On 29 August 1930, the day after Sigmund Freud had been awarded the fourth annual Goethe Prize on the occasion of the poet's 181^st birthday, the Völkischer Beobachter printed the following short notice: "The Goethe Prize of the city of Frankfurt was presented this year to Professor Sigmund Freud, the celebrated scholar and creator of psychoanalysis--this was trumpeted into the world with all pomp and circumstance in the tenth issue of the Israeli Community Newspaper. The Goethe Prize, the greatest scientific and literary prize in Germany, was given to the distinguished awardee on 28 August, Goethe's birthday, as a part of the festivities in Frankfurt am Main. The award carries with it a 10,000 Mark stipend." Aside from the reference to the source of this news item, the article to this point remains fairly neutral, relating only the facts. But the last two sentences of this brief report in the Völkischer Beobachter contain the expected racist invectives: "It is well known that renowned scholars have rejected the psychoanalysis of the Jew Sigmund Freud as highly unscientific drivel and nonsense. The anti-Semite Goethe would turn over in his grave if he knew that a Jew had received a prize that carries his name."⁽¹⁾ The sentiments expressed here are not surprising: Goethe, the pride of German culture and a pure Aryan, was being associated with someone from an inferior race, the Jewish intellectual Sigmund Freud. Moreover, this Jew had scandalized the scientific world by presenting theories that had to do with matters any decent person would not mention in public, namely, human sexuality. In calling into question the legitimacy of Freud's work, the Völkischer Beobachter more importantly seeks to deny a pseudo-scientific scholar and writer any place in the German community. We know, of course, that Goethe himself often dabbled in scientific arenas that were not always completely accepted by the science of his time or ours, and that an offensive sexuality is part of Goethe's works--and, from the perspective of a moralistic nineteenth century, part of his life as well. We also know that many of Goethe's early champions, and not a small number of his early biographers, were Jews.⁽²⁾ But Goethe's image, even if he could not always be advanced as a proto-Nazi or even a German nationalist, was for the general public one of a dignified and noble spirit above the common rabble. What did this thoroughly German patron of the highest ideals have to do with a quack Jewish intellectual, one generation removed from the ghetto? Was the awarding of the Goethe Prize to Sigmund Freud not a betrayal of its spirit, of its essence?

The National Socialist denouncement of Frankfurt's choice of Freud could not be uttered in polite and liberal circles. But the same questions that the Völkischer Beobachter raised in polemical fashion were also part of a discourse that surrounded the entire award and its decision-making process. The public got a hint of the controversy when the Jewish mayor of Frankfurt, Ludwig Landmann, delivered his congratulatory speech in the house in which Goethe was born. Indeed, in part of his short talk he even mentions the passionate debate among the members of the selection committee, something that had not occurred on previous occasions. At issue evidently was the fact that the prize was again being awarded to a non-literary person: after Stefan George had received the award in 1927, it was given in the following years to Albert Schweitzer and then to the philosopher Leopold Ziegler. But in his speech Landmann maintains that Freud had earned the honor because of his enormous impact on the literary world of his time, and because of his contributions to the German language; he also adds that the prize was not conceived solely for literary merit, but was meant to acclaim someone whose entire work warrants recognition. Freud had influenced the entire Zeitgeist, Landmann continued, so that his status as a non-poet could be overlooked. Although these remarks appear sufficient to justify Freud's selection, the mayor obviously felt compelled to add further clarification concerning the appropriateness of the Freud-Goethe connection: "Many people will think it is inapposite and preposterous that Freud should be associated with Goethe," he declared. Goethe, after all, believed in an ethereal unity of all living creatures; he was more spiritually inclined, more intuitive. Freud, as a natural scientist, relies on strict causality; he believes in natural laws and inclines toward materialism. Landmann also couples the two men via intellectual history: Fechner, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, he claims, are the nineteenth-century intermediaries between the intuitive worldview of Goethe and the scientific perspective of Freud. Thus one can construct a bridge between the two men, and Landmann's audience is informed that in the course of intense discussions in committee the inner relationship between Freud, the modern, non-subjective scientist, and Goethe, the quintessential poet, became increasingly clear.⁽³⁾

