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lini.130 At the father’s request, Freud sent the Fascist leader a copy of his book Why War?, inscribed “From an old man who greets in the Ruler the Hero of Culture.”131
Meanwhile, back in Vienna, the political situation continued to get worse. Freud said he was worried about offending Catholic authority in Austria with his forthcoming Moses and Monotheism, 132 although in all the years Freud lived in Vienna, no official complaint or harassment was ever reported. (The ban in Italy, if Catholic in origin, was probably due to the small number of Catholic families that controlled much of publishing. Some influential Church official might only have had to make a critical comment to a member of his publishing family, and “somehow” the journal would not get published.133) Certainly, for Freud to have appealed for help from a Fascist leader has a certain irony to it. After all, in 1936, Mussolini signed a pact with Hitler.134 Freud may have said he did not wish to offend the Church in Austria, but there is no evidence that he ever deviated from writing and publishing exactly what he wished. Certain deep parts of Freud (his Oedipal and Anti-Christ psychology) by this time were bitterly hostile to Catholicism—much more so than to Hitler and the Nazis. In 1937, Freud remarked to a visitor, “The Nazis? I’m not afraid of them. Help me rather to combat my true enemy…Religion, the Roman Catholic Church.”135 (This was Freud’s first expression of such intense hatred of Catholicism; however, we have seen enough evidence of this attitude to expect other expressions of this kind to turn up as more of his correspondence becomes available.) His occasionally expressed hatred of the Catholic Church contrasted with his understanding that the Church was the only power that stood between the Nazi’s and control of Austria. As he said in January 1935, “only this Catholicism protects us against Naziism.”136 Perhaps Freud was aware that in the same year, 1935, only two years after Hitler came to power in Germany, Pater Schmidt published the second edition of his Rasse und Volk (Race and People), one of the first strong attacks on the Nazi doctrine of race from a scientific point of view.137 But books never stopped Hitler. The situation got worse until, in February 1938, Freud remarked, “Will it be possible to find safety in the shelter of the Catholic Church?”138 There was no shelter anywhere, however. In March, Hitler and his forces came in and took over Austria. Before the Nazis were able to control things completely, Freud and his immediate family, with active help from friends, were able to leave very hurriedly; Freud got out on June 3.139 There was no shelter for Freud’s adversary either: “In June 1938, literally at the last hour, Father Schmidt escaped arrest by the Nazi police and was accorded a friendly reception in Switzerland as a refugee.”140 |