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Saving Freud: The Rescuers Who Brought Him to Freedom
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82/99
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Volume
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About This Book
A dramatic true story about Sigmund Freud's last-minute escape to London following the German annexation of Austria and the group of friends who made it possible. In March 1938, German soldiers crossed the border into Austria and Hitler absorbed the country into the Third Reich. Anticipating these events, many Jews had fled Austria, but the most famous Austrian Jew remained in Vienna, where he had lived since early childhood. Sigmund Freud was eighty-one years old, ill with cancer, and still unconvinced that his life was in danger. But several prominent people close to Freud thought otherwise, and they began a coordinated effort to persuade Freud to leave his beloved Vienna and emigrate to England. The group included a Welsh physician, Napoleon's great-grandniece, an American ambassador, Freud's devoted youngest daughter Anna, and his personal doctor. Saving Freud is the story of how this remarkable collection of people finally succeeded in coaxing Freud, a man who seemingly knew the human mind better than anyone else, to emerge from his deep state of denial about the looming catastrophe, allowing them to extricate him and his family from Austria so that they could settle in London. There Freud would live out the remaining sixteen months of his life in freedom. This book is both an incisive new biography of Freud and a group biography of the extraordinary friends who saved Freud's life.
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Reviews
"Andrew Nagorski spikes his thriller with truly terrifying notes...Shortly before the dash for freedom, two of Freud's children, Anna and Martin, were questioned by the Gestapo...They had taken the precaution of asking Schur for a deadly barbiturate to take if torture ensued...Moreover, four of Freud's elderly sisters stayed in Austria; three perished in Treblinka, while the fourth starved to death...At the end of this otherwise excellent book we are still left pondering how Freud himself, whose work was all about facing up to the unpleasant realities of human life, could carry on believing for so long that he alone could give History the slip...A gripping account of how colleagues and admirers spirited the psychoanalyst from Nazi-controlled Vienna to London."
"Because if Freud himself, so attuned to the dark undercurrents of human behavior and so critical of the false security offered by our wishful illusions, proved unable to think clearly even as his country became unrecognizable around him and as nightmare after nightmare became real, what are our chances now?"
"Saving Freud tells the story of a group of people—including Freud's daughter Anna and her lover, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham (heiress to the Tiffany & Co."
"Noting the fate of some of Freud's family members who were left behind underscores the crucial importance of his team of saviors."
"A richly contextual look at Freud's escape to London...Though veteran journalist and author Nagorski delivers a riveting page-turner, German troops don't enter Austria until Page 230, and Freud leaves on Page 254...Few readers will complain once they realize that the narrative is a fine biography of Freud...The author pays close attention to his subject's early life and struggles and the development of psychoanalysis, which, focused on childhood sexuality and the unconscious, enraged as many as it fascinated and made Freud an international celebrity by 1900...Nagorski doesn't ignore Freud's early followers (Jung, Adler), many of whom who were out of the picture by the 1930s, but he maintains a sharp focus on a small group who remained loyal, again delivering complete, satisfying biographies that don't emphasize the rescue...Excellent biographies of Freud and some contemporaries."
"It is also a psychobiographical thriller about the limits of genius ..."
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