Dr. Kurth herself had ambitions to be a writer and had published short stories in Viennese magazines before she and her family were forced to flee to escape Hitler’s 1938 homecoming march into Austria. Arriving in New York, she got work first as a translator for German-speaking émigré professors at the New School for Social Research but soon became an editor at the New School’s book-publishing arm, International Universities Press, whose output was renowned in scholarly circles throughout the world. After a distinguished career there, she decided in the 1960s (in her sixties as well) to get a doctorate and become a psychotherapist. It was work she’d already demonstrated a remarkably precocious talent for in her unofficial role as analyst of Hitler’s psyche in Walter Langer’s secret OSS study of the mind of Adolf Hitler.
Dr. Kurth had been recruited by Langer in 1942 to do research and translation work, although her contribution turned out to be much more influential. And it was in Langer’s company that she made a journey up to the Bronx to interview Dr. Eduard Bloch, the Hitler family’s Jewish doctor, the man who had the only firsthand testimony about “the one-ball business.”
My own journey to interview Dr. Kurth was not an easy one to arrange. She had bouts of severe emphysema, she told me, and was concerned whether her breathing difficulties would permit her to talk. Finally, after one postponement for that reason, she called to say I should come visit her in her office. “You’ll find a woman who looks very old,” she told me in her delightful Viennese accent, “but the noodle is still working.”
The noodle proved, in fact, to be quite sharp. She received me in what looked like a fairly typical Upper West Side analyst’s office. She was a small woman with a steely bun of hair, bright eyes, a strong voice, and a mischievous wit. And, in fact, her memory was quite sharp and detailed in recalling her encounter with Hitler’s family doctor. Much of her work for the secret OSS Hitler study had involved library research and translation, but she’d been called upon to accompany Dr. Langer for this important interview because, for one thing, Hitler’s family doctor was also part of her family, the Kafka clan.
Dr. Kurth was the third person I’d spoken to in the extended Kafka family who was related in some way to Hitler’s Jewish doctor—and to Franz Kafka. In Dr. Kurth’s case, she was related by marriage to Dr. Bloch’s daughter Gertrude. It was Gertrude Bloch who, along with the Washington-based relative of Dr. Bloch, Dr. John Kafka, had led the attack on Rudolph Binion’s theory, the one that singled out Dr. Bloch’s painful treatment of Hitler’s mother’s cancer as a source of Hitler’s hatred of the Jews (see chapter 13). Dr. Kurth was familiar with the controversy; in fact, she admits to being somewhat responsible for it, because it was her influential 1952 paper in the Psychoanalytic Review, entitled “The Jew and Adolf Hitler,” that first focused attention on Dr. Bloch as the one actual Jew Hitler had come close to in the formative period of his life, and moreover, the one Jew who had been most closely enmeshed in the most powerful relationship of Hitler’s life, the one with his mother. (That Hitler’s doctor was also a relative of Franz Kafka is an irony only Kafka could comprehend.)
In that influential paper, Dr. Kurth was the first to suggest that Hitler’s curious public treatment of Dr. Bloch—after his mother’s death, Hitler wrote him grateful missives thanking him for his devoted care; and after Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, he singled out this one Jewish doctor for special praise and special protection—did not tell the whole story. “Hitler’s conscious and unconscious attitudes [to the doctor] were diametrically opposed,” Dr. Kurth argued in her paper. She believed that Hitler “experienced a father transference to the doctor” that was responsible for the public, surface expression of warmth. But that beneath the surface, repressed into Hitler’s unconscious, the anguish and horror of his mother’s fatal illness, which Dr. Bloch’s treatments failed to abate, was displaced: “The attribution of all positive traits to the [Jewish] doctor and of all negative ones to the Jew [in general].”
Binion took this idea and ran with it, ran much too far with it, according to Dr. Bloch’s outraged relatives, who argue that Binion’s version of this theory—which goes beyond Dr. Kurth’s in the way it characterizes Dr. Bloch’s primitive, painful, and ineffective chemotherapy treatments as verging on malpractice—virtually blames their beloved Dr. Bloch for the Holocaust.