In contrast to previous years, the name of the awardee had become public well before the ceremony. Although some information about the controversy surrounding Freud's nomination must have surfaced as well, the exact nature of the discussions in the selection committee became public knowledge only in 1982, when Wolfgang Schivelbusch published an essay that revealed what one might have suspected from Landmann's speech: the provocation that Freud must have represented not only for National Socialists, but also for many conservative and furtively anti-Semitic sectors of the German public.⁽⁴⁾ Freud was hardly the unanimous choice of the committee, and the mayor was nervous about the controversy that even Freud's supporters anticipated would ensue from his nomination. The sides lined up rather predictably: with the exception of Franz Schultz, the Germanists on the selection committee, who evidently believed themselves self-appointed protectors of German cultural purity, voted against Freud; the governmental officials from Prussia and Frankfurt, as well as the left-liberal practitioners of culture, Alfred Döblin and Alfons Paquet, promoted Freud's candidacy from the start. Döblin was most articulate in championing Freud and in establishing the connection between Freud and Goethe. Freud's reputation in the world was indisputable, Döblin reasoned, so that the only objection one could raise had to do with his appropriateness. To justify Freud's selection he employed four arguments. The first involved analogy: Goethe sought to overcome the chaotic of the Dionysian with the greatness of the Apollinian, as exemplified in the figures of Orestes and Iphigenie, or Tasso and Leonore. One need only replace this opposition with Freud's terms to recognize, according to Döblin, that Goethe and Freud are really working on a common project. Döblin, of course, stacks the deck a bit in providing Goethe's works with a Nietzschean interpretation and in assuming that Freud then covers the Nietzschean bases, but his point is that the two men thought in a similar fashion about human existence. Döblin also notes that Freud is sufficiently literary, having exerted a great influence on contemporary literature: he cites Thomas Mann as an outstanding and eminently acceptable illustration. In a similar vein Döblin counters the objections of potential detractors from Freud's nomination, when he maintains that what really counts is not the identity of their thought, but rather Freud's impact on his own time, which is as great as Goethe's impact in his era. Finally, in his most interesting comment, Döblin claims that Freud merits the prize as an act of compensation (Wiedergutmachung) for the relative neglect he has suffered. He points out that in German-speaking countries Freud has received no major awards despite his widespread fame, that he has been shunned by the scientific establishment in Germany. Predicting correctly that names like Einstein and Freud are among the few that will outlive his own epoch, he concludes his plea by stating that "in the name of the nation we have to perform an a sort of recompense to Freud."⁽⁵⁾

The conservatives disagreed wholeheartedly with this line of reasoning. Spokesperson for the anti-Freud contingent, the Frankfurt Germanist and future National Socialist Hans Naumann, countered even Döblin's assertion of Freud's fame. Freud is past his prime, Naumann argues; his teachings are in an unstable mode of revision, and it is impossible to say now what will remain of them after the dust settles. In any case his influence does not extend beyond Zurich; he is virtually unknown or disparaged in France and other nations. Naumann continues:

Of course in America he's alive and known, but we all know that in intellectual matters America is infantile. German scholarship is distanced from Freud. You only need to listen to psychologists, not to mention philosophers. You can ask any religious scholar or any legal expert how distanced we are from Freud and how little is thought of him. I think the entire matter is more of a Russian affair. Freud has had the misfortune to live too long. And for this reason we shouldn't open ourselves up to the reproach of being regressive.

Kurt Riezler, the Frankfurt university trustee who supported the appointment of Max Horkheimer to the directorship of the Institute for Social Research,⁽⁶⁾ weighed in on the anti-Freudian side with reasons that appear at first glance less vulgar. For him Goethe and Freud are simply incompatible, no matter how one evaluates Freud's achievements:

The pregnantly un-Goethean, indeed anti-Goethean, quality lies in the basically causal, mechanical nature of the Freudian world, in its excessively rationalistic structure, in its constructedness, as opposed to any deeply felt universal idea, in its focus on humanity in distressing sickness, in prudery. . . .Whether or not psychoanalysis is correct does not really matter. The confounding of the two names in the awarding of the Goethe-Prize will appear to the public, which possesses a very real picture of their respective mental constitutions, as a tasteless mess.

Despite Freud's putatively anti-Goethean mentality and despite the obvious controversy it would cause in the public sphere, the pro-Freudian faction carried the day with a vote of seven to five.

