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Anna Freud’s letters to Clara Geroe: another part in a ‘life’.

05 Thursday Dec 2019

Posted by Christine in Anna Freud, Archive work, Diaries and Source material

≈ 4 Comments

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archives, Australia, contested realities, immigration, Not being believed., Oh well... it happens sometimes and then you just have to deal with it., reaching behind the myth, refugee, source material, The unexpected things you find in archival research

Some years ago I submitted a paper to a refereed journal. It was based on an interview about Australia’s first training analyst  Clara Lazar Geroe, with her son, George Geroe. This wide ranging interview was conducted and recorded in the sitting room of George’s home. A portrait of his mother painted by her friend, the Hungarian born Australian artist, Judy Cassab presided, hung above the mantlepiece. The artist’s choice to ‘dress’ Geroe in peacock colours: green, teal, blue purple and yellow,  brought  her gravitas to the fore along with  her love for colour and life. An apt illustration of the liveliness with which George Geroe remembered his mother. He was generous with his time  and eager to contribute his bit to the historical record.

My paper was rejected. The scholar concerned did not agree that significant new source material I cited, or information I had gathered, was based on reality. To put it bluntly. The scholar has since passed away. Things have moved on.

Clara Geroe was attracted to life, colour and bohemia. She loved the city and the cultured coffee houses of 1920s and 1930s Budapest. She had trained as a psychoanalyst with Michael Balint as her training analyst, became a full member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytic  Society in 1931 and departed for Australia, in flight from the Nazis, in 1940.  Migration was heart breaking for her. She left behind the people she loved and later learned that many of her colleagues: including the child analysts, Kata Levy, Edit Gyomeroi,  and Eva Rosenberg, had also been forced to find refuge in other countries. Another of these friends was Anna Freud who had fled Vienna with her father in 1938. ‘My mother loved Anna Freud’, George said. She had often spoken of Anna Freud to the family. George described how his mother had sent Anna Freud food parcels during the war; that she had stayed with Anna Freud during her trips to London.

And what had happened to Anna Freud’s  letters to Clara?  George did not know. His father, Willi,  had taken charge of Clara’s archive after her death. Ann Geroe, George’s wife,  was more forthright. Willi had destroyed them, she said.

I still have the correspondence in which the scholar rejected George’s account. He stated that ALL of Anna Freud’s letters were indexed. She had kept copies of everything, he said. That the friendship was Clara’s childrens’ fantasy was confirmed by the lack of letters. Of course they would say they had been destroyed. The fact was, the scholar assured me,  there. were. no. more. letters.

And so the matter rested.

Until this year.

In 2018  Clara Geroe’s papers were donated to the State Library of Victoria and, as I was assisting with this negotiation, the first access was to me. It has meant that the collection has remained with me rather longer than I had anticipated (hooray!) while the State Library finished its renovations. Which it just has.  Soon the papers will be off for cataloguing and eventually public access. Within these thirty  or so archive boxes there are references to Anna Freud in various lectures and a Christmas card or two.  Clara encouraged several young psychologists to study with Anna Freud. There is professional correspondence about these.  But no personal letters are to be found.

George Geroe’s death in February 2019 yielded still more boxes and…

Lo!

In that batch I found a small yellow enveloped marked in Willi Geroe’s hand, ‘To be destroyed’ after Clara’s memorial service on 21 October 1981. It contains several  letters from Anna Freud written in the 1940s.  Enough to show that there was, indeed, a good friendship between the two women. And that Clara had sent food parcels to Anna Freud during WW2. That Willi may have intended to carry out his plan is signified by what looks like a knife cut across this envelope. Was he interrupted? I do not know. Or did he change his mind?

We may speculate why Willi acted as he did… and why it is that the scholar could not believe George’s account.

 

 

 

Miss L’s Dream Diary – Seeking ‘Dr W’.

10 Sunday May 2015

Posted by Christine in 1940s, Diaries and Source material, Refugees, WW2

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1945, consultations with a psychoanalyst, diaries as historical sources, dreams, end of war, grief, immigration, Kristallnacht, relief, resettlement, the experience of German Jews in London during ww2, trauma

Once in a while in the business of researching and writing history a rare document emerges from the archive boxes. Such items are the products of serendipity; the result of a decision made by their author, or someone, that it should be preserved. Writing in the 1940s, the French Historian and then member of the Resistance, Marc Bloch, drew my attention to such moments. The archives we rely upon for historical understanding are built from such off-the-cuff decisions and accidents – and from the systematic collation of records that are part of bureaucratic life. To read the thoughts and ideas of people who were alive in times past is  to read of our formation. These thoughts and dreams, however recorded, are the beginning of understanding. Poetry, novels, theatre and art are their interpretation. So, too, is the writing of history.