“It is not about blame,” Dr. Kurth told me when I asked her about this controversy. “A child reasons not the same as an adult.” In other words, she suggests, the problem was not Dr. Bloch’s treatment decisions, but the child (actually, eighteen-year-old) Hitler’s unconscious, irrational overreactions to them, which tapped into the reservoir of Jew-hatred seething beneath the surface of Austrian culture, a cultural disposition that gave the adult Hitler sanction to vent his displaced rage upon the Jews.
Although she will defend Dr. Bloch from any alleged blame for the Holocaust, Dr. Kurth is decidedly less than enthusiastic in her memory of the man himself in that encounter in the Bronx (the refuge to which Hitler had permitted him to emigrate). What struck her most about him at the time—since the controversy over the putatively absent testicle did not really arise until a quarter century later—was something Dr. Bloch said about Hitler as they took their leave.
“At the end of the interview as we were leaving, Bloch made a point of telling us ‘what a nice pleasant youth’ Hitler was.” More than fifty years later, Dr. Kurth can’t get over this. “Outside in the street, Langer and I laughed and laughed at that—bitter laughter,” she told me, shaking her head.
It is not that she disputes the possibility that Hitler was “a nice pleasant youth.” That has always been the crux of the problem for Hitler explainers—how and why a youth who was remembered by many as pleasant, at least gentle and harmless seeming, could turn into a bloodthirsty mass killer. It was, rather, she says, Bloch’s insistence on clinging to, selectively emphasizing, in 1943, the nice, gentle aspect which provoked the bitter laughter.
Still, she had no doubt whatever about the truth of Bloch’s answer to the question Langer put to him about Hitler’s genital normality. He examined Hitler as a youth, Bloch said, and found that, in fact, there was no genital defect or testicular deficit. “Langer asked him whether the examination included the genitals,” she recalls. “And he said ‘absolutely, they were completely normal.’”
In which case, bitter laughter might indeed be in order now, considering all the elaborate theorizing psychoanalysts and others have erected on the shaky foundation of an assumption that Hitler was monorchid, all that cogitating about the probing fingers of his mother Klara, anxiously searching for the missing testicle in the child Hitler, thus disturbing forever his sexuality and paving the way of his murderous political pathology.
How, then, would she explain the Russian autopsy? I asked Kurth.
She laughed. “You know, when I read about it, I thought—you know, the German slang word for testicles is ‘eggs’—so I thought ‘maybe one of the eggs had been cooked.’” That is, consumed by fire when the corpse was burned. The language of Dr. Faust Shkaravski’s autopsy report suggests otherwise, though: It reports that the scrotum was “singed” rather than burned.
Still, it is conceivable that with a corpse so badly burned overall, a corpse hastily buried and then dug up, the missing testicle or the burned fragments remaining from it fell off or dropped out in the shallow pit in which the body was initially hidden. And that in the years following, as more and more grandiose theories were being fabricated about the implications of its absence, more and more meanings were projected upon the absent “egg” as the metaphysical demon seed of Hitler’s pathological evil, the actual physical remains of the left testicle were quietly disintegrating into organic molecules in the subsoil of Berlin. It is also marginally conceivable that—if Hitler had been suffering from cryptorchism rather than monorchism—both testicles might have been present on the occasion Dr. Bloch examined him, but the left one was AWOL on other occasions, such as those when Klara’s p
robing fingers sought it.
Neither Hitler’s World War I service records nor interviews with fellow soldiers have turned up any mention of a genital wound suffered during the war, subsequent to Dr. Bloch’s examination, so we are left with the contradiction between Dr. Faust Shkaravski and Dr. Bloch—one testicle or two. If we cannot resolve it with absolute certainty, it is possible at least to suggest why analysts of all kinds are drawn to the notion of a genital wound: for reasons that are as much mythic and Wagnerian as they are Freudian. It is a Wagnerian figure, Amfortas, who suffers from a genital wound whose cure is crucial to the quest for the Grail. The genital wound gives a Wagnerian dimension to the figure of Hitler that on the face of it the man himself, the fumbling dissembler, the bumbling hand kisser, seems to lack. The genital wound suits as well the explanatory preferences of a century that has preferred to believe that what is most hidden and most shameful (i.e., sexuality) is most essential and true. And it serves as well the disposition to see Hitler as not normal, not “whole”—that is, not like us.