It is not difficult to see that the awarding of the Goethe Prize in 1930 was about, among other things, Jewish assimilation into German culture. Despite its volatile language, the Völkischer Beobachter was on the mark, or at least more open about the actual cultural and political dynamics at play. Although Goethe had not always been regarded as a genuine representative of Germanness--indeed, in his early reception he was frequently upbraided for his failure to support the nationalist cause--at the latest by the end of the nineteenth century, he had been firmly established as the spiritual pinnacle of the best Germany had to offer. In racist circles around National Socialism his anti-Jewish attitudes and remarks had confirmed his formative role in shaping a German and anti-Semitic agenda, and while these remarks were mitigated somewhat by his humanist reputation and his fervent Jewish admirers, by the Weimar Republic Weimar classicism represented a high point of cultural Germanness.⁽⁷⁾ Freud, by contrast, was conceived as an outsider, an interloper. Complicating his alterity was his scientific and methodological presuppositions as well as his scholarly proclivities. His focus on sexuality and his insistence on a positivitist, materialist conception of research--which we all know now that he preached more than he practiced--would perhaps have been unwelcome by genuine advocates of German culture no matter who propagated them. But these qualities fit very well into the stereotype of Jewishness, which had long since developed the motifs of hypersexuality, on the one hand, and a cold, overly rationalist worldview, on the other. The detractors from Freud in the public and semi-official discourse do not toss around the vulgar, National Socialist slurs; nor do his promoters seek to defend him as a Jew. But the marks of a German-Jewish problem are apparent nonetheless. Naumann's emphasis on Freud's foreignness from German science and his endeavor to relegate him to the land of Jewish capitalism and trivial culture (the United States), or to Bolshevism (Russia) are part of a rapidly forming, anti-Semitic mosaic. Similarly Riezler's emphasis on the overly rationalist and the mechanistic in Freud's thought are part of a larger constellation around Jewish assimilation. And is it entirely coincidental that the Jewish defender of Freud, Alfred Döblin, mentions two Jews, Freud and Einstein, as names that will persevere in the annals of human history, or that he argues the case for Freud's nomination in terms of compensation for someone wronged and neglected?

Was Freud appropriate for the Goethe Prize? Did he have anything in common with classical Weimar and the preeminent features of German culture? Was a twentieth-century Jewish doctor investigating sexuality a good match for a poetic Privy Councillor from the eighteenth-century Dutchy of Weimar? Freud himself certain thought so, and part of his own endeavor to assimilate himself and his writings into the Austro-German culture surrounding him was his relationship to Goethe. Freud cultivated this relationship consciously and conscientiously in his writings, even claiming that Goethe would have appreciated and perhaps validated his novel conception of the human being. Indeed, Freud repeatedly claimed that Goethe was responsible for his choice of a career in medicine. One of the motifs in Freud's self-fashioning is that Goethe appears at the turning point in his life. In his autobiographical text from 1924 he describes his youth in Vienna, where he was the top student in his class. His father, Freud continues, allowed him to select his own path according to his proclivities, and at that point he was disinclined to study medicine. At first he was more attracted to fields that emphasized the relationship between human beings than to areas of knowledge that focused on natural objects. He was swayed in a different direction, however, by two events: one was the general popularity of Darwin and Darwinian thinking; the other was a popular lecture in which Goethe's essay "Nature" was recited.⁽⁸⁾ Goethe thus appears as an inspiration at the very start of Freud's scholarly career, and implicitly Goethe's thoughts are brought into association with Freud's later development. If, however, we glance at the essay "Nature," which may not even have been written by Goethe, we find little that could attract Freud. The rhapsodic, hymnic prose in this short piece, the repeated assertion that nature is ever-changing and creative, and the suggestion that nature harbors eternal secrets never to be revealed to morals--all typical features of an early Storm-and-Stress mentality--seem ill-suited to convince anyone to study natural phenomena.⁽⁹⁾ It is possible, of course, that the lecture accompanying the oral presentation of the essay, delivered by the comparative anatomist Carl Brühl, was inspirational.⁽¹⁰⁾ But in the various places Freud reminisces about his youth, he never foregrounds Brühl, but instead informs his reader of his Goethean beginnings. Important for Freud is less the essay and the occasion than the association with greatness. With Goethe rather than his father aiding his career choice, Freud symbolically exits the Jewish ghetto inhabited by Jacob Freud and enters the more respectable world of German letters.

