When Nietzsche Wept

by Irvin D. Yalom

  During the ride, Nietzsche inquired about the stack of clinical charts, medical texts, and journals crammed in the door pockets and scattered over the empty seats. Breuer explained that his fiacre was his second office.

  “There are days that I spend more time riding in here than in the Backerstrasse office. Some time ago, a young medical student, Sigmund Freud, wished to obtain a first-hand view of the everyday life of the physician and asked to accompany me for an entire day. He was aghast at the number of hours I spent in this fiacre and resolved, then and there, to pursue a research career rather than a clinical one.”

  In the fiacre, they circled the southern part of the city on the Ringstrasse, crossed the Wien River on the Schwarzenberg Bridge, passed the summer palace and, following the Renweg and then the Simmering Hauptstrasse, soon arrived at the City of Vienna Central Cemetery. Entering the third large gate, the Jewish division of the cemetery, Fischmann, who had been driving Breuer to his parents’ grave for a decade, unerringly traversed a maze of small paths, some barely wide enough for the fiacre to pass, and stopped before the large mausoleum of the Rothschild family. As Breuer and Nietzsche alighted, Fischmann handed Breuer a large bouquet of flowers that had been stored beneath his seat. The two men walked silently along a dirt path through rows of monuments. Some simply bore a name and death date; others had a brief statement of remembrance; others were adorned with a Star of David or with a relief of hands with outstretched fingers to denote the dead of the Cohen, the holiest tribe.

  Breuer gestured toward the bouquets of fresh-cut flowers that lay before many graves. “In this land of the dead, these are the dead, and those”—he pointed to an old untended and abandoned section of the cemetery—“those are the truly dead. No one now tends their graves because no one living has ever known them. They know what it means to be dead.”

  Reaching his destination, Breuer stood before a large family plot encircled by a thin carved stone rail. Within lay two headstones: a small upright one reading, “Adolf Breuer 1844-1874”; and a large, flat, gray marble slab on which had been carved two inscriptions:

  LEOPOLD BREUER 1791–1872

  Beloved Teacher and Father

  Not Forgotten by His Sons

  BERTHA BREUER 1818–1845

  Beloved Mother and Wife

  Died in the Blossom of Youth and Beauty

  Breuer picked up the small stone vase sitting on the marble slab, emptied last month’s dried blossoms, and gently inserted the flowers he had brought, flouncing them into fullness. After placing a small, smooth pebble on both his parents’ slab and his brother’s headstone, he stood in silence, head bowed.

  Nietzsche, respecting Breuer’s need for solitude, wandered down a path lined with granite and marble tombstones. Soon he entered the neighborhood of the wealthy Viennese Jews—Goldschmidts, Gomperzes, Altmanns, Wertheimers—who, in death as in life, sought assimilation into Christian Viennese society. Large mausoleums housing entire families, their entrances barricaded by heavy wrought-iron grills adorned with clinging iron vines, were guarded by elaborate funerary statues. Farther down the path were massive headstones upon which stood interdenominational angels, their outstretched stony arms pleading, Nietzsche imagined, for attention and remembrance.

  Ten minutes later, Breuer caught up with him. “It was easy to find you, Friedrich. I heard you humming.”

  “I amuse myself by composing doggerel as I stroll. Listen,” he said, as Breuer fell into step beside him. “My latest:

  Though no stones hear and none can see

  Each sobs softly, ‘Remember me. Remember me.’ ”

  Then, without waiting for a response from Breuer, he asked, “Who was Adolf, the third Breuer next to your parents?”

  “Adolf was my only sibling. He died eight years ago. My mother died, I’m told, as a consequence of his birth. My grandmother moved into our home to raise us, but she died long ago. Now,” Breuer said softly, “they are all gone and I am next in line.”

  “And the pebbles? I see many tombstones here with pebbles on them.”

  “A very old Jewish custom—simply to honor the dead, to signify memory.”

  “Signify to whom? Excuse me, Josef, if I cross the line of propriety.”

