Exodus June 1938

Poor papa with his hagadah book, reading backwards with his finger to me.
Pessach. Next year in Jerusalem. Dear, O dear! All that long business about that
brought us out of the land of Egypt and into the house of bondage Alleluia.
Shema Israel Adonai Elohenu. No, that’s the other. Then the twelve brothers,
Jacob’s sons. And then the lamb and the cat and the dog and the stick and the
water and the butcher. And then the angel of death kills the butcher and he kills
the ox and the dog kills the cat. Sounds a bit silly till you come to look into it well.
Justice it means but it’s everybody eating everyone else. That’s what life is after all.

James Joyce, Ulysses.

Go, read in my Book that I have written and there will burst open for you the
wellsprings of understanding, knowledge, and wisdom. Behold, it is the Book of
Books, from which sages have excavated and lawmakers learned knowledge and
judgement. A vision of the Almighty did you see; you heard and strove to do, and
you soared on the wings of the Spirit. Since then the book has been stored like the
fragments of the tablets in an ark with me.

Inscription from Jakob Freud to his son Sigmund, accompanying the gift of the
family Bible.

I have often felt as though I inherited all the obstinacy and all the passions of our
ancestors when they defended their temple, as though I could throw away my life
with joy for a great moment.

Sigmund Freud, Letter to his fiancée.

In his 1937 essay “Constructions in Analysis,” Sigmund Freud related King

Tutankhamun’s well-preserved Egyptian tomb to his psychoanalytic practice. Upon
closer inspection, it appears that Freud’s office floor plan nearly matches Egyptian
18th Dynasty tomb floor plans, including that of King Tutankhamun. In the tomb
 and office, the space that held the body was composed of conjoining, externally sealed
off rooms. Representations of essential Egyptian tomb elements and furniture were also
included inside Freud’s enclosed, tomb-like office.

Julia K. Schroeder, The Active Room: Freud’s Office and the Egyptian Tomb.

On March 13, 1938, the executive committee of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society
met for the last time; it called on members of the group to flee Austria, which German
troops had entered the day before. According to biographer Ernest Jones, Freud opened
his remarks by noting how, after the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D., Rabbi
Yochanan Ben Zakkai received permission from the Romans to open a Torah study
center in Yavneh. The Jews were about to embark on a similar course, but they were
used to persecution, Freud noted.

David Bargal and Aner Govrin, How Freud Almost Fell Victim to
Repression and Denial.

I must to England; you know that?

William Shakespeare, Hamlet.