Recently I was given a box of documents collated and packed by an elderly woman, whom I shall call ‘Miss L’. She has since gone into full-time care, her mind lost to Alzheimer’s Disease. It is clear Miss L thought carefully about what was to be kept and what was thrown away. Along with the usual documents: degrees, certificates, bank records, letters and photographs there are two diaries – both kept during the 1940s when she was consulting a psychoanalyst in London. One of them follows the course of her consultations with the analyst, referred to as ‘Dr W’. The other is a dream diary, a record of nightly dreams kept during this period. Most of these dreams hold  images of her daily life and interactions with members of her family and lovers. Others are threaded with images of death and violence at the hands of the Nazis in the years before the war broke out. In others, still, she is addressing ‘Him’, her analyst, on one occasion admonishing him for not listening. Sometimes she makes a joke of him, wondering whether psychoanalysis is of value – at least to the patient. Miss L has a story to tell and conflicts to unravel. She wants and needs him to listen.

Miss L is a German Jew. During her childhood she lived near Nuremberg, the youngest of a wealthy family. Her father, a merchant, had fought in the Great War and was awarded the Iron Cross for his services. Like many of his Jewish contemporaries who were similarly awarded, he believed this would protect him from the worst excesses of the Nazis as they came to power in the 1930s. Five days after Kristallnacht in November 1938, Miss L’s father took his own life. She and her mother escaped Germany early in 1939, eventually arriving in England after travelling through Switzerland.

Miss L’s dream diary reflects her larger internal process of emigration and resettlement, from danger to safety. She speaks to her analyst of leaving one country behind but, after several years, still not settled in another. Her dreams are of murder and death. It is not unlikely she was witness to such events, if she did not hear about them from others. She also dreams of losing her identity documents on a train a reference, perhaps, to a period where she was stateless.

After her arrival in London she  experienced rejection by members of the English Jewish community because of her German origins. ‘I was not served in a shop, she tells her analyst.  In later life she recalled how much more devastated she was by this rejection by the English Jews than she had been in Germany during the years when Jews were increasingly deprived of their rights, property and wealth. Miss L eventually anglicised her name and worked hard to become British – even more so than the British. She appears to have been very much helped by Dr W. For it was after her work with him that she went to university to study for a career that would help restore the family fortune lost to the war. Miss L did not necessarily aspire to Law but eventually made a significant contribution to it.

During her analysis with Dr W, Miss L recorded her dreams on a daily basis throughout 1944 into 1945. I will transcribe two: the first because it tells us just how much she had to bear. These were the experiences and memories from which she tried to protect her children. Earlier in the analysis she had dreamed of being told not to speak. But in her conscious selection of this document for the archive box, she has I believe, expressed the wish that these experiences be known. When I read this dream, I wept.

When I read the second dream for the first time I had the feeling I had read it somewhere before. Perhaps in a case study somewhere deep in the psychoanalytic literature…? I record it now because if I am right, this may identify Dr W. Perhaps someone else has read it, remembers it and may know where it has been published. Or perhaps I have imagined reading it.  Suffice to say it is Miss L’s dream.

Dream 1. Tues 2 May 1945.

[Two girls] have offended against some rule of their school and I am told they will both be executed for it. I think it is monstrous. I want to tell everybody about this and do something against it, but I  hear the headmistress did not waste a minute, and they are already dead. I meet a man who worked in my father’s office and he is coming from the execution. I go up to him and start crying but try not to. I say to him ‘I am sorry. I did not mean to cry, but this is just too much’.  I go out to see [a lady], she must be in despair [I think]. The girls were the only thing she had in life. I find her together with some other women each of whom has lost a son. She is quite calm. They all talk about their children.

Dream 2. Sunday 20 May 1945

Mother says we are going to buy some black material for a dress for me at a certain shop in Nuremberg. I am rather thrilled. I haven’t bought any material for years. I leave the house and walk along a street in Nuremberg. There is a beautiful warm shine of light from [ a building she names but is indecipherable]. Before it was bombed the light never shone right through. It is lovelier than ever.

Round the church and the street there are rows of dead bodies of American soldiers. Some are wrapped up in brown paper and string, they must be really dead. One who was lying against a house opposite the church gets up and shows me the way to the shops and I talk to him. I remember that I never told mother I was going out but when I get near the shop I meet her and my aunt with a man in a dark uniform. He has very dark deep set eyes and a rather taut face. He seems much more interesting to me than my guide , who is rather fat and jovial.

The War had ended on 8 May 1945.

References:

Marc Bloch,( c.1944).  The Historians Craft, Oxford, 1971.

Louise London, (2000) Whitehall and the Jews, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

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