  Breuer reached into his coat to loosen his collar. “No, it’s all right. In fact, you ask my type of iconoclastic question, Friedrich. How strange to squirm in the way I make others squirm! But I have no answer. I leave the pebbles for no one. Not for the sake of social form, for others to see—I have no other family and am the only one who ever visits this grave. Not for superstition or fear. Certainly not for hope of reward hereafter: since childhood, I have believed that life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.”

  “Life—a spark between two voids. A nice image, Josef. And isn’t it strange how we are so preoccupied with the second void and never think upon the first?”

  Breuer nodded appreciatively and, after a few moments, continued, “But the pebbles. You ask, for whom I leave these pebbles? Perhaps my hand is tempted by Pascal’s wager. After all, what’s to be lost? It’s a small pebble, a small effort.”

  “And a small question, too, Josef. One I asked merely to gain time to ponder a much greater question!”

  “Which question?”

  “Why you never told me your mother’s name was Bertha!”

  Breuer had never expected this question. He turned to look at Nietzsche. “Why should I have? I never thought of it. I never told you that my eldest daughter is also named Bertha. It’s not relevant. As I told you, my mother died when I was three, and I have no memories of her.”

  “No conscious memories,” said Nietzsche, correcting him. “But most of our memories exist in the subconscious. You’ve no doubt seen Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious? It’s in every bookstore.”

  Breuer nodded. “I know it well. Our café table group has spent many hours discussing it.”

  “There is a real genius behind that book—but it is the publisher, not the author. Hartmann is, at best, a journeyman philosopher who has merely appropriated the thoughts of Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Shelling. But to the publisher, Duncker, I say, ‘Chapeau!’ ”—and Nietzsche flourished his green hat in the air. “There’s a man who knows how to put a book before the nose of every reader in Europe. It’s in its ninth edition! Overbeck tells me that over a hundred thousand copies have been sold! Can you imagine! And I’m grateful if one of my books sells two hundred!”

  He sighed and replaced his hat on his head.

  “But to go back to Hartmann, he discusses two dozen different aspects of the unconscious and leaves no doubt that the greatest part of our memory and mental processes is outside consciousness. I agree, except that he doesn’t go far enough: It’s difficult, I believe, to overestimate the degree to which life—real life—is lived by the unconscious. Consciousness is only the translucent skin covering existence: the trained eye can see through it—to primitive forces, instincts, to the very engine of the will to power.

  “In fact, Josef, you alluded to the unconscious yesterday when you imagined entering Bertha’s dreams. How did you put it—that you had gained access to her innermost chamber, that sanctuary in which nothing ever decays? If your image dwells eternally in her mind, then where is it housed during the moments she’s thinking of something else? Obviously there must be a vast reservoir of unconscious memories.”

  At that moment, they came upon a small group of mourners congregated near a canopy covering an open grave. Four burly cemetery journeymen, using heavy ropes, had lowered the casket; and the mourners, even the frail and elderly, now lined up to drop a small shovelful of soil into the grave. Breuer and Nietzsche walked in silence for several minutes, inhaling the dank, sweet-sour odor of newly turned earth. They came to a fork. Breuer touched Nietzsche’s arm to signal they must take the path to the right.

  “In respect to unconscious memories,” Breuer resumed when they could no longer hear
the gravel pelting the wooden coffin, “I agree entirely with you. In fact, my hypnotic work with Bertha produced much evidence of their existence. But, Friedrich, what are you suggesting? Surely not that I love Bertha because she and my mother have the same name?”

  “Don’t you find it remarkable, Josef, that though we’ve talked for many hours about your patient Bertha, it wasn’t till this morning that you told me that was your mother’s name?”

  “I haven’t concealed it from you. I’ve simply never connected my mother and Bertha. Even now, it seems strained and far-fetched. To me, Bertha is Bertha Pappenheim. I never think about my mother. No image of her ever enters my mind.”

  “Yet all your life you place flowers on her grave.”

  “On my whole family’s grave!”

  Breuer sensed he was being obstinate but was, nonetheless, determined to continue speaking his mind truthfully. He felt a wave of admiration for Nietzsche’s stamina as he persisted, uncomplaining and undaunted, in his psychological investigation.