Elderly Sigmund Freud, in this moment an overwrought figure

playing with his watch chain—nagging unease crowding around
him—his face expressive of strong passion, mixed, perhaps, with
bitter grief, his right hand tightly grasping the Wiener Zeitung, a
daily chronicle of Nazi outrages and tribally irreducible
persecutions, the long fingers of his left hand stroking his
bearded chin, ponders the preparations for the flight from
Vienna with his wife and daughter (and the three brothers,
Jakob’s grandsons), exchanging the sinister shadows of mundane-
bondage-gone-wrong in Nazi-occupied Austria for refugee status
in England (to, as he put it, “die in freedom”), where, in the
coming fifteen months, “between one June and another
September,” extremely ill, the irascibly proud but cynically
disillusioned Freud, will live out the year he still has to live, an
exile, alone in an alien culture, yet, at this terminal juncture in
Nazi-plague-ridden Austria, awaiting my arrival seeking to capture
with my camera a visual record of Berggasse 19, the gray-bearded
old man’s place of residence, where, penetrating the mind’s
psychic enigmas, Freud’s pioneering non-scientific but exact art of
psychoanalysis came into being, in Vienna’s Alsergrund District,
where now, in his cigar-fetid study, plumbing the depths of the
past, diving deep into his childhood and adolescence, reflecting
on his early career, pursued with defiance and passion,
summoning both the tranquil satisfaction and time-lulled pain of
a lifelong chase after a great moment in history—also, all the
mistakes and misconceptions—Freud retrospected on a vast
concourse of mental images during his final interval in Vienna, as
if by an innate compulsion to reflect on his own far-flung
reflections as the “slave of an unknown internal power,” recalling
scenes from his university days and describing them vividly to his
daughter Anna and genially musing on the ultimately ill-starred
friendship with his one-time secret sharer and erstwhile
confidant, Wilhelm Fliess (was Fliess still alive, the friend he
hadn’t seen in so many years?), Freud’s daunted brain beset with
memories from the past, both fallible and firm, haunted by their
presence . . . seated in an amply upholstered chair in his Egyptian
tomb-like office (a routine-workplace-cum-metaphysical-space
where, like the unconscious, time does not follow its normal
logic), our patriarch of recent mention, driven by irresistible
curiosity, unseals and peruses a bundle of letters bound by a
hemp string—correspondence from Fliess dating back to the late
1890s, the highpoint of their association—and atop the stack rests
a missive from Freud to Fliess never dispatched, which, by a trick
of fate didn’t wind up chucked in the trash bin, which he opens:
Dearest Wilhelm, I am resolved to embark, at the earliest opportunity, on
foot to my beloved Salzburg, where a previous sojourn unveiled a trove of
Egyptian artifacts. They serve as poignant mementos of bygone eras and
distant lands—of Isis and Osiris, of Horus and Ammon Ra . . . with
warm regards and heartfelt appreciation for your invaluable collaboration
on what I affectionately term the Egyptian dream book . . . as he raises
his drained eyes from the unposted written page, Freud loses
himself in contemplation of the antiquities before him, consoled
by a deep pensive mood and relishing his unbroken internal
narrative, slipping into reverie—a succession of static frames
drawn from his photographic memory—recalling his father Jakob’s
aspirations that the son of his old age fulfill his father’s mandate
to do great deeds in the wider world . . . and suddenly, a discreet
knock at the door shatters his introspection, and Paula (the maid)
guides me to meet the elderly, probing-eyed and bespectacled
gentleman, rumored to be 82 years old and ailing for many years,
who, rising, with his finger to me, shakes my hand, gestures
towards the glass showcases, varnished dark brown, flanking the
entrance, each brimming with a multitude of ancient relics—
pharaonic statuettes unchanged and unchangeable like the
instinctual unconscious itself—arranged precisely in rows; every
inch of cabinet space diligently filled, and, indeed, it had been
said that Freud, on a weekly basis, would traverse the city's back
alleys to inspect the offerings of dealers who, out of reverence,
reserved choice pieces for his discerning eye, whereupon, in awe, I
stood in the company of the great man, transfixed by his singular
dignity, marveling at a room adorned with ancient treasures—as if
he were owning other cultures’ past, enthralled by their
“pastness”—a delirious daydream of shards and out-of-place
fragments from Etruscan, Assyrian and Egyptian civilizations,
each artifact a numinous portal to bygone eras, complemented by
a prodigious collection of books on obscure and occasionally
idiosyncratic subjects, showcasing Freud's Faust-like intellectual
inquest, encompassing not only texts relevant to his field but also
a rich array of literary classics by Goethe, Schiller, Mark Twain,
and Dostoyevsky, as well as an abundance of volumes devoted to
archaeology . . . Well, then! It transpired that the Jewish Professor
Freud (who now practiced psychoanalysis as a death-defying act),
amidst considerable adversity including a cockily hubristic Nazi
intrusion at his residence and—in an ostentatious display of
thuggery—the apprehension of his daughter Anna (followed by an
unpleasant ensuing scene with her tormenters in room 101 of
Gestapo headquarters), had finally secured authorization to
depart brown-shirted Vienna for bowler-hatted London, courtesy
of celebrated dignitaries and foreign diplomats, and, discovering
that the Freuds would depart in little more than a week (to realize
a subliminal wish for self-preservation), with their historic upstairs
apartment and offices—their long suites of rooms cluttered and
full of superfluous things—slated for disassembly and relocation,
