The Luzern Photograph

by William Bayer

  ‘I do,’ I tell her, surprised by the speed at which she’s moving the conversation.

  ‘It’s not a long story. We met by chance. It was in Vienna at a public lecture about the early days of psychoanalysis, the so-called heroic period … a special interest of mine. Chantal wandered in, sat down a few seats away. I was impressed by the way she carried herself and I liked the way she looked. Later, she confessed, she liked my looks too. Our eyes met, we exchanged smiles. After the lecture I asked if she’d join me at a coffee house. She agreed, we went to one nearby, sat and talked until two a.m.’

  Eva sips from her beer. She smiles as she recalls that first encounter.

  ‘She told me she’d come to Vienna on leave from college to improve her German and because of her interest in Freud. As we talked we discovered we shared a Jewish heritage. When she asked me about myself, I told her exactly what I did – that I was a professional dominatrix catering to male fantasies of female power, a role I regarded as akin to that of a psychotherapist … and often a lot more effective. She was immediately intrigued. When I described the kinds of scenes I created, she said I sounded like a director of an intimate form of theater … which, of course, I am. She asked if she could observe me at work. I told her she could, but by the very act of observing she would also become a participant. She understood. “I will be The Voyeur,” she said. “My presence as witness will intensify the effect.”’

  Eva shakes her head. ‘She was amazing … so smart, intuitive. Turned out she had a natural gift for erotic domination. A born actress, she thrived in my theatrical dungeon. I’d had apprentices before, but never one so talented or astute.’

  ‘So she became your apprentice?’

  ‘The next day. She stayed with me for three years. I taught her everything I knew. We worked together. We also fell in love. You know that, of course.’

  ‘Yes, from the letters. A friend translated them for me. When I realized how intimate they were I was surprised she stored them inside a book.’

  ‘Which one, do you remember?’

  ‘A book of old photographs of traditional Viennese coffee houses.’

  ‘Of course!’ Eva’s delighted. ‘An excellent hiding place since we spent so much time in them. Kaffehauskultur is among the great joys of Viennese life.’

  ‘Still I wonder why, when she sold her books, she didn’t pull your letters out.’

  ‘Perhaps she was so busy getting rid of stuff she forgot they were there.’

  ‘Why do you think she was in such a rush?’

  ‘She was scared.’

  ‘Do you know why?’ I ask holding my breath, hoping I’ll finally learn the reason.

  ‘She called me on Skype a few days after she abandoned the loft, told me she was staying in a hotel. I could tell she was upset. She muttered something about not wanting to sound paranoid.’

  Eva exhales. ‘It takes courage to do our kind of work, dealing with the eccentric fantasies of strangers. Occasionally our kind of treatment will release something in a client and he’ll explode. I taught her how to handle these situations, and she took the usual precautions. My guess is she must have felt severely threatened by something she didn’t think she could handle. When I asked her again what was going on, she said it had to do with the photograph. “The Luzern?” I asked. “In a way,” she said. She promised she’d tell me the details when she saw me. She mentioned she had a few things to settle before she came to Vienna to cool off. She asked if she could stay with me. I told her she knew she didn’t have to ask. She was grateful. “I want to spend a few weeks with you,” she told me, “walking the streets as we used to do. I need some time to figure out the rest of my life.”

  ‘She said she was thinking of returning to school, getting her degree, then finding a new career. She loved black-and-white photography and had always admired the work of Helmut Newton. “I’d like to apprentice to a good art photographer,” she told me, “learn how it’s done and see how I might fit in.”’

  Eva lowers her eyes. When she speaks again it’s with sorrow. ‘After that I didn’t hear from her. She didn’t answer my emails or calls. Worried, I phoned Lynx. She didn’t know anything more than that Chantal had seemed upset then disappeared. I was frantic. Then two weeks later Lynx emailed me that Chantal had been killed. At first I refused to believe it. I thought maybe she’d faked her death and was walking around someplace free of whatever had frightened her. Then her brother confirmed it. When he told me he had her ashes I was devastated. I knew my dear Chantal was truly gone.’

