Heinz Kohut

Part One
VIENNA 1913-1939




One
PREHISTORY




On May 3, 1913, Heinz Kohut was born to Felix and Else Kohut in old Austria's great city of Vienna. Both parents were talented and financially comfortable members of the city's assimilated Jewish elite and lived in the Ninth District at Liechtensteinstrasse 121. Felix, dashing at twenty-four, was a brilliant pianist in active training for a concert career. The First World War, however, was to shatter such dreams and force him into business, while leukemia would end his life prematurely at forty-nine in 1937. Else, twenty-two at the birth of her only son, was a beautiful, very dramatic, and determined young woman who sang well and later ran her own business. In 1940 she would follow her son into immigration to escape the Nazis and live several decades in Chicago before dying in 1972 at eighty-two years of age. 1
The prehistory of the family exists more in myth than fact. Take the patrimonial name itself. "Kohut" is a fairly common Jewish name that is probably derived from the Hebrew name (Kohath), the son of Levi (one of the sons of Jacob) mentioned in Genesis 46:11. There was, furthermore, a distinguished line of Rabbi Kohuts from Hungary in the nineteenth century, including Alexander Kohut (1842-1894), a great philologist who came to America in 1885 and wrote a prodigious eight-volume study of the Talmud; his son, George Alexander Kohut, who became a learned rabbi and, like his father, was an important figure at the Jewish Theological Seminary of New York City; another Hungarian writer, Adolf Kohut (1848-1917); and several other Hungarian Kohuts who were leaders of the Jewish community.2
Kohut himself, however, never said his name came from the biblical son of Levi and certainly never mentioned any rabbinic forebears. On the contrary, his story, as woven in the family, was that "Kohut" means "rooster" in Czech and that most Bohemian Kohuts were Christian. In fact, the Czech word for rooster (kohout) is similar, though the likelihood that any of Heinz Kohut's ancestors were Christian Kohuts in Bohemia is slim indeed. His maternal family, furthermore, the Lampls, was descended from Jews in Slovakia, a fact about which Heinz Kohut, as best one can tell, never once commented in his adult life. Both sides of Kohut's family were almost certainly, then, part of the vast migration of Jews to Vienna from the provinces of the Austrian Empire after mid-century; Kohut once told an interviewer that both the Kohuts and the Lampls had been in Vienna for several generations, which would put both families in that first wave of Jewish immigrants in the 1850s and 1860s.3 Some Jews had been in Vienna for nearly a millennium, but after the revolution of 1848 the government lifted the traditional restrictions on Jewish residence. Jews flocked to Vienna from the shtetls and towns of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They helped transform the arts, commerce, and banking in the old capital. From a population of 2,000 in 1847, by the First World War there were about 200,000 Jews in Vienna, or 10 percent of the total population of two million, and by the mid-1930s the number of Jews in Vienna had risen to nearly 300,000, with the population of the city rising accordingly.4 Jews helped transform the culture of Vienna within a generation. Things had never been better, as the Viennese say, and they had never been worse.5
Kohut's paternal grandfather, Bernhard (or, in the Jewish records, Bernat) Kohut, born in 1842 to Ignaz Kohut and Ester Hupka Kohut, was an English teacher in a gymnasium, having worked his way up from elementary-school teaching.6 A gymnasium teacher was accorded a greater degree of status in society than we would associate with a high school instructor. They were called "professor" and bore themselves with some dignity and stiffness, as Heinrich Mann captured in his novel Professor Unrat, made famous in the movie The Blue Angel with Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich. Bernhard, who politically yearned for the ideal of a united Germany that included Austria,7 was true to his professorial stereotype. Two stories about him became part of family lore. One concerned a ritual he had on Sundays. The family, including Bernhard and his wife, Sophie Fischl Kohut, and the children, Felix, Anna (born 1879), Richard (born 1883), and Friedrich (born 1891), all of whom, except forFelix, died in the Holocaust, would gather for their main meal of the day. There would be talk and chatter as the children tried to contain themselves as they waited for the climactic end of dinner. Then, with much pomp and circumstance, the father would call the child to his side who had behaved the best. He would give a key to that child, who would go to a designated box, put the key in, and open it. Inside would be an apple. The child would take the apple to the father, who would ceremoniously peel it according to his mood. In a good mood, he would peel the apple thickly, in a bad mood he would peel it thinly. In any event, the favored child got the peel and the father ate the apple. The wife got the core. The other story about this ornery patriarch is that when he was dying he made his children stand and slam the door to his bedroom as loud as they could to keep him from slipping away. That haunting sound of the door slamming stayed with Felix the rest of his life as a metaphor for death. 8
The Lampl family, partly because of the longevity of Else, reached more deeply into Heinz's experience. Her parents were Sigmund Lampl and Franziska Ullmann Lampl. They had four children, of whom the eldest, Rudolf, died at two (1884-1886). Else was born in 1890. She had two younger brothers. The older, Wilhelm (born in 1892), called Willy, served in the First World War and was something of a hero. When the Second World War started, Willy never left Vienna and died with his child in the Holocaust. He probably assumed that he was safe because of his heroic record in the first war. The next boy, Hans Lampl, was a cosmopolitan young man. Only nineteen when Heinz Kohut was born, Hans had wide-ranging interests in music and culture that he was to share with his talented nephew. As a young man, Hans started several small business partnerships; after the first war he became an executive of a large company that produced pulp and fine paper. He survived the second war by moving to London. The last Lampl child was Else's younger sister, Mitzi, who was an invalid, probably retarded, and perhaps disturbed in other ways. She lived all her life at home with her aging parents, who cared for her. Walter Lampl, Hans's son, remembers visiting his grandparents as a child and seeing this mysterious aunt in the back, darkened room of the apartment. One suspects the Lampls were ashamed of letting her out. Mitzi died sometime in the 1920s.9
For the rest the names and stories fade into obscurity. The only real curiosity about Heinz Kohut's genealogy is his personal myth about the Christian Kohuts from Bohemia. It is not the kind of issue about which itwas possible for there to be confusion. Jews in Vienna had no doubt about their ethnicity. They were required by law to be members of the "Israelite community," as it was designated. Because of its autonomy, Jews had to pay taxes collectively as a unit through their elected representatives. 10 In schools Jews were segregated for separate religious instruction. Felix and Else also had a Jewish wedding ("Eingetragen in dem Trauungs-Protokole der Israelitischen Kultusgemeinde in Wien," says their wedding certificate). The only curiosity is that there and on her birth certificate Else's name is spelled "Elsa" (her middle name was Sara), which is the more common German, as opposed to Austrian, version of her name.
It was certainly true, however, that Heinz's parents had different religious identities. His father was conventionally Jewish. Felix came out of a Jewish family, was raised religiously and bar mitzvahed, and never questioned his personal or spiritual relationship to the faith of his fathers. Felix was not Orthodox but he was observant. He and Else reserved seats in the temple in the Ninth District near the Liechtenstein Park. He attended temple on most holy days, often with his nephew, Walter Lampl, because his son, Heinz, was not interested. On Yom Kippur, Felix honored tradition by walking from his house to the temple. Felix moved in upper-middle-class circles that sharply separated him from the teeming Jewish community of mostly poorer immigrants settled in Leopoldstadt. But Felix was a religious man, and when he died young of leukemia in 1937 it was natural that his wife and son gave him a full Jewish funeral, though it does not seem that they sat shiva.