  “Yesterday we worked on every possible meaning of Bertha. Your chimneysweeping stirred many memories. How can it be that your mother’s name never came to mind?”

  “How can I answer that? Nonconscious memories are beyond my conscious control. I don’t know where they are. They have a life of their own. I can only talk about what I experience, what’s real. And Bertha qua Bertha is the most real thing in my life.”

  “But, Josef, that’s exactly the point. What did we learn yesterday if not that your relationship to Bertha is unreal, an illusion woven from images and longings that have nothing to do with the real Bertha?

  “Yesterday we learned that your Bertha fantasy protects you from the future, from the terrors of aging, death, oblivion. Today I realize that your vision of Bertha is also contaminated by ghosts from the past. Josef, only this instant is real. In the end, we experience only ourselves in the present moment. Bertha’s not real. She’s but a phantom who comes from both the future and the past.”

  Breuer had never seen Nietzsche so confident—certain of every word.

  “Let me put it another way!” he continued. “You think you and Bertha are an intimate twosome—the most intimate, private relationship imaginable. Not so?”

  Breuer nodded.

  “Yet,” Nietzsche said emphatically, “I am convinced that in no way do you and Bertha have a private relationship. I believe that your obsession will be resolved when you can answer one pivotal question: ‘How many people are in this relationship?’ ”

  The fiacre waited just ahead. They got in, and Breuer instructed Fischmann to take them to the Simmeringer Haide.

  Once inside, Breuer took up the question. “I’ve lost your meaning, Friedrich.”

  “Surely, you can see that you and Bertha have no private tête-à-tête. It’s never you and she alone. Your fantasy teems with others: beautiful women with redemptive and protective abilities; faceless men whom you defeat for Bertha’s favors; Bertha Breuer, your mother; and a ten-year-old girl with an adoring smile. If we have learned anything at all, Josef, it is that your obsession with Bertha is not about Bertha!”

  Breuer nodded and sank into thought. Nietzsche, too, fell silent and stared out the window for the remainder of the ride. When they alighted, Breuer asked Fischmann to pick them up in an hour.

  The sun had now disappeared behind a monstrous slate-gray cloud, and the two men leaned into an icy wind, which only yesterday had swept the Russian steppes. They buttoned up to their necks and started off at a brisk pace. Nietzsche was the first to break the silence.

  “It’s strange, Josef, how I’m always soothed by a cemetery. I told you my father was a Lutheran minister. But did I also tell you that my backyard and play area was the village churchyard? Incidentally, do you know Montaigne’s essay on death—where he advises us to live in a room with a window overlooking a cemetery? It clears one’s head, he claims, and keeps life’s priorities in perspective. Do cemeteries do that for you?”

  Breuer nodded. “I love that essay! There was a time when cemetery visits were restorative for me. A few years ago, when I felt crushed by the end of my university career, I sought solace among the dead. Somehow the tombs soothed me, allowed me to trivialize the trivial in my life. But then suddenly it changed!”

  “How so?”

  “I don’t know why, but somehow the calming, enlightening effect of the cemetery disappeared. I lost my reverence and began to regard the funerary angels, and the epitaphs about sleeping in the arms of God, as foolish, even pathetic. A couple of years ago, I underwent another change. Everything about the cemetery—the headstones, the statues, the family houses of the dead—began to frighten me. Like a child, I felt the cemetery haunted by ghosts, and I walked to my parents’ grave swiveling my head continuously, looking around and behind me. I began to procrastinate about coming and sought someone to accompany me. Nowadays my visits get shorter and shorter. I often dread the sight of my parents’ grave and sometimes, when I stand there, fear I’ll sink into the earth and be swallowed up.”

  “Like your nightmare of the ground liquefying beneath you.”

  “How eerie your speaking of that, Friedrich! Just a few minutes ago, that very dream passed through my mind.”

  “Perhaps it is a cemetery dream. In the dream, as I remember, you fell forty feet and came to rest upon a slab—wasn’t ‘slab’ your word?”

