The Elixir of Immortality

by Gabi Gleichmann

  A FEW YEARS LATER during the Dreyfus trial in Paris—when a French officer of Jewish ancestry was accused of treason and sentenced to life at hard labor even though he was innocent—my grandfather’s father, the journalist Bernhard Spinoza, made the acquaintance of the Italian physician Cesare Lombroso, founder of the science of criminal anthropology. They remained in contact and exchanged letters at more or less regular intervals. Appalled by the behavior of his eldest son, Bernhard turned to Lombroso, who held the professorship of psychiatry at the University of Turin. Before long he had in hand a twelve-page letter of reply. The contents indicated that although he had never met Moricz, the Italian was convinced that the young man’s criminal tendencies could be ascribed to inherent biological characteristics, linked either to improper nutrition or to directly inherited physical defects. Lombroso referred to the most recent scientific discoveries, citing his own research, and wrote that without question, Moricz’s character was an example of the close links between genius and madness. Exactly what kind of mental aberration, however, he could not determine with precision. He therefore recommended that Signor Spinoza take his son to a psychoanalyst—Dr. Sigmund Freud in Vienna or his colleague Sándor Ferenczi in Budapest—for a complete evaluation.

  THE APPOINTMENT took place in an office on the third floor with a view over the Danube and the lovely hills of the Buda section of the city. There was a sweet smell in the waiting room that made Moricz think of the Turkish delight he used to steal from Hermann Kohn’s delicatessen. He had consented to psychoanalysis only because his father had forced him to do so. He had decided in advance that he would not trust Sándor Ferenczi for a moment.

  “If you would, gentlemen of the Spinoza family, please come in.”

  The doctor was a short man with a dark, piercing gaze through the thick lenses of his spectacles. He spoke loudly, moved in a jerky fashion, and seemed nervous.

  “Herr Spinoza, I am in the habit of reading everything that you write, and I am well aware of the significant contributions you have made as a journalist. You are a defender of justice, and you always take the side of the weak against the powerful and the authorities. I understand that you have provided your son with a proper education in his civic duties, emphasizing honesty and the virtues of honorable conduct. Despite this, the boy for some cause unknown to you is periodically overwhelmed by the desire to commit crime. Have I understood the situation correctly? That is, in fact, why you are here?”

  Bernhard was embarrassed and squirmed uncomfortably in his chair. Moricz sat there as stiff as a poker.

  “I once met Professor Lombroso in Milan, and he advised me to turn to you for help,” Bernhard explained. “My son Moricz is a fine young man; he is warm, humorous, inventive, eager to learn, and talented in many ways. But he has always found it difficult to stick to the truth. As long as he limited himself simply to lying I was quite unworried and thought he would learn how to rein in his fantasies once he got older. But he has now engaged in various serious criminal undertakings, and this has me deeply concerned. That is why I have come for the doctor’s assistance. I hope that the doctor will be able to cure him.”

  “Herr Spinoza, I must be frank. I do not believe that I am capable of curing your son. But I shall seek to understand him.”

  THE SESSIONS lasted for nine months, and Ferenczi was deeply frustrated because he got nowhere with Moricz. Many of his other patients also had odd delusions, but this case was stranger than any of the rest. The doctor had never seen a personality as split as this one. The young man appeared for his appointment three times a week, and each time it seemed that a different person was sitting on the doctor’s couch. Sometimes Moricz was silent and withdrawn, staring straight ahead. Other times he giggled constantly for the entire half hour and then thanked the psychoanalyst for his undivided attention. Other times he wept, his head on his knees, and said that he was shedding tears for his dead mother because he hadn’t been allowed to mourn for her. Often he cast about wildly through time and space and served up a cavalcade of the most incoherent and unbelievable stories about his family, alleging they had wandered around Europe since the founding of the kingdom of Portugal. He insisted that his ancestors could awaken the dead and transform impotent old men into virile bulls. He adamantly declared that one of his ancestors had lived for more than three hundred and fifty years because he had drunk seven drops of a potion that made him immortal, and another had been a wealthy maharaja in India even though he didn’t know a word of Hindi, that a third had been the cause of the French Revolution and had lost his head to the guillotine, and a fourth had discovered electricity and caused a disastrous fire that killed his seven children. One day he came to the appointment and sat there spinning a tale that his mother was a blind princess and her mother had been the best-known courtesan of Vienna’s demimonde.

