Jane suggested that I write about Freud’s possible take on the Holocaust. Exemplary idea! So I came up with the title you see above. I have not come up with a story. The self-fantasy is that it would make an avant garde or modernistic short story but the reality is that I may lack the craft to do so. I tried to jot down some thoughts about the story to be, if that. I thought of his cases — Dora, the Wolfman; I thought of his colleagues, Adler, Rank, Jung, Brill, Abraham, Ferenci: the concepts of transference and counter-transference, the repetition compulsion, dream contents, dream distortion, condensation, overdetermination, symbolism and all the rest; I considered the books he wrote, especially Totem and Taboo, Civilization and Its Discontents, Moses and Monotheism. All that he had done crossed my mind. As great as Darwin and Einstein, he entered the world of the unconscious like a conquistadore — he once compared his studies and his intent to that of the Spanish conquerors.
Freud lost his sisters to Auschwitz, I believe. And I tried to imagine what a mind like his might make of the railroad station he might have been dropped off at, facing Mengele and German dogs, and being selected. I imagined what it might be like for a sondercommando to remove his jaw prosthesis that smelled so terribly his favorite dogs would leave the room and his faithful Anna would remove it. Here is the kernel of a story that drives me to distraction because I am frozen at the very beginning What would Freud make of camp life? What would he make of mankind as he saw arbeit und frei? The opening word for the story that I cannot write at this point — not even an awkward rough draft — is “So!”
In that word may be the entire story. I wonder if I should just have the title of the story and then write “So!” from the mouth of Freud. A one word story. In that word and the exclamation point may be a summation of everying. “Why!” doesn’t do it for me. For there is no why in Auschwitz. Never was. “So”! comes after the act, not before it. “How” is irrelevant, just scheduling trains, building crematoria, organizing, ruling, digging trenches, using Zyklon B gas. And then my mind took flight: Suppose I just listed five names, to wit: Einstein, Faulkner, Proust, Joyce, Socrates; and imagine I gave each creative giant a one word comment or assessment ab0ut Auschwitz.
I give you Proust: “Remember!” Joyce: “Bloom!” Faulkner: “Past!” Einstein: “Time”! Socrates: “Unexamined”! Of course, I have failed here just as I have failed to get at Freud in Auschwitz. I may very well give up trying. But the idea of crawling behind Freud’s eyes and seeing the world and this horrific event in his mind’s eye intrigues me.
I don’t think the task is unimaginable but terrifically difficult to accomplish. The only way it can be accomplished, perhaps, is to turn it into a fantasy so that the impossible becomes the norm. And what can I attain with an atheistic and stoic Jew seeing the attempted eradication of his people? Here words should fail everyone. Kane said Rosebud on his death bed, summing up his life in the remarkable Freudian symbol of the sleigh so overdetermined by a multiplicity of meanings that Freud would have had a field day with it. I wonder what Freud’s last mental memory trace flashed in his mind after being given that final does of morphine, upon his request, from his family physician. — Was it nothing? Was it something irrelevant? Well, let me grandiosely try a few words that come to my mind as I try to creep into his last thoughts: Anna…Martin, his son…the death of his daughter…Breuer…Fleiss…his elementary school in Moravia…the cover of his The Interpretation of Dreams… or one of his favorite Greco-Roman statuettes that had strewn his office…Better yet, he remembers for a moment how he stood before Michelangelo’s statue of Moses in Rome and first began to contemplate his essay about it which would create psychoanalytic art history.
Does Freud at the Auschwitz station raise his hands to the sky like a patriarchal prophet, this man who took only aspirin for his cancer pains, and declare to a god who does not exist and therefore cannot hear, that the choice will be his to make. Walking into the “showers” stripped of all clothes, his whitish beard, his cane gone, his prosthesis to become a sondercommando’s “find,” he stands stoically straight as best a man of his age can, and says to all those around him: “Work and love; that is all there is. I hope you have had at least one of these in your time. If not, I am with you now, a friend of mankind.”
“So’!
Should my story begin with “So”! and end with with the last paragraph. Is this enough for Freud in Auschwitz?”
I await your responses.
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