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| Freud and Hitler face to face
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The play “Vienna 1913” explores the origins of psychoanalysis and mechanisms of racist feeling on the backdrop of early 20th century Vienna, where great minds came together and where Adolf Hitler was born.
Written by psychoanalyst Alain Didier-Weill, the play tells of the meeting of leading thinkers, artists and scientists such as Freud, Jung, Klimt, Hanish, and also the young Adolf Hitler, a failed artist, who lived miserable in a hostel.
Hitler, whose name is not pronounced during the play, develops his ideal of the “Aryan people”, “new man”, on the basis of pan-German ideologies. His troubled family origins fuel his anti-Semitism.
“My grand-mother fell pregnant when she was emplyed by these Jews,” he writes in Mein Kampf.
“I lived in a town where my hatred was born against this mix of foreign people wearing out the old German centre of culture.”
For Weil “this mad love for ‘blood’ and ‘race’, above the human race is the source of racism”.
The author asks how all this horror can have taken place and what we can do to ensure it never happens again.
Meeting of destinies
At 20, Hitler meets another boy, brilliant and good-looking, an heir of an aristocratic Viennese family, Jung. But this rich young man is anti-Semitic. The psychoanalyst Jung send him to consult his master, Freud.
They confront each other on every aspects of the Viennese society and create a new ideal.
This unlikely meeting between Hitler and Freud explains the relationship between psychoanalysis and anti-Semitism and also deals with the conflict between Jung and Freud about subconscious.
The play is presented as an opera with actors standing behind music stands like in a choir. Two mezzo-sopranos accompany the actors as well as an orchestra of glass instruments that was used for the treatment of hysteria in the early 20th century. It shows fragility of an era which may explode anytime.
“Vienna 1913” by Alain Didier-Weill plays at the Rachi centre until 12 March 2006.
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