Attitudes toward anarchy and polygamy were also inquired and any plans to overthrow the government also had to be indicated (fields 26-28). Height, weight, color of skin and hair, and physical and mental health were also recorded (fields 32-36). Source: The Statue of Liberty – Ellis Island Foundation

“I recall the great panic that overtook many Viennese Jewish intellectuals at the time the Nazi troops moved into Austria in March 1938. The Viennese analysts, while naturally sharing in the heightened concern, were less panicked by the political turn than other professionals. In fact, they really behaved in a quite ‘analyzed’ way, banding together in the tradition of the most efficient Freemason groups and undertaking systematic organizational work to see to it that every Jewish analyst was safely relocated.”

Margaret S. Mahler, 1988

Margaret S. Mahler

Margaret S. Mahler was born Margarethe Schönberger on July 10, 1897, into a Jewish family in Ödenburg/Sopron in today’s Hungary. In 1917, she began studying medicine with a focus on pediatrics in Budapest and from there went to Munich, Jena, and Heidelberg. After receiving her doctorate in 1922, she worked in Vienna as a pediatrician. Through Willi Hoffer, she came into contact with psychoanalysis and met August Aichhorn. In 1926, she began a training analysis with Helene Deutsch – who, however, deemed Mahler unsuitable for psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, Mahler was able to continue her analysis with Aichhorn and later with Willi Hoffer; in 1933, she was accepted as an associate member of the WPV.

Through the intervention of a patient, she and her husband Paul managed to obtain temporary residence visas for Great Britain, where they arrived in May 1938. The rent for their Hampstead apartment was paid by the British Psychoanalytical Society (BPS), which also provided a loan to pay for their tickets to the United States. Dorothy Burlingham on her part intervened with the American embassy in Britain for the emigration applications to be processed more quickly. On October 13, 1938, the couple was able to board the Queen Mary for New York, where they were personally welcomed by their WPV colleague Bertha Bornstein.

In 1940, Mahler became a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and was given a lectureship in psychiatry at the Columbia University. In her practice and research, she focused on child psychosis. In 1945, she learned of the death of her mother who had been deported to Auschwitz in 1944. This triggered a severe depression, and she started a further analysis with Edith Jacobson. In 1950, Mahler founded a therapeutic kindergarten for psychotic children at the Einstein
College in New York. In the following years, she directed the training program of the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1975, she published her arguably most famous
study, The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant, which is based on observational research in a natural environment.

Margaret S. Mahler died in New York on October 2, 1985. In accordance with her last will, her ashes were buried next to her father’s grave at the Jewish cemetery in Sopron.

Letter from Margaret S. Mahler to August Aichhorn, dated May 28, 1948: “It is hard to go to Austria, and I have already given up on this plan 10 months ago. Clearly I have a great aversion of going there – please don’t take this badly. I know you will try to understand me.” Mahler consistently refused to travel to Austria after 1945.

Thomas Aichhorn Archive, Vienna

Excerpts from an interview conducted with Bluma Sverdloff on November 15, 1974. Columbia University Libraries

Paul Federn

Paul Federn was born into an eminent Viennese Jewish family on October 13, 1871. As a young adult, he led a bohemian life before starting to study medicine following his father’s wishes. After receiving his doctorate in 1895, he trained as an internist and opened his private practice in 1902. In the following year, he made the acquaintance of Sigmund Freud and soon was part of the latter’s innermost circle, the »Wednesday Psychological Society.«

In 1919, Federn published his study on the psychological motives of the First Republic: Zur Psychologie der Revolution: Die vaterlose Gesellschaft [On the Psychology of Revolution: the Fatherless Society]. In the early 1920s, the convinced socialist Federn, who was interested in issues like sexual education, family welfare, and women’s emancipation, became one of the foremost training analysts within the WPV and also took a leading role in the foundation of its outpatient clinic in 1922 as well as in the training committee. In 1924, Freud named him his official representative – besides Anna Freud – and he was elected vice president of the WPV. In 1926, he co-edited Das Psychoanalytische Volksbuch [The Popular Psychoanalysis] with Heinrich Meng in the Hippokrates publishing house.