we unanimously acknowledged the utmost significance, for the
annals of psychoanalysis, in painstakingly documenting, amidst
these cruelly troubled times, every facet of the birthplace of the
good doctor’s scientific discipline, foreseeing the eventual
establishment in Vienna of a Freud museum on “the day after
tomorrow,” hopefully to rekindle, in due course, memory’s fire
and to “re-assemble the pieces” and “infuse life into dead
fragments,” once our present blighted fortunes shift and the
future no longer resembles these grievously tortured days . . . and,
on that damp soon-after-the-break-of-dawn May the twentysecond
morning in 1938 (like Freud’s, my last year in Vienna), my grip
tightening on the little mottled brown leather valise crammed
with the accouterments of my photographic trade (papa’s
daguerreotype atelier their original provenance), its weight
seemingly compounding with each advancing step, accelerated by
unyielding emotional exertion, a silent burden signaling my
clandestine purpose, while my wandering mental faculties alert to
anything unusual, convinced that every passer stopping in wonder
could discern my destination—to wit, Dr. Sigmund Freud's
office—a mission diametrically opposed to the desires of the
encroaching Nazis, the recent cessation of spring rain failing to
dispel the ominous vesture of a shroud of dark clouds still
blanketing the sky, the cobblestones of Berggasse glistening with
moisture while echoing from time to time the passing whirr of a
German Army vehicle, amplifying my worry as the dimness of the
day cast doubts on the adequacy of natural light’s mad vagaries
for photographically capturing the tenebrosity of the Freud
Apartment’s interior, with flash and floodlights ruled out under
the constant surveillance of the Gestapo, heightening my
mounting sense of trepidation . . . but ultimately, there were no
hindrances, ample light at my disposal, and meticulous care
exerted throughout the process; on the first night within my
darkroom, I crafted a series of diminutive proof prints—the
importance of creative invention uppermost in my mind—and
affixed them into an album of photographs arranged successively
in order of the flat’s layout, with the intention of presenting it to
the expectant Freud prior to his departure, thankfully, all the
images of this world-soon-to-end turned out flawlessly—images an
artist, immersed in the mystical power of the photographic
representation to defy the changes wrought by time, might have
dreamed of—instilling within me a favorable sense of confidence
that my endeavor would culminate in genuine success, prompting
me to embark upon the following day with fervor, fastidiously
executing my room-by-room agenda to thoroughly document the
capacious surroundings through photography . . . and here, upon
the wordless page as I am about to record these thoughts, I reign
supreme over the remains of memory, much as I do in the dimly
lit confines of the darkroom, orchestrating the transformation of
images imbued with the potential to awaken the hidden
significations of, in Walter Benjamin’s coinage, the “optical
unconscious” within the alchemical embrace of the developing
bath, shuffling the lives I encounter like actors in the scenes of a
play, their visages staring back at me, embodiments of
metamorphosis, of aging, of the betrayal of dreams, soon to
become specters of memory . . . and, on the second day, devoid of
anticipation or apprehension, Freud’s existence bereft of any
semblance of a future, and with an intuitive intimation of
impending cultural doom, he paced with an air of agitation, the
tufted pile of the bourgeois Persian carpet underfoot muffling the
vigor of his gait, proclaiming, via modulation to a dolorously
impassioned minor key, almost as if he were conversing with
himself, in the manner of a Hamletian soliloquy, "I have to go to
England. You know that? Well then, so be it. I am waiting, with
ever decreasing regret, for the curtain to fall for me," and, in that
moment of contemplative recollection, attuned to the potentially
consolable dark mood of my host, I realized I had the album I
had carefully prepared the preceding evening tucked away in my
valise, and retrieving it, I presented it to Freud, explaining that it
was intended as a memento for him to carry to England,
observing as he perused it methodically, page by page, and picture
by picture, his initial scrutiny gradually giving way to a broad and
genuine smile, followed by a more solemn expression as he
uttered, “My deepest thanks. This will mean much to me,”
prompting me to inquire if I might capture his likeness in a
photograph, to which he graciously consented, granting me carte
blanche to proceed as I saw fit; however, as I readied the camera,
a tinge of melancholy played upon my lips, and as he settled
before his desk, retrieving a leather folder and commencing to
write with a fountain pen upon a sizable sheet of paper, initially
assuming a rather formal posture and maintaining his gaze
towards the camera, gradually becoming so absorbed in his
ongoing writing project—continuing to be enslaved in recent
weeks and days, so I heard, like a day-laborer to the task of
preparing his book, Moses and Monotheism, about the Hebrew
prophet Moses, who led his people out of bondage to live and die
in freedom—that it seemed as though the world beyond his study
had dissolved into oblivion, frozen in that instant, disengaged
from the tumult of the times, he and I suspended in a realm of
spectral imagination, grappling against the relentless march of
time, yearning for the illusion of temporal arrest, recognizing,
albeit tacitly, that in the grand tapestry of existence, "Words are
the only things which last forever."

______________________________________
Historical material for this essay is drawn from Berggasse 19: Sigmund
Freud's Home and Offices, Vienna, 1938: The Photographs of Edmund
Engelman.