  She turns to me, brightens. ‘It’s a lovely evening. Let’s stretch our legs. I love New York this time of year.’

  We exit the hotel. A cool breeze has replaced the summer humidity that hung over the city when I arrived. The rush hour has passed, the sidewalks aren’t crowded. It’s possible to speak in normal tones as we make our way toward Fifth Avenue.

  ‘I love the tempo here,’ Eva tells me, ‘so different from the measured pace of old Vienna. It’s good to come for a few days and drink up the energy. But I could never live here.’

  Reaching Fifth, we turn and start uptown, passing store windows, banks, office towers. Feeling strangely comfortable walking beside Eva, I ask her about Chantal’s interests as reflected in her library: Lou Andreas-Salomé; Freud and psychoanalysis; Hitler and the Third Reich.

  ‘Those are all my interests,’ she tells me. ‘Dear Chantal, madly in love with me, soon took them up as her own. You know they call Vienna “City of Dreams”. I think it’s impossible to take up residence there and not become interested in Freud. She was already interested in him, which was why she happened to attend the lecture. As for Hitler and Salomé, those have long been special interests of mine. Once I told Chantal about Lou, she fixated on her. Most people concentrate on the relationship with Nietzsche or the years with Rilke, but for personal reasons I’m more interested in her time with Freud. After I shared my reasons, Chantal took them up with even more fervor than myself.’

  Eager as I am to hear about these personal reasons, I’m relieved when she asks me about myself. She perks up when I mention I’m in therapy with a neo-Freudian analyst whom I see weekly for sessions that revolve around unresolved issues with my father.

  ‘Interesting … I also have daddy issues.’ She pronounces ‘issues’ as if the word can barely describe them. But when I recount Dad’s criminal history, his stint in prison, and the destruction he wreaked on our family by his toxic combination of charm and lies, I can tell by her reaction she understands that for me the word ‘issues’ is also an understatement.

  When she asks about my performance work, I describe Recital, Black Mirrors, and my Weimar piece. She seems especially impressed when I recount my recent femme-fatale gig in Rex’s Vertigo.

  ‘I sense you enjoyed doing that one,’ she says. ‘Perhaps more than you like to admit.’

  Surprised by her insight, I ask how I betrayed myself.

  ‘There was no betrayal. I heard it in your voice, saw it in your eyes.’

  Meeting her gaze, I feel that I can safely confide in her, that like Dr Maude she won’t judge or disparage me no matter what I say.

  She suggests we have dinner at a nearby restaurant. Then she stops to gaze at me again. ‘I think now I understand, without you telling me, why you’re so intrigued by Chantal. You have much in common – beauty, brains, a love of performance, and a fascination with decadence. But have no fear … I won’t come on to you. You’ve signaled many things, but not that.’ She chuckles. ‘Unless … well, that would be up to you. Personally I prefer to court rather than be courted. But if you’re so inclined, I’d happily make an exception.’

  Amused, I shake my head. I also decide not to disclose my erotic dreams about Chantal. Settling the matter with a quick clasp of hands, we turn east on 62nd Street.

  En route to the restaurant, I ask if she made the same exception in regard to Chantal.

  She laughs. ‘In her case I was definitely the seducer. I cou
ld tell she was ripe for it, but shy and inexperienced. It took me about a week to bed her. Then there was no turning back. It was, as the Viennese say – Wunderbar! Really, the best time in my life. I think of Chantal as my greatest love. Even after we parted I held her close in my heart.’

  To hear such an admission from such a powerful woman brings home how closely bound they’d been.

  Waiting for the light to change, I turn to her. ‘May I ask a personal question?’

  ‘You want to know what caused the break-up? It was a gentle drifting apart, not a dramatic rupture. Certainly the age difference was a factor. Also the intensity of our relationship and of our joint practice as dominatrices. A passion as powerful as ours could not but burn out after a time. I think in the end the cause was mutual exhaustion. We both realized quite sadly the time had come to separate.’

  She leads me to a small Italian restaurant she’s fond of on account of the food and because the proprietor allows diners to linger on after coffee and dessert. Over dinner she explains the source of the fascinations later adopted by Chantal.

