The second installation of my 'Postcards from Vienna' column over on the Cambridge Language Collective
This week’s postcard is sent from Berggasse 19, an unassuming apartment block in the 9th district whose address has become synonymous with the name of one of its former residents: Sigmund Freud. Behind the façade lie the rooms where Freud lived with his family and ran his practice until he was forced to flee from National Socialism in 1938. It has since been converted into the Sigmund Freud Museum and recently renovated, so you can wander around the study in which he wrote his most influential works, see where patients would hang up their coats before entering for treatment, and peer at scrawled notes of some of Freud’s most radical theories on dreams and sexuality.
Home to the founder of psychoanalysis for 47 years, Vienna is often referred to as the ‘City of Dreams’ – or at least it is in guidebooks and travel blogs; I have yet to find this label used anywhere else. Over the past two years of studying MML, Freud has been one of those names that finds its way into everything from critical theory seminars to German literature supervisions, often with little regard for how relevant or useful ‘looking at something through a Freudian lens’ might be. It is therefore hardly surprising that visiting the Freud Museum was on my ever-expanding list of things to do during my time here in Vienna. In true Year Abroad 2020/21 fashion however, Austria kept entering lockdown every time I planned to visit, and so the museum remained tantalisingly close – just ten minutes away from me – and closed. In the most meta-Freudian experience I’ve had to date, I even had a dream in which I was going round the exhibitions in the Freud Museum, despite having no idea what the place actually looked like in real life. It is thus with great relief that I’m able to report that on a rainy afternoon last week, I finally pushed open the door of Berggasse 19.
If I were to keep up with the descriptive clichés, I would write that I felt like I stepped back in time as I entered Freud’s former apartment, but that would simply be untrue. Apart from one reconstructed salon and a couple of pegs still attached to the wall of the garderobe, it would have been hard to differentiate the place from any other contemporary museum. Blank white walls, sleek paragraphs written in a font more stylish than legible, and an assortment of books and manuscripts. If you were hoping to see the famous psychoanalytic couch on which patients reclined, Freud’s extensive collection of antiquities, or even his personal library containing thousands of books, you’d be disappointed – all of Freud’s furniture and household effects were brought with the family to Hampstead when they emigrated to London in 1938. What is left in Vienna is empty space, blank gaps to be filled by the imagination, and with the aid of the black-and-white photographs taken by Edmund Engelman. Engelman entered the apartment when it was already under Gestapo surveillance, risking his own life to carry out his assignment. In his memoirs he writes, ‘I wanted to see things the way Freud saw them, with his own eyes, during the long hours of his treatment sessions and as he sat writing.’ Persecuted for being a Jew, Engelman emigrated to the United States in 1939.
What can we learn from empty spaces? What did I learn from simply standing in the room which Freud and his wife, Martha, slept in? I was baffled by the fact that their bedroom had four doors leading to adjoining rooms. Given that just one door not being shut properly is enough to trouble my sleep, I wonder whether having four bedroom doors might go some way in explaining Freud’s fascination with peculiar dreams. I suppose physically being in his former apartment is meant to help the visitor (Freudian) slip into his shoes (if you’ll excuse the pun) or help us come closer to understanding how he lived and thought each day. Yet looking out onto the courtyard, where chestnut trees once grew, I realised that trying to get inside Freud’s head was a futile, perhaps even impossible, task – to say that he was at times utterly bonkers would be an understatement.
Freud was an eccentric character, and the collection of biographical facts and items on show highlights his eclectic personal life, normally resigned to the footnotes of his works. A brown leather bag stamped with his initials a reminder of his years working as a physician in the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, sheaths of notepaper remnants of a correspondence with intellectuals and authors which totalled more than 20 000 letters over the course of his lifetime.
No matter how difficult to follow or questionable Freud’s theories might seem, or how uncanny, for want of a better word, my afternoon at an empty Freud Museum turned out to be (an awkward encounter with the volunteer certainly didn’t help, though I suppose those who choose the Freud Museum out of all the museums in Vienna are inevitably going to be a little quirky), the influence of Freud across academic disciplines and on contemporary culture is immeasurable. I’ll sign off this postcard with the words of Stefan Zweig, spoken at the interment of Freud, thousands of miles away from Berggasse 19, at Golders Green Crematorium on 26th September 1939:
„Jeder von uns dächte, urteilte, fühlte enger, unfreier, ungerechter ohne sein uns Vorausdenken, ohne jenen mächtigen Antrieb nach innen, den er uns gegeben.“
“Each of us would think, judge, feel, more narrowly, less freely, less justly without his thinking ahead of us, without this powerful inward stimulus he has given us."