  “A marble slab! A headstone!” Breuer replied. “One with writing on it that I could not read! And there’s something else I don’t think I’ve told you. This young student, also a friend, Sigmund Freud, whom I mentioned before—the one who rode with me all day on my house calls. . . ”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, dreams are his hobby. He often asks friends about their dreams. Precise numbers or phrases in dreams intrigue him, and when I described my nightmare, he proposed a novel hypothesis about falling precisely forty feet. Since I first dreamed this dream near my fortieth birthday, he suggested that the forty feet really stood for forty years!”

  “Ingenious!” Nietzsche slowed his pace and clapped his hands together. “Not feet, but years! Now the riddle of the dream begins to yield! Upon reaching your fortieth year, you imagine falling into the earth and ending up on a marble slab. But is the slab the end? Is it death? Or does it, in some way, signify a break in the fall—a rescue?”

  Without waiting for an answer, Nietzsche rushed on. “And still another question: The Bertha you searched for when the ground began to liquefy—which Bertha was that? The young Bertha, who offers the illusion of protection? Or the mother, who once offered real safety, and whose name is written on the slab? Or a fusion of the two Berthas? After all, in a way they are near in age, your mother dying when she was not much older than Bertha!”

  “Which Bertha?” Breuer shook his head. “How can I ever answer that? To think that only a few months ago I imagined that the talking cure might eventually develop into a precise science! But how to be precise about such questions? Perhaps correctness should be gauged by sheer power: your words seem powerful, they move me, they feel right. Yet can feelings. be trusted? Everywhere, religious zealots feel a divine presence. Shall I consider their feelings less trustworthy than mine?”

  “I wonder,” Nietzsche mused, “whether our dreams are closer to who we are than either rationality or feelings.”

  “Your interest in dreams surprises me, Friedrich. Your two books barely mention them. I remember only your speculation that the mental life of primitive man still operates in dreams.”

  “I think our entire prehistory can be found in the text of our dreams. But dreams fascinate me from a distance only: unfortunately, I recall very few of my own—though one recently had great clarity.”

  The two men walked without speaking, cracking twigs and leaves underfoot. Would Nietzsche describe his dream? Breuer had learned by now that the less he asked, the more Nietzsche gave of himself. Silence was best.

  Several minutes later, Nietzsche continued. �
��It’s short and, like yours, involves both women and death. I dreamed I was in bed with a woman, and there was a struggle. Perhaps we each tugged at the sheets. At any rate, a couple of minutes later, I found myself tightly bound in the sheets, so tightly that I could not move and began to suffocate. I awoke in a sweat, gasping for air and calling out, ‘Live, live!’ ”

  Breuer tried to help Nietzsche recall more of the dream, but to no avail. Nietzsche’s only association to the dream was that being wrapped in sheets was like Egyptian embalming. He had become a mummy.

  “It strikes me,” Breuer said, “that our dreams are diametrically opposite. I dream about a woman rescuing me from death, while in your dream the woman is the instrument of death!”

  “Yes, that’s what my dream says. And I believe it’s so! To love woman is to hate life!”

  “I don’t understand, Friedrich. You’re speaking cryptically again.”

  “I mean that one can’t love a woman without blinding oneself to the ugliness beneath the fair skin: blood, veins, fat, mucus, feces—the physiological horrors. The lover must put out his own eyes, must forsake truth. And, for me, an untrue life is a living death!”

  “So there can never be a place for love in your life?” Breuer sighed deeply. “Even though love is ruining my life, your statement makes me sad for you, my friend.”

  “I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another. Once, not long ago, I thought I had found it. But I was mistaken.”

  “What happened?”

  Thinking that Nietzsche had shaken his head slightly, Breuer did not press him. They walked together on until Nietzsche resumed: “I dream of a love in which two people share a passion to search together for some higher truth. Perhaps I should not call it love. Perhaps it’s real name is friendship.”

  How different their discussion was that day! Breuer felt close to Nietzsche, even wished to walk arm in arm with him. Yet he also felt disappointed. He knew he would not get the help he needed on this day. There was not enough compressed intensity during such a walking conversation. It was too easy, in an uncomfortable moment, to slip into silence and to let one’s attention be caught by the clouds of exhaled breath and the crackling of bare branches trembling in the wind.