Else Lampl, on the other hand, had a much more complex relationship with religion. She was born Jewish in a family that mostly remained committed to its faith and observant of its rituals. Both her parents and all her ancestors were Jewish, and her family may have included some noted rabbis. She was thus "racially" Jewish, as the Nazis defined such things, and was forced to flee Vienna after the Anschluss; undoubtedly she would have otherwise perished in the Holocaust. She was also formally part of the Jewish community in Vienna (the Kultusgemeinde). When Siegmund Levarie's father, Josef Löwenherz, was gathering votes for the Progressive Party in their bid to take control of the Kultusgemeinde in the mid-1930s (when they won, he was appointed vice-president), Löwenherz personally called Else to ask for her vote. Else furthermore "looked Jewish" (according to her grandson, Thomas, and others who knew her), though she was, of course, privileged, educated, and assimilated. She married a Jew,Felix Kohut, and attended temple with her husband on the major Jewish holidays. She did cut corners. While Felix would walk to temple on Yom Kippur, Else would drive her car to the vicinity of the temple, park it, and walk the rest of the way.11
As a girl, however, Else also seems to have established some kind of relationship to the Catholic Church. She may even have been confirmed. One of the items she took with her out of Vienna into emigration was a confirmation bracelet. The bracelet has remained in the family.12 Furthermore, the slight variation in the spelling of her name may reflect her dual identities. On all legal, that is, Jewish, documents she is "Elsa" (birth and wedding certificates and the Inventory of Jewish Wealth, which the Nazis forced her to complete in 1938), while she was otherwise "Else." Thomas Kohut, her grandson, always understood that Else was Catholic in her childhood and "would have described herself probably as a Christian." She grew up with Christmas trees during the holidays, and the Lampls--and later the Kohuts--celebrated Christmas (Weihnachten) by exchanging presents on December 24, as was customary.13 Else clearly had a layered religious identity that embodied contradictions about both ethnicity and belief. As Thomas Kohut sees it, her Jewish origins and life and involvements seemed not to fulfill her spiritual yearnings, and in some way she connected with Catholicism as a girl. That made her, in the eyes of her grandson, a Catholic by belief in a world that came to insist she had to stand up and be counted ethnically as a Jew, which became, of course, the great crisis of identity for all converted Jews throughout Germany after 1933 and Austria after 1938. Faith for Else seemed to take precedence over birth as she sought to define her identity in an individual way that allowed for a crossing of lines in many directions.
But this official "family" version of her story may itself embody contradictions that reflect the pain of forced emigration and the residues of her own early struggles. Siegmund Levarie, Heinz's best childhood friend, was often around the Kohut home and was to know Else well in America. He says it is preposterous to think of her as anything but completely Jewish. He scorns the idea that she was confirmed a Catholic in Vienna. "One can pick up a junk bracelet in any jewelry store," he said.14 Walter Lampl (born 1921), furthermore, Else's nephew, who was close to the Kohuts, went to synagogue with Felix, and kept up contact with Else in emigration, doubts seriously that there was ever any kind of conversion on her part. Certainly he never heard anything about it. His own father and Else's brother, Hans Lampl, had renounced his Judaism in the 1920spurely as a business decision. He was an utterly agnostic man. All one did was to change one's religious affiliation from Jewish to Roman Catholic on the appropriate forms. He never was confirmed or went to church. There was no shame about the way Hans handled his religious identity, nor was there anything secret about it. But it was naturally known in the family. Walter Lampl also points out that it was common for Viennese Jews, even quite religious ones like himself, to have Christmas trees and celebrate Weihnachten. It was a fun holiday for children and was, in a sense, Judaized.15
Else remained officially--which meant legally--a Jew. She did not become a convert to Catholicism; to begin with, to have done so would have made her marriage illegal, for intermarriage in Vienna required prior conversion of the non-Catholic partner.16 Had she gone to church as an adult, someone in the family would have noticed, which is what makes Walter Lampl's testimony so significant. Else's confirmation, if it occurred at all, was thus probably part of a passing adolescent experimentation, long before she met Felix and started her family. The existence of the bracelet and the story of the confirmation--which even if part of a personal myth constitute something real historically--suggest that Else had a profound religious confusion in her core self. Psychologically, she seemed to think of herself as some kind of complex mixture of Judaism and Christianity, though she retained into adulthood the identity and self-presentation of a Jew. It was a kind of spirituality that defied religious convention and certainly mocked the categories the Nazis established.