And in subsequent writings Freud makes certain that his readers know that he belongs to this cultivated, German world. Since Freud had no qualms in constructing his conceptual framework around borrowings from the literary tradition--witness the Oedipus and Electra complex; since he believed that creative writing was the consequence of a redirection and channeling of sexual energy; and since, finally, he persistently abstracts from the social and historical conditions in his observations on the psyche, he can feel justified in employing a citation from Goethe to bolster his argument. In a few cases Freud actually uses Goethe in an evidentiary fashion to document psychoanalytic claims. In most instances, however, references to Goethe and his works are actually superfluous in terms of explicating theoretical insights into human psychology. Their function in Freud's writings lies in their illocutionary force: Freud makes the implicit claim that he and his texts belong to German culture, that the inventor of psychoanalysis is no different from other refined members of society, and that psychoanalysis itself is a universal, and certainly not a merely a Jewish science. Goethe is decorative, a revered writer placed on a pedestal, on display for everyone to admire and to remind the reader that Freud, while posing as an outsider, is really a fully assimilated insider.

The Interpretation of Dreams provides illustrations of the various ways in which Freud showed off his knowledge of Goethe. In his review of dream theories Freud referees Carl Binz's claim that stimuli bombard a sleeping person from every direction (2: 99; 4: 77-78),⁽¹¹⁾ and compares this hypothesis to Mephisto's plaint (Iiii; 8: 192)⁽¹²⁾ concerning the appearance of ever new seeds in all elements and climates. The allusion to Faust at this point in the text has no other function than to demonstrate Freud's knowledge of the literary tradition and to stake his claim for a place in that heritage. At another point in the same text Freud seeks an analogy for the mechanism by which dreams hide their real meaning. He finds a similar process at work in social situations, and he cites in this context the compulsion to distortion when he interprets dreams for his reader (2: 158; 4: 142). Again Mephistopheles is allowed to supplement Freud's argument, this time with two lines from his conversation with Faust concerning his teaching practice:

Das Beste, was du wissen kannst,

Darfst du den Buben doch nicht sagen. (Iiv 8: 205)

[The best of what you hope to know

Is something that you cannot tell the youngsters]⁽¹³⁾

It is easy to understand why this quote was one of Freud's favorites: it speaks of the prohibition on direct expression that is the rule for unacceptable urges. Although again the function of this citation is as much display as substance, Freud is here able to locate in Mephisto's directness a proclamation of the necessity for indirectness. On other occasions, however, Freud's citations of Goethe appear completely arbitrary and only tangentially related to the line of reasoning: In the analysis of a dream he relates the story of a painter who wanted to make a portrait of a man because of his unusual features. The man responded crudely that the painter would prefer a piece of the behind of a young woman to his whole face. Freud supplies the following puzzling gloss in a footnote:

Cf. The phrase 'sitting for one's portrait' and Goethe's lines:

Und wenn es keinen Hintern hat,

Wie kann der Edle sitzen?

[And if he hasn't a behind,

How can his Lordship sit?] (2: 163; 4: 147)⁽¹⁴⁾

The citation is from an epigram entited "Totalität" ("Totality") published in 1815 (1: 469); but the connection with the dream analysis is obscure, and one suspects that Freud included it more for his own amusement than for its relevance to any scientific point--amusement and, of course, as a sign of his belonging to the civilized world in which educated people are expected to cite prominent German authors as aids and embellishments for their thoughts.

One other passage in the Interpretation of Dreams merits our attention. It is significant because it contains a dream in which Goethe is mentioned, and because Freud mentions this dream and its analysis on three separate occasions. His most complete description occurs under the rubric of absurd dreams. In the preface to the section Freud states that he will present examples in which the absurdity of the dream disappears when the deeper meaning is explicated; he further claims that the dreams deal with a dead father (2: 413; 4: 426). Freud relates two dreams about his own father--Jacob Freud had died in 1896, a few years prior to the publication of the Interpretation of Dreams--and about a patient who, like Freud, had recently lost his father. But two additional dreams do not conform to this general description: one in which the viewing of the play The New Ghetto, dealing with the Jewish question, is allegedly translated into an absurd situation with children in Rome, and Freud's dream about his friend, identified only as Mr. M., who was criticized with unjustified vehemence in an essay by none-other-than Goethe. Mr. M. is naturally devastated by this criticism, and complains bitterly about it to his friends; but he never loses his great admiration for Goethe despite the personal attack. Within the dream Freud begins to calculate: Since Goethe died in 1832 and must have, therefore, composed this essay earlier than that date, Mr. M. must have been quite a young man. To Freud it seems plausible that he was eighteen years old. Since he is disoriented and not certain of the present year, the entire matter becomes obscure, except that Freud can recall that the attack occurred "in Goethe's well-known essay on 'Nature'" (2: 424-25; 4: 439).

