On Dangerous Ground by Diane O'Donoghue

Author:Diane O'Donoghue
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Figure 4.2 Heinrich Natter. Andreas Hofer-Denkmal (Andreas Hofer Monument), bronze, 1892, Bergisel, Innsbruck. Postcard (Private collection, Vienna).

It was a relatively recent installation, dedicated in 1893, and thus put in place only six years before Freud encountered it. Hofer’s remains had been returned from Mantua to Innsbruck in 1823 and interred in an elaborately ornamented crypt in the city’s Hofkirche.52 The commanding bronze figure, intended to complement the burial monument, was created by the Austrian artist Heinrich Natter and culminated a long project to commemorate the nearby battle site, at Bergisel. It was here that Hofer had one of his great victories, leading a battle of the so-called “Tyrolean Rebellion” against Napoleonic forces, in which he, born in a village in this alpine region, was a key figure.53 Natter created a heroic rendition of the patriot, shown confidently hoisting a banner; the artist died the year before the work could be completed, but it was cast in bronze from his specifications and is considered a posthumous work.54

Below the figure of Hofer was a medallion on which Natter had included three words: Gott König Vaterland (king, emperor, fatherland), a trio associated both with Hofer and with Mosen’s poem, whose popularity had been very influential in keeping Hofer’s memory alive. When Freud read these words, the trio in all likelihood suggested something far less positive. What he imagined this instance of forgetting shared with his “great dream” probably involved his inability to claim a national identity and its attachments—being, as he had said, bereft of a homeland. Freud’s letter to Martha, written the next day, suggests that he came upon the statue while touring the city’s well-known sites; it is probable that seeing the statue, recalling the poem, and then reading the cartouche all occurred unexpectedly, perhaps causing Freud to suddenly confront his own disenfranchisement at an unwelcomed moment that may have engaged his attention at the cost of being able to recall Mosen’s name. When, in the letter to Fliess, Freud introduces the Signorelli lapse as contrasting with his forgetting the name of Mosen, he is crafting the former in a way that allows him to present a psychical explanation rather than one—no less deeply affective—exquisitely particular to him. While the elision of the Jews and “Moors” in the Duomo, themes within the chapel beside the Signorelli paintings, was itself a common trope, it can be said that Freud, in his narratives of forgetting, replaces the effects of one form of racism with those of another, deploying stereotypic exoticisms associated with the Balkans as a way to appeal to the “universality” of a provocation to “forbidden” thoughts and their subsequent repression.

Part of the reason why Freud could make a successful argument for the motivations underlying the otherwise unremarkable experience of forgetting Signorelli’s name was the surroundings in which this incident of forgetting occurred: the lapse was more easily “solved” than the Mosen episode because Freud was able to exploit certain colonialist fantasies about the Balkans to create a narrative that served to buffer him from revealing any anxieties about his own vulnerability.

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