Of all the genital-wound variants offered, the only one that holds out a slender hope of reconciling the reports of Dr. Bloch and Dr. Faust Shkaravski is the cryptorchism diagnosis. It has at least a certain power as a self-referential metaphor for the slippery, elusive state of fact and interpretation in the realm of Hitler studies—a field plagued by crypto-explanations that depend on truths that appear and then, the more one probes them, seem to disappear or elude the efforts of researchers seeking to grasp their significance.
But to move on from the physical to the psychological genital-wound theories of Hitler, we find the diminutive Dr. Kurth once again casting a giant shadow, because it was she who made the controversial discovery of that grail of Freudian interpretation—an alleged primal scene!—in a veiled, overlooked passage of Mein Kampf—a discovery that, like the monorchid theory, was responsible for giving rise to an entire explicatory industry that has subsequently had the rug pulled out from under it.
“That was my big scoop” is the way Dr. Kurth recalls her primal-scene revelation. She found it when reading over a passage in Mein Kampf in which Hitler seems, on the surface, to be diagnosing the familial origins of societal ills, tracing them back to the oppressiveness of an impoverished childhood. Here, in the redaction of Hitler’s words by Robert Waite—who became a vocal champion of the primal-scene theory (in addition to the monorchid theory)—is the controversial passage Dr. Kurth singled out, in which Hitler invites us to join him in a fantasy:
Let us imagine the following: In a basement apartment of two stuffy rooms live a worker’s family. . . . Among the five children there is a boy, let us say, of three. This is the age at which a child becomes conscious of his first impressions. In gifted people, traces of these early memories are found even in old age. The smallness and overcrowding of the rooms do not create favorable conditions. Quarreling and nagging often arise because of this. In such circumstances people do not [so much] live with one another, [as] push down on top of one another. Every argument . . . leads to a never-ending, disgusting quarrel. . . . But when the parents fight almost daily, their brutality leaves nothing to the imagination; then the results of such visual education must slowly but inevitably become apparent in the little ones . . . especially when the mutual differences express themselves in the form of brutal attacks on the part of the father towards the mother or to assaults due to drunkenness. The poor little boy at the age of six, senses things which would make even a grown-up shudder. Morally infected . . . the young “citizen” wanders off [to become one of the dangerous disaffected members of society].
It is a fascinating passage in which, on the surface, Hitler seems to take on the guise of a concerned liberal social reformer probing the roots of social pathology in the poverty and misery that produce dysfunctional families and spousal abuse. Hitler as a caring feminist; Hitler as Jane Addams.
But Dr. Kurth saw something more in this passage, a darker vision lurking beneath the surface of the social reformer’s prose. She interprets the “brutal attacks” that would make even an adult “shudder,” the assaults that leave “nothing to the imagination,” as specifically sexual assaults: the child witnessing his drunken father forcing himself on his shuddering mother. She believes that in writing about this scene, Hitler is consciously or unconsciously recalling, recreating the primal scene of abusive parental intercourse that he himself witnessed as a child: Alois forcing himself on Klara.
Until Dr. Kurth made this interpretation, no one had taken any particular notice of the passage. But once she brought it to the attention of Dr. Langer, he incorporated it as his own into the summary of his secret OSS wartime report on the mind of Adolf Hitler. Langer’s report, of course, was not declassified until the late 1960s; and the first public adumbration of the primal-scene theory of Hitler’s sexuality appeared in Dr. Kurth’s 1947 Psychoanalytic Review paper.
