Hitler, Freud, and "The Feminine Principle"

A trip to Vienna in 1986

When Hitler planned to eradicate Jews from existence, he also thought he was wiping out "the feminine principle." He thought Jews embodied “the feminine principle” and that “the feminine principle” was a really bad thing you’d be justified in destroying to protect “the masculine principle” from contamination. Read on, if you would like to know more about the marriage of anti-Semitism and misogyny in this excerpt from a long piece I wrote about Vienna for the Village Voice in 1986.

The Revenge of the Unrepressed (again)

In 1986, I visited Vienna during the campaign of Kurt Waldheim, a former Nazi, who was running for President of Austria. While I was in the city, I spoke to Jews and feminists who lived there. In the piece I wrote, I described a visit to Freud’s house as well as a huge museum exhibition called “Vienna 1900” that I saw in Paris and that later came to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Why revisit this piece now—a piece that centers on anti-Semitism in Europe? I don’t want to appear to be propping up in any way Israel’s militarism and bombing of Gaza. That’s just it. I think this piece is timely because it looks at how misogyny was attached to the anti-Semitism that fueled Nazism—the way Jews were considered in all sorts of ideological and intellectual frameworks “a feminine” race that needed to be eliminated.

This history sheds light, I think, on the hyper macho, militarist stance Israel has assumed, reactively, since its establishment in 1948. It sheds light, I think, on what can happen in the minds of male humans and in the policies of the countries they come to rule—including in the minds of Putin and Trump—when they have been shamed as girly-men early in their understandings of being men. That is, when they are taught that “the masculine principle” is the opposite of “the feminine principle,” neither of which is a real thing. What is real is the deadly power of these ideas expressed in politics and wars. We are all being held hostage by a group of six-year-old, school-yard bullies who believe in the deepest recesses of their hearts that real men prove they are real men by showing they have power.

Freud on the young side.

In 1986, I traveled to Vienna with Gardner Leaver, who was an artist, at the same time that Kurt Waldheim was running for president of Austria. Waldheim would win in July 1986, and he would serve as president until 1992. During his campaign, the World Jewish Congress publicized its findings about Waldheim’s Nazi past. Waldheim had omitted from the vita he sent to the UN (where he served two terms as the fourth secretary-general from 1972 to 1981) of his three years of enthusiastic service under General Alexander Löhr, who was executed for war crimes in 1946. There was evidence that Waldheim had aided in the deportation of thousands of Greek Jews, most of whom were gassed at Auschwitz—or at least had closed his eyes to the action, since it happened right in front of him—and that he’d passed orders for the torture of hostages and the murder of Yugoslav civilians who were resisting German occupation.

After these findings were publicized, Waldheim leapt ahead in the polls against his opponent, Socialist Kurt Steyrer. The return of the unrepressed—it’s hard not to think in the city where Freud formulated his ideas about the unconscious and the way consciousness, once established, doesn’t stay out in the open but sinks back into the swill of forgetting, again and again.

Gardner and I had planned to see art and architecture, but being a Jew in a place where a Nazi was rising to power, I spent time on our visit searching for Jews and feminists to talk to.

On the corner of Seitengasse and Judengasse, across the street from a kosher restaurant and the large central synagogue—the only one left in Vienna—a police guard stands holding a machine gun, for the area is a target for terrorists. It’s also the center for the sweetly retro bohemianism stamped by shops selling scented candles, army-surplus clothing, and shirts splashed with flowers. It’s where I met a young man named Erwin, who produced short documentaries about Vienna’s Jews. He sketched out a history for me.

Before World War II, approximately 200,000 Jews had lived in Vienna, while only 600 were left following the war. The rest either escaped or were sent to concentration camps. Some of the 15,000 Jews who live in Vienna now [remember, I’m reporting this in 1986] were born there, fled, and then returned. Among them are Erwin’s parents, who went to New York in 1939 and came back to Vienna in 1962. Other Jews—mostly Socialists and Communists—left Russia during the Stalin purges, or they left Hungary in 1956, or Poland in 1967. Some are Israeli, others recent Russian émigrés. About half the Jews in Vienna belong to the Jewish Community, a body of Jews registered with the Austrian government, with its own political parties and officials. The average age of members of this community is 69. Each month, 20 die and three are born.

