Wondrous Transformations by Alison Li

Author:Alison Li
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2023-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

When Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, Eugen Steinach and his wife were safely away on a lecture tour in Switzerland. Two-thirds of the Vivarium staff were Jewish and were dismissed on racial grounds; many would go into exile and several to concentration camps. The founder, Hans Leo Przibram, and his wife escaped to the Netherlands but were captured and deported to Theresienstadt; Przibram died there and his wife took her own life the next day. The Vivarium’s legacy was obscured and the contributions and efforts of its investigators ridiculed. Although the Vivarium continued to exist for several more years, its heart was destroyed in 1938. In 1945, the building was burned to the ground by Allied bombings. After the war, the pioneering work of its researchers was almost completely erased from official histories, and the once internationally renowned institution was almost forgotten.67

Steinach and his wife were granted residency in Switzerland, and Steinach kept hoping that he would be able to continue his research in the United States, but many efforts made to bring him to America failed. In September 1938, his wife died by suicide. Benjamin wrote Gertrude Atherton that, “with Austria no longer being a civilized country, I doubt very much whether I shall go to Europe this year at all.”68 Benjamin never saw Steinach again but continued to write faithfully. Gretchen managed a visit to Steinach in Zurich in 1939, just before the war, and he seemed to her still a gracious host and loyal friend, but she knew he felt greatly frustrated.69

Benjamin had become an American citizen in 1921, but as late as 1931, when his practice was poor and his income small, it seems he still harbored the hope that he might finally return to Berlin for good.70 Until 1933, his sympathies were with the Weimar Republic. But his transformation from a German into an American was made complete by his horror at what he described as “the revolting demonstration of the Nazi brand of the Furor Teutonicus” (the legendary ferocity of the Teutons). With the rise of Hitler, Benjamin felt that he would have to go back almost to Goethe’s time to find the Germany of which he could be proud.71 Berlin had been the world center of sexology, but Benjamin watched in despair as, he would one day say, “this whole hopeful science fell victim to Nazi barbarism.”72 From 1921 to the early 1930s, Benjamin had seen himself serving as a bridge between the Old World and the New World. After the collapse of sexology in Berlin and Vienna, he was left one of a small number of surviving links to a once flourishing and avant-garde intellectual tradition.73

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