On August 29, 1938, Federn, who by then was completely penniless, was able to flee to the USA on board the Drottningholm via Sweden, where he had already travelled in the course of a teaching assignment after World War I. In 1940, he became an honorary member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society; for a full membership, he needed to re-take exams in medicine. His medical degree was only recognized as late as 1946. One of Federn’s most famous patients in New York was the exiled Viennese author Hermann Broch, with whom he had corresponded on problems like global citizenship, human rights, and the theory of mass hysteria since 1939. After years of correspondence, Federn was reunited with his son Ernst in 1948, who had survived the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps and settled in New York to study. In 1949, after a lecture tour to Topeka, Kansas, Federn learned that he was suffering from malignant bladder cancer; at the end of that year, his wife Hilde passed away.

On May 4, 1950, Paul Federn shot himself in his New York study.

Ernst Kris

Ernst Kris was born into a Jewish middle-class family on April 26, 1900. In the last years of the Habsburg monarchy, he converted from Judaism to Catholicism. After studying art history, history, archaeology, and psychology and receiving a doctorate in art history, he started to work at the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien. In 1924, his fiancée Marianne Rie, a future pediatrician, mediated his presentation to Sigmund Freud as an antiques expert, and he began his training analysis with Helene Deutsch.
In 1929, Kris catalogued the intaglio and cameo collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 1933, he became a full member of the WPV. With his former fellow student Ernst H. Gombrich, he worked on a project on caricature – which remained unpublished – and together they curated an internationally acclaimed exhibition of works by the French artist Honoré Daumier at the Albertina in Vienna in 1936.

To escape National Socialist persecution as a »full Jew,« Kris wrote to his superior Fritz Dworschak, since the »Anschluss« acting director of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, on March 21, 1938, asking for retirement from his post and for a recommendation for a permit to leave the country for himself and his family – and succeeded. On May 15, 1938, Kris was able to leave for London with his wife and their two children Anna (7 years) and Anton (3 years). There, he worked for the BBC. On July 29, 1940, they arrived in Canada on board the SS Duchess of Bedford – it was easier to enter the United States from there. On September 15, 1940, the family set foot on American soil in New York in possession of valid visas that had already been obtained by their friend and colleague Ruth Mack Brunswick in 1938. Waiting for Kris was a post as guest professor at the New York School for Social Research. As he did not hold a medical degree he was accepted into the New York Psychoanalytic Society as a honorary member but he was denied full membership. Although he thought about returning to his adopted country, England, in 1945, he finally decided against it. »It is very hard to emigrate a second time,« wrote Anna Freud in a letter dated July 16, 1945, to her friend Kris.

In 1950, Ernst Kris founded the Postgraduate Study Group of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, which he directed until his death on February 27, 1957.

Letter from Ernst Kris to Fritz Dworschak, dated November 7, 1938, from London. In it, he sends Dworschak, who had been acting director of the Kunsthistorisches Museum since the “Anschluss”, “and the Viennese colleagues the most devoted greetings”. And further: “The above address will probably be valid for the next 3 months. / I am including my civil servant’s legitimation.” Dworschak had favorably intervened with the Vienna police department and the Ministry of Education for Kris’s plans to leave for England.

KHM Museum Association

Re-Establishment of the WPV and Return to Vienna

Post-war Vienna was very unlike the city before the rise of totalitarian structures, was unlike the image in people’s memory. Hunger and hardship, damaged buildings and infrastructure, the continued and noticeable presence of antisemitism – the general situation after the end of the war was disheartening. While democratic structures had quickly been re-established, a collective confrontation with or reappraisal of the Nazi past was still decades away; in addition, complicated application processes and long-drawn restitution proceedings discouraged many victims from claiming reparations.

By 1946, among the former WPV members and candidates, only Walter Hollitscher from London, Otto Fleischmann from Budapest, and Robert Hans Jokl from France had returned. The latter failed to reconnect to Vienna and emigrated to the United States in 1947. In March 1944, before his planned remigration, Josef Karl Friedjung died in Haifa.

In April 1946, the WPV was ceremoniously reopened under the direction of August Aichhorn (president) and Alfred von Winterstein (vice-president) – both had never been NSDAP members – and recognized by the International Psychoanalytic Association. The emigrated WPV members sent messages of congratulation – from afar.

“To revive the old and famous Viennese group is a noble task, and I wish you the best of success with it.”