Freud interprets this dream as the reworking of three events from his life. The first is his experience with a patient whose symptoms included psychic paralysis: Freud visited him and found that without any provocation he related embarrassing excesses about his brother's younger years. Freud associates the paralysis of this patient with his own paralysis, when he is unable to recall the correct year. The second source for the dream material is the publication in a medical journal of a review of a recent book written by Freud's friend Wilhelm Fließ. The author of the review was young and, according to Freud, incompetent, and Freud eventually broke relations with the journal after he was unable to gain a satisfactory explanation and remedy from the editor--although Freud, like Mr. M. in the dream with regards to Goethe, emphasizes that their personal relationship should not suffer because of this incident. Another patient supplies a third source for the dream's material. Freud relates that a patient informed him that her brother's outbreak of insanity was preceded by his shouting "Nature, Nature," and that this exclamation was ultimately the result of his reading of the essay by Goethe and the exhaustion he suffered in studying natural sciences. The brother was eighteen years old when he went insane. From these various materials Freud concocts his interpretation, which is less comprehensible than the absurd dream itself. For reasons that remain unclear Freud claims that in the dream he has placed himself where his friend is. He then asserts that he behaves as if paralyzed, and the dream becomes absurd. He concludes that its content is ironic and can be summarized in two sentences: "Naturally, it's he [my friend F.] who is the crazy fool, and it's you [the critics] who are the men of genius and know better. Surely it can't by any chance be the reverse?" (2: 425; 4: 440). The reversal is indicated in the dream by the absurdity of Goethe attacking the young man, while it is easy for a young man today to attack the immortal Goethe, and by the fact that in the dream Freud calculates from Goethe's date of death, but from the young man's date of birth.

Psychoanalysis is a remarkable exegetical tool. Since it makes no claims to logic or to verifiable results, it has continued to be the darling of literary and cultural criticism long after real scientists have recognized that it is devoid of methodological substance. In writing about Freud, one is tempted to apply his own arbitrary procedures against him. It would, after all, take very little imagination to interpret Freud's dream as even more personal than he acknowledges. The cry of "nature" could be seen as a Goethean rebuke to Freud, who has betrayed the spirit of his--Goethe's--infatuation with nature, and misunderstood the message he--Freud--has claimed served him as the inspiration for his studies of the human mind. The distance between Freud and the venerated figure he continues to esteem could be translated as a combination of fatherly reproach, since the first dreams in the section deal with dead fathers, and a still failed Jewish assimilation, which is the putatively real content of the dream Freud next narrates. Or one could ruminate on what it means that Fließ's book panned by the inept, young reviewer, was most probably the monograph from 1897 on the "Relationship Between the Nose and Female Sexual Organs."⁽¹⁵⁾ Freud never really accounts for the fact that the friend was named Mr. M. rather than Mr. F. So we could speculate that Freud had in (his unconscious) mind the name of John Noland Mackenzie, a Baltimore laryngologist, who had already proposed the nasal-sexual connection a decade prior to Fließ.⁽¹⁶⁾ Psychoanalysis continues to be a great machine for cranking out interpretations, which is unfortunately increasingly what literary and cultural studies is about, no matter how perverse and absurd these interpretations may be. But in this dream, the only thing that seems rather certain is that it indicates how central Goethe was to Freud's psyche: his obsession with his origins as Goethean, his fear of rebuke from Goethe, and, the corollary to these fears and obsessions, his concern with assimilation into a culture in which he simultaneously desired acceptance, and from which he sought to distance himself.

Let me turn now to the couch, that is, to the one place in Freud's oeuvre where he offers an extended analysis of Goethe, gleaned from one of Goethe's writings: his essay on memory in Poetry and Truth (Dichtung und Wahrheit 1811-14). In this short piece, which originally appeared in Imago in 1917, Freud comments on an early passage in Goethe's autobiography, in which the author relates how he tossed bowls, pots, and other tableware out of the window and onto the street, egged on by some neighborhood boys. Freud points first to the significance of Goethe's including this tale in Poetry and Truth at all: since reminiscences from early childhood are rare, the ones that do remain in one's memory are of particular psychic import, which for Freud means that they contain a deeper psychoanalytic meaning. We are thus compelled by the mere fact that Goethe narrates this recollection to interpret it and consider it a cover for something that Goethe does not want to openly concede. After the usual caveats concerning the difficulty of, in effect, performing psychoanalysis on a person unable to respond in a therapeutic setting, Freud goes on nonetheless to offer a narrative of his own for "solving" the problem posed by this passage. After reading it, recognizing that it must conceal a deeper meaning, and determining that it would be best to let the matter rest, he informs the reader about an anonymous patient who similarly threw tableware out of the window. This action was evidently part of the patient's displaced anger at the birth of a brother when he was four years old, and Freud reasons that Goethe's actions have the identical origins: in Goethe's case Freud hypothesizes that his ill feelings were directed toward Hermann Jakob Goethe, who was born on 27 November 1752 and died on 13 January 1759. Similar reports about other comparable incidents confirm his opinion: Throwing tableware or other items out of the window is a symbolic or magical act, by which the child expresses his desire to rid himself of the newly arrived competitor for the affections of the mother. For Freud it is also significant, as he states in the original essay from 1917, that Goethe never mentions his brother, that he represses his existence entirely. The case for Freud is therefore clear, and he offers us the following translation of the episode: "I was a child of fortune; destiny preserved my life, although I came into the world as though dead. Even more, destiny removed my brother so that I did not have to share my mother's love with him" (10: 266; 17: 136). And Freud concludes by theorizing that being a mother's favorite child results in a feeling of conquest and a confidence in success that often actually leads to success.