Erwin, the youngest of six brothers—and the only one born in Austria, in 1965—was also the only member of his family active in the Jewish Community. He’d seen the film Stranger Than Paradise (1984), by Jim Jarmusch, three times. In it, a young woman from Hungary pinballs across America via haphazard meetings with strangers, and our encounter, Erwin thought, had a similar flavor. I asked him why he aligned himself with a more-or-less separatist group, a kind of “little Israel” inside Austria. He turned his palms up and looked at me, as if my not understanding was a naïve joke. He said, “You go to a bar mitzvah, and afterward an old grandmother will take out a shopping bag and start collecting food. No Austrian woman would ever do that. She’d be too embarrassed. There are movies at the synagogue, and the men stand up and shout at the screen. They yell. They’re unruly. They show their emotions. This is what I like.”

I said, “They’re peasants with no manners.” He said, “Yes,” smiling. “You show your emotions too. You just did.” I asked why he felt a need to participate in the religion as well as these cultural forms. Then the Waldheim candidacy came up.

He said, “Here the common slang for a cigarette butt is Jew.” His voice was soft and matter-of-fact. “I see posters of Kurt Steyrer with Jewish stars marked on them. This goes to my heart, ya? On television, Alois Moser, the leader of the People’s Party, said, ‘This is a time when all good Austrians should vote for Waldheim, and so should our Jewish citizens.’ In German, this is the equivalent of calling Austrians one class of citizens and Jews our other citizens—that goes right through me. They are thinking, just as they did before the war: the Jews are a powerful people; they control public opinion; we’re not going to let them push us around—while really the World Jewish Congress is this little organization with no power at all.”

It had been one thing for me to read about European anti-Semitism, colored by race theory. Feeling it in your body was another experience. During the presidential campaign, Waldheim was repeatedly presented as an honorable public servant unjustly maligned by “Herr Singer, Herr Steinberg, Herr Bronfman and the World Jewish Congress—anti-Semitism was being stoked at the same time its existence in the past and present was being denied. [Isn’t this always the way with defense and denial—a half-conscious and half-unconscious misplacement of the thing that is driving you nuts and that everyone but you can see?] 

As I talked to people in Vienna, I listened to generalizations about Jews, said with a smile, such as “You Jews have such a remarkable habit of banding together.” I heard people describe Jews as a different race, not viciously, rather as though stating an obvious fact. I met Jews not affiliated with the Jewish Community, among them anti-Zionists. Their identity as Jews, like mine, came down to being against anti-Semitism. But in Austria, during the Waldheim campaign, it wasn’t possible to be a Jew, for or against anything in an abstract way. The climate forced emphasis on the adjective “Jewish,” and that word, at the very least, meant disturbance in the field.

In my conversations, it was easy to distinguish Jews from non-Jews by the way they responded to the topic of Waldheim. The Jews I met grew sad and forlorn. They sighed. Their faces if not their words said, “What can you expect? Look where we are.” Non-Jews became animated, whether or not they were for Waldheim. In every encounter, the word “Jewish” was enough to prompt quick smiles, lips drawn tight, darting eyes, responses that said that although, a moment before, I’d struck them as an ordinary person, now there was something marking me as other.

Self-portrait of Oskar Kokoschka

In Vienna, I did not enter the synagogue. Instead, I went to Freud’s house. Freud and his family had lived at Berggasse 19 from 1891 to 1938. He saw his patients there and developed all of his theories there. The rooms are quite bare—most of the furniture, including the famous couch, is in London—but mounted on the walls of his office and consulting room are publications he wrote and read and small objects: pens, an eyeglass case, and pictures of intimates. Lining the walls, too, are blowups of the famous Engleman photographs, showing the rooms as they were in Freud’s day with their beautiful Asian rugs and clutter of small classical antiquities. Below the windows lies the tranquil garden many patients described.

On one wall was a newspaper photograph of Freud as an old man of 82, arriving in London in 1938, shortly after the Nazis ransacked his apartment. His mouth is slightly slack, and cancer of the jaw, which would kill him a year later, is on his face. In most photographs, he meets the camera’s eye with wry, almost cocky confidence, but here he looks befuddled, fearful, and childish.

The expression reminded me of my father’s face during his last days in the hospital. Before being diagnosed with liver cancer, my father had moved in the world seeming relaxed, a citizen of the city. In the stories he told, he was already always a man, even as a boy of 14, on the road selling ladies’ dresses and lingerie. He was always a man with a broad-brimmed hat. In the hospital, his fear was a shock. It was a shock to see fragility that had always been there but inside.