Else's personal struggles with her Jewish religion and identity were not in isolation. Assimilation in all its forms, including its end product, conversion, touched the experience of many affluent and educated Jews in Vienna at the turn of the century. There were, to be sure, broad cultural associations of Jews with dirt and evil that prompted both anti-Semitism and self-hate.17 But the move away from Judaism and toward Christianity was equally, if not primarily, based in the affirmation of a shared culture. It was common for Jews to shed their Judaism once exposed to the culture and humanism of Vienna. Freud, for example, could not read the Hebrew that his father inscribed in the family Bible and considered himself a determined atheist who felt that organized religion was at best foolish. 18 He was well educated, successful, bourgeois, and an integral part of Viennese cultural life in the early decades of the century. At the same time and however assimilated, Freud was clear about his Jewishness. He joined B'nai B'rith in 1897, collected Jewish jokes, and associated mostly withJews; Carl Jung was important to Freud at first precisely because he was not Jewish and broke the stereotype of psychoanalysis as a Jewish science. 19
Other Jews more eagerly sought to shed their Jewish ethnicity along with their religion. That attempted transformation usually began with conversion to Christianity. Sometimes, "conversion" was purely pragmatic and perfunctory, as with Else's brother, Hans Lampl. More commonly, however, conversion was a prelude to intermarriage. There were quite a few such conversions in Vienna: some 9,000 between 1868 and 1903.20 Many converts or their children became quite famous, including Alfred Adler, Hugo Bettauer, Hermann Broch, Karl Kraus, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. And yet even with conversion and intermarriage the subjective sense of being Jewish remained, if subtly. For one thing, the world at large, especially after 1890 and with mounting intensity after 1933, kept alive the sharp distinction between Catholics and anyone ethnically Jewish. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, for example, was not Jewish by religion and only one-quarter by descent, but he was a clear product of assimilation, as was Wittgenstein. In this sense, far from producing a complete merger with the surrounding populace, "assimilation was in itself a Jewish phenomenon."21
The story of the assimilation of Viennese Jews, however, taking place as it did on the cusp of the Anschluss and the Holocaust, has not been a neutral historical problem. Its history has gotten encrusted with clichés, especially that of Vienna "waltzing toward the abyss." Many Zionists and others who read history backward now mock the self-absorbed pretensions of cultured Jews aspiring to forget their origins and merge with the larger Christian world. Among such observers, a few clairvoyants are exempt from the charge of naive complacency. The rest are in a "freefall that prefigures the collapse of western culture itself."22 Written this way, history mocks those who believed in assimilation into a society that was so brutally to expel them. Few, for example, possessed the insight and commitment of Schoenberg, who reembraced Judaism after Hitler came to power in 1933. Perhaps only the lemmings as metaphor captures the past in this historicist perspective.
But from within the contemporary world of Viennese Jewish experience, assimilation looked very different. The future seemed boundlessly hopeful. There had been only rapid economic, social, and cultural progress for the Jews who escaped the shtetl and towns of eastern Europe for the wonders of Vienna. They were hardly blind to the politics of KarlLueger, the openly anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna in the 1890s, or the rantings of people like Georg von Schönerer, or the vile propaganda of the rising Nazi party in the late 1920s and early 1930s.23 Virulent anti-Semitism, after all, was hardly new in the historical experience of central and eastern European Jews. They had suffered centuries of pogroms and other abuses. But late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Vienna, for all the dangers that lurked at the margins, seemed different. At least until 1933 in Vienna, and to some extent until 1938, one could reasonably hope for the emergence of more tolerant political alternatives and refuse to abandon the contours of an assimilated life. Even the image of decadence one associates with fin de siècle Vienna is wrongheaded, especially its Jewish face. It is an art not of decline but of uplift. The work of Gustav Mahler and Arthur Schnitzler, for example, is "defiant and liberating," challenging the staid art of the nineteenth century. In science, Freud's work, in particular, challenged the contemporary formalistic approaches to mental illness and opened up new pathways to the soul with his work on dreams. Finally, in politics, Jews, and Viennese Jews most of all, really believed in the idea of a transnational cultural identity. Mocked by anti-Semites, this vision of something beyond fascist nationalisms has a deep appeal after Auschwitz and Hiroshima.
Copyright © 2001 by Charles, B. Strozier