Saving Freud
The Rescuers Who Brought Him to Freedom
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3.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A dramatic true story about Sigmund Freud’s last-minute escape to London following the German annexation of Austria and the group of friends who made it possible.
In March 1938, German soldiers crossed the border into Austria and Hitler absorbed the country into the Third Reich. Anticipating these events, many Jews had fled Austria, but the most famous Austrian Jew remained in Vienna, where he had lived since early childhood. Sigmund Freud was eighty-one years old, ill with cancer, and still unconvinced that his life was in danger.
But several prominent people close to Freud thought otherwise, and they began a coordinated effort to persuade Freud to leave his beloved Vienna and emigrate to England. The group included a Welsh physician, Napoleon’s great-grandniece, an American ambassador, Freud’s devoted youngest daughter Anna and his personal doctor.
Saving Freud is the story of how this remarkable collection of people finally succeeded in coaxing Freud, a man who seemingly knew the human mind better than anyone else, to emerge from his deep state of denial about the looming catastrophe, allowing them to extricate him and his family from Austria so that they could settle in London. There Freud would live out the remaining sixteen months of his life in freedom.
It is “an insight-filled group portrait of the founder of psychoanalysis and his followers…Compelling reading” (The Wall Street Journal).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sigmund Freud's vibrant life in Vienna and narrow escape from the Gestapo are recounted in this entertaining history. Journalist Nagorski (1941) reveals that Freud, who was 81 years old and struggling with cancer when Nazi Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, was in deep denial of the danger he faced as a Jew and as the founder of psychoanalysis, which the Nazis deemed "Jewish pseudoscience." Nagorski chronicles Freud's modest upbringing, enrollment in the University of Vienna in 1873, swift rise to academic fame, marriage to Martha Bernays, and the intense and often toxic friendships he forged with his devotees. Though Freud's relationships with Carl Jung and Albert Einstein are discussed, the focus is on those credited with getting him out of Europe, including Welsh psychoanalyst Ernest Jones; William Bullitt, the U.S. ambassador to France and a patient of Freud's; and European socialite Marie Bonaparte. Nagorski draws vivid profiles of these and other acquaintances, shares intriguing tidbits about Freud's eccentricities, and dramatically recounts how Freud, his wife, and his daughter escaped to London. The result is an invigorating look at a lesser-known chapter of Freud's well-documented life.