  ‘Earlier you mentioned having daddy issues. I had major ones. My father was an extraordinary man. I don’t necessarily say that in praise. I’ve yet to come to grips with who he was and many of the things he did. To this day I’m haunted by him.’

  Her dad, she tells me, was sixty when she was born, so she only knew him in his final years. He had an amazing life story, or rather two life stories, although she only learned about the first after her mother died and she inherited three things: a book, a drawing, and a manuscript.

  The book was a signed first edition copy of Freud’s Die Traumdeutung, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams,’ warmly inscribed by Freud to Lou Salomé. Eva tells me she recently put it up for auction in Vienna, where it fetched over a hundred thousand euros. She donated the entire sum to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.

  When I gasp and interrupt to ask how on earth her father acquired such a treasure, she politely suggests I hold my questions until she’s finished.

  The second item, an erotic drawing, was alleged to have been made by Adolf Hitler when, prior to World War I, he was trying to eke out a living as a young artist in Vienna. Supposedly, Eva tells me, he presented it as a gift to Lou Salomé, which, if true, occurred under circumstances that remain obscure. What’s interesting about this drawing, she says, is that it reprises the famous Luzern photograph of Lou, Nietzsche, and Paul Rée that enraptured Chantal.

  Eva pulls out her cell phone, shows me the drawing on the screen. I stare at it dumbfounded.

  ‘No Hitler scholar will authenticate it,’ she says. ‘Though it bears his initials on the back and a short dedication to Lou in what looks to be his handwriting, experts claim it’s psychologically impossible for Hitler to have drawn it and that it bears no resemblance to any other drawing he ever made. Everyone I’ve consulted assures me it’s a worthless forgery.’

  The third item, she tells me, the manuscript, was a memoir written by her father in his final years. In it he described his strange double life: first, as a man named Ernst Fleckstein, a private investigator in Munich specializing in matrimonial work; later a ‘fixer’ for the Nazi leader, Martin Bormann; and, finally, a major in the German intelligence service. And then a totally different second identity acquired in the early nineteen-forties when he decided to flee Germany: a Jewish doctor/psychoanalyst named Samuel Foigel, which was the name by which Eva’s mother knew him and the name Eva continues to use as her own.

  She summarizes her father’s memoir in broad strokes. Listening I’m most intrigued by his description of his encounter with Lou Salomé on a mission, assigned to him by Bormann, to reclaim the scandalous erotic drawing.

  ‘I think now,’ she says, ‘you may understand why I’m so fascinated by Frau Lou, as much as or perhaps even more than my father was. If I’m to believe what he wrote, it was the few minutes he spent trying to persuade her to hand over the drawing that later made him decide to become an analyst. I’m not sure what really motivated him. There’re hints in the memoir and many things left unstated. To hear my mother tell it, he helped a great many people. She herself had been one of his patients. Dad was what they call a natural, gifted in the art if not the science of psychotherapy. It gave him great pleasure to interpret his patients’ dreams, help them work through the origins of their erotic fantasies, unravel the truth and underlying meanings of their childhood traumas. Yes, he took advantage of some of his female patients. By his own account he bedded a few … including my mom. In those days such misbehavior was not all that uncommon. In the end, despite his many ethical shortcomings, I believe my father did his patients much good. Yet it’s still hard for me to believe that this man, so ruthless in his early life, would later become so empathetic. It’s as if the very act of taking on Foigel’s identity totally changed his character.’

  ‘Was he a Nazi?’ I ask, fascinated by what she’s telling me.

  ‘He was a party member, but not a believer. In those days many played that game. He played it well to further his ambitions. He was by his own admission an opportunist. Some might describe him as a psychopath … which, I gather, is how you view your dad.’

  ‘Compared to yours mine was an amateur. Isn’t it strange your father took on the identity of a Jew?’

  ‘He was never, far as I can tell, anti-Semitic. I believe the only reason he made that choice was because he thought it would make for a great disguise.’

  ‘And this all goes back to a single brief meeting with Lou Salomé?’

  ‘So he claims. According to his memoir their meeting was a turning point.’

  ‘Chantal knew this?’