Ernest Jones to August Aichhorn, July 26, 1946

Walter Hollitscher

Walter Hollitscher was born into an upper-class family in Vienna on May 16, 1911, and christened a Protestant. After his parents’ separation, he moved to Prague with his father. Already in secondary school, he joined the Communist movement. In 1929, he moved to Vienna and became a member of the Kommunistische Partei Österreichs (KPÖ) [Austrian Communist Party]. At the University of Vienna, he initially studied medicine, then philosophy, and in 1934 he wrote his doctoral thesis on the causal principle in quantum physics under Moritz Schlick. In order to be accepted into the WPV as a candidate, he promised »to refrain from any political activity prohibited by law during the time of his analytic training« in a letter to Anna Freud in 1936. Already in 1935, after the arrests of WPV member Edith Buxbaum and candidate Marie Langer, the training committee had enacted a prohibition for candidates to actively engage in political resistance during their training.

Hollitscher began his training analysis with Grete Bibring-Lehner and Willi Hoffer and also resumed his medical studies. Already on March 18, 1938, he was able to leave Vienna for Switzerland, where he obtained a temporary visa for Great Britain. In London, he continued his medical studies and, at the British Psychoanalytical Society (BPS), his psychoanalytic training. The convinced communist also became an active collaborator of the Austrian Centre London, which had been founded as a self-help organization in 1939 and developed into a politically and socially committed institution for Jewish and otherwise politically persecuted Austrians in exile.

In 1946, Hollitscher returned to Vienna. As a representativeof the BPS, he took part in the ceremonial reopening of the WPV and participated in its first management meetings before resigning from the WPV in 1948. He had lost all interest in psychoanalysis, which he criticized as an expression of bourgeois ideology, as unscientific, speculative, and ahistorical.

In the following decades, he lived and worked in the German Democratic Republic as well as in Vienna, where he was a member of the KPÖ’s central committee from
1965 to 1977. A prolific scientist and author, Hollitscher wrote around 30 books on scientific, philosophical, and psychological subjects from a Marxist perspective.

On July 6, 1986, Walter Hollitscher died in Vienna.

Condolence letter from Walter Hollitscher to Anna Freud, dated September 25, 1939: “Dear Miss Freud! I want to write to you how much your father’s death also / affected me. He was my only great authority; since he ceased to be among the living, the world has changed a lot for me. […] / Your very devoted / Walter Hollitscher”.

Freud Museum London

Reunion in Stockbridge

From its foundation in 1910 up to 1938, the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) organized regular congresses for its members, offering not only opportunities for professional exchange but also for personal friendship and sociability. The first congress after the end of the war took place in Zurich in 1949, but only a small number of former WPV members were able to take part.

In 1950, however, in the context of the »First Stockbridge Congress on Child Analysis« called in honor of Anna Freud, the former colleagues reunited in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Two thirds of the 66 participants had been trained in the WPV.

Anna Freud, who was on the first of her 12 lecture tours to the USA at the time, was not required to present a lecture. Instead, she was asked to devote herself – far from official (representative) duties – completely to open discussions with her former colleagues from the WPV and the participants in her child psychology seminars and thus rediscover an atmosphere familiar from Vienna. »A part of the audience is familiar with the situation of an extensive discussion with Miss Freud. (…) For others, it is a new experience. We hope to be able to revive the spirit of former years for a few short hours here,« Ernst Kris said in his opening remarks.

Photos by Edward Bibring

Edward Bibring‘s photographs of colleagues, which were made in the context of psychoanalytical congresses between 1932 and 1938. Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute Archives

Austen Riggs Foundation, Stockbridge, Massachusetts

Top row from left to right standing: Heinz Hartmann, René Spitz, Marianne Kris, Ernst Kris, Edith Jackson, N.N., Joseph Weinreb, N.N., N.N., Howard Edgerton, Max Schur, Edward Kronold, Robert Knight, Jan Frank, Walter Langer, Bertram Lewin, Edward Glover, Felix Deutsch, David Rapaport, Robert Waelder, Maurits Katan, Rudolph Loewenstein, Erik Erikson, Willi Hoffer, Merton Gill, Richard Sterba, Milton Senn

Middle row from left to right sitting: N.N., N.N., Berta Bornstein, Melitta Sperling, Dora Hartmann, Mary O’Neill Hawkins, Anna Maenchen, Jenny Waelder, Grete L. Bibring, Annie Reich, Christine Olden, Margaret S. Mahler, Phyllis Greenace, Emmy Sylvester, Annie Angel-Katan, Rosetta Hurwitz

Lowest row from left to right: Margaret Ribble, Lydia Dawes, Marian Putnam, Dorothy Burlingham, Elisabeth Geleerd, Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Beata Rank, Helene Deutsch, Anna Freud, N.N., Mc Cormick, N.N., N.N., Editha Sterba, Julia Deming, Salomea Isakower

In memoriam

All WPV members residing in Vienna managed to leave the country after the »Anschluss.« They – the survivors – had to mourn the loss of family and friends murdered in the Shoah from a distance.