  Ferenczi often scratched his head in perplexity as he sat reading over his notes late at night. At length he concluded that Moricz had spent the whole time intentionally trying to fool him with these wild fantasies. He understood that this was the young man’s way of protecting his real self. But which of these manifestations was his real self?

  Ferenczi was bewildered. He could not put his finger on whatever dark depth of the soul gave Moricz the strength to elaborate his tales and do his tricks of psychological transformation. He decided it was beyond his ability to make a complete diagnosis of that strange teenager’s psyche. He thought for a time of referring the boy to Sigmund Freud. He dismissed the notion as a terrible idea, at least for the time being, since it would be humiliating to admit defeat and thereby acknowledge his own professional shortcomings. But later, when his office was closed between Christmas and New Year’s Day, he sat in his rocking chair and reconsidered the matter. In a moment of inspiration he realized that the only hope was to assemble his personal notes and the record of Moricz’s appointments and send it all to 19 Berggasse in Vienna. Freud was never reluctant to provide psychological analyses of people he had never met. Only Freud could see through the young man, apply his stringent no-nonsense analysis, and elucidate the boy’s hidden motivations.

  I’VE BEEN WONDERING lately how Moricz could have known so much about the Spinoza family. My hypothesis is as follows.

  Shortly before Nicolas was carried off to the Conciergerie, he recalled the fate of Danton. A shudder went through him as he realized that something equally terrible could happen to him. This prompted him to exact from Chiara a vow to safeguard the historical account of the Spinoza family for their two small children and to hide Benjamin’s Elixir of Immortality somewhere secure. She had to promise not to open it and to turn it over someday to their eldest son, Gérard.

  Chiara was no Madonna, and it was obvious that God was not at the center of her life. She enjoyed drinking wine and gossiping, and the relationship in which she lived—a ménage à trois—was beyond all doubt completely at odds with the morals of the time. Nor did she have any Spinoza nearby to support her. Nevertheless, she kept her promise to Nicolas. Perhaps from loyalty; perhaps because she understood that our family was truly special.

  Our family originated in a mystery and a miracle before almost any of the European nations were created, and we’ve played a significant role in history without feeling arrogant about the secret knowledge—completely incomprehensible to humanity today—that we bore with us through the various ages and lands. None of us ever spoke of it. Not because of Moses and his prophetic warning to us on that dusty road in León to fear the wrath and terrible punishment of the Lord, warning that our lineage would be obliterated from the face of the earth if we uttered a single word of it to anyone. But because we knew—and he who possesses great knowledge has no need to speak of it. We knew and our lives were wrapped in silence—a vow of silence that we ourselves had not taken but one that we had inherited from preceding generations—and we knew that the purpose of that knowledge of ours was to make the world a better place. We were serving the future by bearing the burden of the past.r />
  After Chiara buried both of her sons, she had to start all over again. Now Jakob would receive the family history and inherit Benjamin’s book. I can vividly imagine the conversation between grandmother and grandson. She succeeded in convincing Jakob that he was an essential link in a long family chain that should never be broken, and that he had to accept as his own the family legacy that gave individual life its meaning and purpose. Because Jakob loved his grandmother more than anyone, he systematically fulfilled, without exception, all of his obligations to family tradition.

  After Jakob died, the book went to his eldest son, Bernhard. That energetic and principled journalist who lost his adored young wife never took the time to develop deep relationships with his three children. Bernhard was far too absorbed in his campaigns to save the world. He was even less able to find time to orient the next generation to those family legends he had heard as a child, for he regarded them as myths. He had no desire to deceive his sons about their family origins.