Freud’s ideas were mostly disliked by his Austrian contemporaries, and they still are in Austria. Only in recent years has psychoanalysis been taught in the University of Vienna, I’d learned. Surrounded by Freud’s books, letters, and honors, I saw the seriousness of his life, this man who was candid about himself and astonishingly free inside his imagination. I recalled his bold, fanciful leaps as a storyteller, the way, especially in the case histories, he subtly alternates dramatic narrative and analysis, builds suspense, moves in and out of points of view and moments in time.

In 1895, two years before Freud underwent his self-analysis and began formulating his theory of repression, Karl Lueger was elected mayor of Vienna on an anti-Semitic platform. In Freud’s era, sex was repressed and anti-Semitism was open. Today, the situation was reversed, but I could see how the principle still applied, how, in Vienna now, a place swirling with talk of Jews and Austria’s Nazi past, Jews stood for sex—in that they stood for everything in which desire and loathing were knotted together with primitive, panicked heat.

Freud had lacked a Viennese coterie for a long while. The real first audience for his ideas were his patients, it struck me, and suddenly I began to feel like one of them. Suddenly, too, all the sympathy and respect I’d been feeling for Freud drained from my heart. Most of the early adventurers in the talk cure were women, and I imagined them squirming on the couch, clutching their aching stomach, spilling their painful secrets beneath their doctor’s superior gaze. I could feel their unhappiness lingering in the room.

Who was in a better position than Freud to assess the damages to women of misogynist culture? No one. He was on the brink of doing this, but he recoiled. Instead of analyzing the way social views produced human misery, Freud gathered the disturbances he observed in his female patients and turned them into a description of woman’s nature and biological destiny. Having created this figure—Woman—in his mind, he added “penis envy” to the mix. To explain why women longed for sex and relentlessly fantasized about it, he said they needed a penis for a sense of completion.

The Freud that came to mind now was a bulldog, snapping at Dora’s heels, a windbag slurring feminists and females that achieved things as freaks of nature—apes in evening clothes, the identical images of otherness anti-Semites ascribed to Jews. It was always appalling to recall that Freud, our archaeologist of repression, was unable to identify his own misogyny. In Vienna, it hit home with special force since misogyny and anti-Semitism were so often twinned in the culture’s racist ideology.

A line of thought in which “the female principle” was equated with irrationality (or sex, or fantasy, or debased animality) extended from Nietzsche and Schopenhauer to the widely influential Viennese theoretician Otto Weininger. Weininger believed that everything destructive in history derived from the feminine principle and that Jewish culture, above all others, embodied it. He presented these view in Sex and Character, in 1903, and the same year committed suicide (in the house where Beethoven had died!). A Jew, Weininger insisted he couldn’t overcome his nature. (Boo-hoo.)

He had a strong impact on brilliant, mercurial Karl Kraus (also a Jew), the foremost cultural critic of his day, as author as author/publisher of Vienna’s gadfly journal Die Fackel (The Torch), which appeared biweekly between 1899 and 1936. To Kraus, “the man has sexual urges, the woman is sexuality itself. Woman is emotion, irrationality—she only appears to be of the same race as the man,” summarized Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin in Wittgenstein’s Vienna (1973).

Freud was much taken with Weininger too—as was Hitler. During his twenties, Hitler lived in Vienna as an aspiring artist. Feeling himself inadequate and rejected, he roamed the streets, and he read, and he absorbed the city’s cultural life—at once immersing himself in an art-world heavily influenced by Jews, and also absorbing theories about the “race” of Jews he was growing to despise.

Hitler, who clung to fantasy, hated Jews and hated women, and he lumped them together. Kraus claimed to love “the feminine principle,” although he didn’t like Jews (he converted), and he hated psychoanalysis for dissecting fantasy. Feud discounted Weininger’s anti-Semitism but took seriously his views on female character. Four men with so many disputes: Freud, Weininger, Hitler, and Kraus, could nonetheless all agree on one thing: women!

Moving toward the door of Freud’s house, I yelled at him, “If you could feel how Jews were distorted, and you saw Jews compared to women, why couldn’t you see that women were also distorted?”

Freud said, “I questioned that Jews were like women. I never questioned that women were ineluctably vile.”

I said, “Why not?”

He said, “Because that, my dear, is the essence of repression.”

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