What are we to make of Freud's interpretation? At the very least we can point to two errors. Freud's initial claim that childhood memories have a particular significance for one's psychic life may be true, but what Goethe writes in Poetry and Truth is not reported as his childhood memory. Indeed, Freud begins his reading with the following citation from Goethe, which occurs in the paragraph prior to the episode about the tableware: "If we try to recollect what happened to us in the earliest years of childhood [Goethe actually wrote Jugend or "youth," not Kindheit or "childhood."], we often find that we confuse what we have heard from others with what we ourselves have witnessed" (10: 257; 17: 147).⁽¹⁷⁾ Goethe's point here is simple: what he is going to relate may or may not have occurred, but it is definitely something that was related to him by others. And Goethe is consistent: before recounting the story of how he threw tableware out the window, he states that his relatives [Die Meinigen] were fond of talking about all kinds of mischief to which he was provoked by the three brothers named von Ochsenstein, who lived across the street. His tale of the tableware is an illustration of something others remembered and subsequently told him. Goethe does not represent the story as part of his memory, but rather as part of familial lore. Obviously the status of this particular statement is crucial for Freud's interpretation. If it is does not belong to Goethe's memories, but merely to the stories conveyed to him by others, then its value for an analysis of Goethe's psyche is questionable. Freud's misreading thus allows him to construct an interpretation to which he is not entirely entitled.

Freud's second error concerns the contention that Goethe never mentions his brother in Dichtung und Wahrheit. In fact, Goethe does mention him, and if we are inclined to be charitable toward Freud, then we could conjecture that initially Freud simply overlooked the passage, which occurs later in the first book, in which Goethe writes about his younger brother. In this passage Goethe mentions that he wants to recall at this point his brother, who suffered from the childhood illnesses that Wolfgang also contracted. Goethe comments further that he had a fragile constitution (von zarter Natur), that he was withdrawn, and that he died as a small child. Thus Goethe does not suppress the memory of Hermann Jakob at all. By the time Freud got around to publishing this essay for the third time, someone must have alerted him to his mistake. But instead of revising his essay on the basis of this information, or withdrawing it from circulation completely since it was not apparently seriously flawed, he simply added a footnote acknowledging his error. Why did Freud not revise his text? We cannot know for certain; we only know that a correction of the main text would have significantly weakened the argument that Goethe's story about the jettisoned tableware was a substitute for something he repressed. Was Freud simply too lazy or too busy to revise his text, or was he again fudging his evidence? Freud's essay on Leonardo can assist us in our evaluation of his scholarly rigor. During Freud's discussion of Leonardo's dream about the vulture, which also turns out to have something to do with a maternal relationship, he inserts, in the second version of the essay from 1919, a footnote devoted to his Goethe analysis. He refers to "the remarkable absence of any mention whatever of a young brother" (10: 111-12; 11: 85) as the original impetus for undertaking the analysis of the passage from Poetry and Truth; his statement here is consistent with his ignorance of the actual state of affairs at that time. In the version of the Leonardo essay from 1923, he modifies the footnote to read as follows: "the absence in this passage of any mention of the young brother"; thus the circumstance is no longer "remarkable" (merkwürdig), and "whatever" (überhaupt) becomes "in this passage" (an dieser Stelle). Freud retains the claim, however, that this circumstance--now not remarkable"--caused him to pursue his analysis. He then includes in parentheses: "This child is in fact mentioned at a later point in the book, where Goethe dwells on the many illnesses of childhood." For any reader who has followed Freud's editorial legerdemain the obvious question is: why should Goethe have mentioned his little brother in recounting a story he is repeating from his relatives concerning how he--Wolfgang--threw tableware out of the window? The only possible reason Goethe would have to mention his brother at that point would be if he associated his own destructive act with his brother. But why should Goethe have made this association, since it is Freud's? But then how can Freud make this association, which depends at least in part on a repression of the younger rival, when the younger rival is not repressed? Freud's evidentiary practice is, stated quite simply, utterly dishonest. When he believed Goethe did not mention his brother, the repression of the brother was a significant piece of evidence. When he learns that Goethe did mention his brother, he either relegates that knowledge to a footnote, leaving the text and the main argument unaltered, or fabricates a new tactic, claiming that it is significant that Goethe fails to mention his brother "in this passage" when there is no reason whatsoever for Goethe to do so.

