Freud's Free Clinics

1933–1938: TERMINATION
swept down on 7 Berggasse, destroyed the Ambulatorium’s clinical records,
looted all the books, and draped 19 Berggasse with a swastika. “The Ambulatorium,
Bibliothek . . . the Verlag and everything else ha[s] been confiscated,“
Jones wrote to Edith Jackson at the end of March. 3 The Nazis had moved into
Vienna swiftly. Whatever resistance the vanquished Social Democrats had
planned folded fast, and the Wehrmacht laid waste to much of the city not only
unimpeded but with ample enthusiasm from anti-Semitic Viennese citizens in
a jubilant frame of mind. An early April plebiscite affirmed their wishes.
Because Müller-Braunschweig believed the recent annexation of Austria
would entitle him to superintend all of Freud’s psychoanalytic activity, a post
even more prestigious than Göring’s in Berlin, he wasted little time in starting
to aryanise the Ambulatorium. “As trustee of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Association
and Clinic,” he wrote to the new district leader Josef Bürckel, Hitler’s
representative for the plebiscite in Austria, “I urge the authorization, as rapidly
as possible, of reform[s]. Delay would harm not only the patients of the
Polyclinic, but also financing of the institutions which is based essentially on
the fees of the patients of the Polyclinic and on income from lectures and
training. Heil Hitler.” 4 As acting head of the Nazi party in Vienna (and Heinrich
Himmler’s future chief of staff), Bürckel had been assigned the task of integrating
Austria politically, economically, and culturally into the German Reich.
Tall and blonde, with smooth skin and soft, slightly droopy eyes, Bürckel
was, by Nazi standards, the purist kind of Aryan man. Josef Bürckel understood
that Nazi “reform” meant expelling all Jews and replacing Freudian psychoanalysis
with an alternative, civic-minded psychotherapy. Unfortunately
for him and Müller-Braunschweig, most Jewish analysts were already gone
and the few Gentiles who remained, like Richard Sterba, were on their way.
The Nazi’s effort to aryanize the Ambulatorium was already seen as precarious
because, unlike Berlin, the psychoanalysts had already decided to fold and
to relocate wherever Freud moved. As for the publishing company, Müller-
Braunschweig figured on issuing a new journal “on a purely Aryan basis, and
in the spirit of the cultural and political guidelines in force . . . a German journal
for psychoanalysis, firmly grounded in the soil of the Third Reich.” 5 This
effort failed as well. Within a month Müller-Braunschweig admitted defeat
and turned over his brief trusteeship of the Vienna society to the general medical
directorship (Landesärzteführer) for Germany-Austria. He did not withdraw
from his post, however, without asking the new government to repay his
expenses “after the release of liquid assets, at present blocked, of the former
Vienna Psychoanalytical Association and the Vienna Psychoanalytical Clinic.
Heil Hitler.” 6
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