Four WPV members, however, lost their lives during the war years: Rosa Walk, who emigrated from Vienna to Paris, and Ernst Paul Hoffmann, who was in Antwerp at the time of the »Anschluss,« Otto Brief from Prague, and Nikola Sugar from Subotica. They were interned and murdered or died as a consequence of deportation.

Ernst Paul Hoffmann

Ernst Paul Hoffmann was born in Radautz/Rădăuți in today’s Romania. After graduating from school in 1909, he enrolled as a student at the medical faculty in Vienna. In 1914, he completed his medical studies, in 1922, he began a training analysis with Paul Federn and, in 1926, he became an associate member of the WPV.

At the beginning of March 1938, Hoffmann was in Antwerp. Taken by surprise by the invasion of German troops in Austria, he sought political asylum in Belgium. On July 15, his wife and son joined him, in November 1938, they moved to Brussels. Hoffmann approached Bettina Warburg at the Emergency Committee, but before his efforts succeeded, German troops invaded Belgium on May 10, 1940. Already in April, after the German invasion of Norway, the Belgian government had established lists of »suspect individuals« – mainly foreign emigrants – which, without any legal basis, were to be arrested in case of an attack on Belgium. Hoffmann was arrested during an analysis session in Brussels.

Over the following years, Hoffmann was interned in various French camps: from May 14 to 29, 1940, at Le Vigeant; from May 30 to October 30, 1940, at Saint-Cyprien; from October 31, 1940, to March 9, 1941, at Gurs; and from March 10, 1941, to May 19, 1942, at Les Milles. Suffering from a chronic stomach sickness and without diet or medicine, his life was in immediate danger in the internment camps. In 1942, Hoffmann got leave from the camp to see to consular matters and to have a hernia operation. His hopes that his wife and son would follow him to Marseille came to nothing. After the end of his leave, his only escape was to flee to Switzerland, where he was arrested by Swiss border police on September 27, 1942.

For a short time, Hoffmann was detained in an internment camp at Aigle in the canton of Vaud. Because of severe depression, he was moved to a clinic where he also worked as a teacher and supervisor.

On December 23, 1944, Ernst Paul Hoffmann died in a hospital in Basle from complications after surgery for a duodenal ulcer without having seen his wife and son again.

Nikola Sugar

Nikola Sugar was born in Subotica in Vojvodina, which belonged to the Hungarian half of the Habsburg empire at the time, on August 25, 1897. He studied medicine in Budapest and, after receiving his doctorate in 1923, went to Berlin for specialist training in neurology and started a training analysis with Felix Boehm. From 1925, he lived in Vienna in order to complete his psychoanalytic training. He worked at the Neurologic-Psychiatric University Clinic under Paul Schilder and became a member of the WPV.

In 1926, he returned to Subotica and opened a private practice, the first psychiatrist in the city and the first psychoanalyst in Vojvodina. In 1937, he moved to Belgrade and was among the founding members of the Psychoanalytic Society of Serbia.

After the German attack on the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in April 1941, Sugar returned to Subotica, which was occupied by Hungarian troops. Right from the start of the occupation, the Jewish population was arrested and forced into improvised ghettos. From April 1944, the Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau; some of them were taken to nearby places under German occupation to serve as forced labor. Sugar was first deported to Szeged in southern Hungary and from there to Groß-Siegharts in Lower Austria. Between July 1944 and March 1945, a forced labor camp for around 250 Jews, women and men, was established there; the prisoners had to move earth or work for the Siemens-Schuckert plant. Sugar acted as a doctor for the agricultural workforce and also organized courses in Russian. As a »rebel element,« he was deported to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in mid-September 1944, where he worked in the hospital. In April 1944, he was brought to Theresienstadt concentration camp with 6,800 prisoners from Bergen-Belsen.