Clearly there is something fraudulent in Freud--I am hardly the first to have noticed it⁽¹⁸⁾-- something deceptive psychoanalytic argumentation. But as curious readers we might ask: what is going on in Freud's essay on Goethe? If the interpretation does not fit the facts, even when Freud knows the facts, why does he continue to republish the text of the Goethe essay in unchanged form and retain the misleading footnote in the Leonardo essay? Why is Freud's investment in this reading of Goethe so great? Unlike Freud, I will not claim that the following hypotheses are based on science. My interpretation is clearly conjecture, but in contrast to Freud's procedure, at least mine is based on evidence: perhaps it is even a persuasive reading, but it belongs to the art of hermeneutics, not the pseudo-science of psychoanalysis. I start with a simple question: if Goethe does not fit the facts, is there someone else who does? We do not have to search very far for the answer. Freud himself is an almost perfect match. Little Sigismund Schlomo was a child who was particularly attached to his mother; as the forty-year-old doctor reported to his close friend Wilhelm Fließ, his "libido toward matrem" and been aroused on the occasion of an overnight railway journey from Leipzig to Vienna, when he had the opportunity "of seeing her nudam."⁽¹⁹⁾ It was Freud who displayed a jealousy for his little brother, at least as he recollects for Fließ. His self-analysis revealed that he welcomed the death of little Julius, who died as a seven-month-old infant. It was Freud who admits that he harbored "adverse wishes and genuine childish jealousy" toward his putative rival.⁽²⁰⁾ We have no report of broken dishes, but otherwise Freud, in his analysis of Goethe, could be describing himself. Indeed, the "true meaning" of the tableware incident fits Sigismund, not Wolfgang: "Destiny removed my brother so that I did not have to share my mother's love with him." And, finally, Freud is the person who is overly concerned with success, whose ambition drives him so fiercely that he is willing to ignore and distort evidence in order to validate his theoretical "insights." The next question we might want to ask is why Freud would speak of himself in his Goethe essay? Why does he impute to Goethe feelings and desires that were his own? Again I speculate, but with some evidence and logic behind my conjecture. Stated quite simply, Freud substitutes himself for Goethe because he wanted to identify himself with Goethe, and in that identification lies his aspiration to be accepted, integrated, assimilated into the German world. His passion was to be recognized as a great man, to be not only an assimilated Jew, but to be a Jew whose celebrity was so apparent that he could remain a Jew and still be part of German society. He did not want to compromise--he never considered conversion--and he never abandoned his religious community--he was an atheist, who always affirmed his Jewishness.⁽²¹⁾ Let me go one step further: Is it not possible that the anonymous patient, who "solved" the Goethean tableware conundrum, and who is described as someone of a foreign nationality, someone "not acquainted with German literature" [nicht in deutscher Bildung erzogen](10: 260; 17: 150) in short, an outsider to Germanness, its very antithesis perhaps, is the symbol for the Jew Freud was, or at least of the prototype of the Jew as seen through German eyes, who comes, through the similar experience of desiring the mother and hating the rival brother, to resemble the greatest of all German writers? Is it possible that the Goethe essay is thus really about Jewish assimilation. Could it be that Freud is saying--and here I, like Freud, will strive to reduce my interpretation to a single thought: "I, Sigmund Freud, want to be recognized by German-speaking society as a great man, as a second Goethe, or at least as Goethe's equal"?