  So perhaps it’s not so surprising that Moricz managed to lay hands on detailed accounts of that past. Nothing came more naturally to him than hunting through his father’s cabinets, picking the locks of the desk drawers, and snooping through his jacket pockets in search of something worth stealing. Bernhard would have died of mortification if he’d known what his eldest son had been doing ever since he was a child.

  One day Moricz came across The Elixir of Immortality in a secret drawer in his father’s desk. He began leafing through the manuscript but was intimidated by the overwhelming weight of the many dark mysteries that filled its pages. Luckily for him, his instinct for self-preservation warned him somehow of impending danger. He returned the book to its place at once, carefully locked the compartment, and left the study. Only seconds later his father came home to retrieve from his desk some important documents he had forgotten.

  Thoughts of that book gave Moricz no rest. Driven by nagging curiosity, he returned to the study a few weeks later and took out the thick leather-bound volume. He opened it at random and read the start of chapter two: “The first Spinoza mixed life-giving herbs and the last Spinoza will let his family’s inheritance go up in smoke.”

  He understood that The Elixir of Immortality—in addition to a great deal more—provided a detailed account of the family’s early history. He was fascinated to discover that Benjamin had made a number of predictions about coming ages. He searched frenetically through the account for his own life story, for he had the feeling that it had been written more than two hundred years earlier. But he was unable to decipher the meaning of the only passage related to his own fate, because he looked through the book before the time was ripe.

  FERENCZI READ the curt response with a distinct feeling of disappointment. It surprised him that everything Freud said about Moricz was couched in vague terms and generalizations that could be applied not only to all of his own patients but to most of the Jews of central Europe, as well. The father of psychoanalysis wrote:

  Two thousand years of persecution and life in the strict isolation of the ghettos in which they were confined have created a uniquely Jewish model of behavior. It manifests itself in body language, in the powerful urge to flee, in the intensity of their conversation, their frantic activity, and the ambition to excel, all in the effort to survive. It is also seen in an almost uncontrollable impatience, extreme reactions to any stimuli interpreted as threatening, fierce outbursts of anger, the desire to contradict others, and dark, pervasive fears.

  Freud said that Moricz Spinoza displayed all of these symptoms. However, he lacked the typical Jew’s genuine curiosity about the lives of others, the characteristic sense of humor, and the ability not to take himself all too seriously. This was because like most adolescents he suffered from narcissism. The young person often has a strong need to be the center of attention and lacks empathy with others.

  Patients afflicted in this way seldom feel the need to change their behavior. Moricz Spinoza was young, however, and it was most likely that the eventual awakening of his sex drive would bring about changes for the better in his behavior.

  MANY YEARS LATER, at the Café Gerbeaud in Budapest, Ferenczi was leafing through Esti Lap—Budapest’s leading newspaper, which featured a daily serving of sensational news from all parts of the world—and he came across an extensive article describing the Nazi Party’s beer-hall coup in Munich in November 1923, published on the day that Hitler and his companions were to go on trial.

  According to the article, the attempt to overthrow the government—the so-called putsch—began when a handful of men in brown shirts and swastika armbands rushed into the popular Bürgerbräukeller and noisily interrupted a speech by the former prime minister of Bavaria. Hitler stood on a table, fired a revolver at the ceiling, shouted that the national revolution had begun, declared the ruling government abolished, and said the time had come to free Germany from the red terror. The following day he led a march to the sound of beating drums, and a mass of three thousand political supporters followed him all the way to the center of town. Many were armed with pistols; others carried flags with swastikas. That was when a police official ordered his troops to open fire against the conspirators. Shots were exchanged. The national revolution was put down in less than two hours, and twenty dead bodies lay in the streets. The coup leader was arrested and charged with high treason. Sitting in the dock were Hitler, Ludendorff, Röhm, Wagner, and several more, but Moricz Spinoza, the alleged brains behind the failed putsch, was still at large. The article reported the rumor that he had left Germany and was then in China.