She recalls that the response to it was immediate. “Menninger [Dr. Karl Menninger, head of the renowned Menninger Clinic] wrote me offering me a job,” she says. Other psychoanalytic explainers fell in line; in addition to Langer, Bromberg and Waite agreed that here was the origin of the pathological disturbance of Hitler’s psyche that gave rise to both sexual perversions and perverted political views. For Waite, this primal-scene trauma gave rise to “severe castration anxiety,” which, in conjunction with his monorchism, made Hitler the psychopathic pervert Waite believes he was. Waite even went so far as to connect the primal-scene vision of parental sex with that other primal visual trauma Hitler describes so dramatically in Mein Kampf as a turning point in his life: his first glimpse of the spectral, black-caftaned, black-earlocked Jew-as-alien in the streets of Vienna.
Unfortunately, like so many other “scoops,” so many other eureka concepts in Hitler studies, just as the primal-scene interpretation was settling in as received wisdom among psychoanalytic and psychohistorical Hitler explainers, a Johns Hopkins scholar, Hans Gatzke, threw cold water on it, debunking Langer’s use of the passage on the grounds that he depended on a strained and skewed translation of the actual German phrases Hitler used. Gatzke insisted the passage referred to physical assaults—beatings—but not sexual assaults.
Dr. Kurth herself now has second thoughts on the weight Freudians give to the alleged primal scene. She’s spent some time researching a reconsideration of Freud’s view on the traumatic potential of the child witnessing parental sex. The great majority of people living in poverty (i.e., the great majority of people who live or have lived on the planet) have routinely lived and slept together in a single room, she points out, so that primal scenes have inevitably been a far more frequent feature of “normal” childhood experience than Freud conjectured from the perspective of his genteel Viennese milieu. In addition, Dr. Kurth points to some recent research into the culture of childhood which suggests that those who spent their infancy in the same room as their parents are at least as likely to have derived comfort and strength from the closeness of parental presence as they are to have been scarred by witnessing parental sex.
Still, there is one assertion in Kurth’s 1947 paper that has appeared persistently in almost every succeeding attempt to explain Hitler’s psychology, one persistent belief that has consistently drawn explainers back to the Geli Raubal relationship as somehow able to supply a crucial revelation about his psyche: the belief that Kurth called “inescapable” in her paper, “that Hitler’s anti-semitism . . . was ‘unmistakably of sexual origin.’” A tortured sexual origin that was engendered in Vienna and somehow finally revealed itself floridly in the bedroom where Geli Raubal’s body was found.
Even the cautious Alan Bullock told me he believed there was “probably something sexual” to Hitler’s anti-Semitism. In other explainers, the longing to find a sexual explanation is almost sexual in its intensity. And almost all those who posit a sexual explanation for Hitler’s psyche end up arguing that, but for his nicht natürlich sexuality, Hitler would have been not only “normal�
�� sexually but (the implication goes) normal morally as well, at least not driven to mass murder. It is a forlorn echo of Wilhelm Reich’s belief that the origins of evil can be found in the failure to achieve wholesome, “normal” orgasmic release. It is the last forlorn echo of the Romantic faith that liberation from sexual repression would free us from the Dark Ages, the dark impulses within us. In the realm of Hitler studies, it is expressed as the hope that a sexual explanation will liberate us from the darkness of inexplicability, from the darker implications of a “normal” Hitler—release us from implicating ourselves, implicating “normal” human behavior in the mystery of what made Hitler so profoundly unnatural morally.
It is rare to find a Hitler explainer who does not make an occluded sexual secret the hidden variable of Hitler’s psyche. Which is perhaps why, after having encountered so much speculation about the unknowable sexual dark matter, I found myself drawn by contrast to the more sedate, less fevered vision of Hitler’s sexuality proposed by the historian John Lukacs.
In his book-length study of the Hitler-Churchill relationship (The Duel), Lukacs argues that “sexuality and its appetites seem to have played a less than decisive part in their [Hitler and Churchill’s] lives.” He calls Hitler “undersexed” not in the sense of a deformity or dysfunction but in a temperamental lack of interest. “In my considered view,” Lukacs argues, Hitler’s “relations with women were fairly normal”—a shocking statement in the context of a literature consumed with an obsession with Hitler’s alleged abnormalities.
Explaining Hitler Page 28