If all of this is more than mere idle speculation, then perhaps, when in 1930 Freud was honored in absentia in Frankfurt, he could feel affirmed in both his identification with the great man whose prize he received and his acceptance in the greater German world. Perhaps he could believe that assimilation, symbolized by the spiritual proximity of Sigismund Schlomo to Johann Wolfgang, had become a modern reality. If Freud did feel that he and his teachings had gained a permanent foothold in German society, that a German-Jewish, or at least an Austro-Jewish, identity could become a lasting reality in the fourth decade of the twentieth century, he would soon find that he was mistaken. The dispute surrounding the awarding of the prize, in particular the National Socialist response, was indicative, as we now know, of the actual state of affairs. Not the outcome, of course, which was controlled by the liberal forces of Frankfurt, but the framework for the debate, which called into question the compatibility of Freud and Goethe, of Jew and German. Ultimately, as Adorno and Horkheimer wrote in Dialectic of Enlightenment, the liberal view of Jewish assimilation was only true as an idea, opposed by the more palpable, naked truth of Nazi racist dogma.⁽²²⁾ To the last moment Freud clung to his native land; he likened his departure from Austria to a soldier's desertion of his post. When he finally and reluctant left Vienna on 4 June 1938, he left part of himself behind. "One has been told so often that one is not a German," he wrote from London. "And indeed one is glad oneself that one no longer needs to be a German."⁽²³⁾ Nonetheless, in his last sustained piece of writing, Moses, the Jew who is not really a Jew, who belongs, yet does not really belong, is compared in greatness to Goethe (9: 555; 23: 108).

Notes

1. Völkischer Beobachter 29 Aug. 1930: 2.

2. See, for example, Wilfried Barner, Von Rahel Varnhagen bis Friedrich Gundolf: Juden als Deutsche Goethe-Verehrer (Wolfenbüttel: Wallstein Verlag, 1992); and "Jüdischer Goethe-Verehrung vor 1933," Pioniere, Schulen, Pluralismus: Studien zu Geschichte und Thorie der Liteaturwissenschaft (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997), 129-49.

3. The text of the mayor's speech can be found in the Frankfurter Zeitung und Handelsblatt 29 Aug. 1930: 7.

4. A more complete review of the committee's proceeding is contained in Hanna Leitgeb's Der ausgezeichnete Autor: Städische Literaturpreise und Kulturpolitik in Deutschland 1926-1971 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1994), 85-104.

5. Cited from Wolfgang Schivelbusch, "Der Goethe-Preis und Sigmund Freud," Intellektuellendämmerung: Zur Lage der Frankfurter Intelligenz in den zwanziger Jahren (Frankfurt: Insel, 1982), 77-93; here 84-85.

6. See Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 129.

7. See, for example, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Goethe (Munich: Bruckmann, 1912).

8. Sigmund Freud, "Selbstdarstellung," Gesammelte Werke Chronologisch geordnet (London: Imago, 1948), 14: 34. In English in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 20: 8.

9. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, "Die Natur," Hamburger Ausgabe 477-79.

10. See Uwe Henrik Peters, "Goethe und Freud," Goethe Jahrbuch 103 (1986): 86-105; here 96. The English edition of Freud's autobiographical sketch mentions Brühl; the German does not.

11. First references to Freud in parentheses are from Sigmund Freud, Studienausgabe, 10 vols. (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1982). Second references and citations in English are from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74).

12. References to Goethe in parentheses are from Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Berliner Ausgabe (Berlin: Aufbau, 1971).

13. Translation by Peter Salm, Faust: Part One (New York: Bantham, 1962), 113.

14. The footnote in German is more telegraphic in style:

Dem Maler sitzen.

Goethe: "Und wenn es keinen Hintern hat,

Wie kann der Edle sitzen?" (2: 163)

15. See Paul Robinson, Freud and His Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 41.

16. Frank J. Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 150.

17. The citation occurs in Goethe's writings in vol. 13, 13.

18. Among the many works that reveal Freud's diverse errors and dishonest practices, I cite only the anthology edited by Frederick Crews: Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend (New York: Penguin, 1998); and Malcolm Macmillan, Freud Evaluated (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997).

19. I will leave it to the more psychoanalytically inclined to comment on Freud's recourse to the Latin for the words "mother" and nude."

20. The complete letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1877-1904, ed. and trans. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1985), 268.

21. "In 1939 he told the London branch of YIVO: 'You no doubt know that I gladly and proudly acknowledge my Jewishness though my attitude toward any religion, including ours, is critically negative.'" In Marsha L. Rozenblit, The Jews of Vienna 1867-1914: Assimilation and Identity (Albany: SUNY Press, 1983), 10.

22. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1999), 168-70.

23. Cited in Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1988), 632.