  Ferenczi started in surprise at the sight of Moricz’s name. The brains behind the Nazi attempt to grab power? Escaped to China? This couldn’t be true! He read the paragraph about Moricz again. Somewhat shaken, he put the newspaper down and thought back to the curious case of the young man who had told so many tall tales and refused to face reality. Even now, he couldn’t think of Moricz without an affectionate little smile.

  Upon his return to his office Ferenczi took out the file on Moricz and reviewed the records. He glanced at some of his notes and looked at Freud’s letter again. He was miffed by the slovenly analysis. What drivel; what a pack of banal stereotypes. He remembered his disappointment at Freud’s reply and how he had not dared to be so tactless as to criticize the master in Vienna. He poured himself a glass of cognac and settled on his analyst’s couch. The facts were staring him in the face. That letter from Freud had prompted him to contact Moricz’s father to recommend discontinuing the therapy sessions. He blamed himself now for heeding Freud’s advice and concluded that his mistake arose from a professional failing; one of several unfortunate aspects of such a close collegial relationship was that it was impossible to maintain a healthy critical distance. He should have listened to Moricz more closely and steered their conversations to the boy’s relationship with his mother. The doctor told himself that perhaps additional therapy might have kept him from going so far astray in life.

  FROMBICHLER AND MORICZ were cousins. They frequented each other in Vienna in the months before the outbreak of the First World War. That was where Moricz met Frombichler’s childhood friend Adi, who at that time was still a long way from becoming the leader of the German National Socialist Party. Moricz and Adi discussed all kinds of things. Behind Frombichler’s back they also debated the Jewish question. Adi said this was the most important issue of all. Adi was never inhibited about spewing anti-Semitic comments in all directions (except when he was with Frombichler, who reacted badly to such talk). Moricz, in contrast, appreciated Adi’s caustic jokes about the Jews. Once after Moricz smiled at one of his crudely dismissive gibes at the Jews, Adi rose from his seat at the table, seized Moricz’s hand in both of his own, and declared, “Mein Bruder!”

  MORICZ AND ADI were criminal geniuses who thrived in each other’s company. They hammered out many a plan together. One of these schemes was to lay hands on the Spinoza family treasure and sell it to some noble German plutocrat
with secret Jewish roots.

  But my grandfather got there before them. He found The Elixir of Immortality among the papers his father left behind and realized immediately that the book must be kept out of the hands of his unreliable brother. He hid it. Moricz was incensed and terribly angry when he found out; he felt that he had been robbed. He insisted that because he was the firstborn son, the book was his rightful property. Frombichler agreed with him. Adi was the most disappointed of them all, for he had secret plans for it. He chewed his mustache in anger, but he did not dare tell them his real intentions. He vowed that one day he would murder the Jew Nathan Spinoza to get The Elixir of Immortality, for he believed the book would give its owner dominion over the secrets of the universe and knowledge of the ultimate mysteries of existence.

  BEFORE I RETURN to Chiara and Jakob, I need to make one thing clear: Anyone looking for historical fact or philosophical insight here should look elsewhere. I make no claim to accuracy or insight. I have one purpose before I die, and that is simply to prevent my family from slipping into oblivion, forever forgotten. My time is short, and all too often, this wandering around in the maze of memory gives me a headache. That’s why I haven’t managed to put these stories into proper order. I just record my memories as they come. I promise no structure here, for this narrative is shaped by pure chance. Let me again emphasize that I haven’t made anything up; I’m just repeating what I heard.

  CHIARA AND JAKOB and family arrived in Vienna in early December after two years in Regensburg with Prince Ludwig von Thurn und Taxis, a longtime devotee of the fine art of extravagant living who had gotten himself into dire financial straits. Jakob had put the prince’s finances in order by selling off certain postal routes in the Habsburg dominions that the prince’s ancestors had run for hundreds of years. This astute move established the foundation of the European postal system of our own day. A few years later Jakob again gave the prince a helping hand in negotiating the agreement for the German state to take over the rest of the Thurn und Taxis courier network, in exchange for extensive grants of land. The deal made the prince the proprietor of one of the largest estates in Europe. It established Jakob’s reputation as a financial wizard and economic genius.