  ‘All of it! She helped me work it through. In a way it became the focus of our lives together – trying to solve the mystery of my father’s past.’

  I mention the map folded inside Chantal’s Baedeker Guide bearing highlighted markings defining buildings and routes.

  Eva smiles. ‘I remember that map. Chantal liked to mark the places we visited and the routes we walked. We loved retracing the footsteps of the writers, artists, and thinkers who lived there before World War I. We also traveled beyond Vienna. We went to Göttingen, where Lou lived and conducted her analytic practice, saw the very house where my father confronted her. We found the place outside Munich where the blackmailing Father Stempfle was murdered, an act for which my father claims he felt remorse. We visited his old office suite in Berlin, where he practiced as a fake analyst, and the suburban villa where he played an unwitting role in the suicide of a movie star who’d been traumatized by a bizarre encounter with Hitler. The point wasn’t just to retrace his footsteps, but to get a feeling for the various places where he lived and worked. I’m not sure all these walks and visits helped. What did help was making them with Chantal. I’m still haunted by my father’s double life, but, thanks to her, with less anguish than before.’

  So many things I’ve puzzled over are now coming clear: Chantal calling her loft ‘The Eagle’s Nest’; the many notes in books about Hitler regarding his sexuality; the speculative notes in the margins of all the biographies of Lou Salomé … and more.

  After dinner, we linger over coffee. It’s then that I broach the subject of Chantal’s fixation on the Luzern photograph.

  Eva nods. ‘It looks almost innocent today, doesn’t it? Chantal and I spent hours mulling over it. She saw things in it I hadn’t seen, and when she saw how it connected to the Hitler drawing she became obsessed with it. What did it mean? What was the backstory? And what was the backstory behind the backstory, the unconscious forces at work within the three protagonists revealed by their odd mismatched postures and expressions? It’s a fascinating picture, and perhaps indecipherable. Also great fun to speculate about.’

  Eva listens closely as I share Dr Maude’s interpretation.

  ‘I think you have an excellent shrink,’ she says when I’m finished. ‘That’s as good a take on it as I’ve heard. We must remember that this photo was ta
ken long before Freud revealed the role of the unconscious. When they posed in Luzern I doubt any of them fully grasped the undercurrents.’

  ‘Did you know Chantal set up her own version of it?’

  ‘She sent it to me. She wrote that she loved making it. When I saw it I took it as an act of homage. By placing herself in Lou’s position in the chariot, I believe she was declaring something important about who she was.’ Eva’s eyes turn moist. ‘I thought she looked exceptionally glamorous. I viewed it as a superb modern-day reinterpretation of the original. I also thought it showed great talent. I believe if she’d lived she’d have been successful as a fine art photographer. Her take on the Luzern picture suggests a direction she could have taken – reinterpreting famous photographs from the past. It hurts me to think of all the wonderful things she might have accomplished.’

  As we walk back toward the hotel, I tell her I keep a reproduction of the Luzern photo beside my computer as I write.

  At this she stops walking, turns and peers at me intently. ‘In your email you mentioned doing a piece about Chantal. Do I understand you’ve already started?’

  I nod. ‘Writing it in the place where Chantal used to live … maybe this’ll strike you as crazy but sometimes I feel her spirit with me when I work. My shrink thinks I may be overly obsessed with Chantal and overly committed to this project. I’ve told her becoming obsessed is the only way I’m able to create.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re crazy, Tess. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being obsessed.’

  As we walk on I tell her honestly I feel I must understand Chantal better than I do. ‘You’ve clarified many things,’ I tell her, ‘but still I find her mysterious. I don’t mean her everyday life, but her feelings, her mind. When I try to get a fix on her I feel like I’m peering into a kaleidoscope. Every time I rotate the shaft I see a different pattern. I have so many questions. What did she really feel when she sessioned with clients? Besides her love relationship with you and her friendships with Lynx and Josh, what other people played significant roles in her life? Who were her other lovers? Were they men, women, or both? Was her reenactment of the Luzern photograph intended solely as a work of art, or did she make it in order to revel in some sort of personal psychodrama? And finally, of course, who killed her and why?’