The circumstances of Nikola Sugar’s death remain unclear. His official date of death is given as May 15, 1945 – after the end of World War II.

Otto Brief

Otto Brief was born in the Moravian village of Znorow/ Vnorovy in today’s Czech Republic on December 31, 1891. From 1911, he was a registered student of medicine in
Vienna; on March 5, 1928, his move to Olmütz/Olomouc is recorded. Together with his wife Marie, a kindergarten educator, he was one of the co-founders of the Prague
working group of the WPV, which was headed, among others, by Steff Bornstein-Windholzova and Anni Reich. In 1935, Otto Fenichel joined after arriving from Oslo.

On May 26, 1939, Brief was arrested by the Gestapo in Prague. »Reason for arrest: communist views. Protective custody ordered by the State Police, Prague, on May 26,
1939.« After some months of arrest in Prague, Brief was transferred to Hof in Bavaria, where he was issued withprisoner number 2423. His record now said: »Protective
custody, political, Jew.« Only three days later, he was transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where his prisoner number was 14892/10151. Ten months later,
on September 5, 1940, he was transferred to Dachau concentration camp, prisoner number 17847. On July 12, 1941, Brief was transferred once more, this time to Buchenwald concentration camp, prisoner number 8680. Finally, he was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp on October 19, 1941, prisoner number 68378. He died there in December 1942. The cause of his death is unknown.

The frequent transfers can probably be explained by the efforts of the international psychoanalytic community to obtain Otto Brief’s release from the concentration camp. The substantial sum of 1,700 US Dollars (today approx. 30,000 Euros) was raised for this purpose, amongst others, by psychoanalysts Hanns Sachs and Max Eitingon. But the National Socialist authorities failed to keep their promises in the matter. On the occasion of Brief’s transfer to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, the camp administration sent Otto Brief’s clothes to his wife in order to suggest he was already dead. Only later, they were forced to admit he was still alive.

Rosa Walk

Rosa Walk (née Cilcer) was born in the at the time Hungarian city of Marmaroschsiget/Sighetu Marmației in today’s Rumania on April 30, 1893. After graduating from a girls’ grammar school in Budapest in December 1919, she began studying medicine in Frankfurt am Main. In 1924, she moved to Vienna, where she received her doctorate in 1928. In the same year, she applied to the WPV for a free training analysis. In 1933, she became an associate member of the WPV and opened a private psychoanalytic practice.

On June 17, 1938, the Viennese registration office recorded her notice of departure, and on June 20, Walk was present at a session of the Société psychanalytique de Paris. During the following management meeting, she applied for admission into the Paris society.

At the beginning of autumn 1939, former Austrian as well as German citizens were classified as »ressortissants ennemis« – enemy aliens who constituted a danger to national security – by the French authorities, and in 1939 and 1940, they were interned. In summer 1940, National Socialism ultimately caught up with the German-speaking migrants in France: for more than 2,500 people from former Austria, the exile in France, which they had believed to offer a safe haven, proved to be a dead end that directly led to the National Socialist concentration and extermination camps.

It seems that with the help of Marie Bonaparte, Walk initially successfully evaded internment. But in 1942, she was arrested by the Gestapo – probably in Southern France. The circumstances of her death are not entirely clear. On the one hand, people claimed she committed suicide after her arrest; on the other hand, her name is recorded on a deportation list according to which she was deported to Auschwitz from Drancy on convoy no. 27 on September 2, 1942, and murdered there.

The biographies of the escaped psychoanalysts are available as PDF files.

20-page list with names of WPV members and candidates from the archives of the British Psychoanalytical Society, with handwritten entries, mostly by Ernest Jones. Eva Rosenfeld, who had emigrated from Berlin to London in 1936 and volunteered as a secretary for the »Austrian Fund« founded by Jones in 1938, also maintained the list.
The transcriptions of the different list entries were made by the members of the »Working Group on the History of Psychoanalysis« Source: Archives of the British Psychoanalytical Society, London

See the escape routes of the psychoanalysts portrayed in the exhibition

“To my own amazement, any news from Vienna disturbs me much more than I would have thought possible. One never come to terms with a part of one’s own life in the way one would have thought. I ought to know this better than others.”

Anna Freud to Harry Freud, 1945