over, he was working closely with the one man with whom he is known to have discussed religious conversion, one must wonder. Freud is, it should be noted, on record as being the one who initiated the use of the term “conversion” in the psychological sense.200
C. F. Meyer: Poems and NovelsI conclude this chronological treatment of the religious significance of Freud’s adult life prior to 1900 by turning to his involvement in the literary culture of his time. In 1898, Fliess drew Freud’s attention to the poetry and short novels of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (1825-1898), a Swiss-German writer who is still considered one of the more important contributors to German literature in the 19th century. Following Fliess’s suggestion in 1898, Freud read a 12-line poem by Meyer, “Am Himmelstor” (“At the Gate of Heaven”).201 Shortly thereafter, he began reading widely in Meyer’s work and became something of a Meyer fan. It is informative to describe briefly those works of Meyer in which Freud had some serious involvement. Freud quoted most often from Meyer’s lengthy 1871 poem Huttens Letzte Tage (Hutten’s Last Days).202 Set in the past, like all of Meyer’s major works, the poem is centered on Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523), an historical figure well known as a soldier who fought against Rome for German political and religious freedom.203 This German Protestant knight, sick and outlawed, was provided by Zwingli (the famous Swiss Protestant theologian) with a peaceful retreat on an island in the Lake of Zurich. Here, Hutten spent his last days; he died in the summer of 1523, not long after his arrival. The poem is set in these last days. On the surface, the strongest theme of Huttens Letzte Tage is its expression of German nationalism, but it contains many other various symbolic and ambivalent currents underneath this more obvious, or manifest, meaning. Freud probably had some modest response to German nationalism, but he never quoted these parts of the poem, and it is rather obvious that the other themes were the real basis of its appeal for him. One of these themes is the portrayal of the conflict between German Reformation values and culture and those of Catholic and Renaissance Rome. In spite of the clear preference for the German side, there is still a real appreciation of the Roman world. C. F. Meyer, like Goethe and Freud, had visited Rome, and Meyer’s biographers agree that it was a decisive and positive experience for him. Other themes in this work also have what by now we can recognize as a “Freudian” character. In the first section of the poem, Hutten arrives on the island with his pen and sword. Curiously, his host on the island is a |