I was sorry not to have served longer as a double agent as I had expected to find it a role well suited to my temperament. And there was something, I admit, a bit glamorous about it too. But Landon, a forensic psychiatrist, soon placed me on a team preparing psychological profiles of the Nazi leadership (Hitler, Bormann, Heydrich, Himmler, Göring, Goebbels, Hess, Kaltenbrunner, and Rosenberg) with two principal issues in mind: descriptions of each man’s vulnerabilities and informed speculation as to how each would react to the prospect of German defeat.
I enjoyed this work, adding what details I knew or had picked up during my time in Berlin, sometimes even inventing vignettes when I believed they would be revealing of character.
Jim and I became friends. He was the only OSS officer, aside from Dulles, who knew my former identity. At first he questioned my ability to practice authentic psychoanalysis, but in time he showed a grudging respect. ‘I believe you’re good at it … whatever it is,’ he told me, expressing a view then held by many American psychiatrists that Freud’s discoveries were speculative and his methods ineffective.
I should add that during this period I enjoyed playing the refugee Jew. In fact I reveled in the role. There was something cleansing about it, I’d almost say cathartic, considering the anti-Semitic venom to which I and all Germans of my generation had been subjected for so many years. I also realized that my story, that of a Jewish psychoanalyst who’d hidden and worked in plain sight in Berlin, caused many of my OSS colleagues to regard me as heroic. In time I was able to do just what my Abwehr handlers had instructed: internalize my legend so deeply that it occurred to me one day, peering at myself in the shaving mirror, that I was no longer pretending to be Foigel, that in fact I had become him!
In 1947, having attained American citizenship and an impressive ribboned medal for my wartime service, I decided to start my life anew in Cleveland, Ohio. This may seem an odd choice, but several considerations entered in.
Foremost was the encouragement of Jim Landon. Cleveland was his hometown, to which he’d returned after the war. If I also moved there he promised to help me set up my practice by referring patients and encouraging his medical colleagues to do the same. At the time there were very few practicing analysts in the city to meet a relatively high demand by a segment of the educated upper-middle class. This would enable me to quickly build the kind of specialist practice I wanted, catering to the needs of well-to-do neurotic female patients, who, despondent over their roles as suburban mothers and wives, were desperate to find meaning and satisfaction in their lives.
In addition Cleveland was regarded as a friendly city where a newly arrived European Jew would be warmly welcomed. Lastly, I felt it important to choose a locale where I was unlikely to be recognized by anyone who knew me in my past life. Recognition, I knew, was the great danger I might someday face, and for which I was at all times prepared. Thus my task was to reduce the possibility. To achieve this I made a point of keeping a low profile, that of the shy but highly proficient Jewish refugee analyst with the subtle seductive manner and beguiling German accent.
On Jim’s advice I rented a suite in an upscale medical building on Carnegie Avenue and fitted it out with modernist Bauhaus-style furniture. My single extravagance was the purchase of a luxurious black leather Mies van der Rohe-designed chaise longue to serve as my analytic couch. I hung my forged diplomas on the wall, placed my name on the lobby roster, and opened for business. Through Jim’s referrals and those of his friends I was soon on my way to achieving the American Dream.
In 1958 I married a former patient, Rachel Shapiro. She had come to me six years earlier, a pretty and deeply troubled young grad student at Western Reserve University. She was the daughter of refugee Jewish-Austrian parents who had departed Vienna just prior to the Anschluss. I worked with her intensely over three years, seeing her in session four times a week. Nearly all her relatives had been killed in the Holocaust. She suffered recurring nightmares about a fiery death as well as a generalized debilitating anxiety. Her father, a violin teacher, and her mother, a potter, lived in an unpretentious middle-class house on Cleveland’s East Side.
Although we yearned for one another while Rachel was my patient and in fact consummated our relationship many times during those years on my butter-soft black-leather analytic couch, we waited a full year after termination of treatment before going public with our romance.
In June 1960, our only child was born. We named her Eva after Rachel’s grandmother. I was then sixty years old.
The same year I purchased a fine Tudor-style house on a quiet street in the upscale suburb of Shaker Heights. Rachel, having attained her graduate degree in microbiology, started work as a researcher in the nephritis lab at Western Reserve Medical School. We enrolled Eva in the exclusive private Ashley-Burnett school just walking distance from our house. In short all was going well for us. Life was good.
In late July 1966, as I was showing out my last patient of the day, I discovered a not-very-well-dressed gentleman sitting in my waiting room.
I did not recognize him at first but he seemed to know me, coming toward me with a broad ingratiating leer and addressing me by name in German.
‘Herr Doktor Foigel?’
Immediately I went on guard.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘do we know one another?’
‘I know you as Dr Ernst Fleckstein. Or are you actually this Foigel person whose nameplate is affixed to the door?’
‘Excuse me!’
‘You look frightened, dear doctor. As well you should. Your worst nightmare has just arrived.’
At first I thought he might be an Israeli agent or perhaps one of Simon Wiesenthal’s boys. But if he were I couldn’t imagine what interest he would have in Fleckstein. Although I’d been a party member, I played no role in the Holocaust nor had I ever served in an official capacity in the Third Reich. Except for my regrettable role in the Stempfle assassination (known only to Bormann and Hess) and the intelligence I’d provided concerning the Solf Circle, my hands were relatively clean.
My visitor, as it turned out, was a smalltime blackmailer who had not smoked me out by intellect or detection, but had simply spotted me by coincidence as I, Rachel, and Eva were leaving a movie theater. His name was Karl Gangloff. He’d been the elevator man at 29 Wielandstrasse, the building where Dr Ernst Fleckstein, acting as an Abwehr agent, had practiced psychoanalysis from 1940 to 1943.
I’m certain that in my previous life I would have reacted violently to Gangloff’s appearance. Fleckstein the fixer would immediately have begun to calculate how best to kill this smirking little peasant, then devise an efficient way to dispose of his body. But I was Foigel then, and Foigel was a far cooler type, not aggressive or quick to anger, rather a cerebral gentleman in his late sixties with an agreeable low-key manner and a deep understanding of human psychology.
‘Come in, Karl,’ I told him, beckoning him into my consulting room. ‘Make yourself comfortable. Care for a cup of tea?’
As I prepared his libation and engaged him in small talk, I observed him growing increasingly nervous. This was not the reception he’d expected. I was supposed to cower before him, fearful of the damage he could do me, eager to pay whatever outrageous sum he demanded to keep silent about my past.
Finally he interrupted. ‘I’m here for money, Herr Fleckstein.’ He tried to sound authoritative, but I detected strain in his voice.
‘Oh, you’re in need of funds?’ I asked lightly. ‘Well, aren’t we all these days?’
Peering around my consulting room, he noted that I seemed to have done quite well for myself. Meantime, he told me, he was totally dependent on relatives, his sister’s kids, who’d sponsored his immigration, found a job for him as a janitor in a machine-tools plant, and had taken him into their home. He added that he didn’t much like them and they made it clear they felt pretty much the same way.
I told him how sorry I was to hear of his predicament, but that I hadn’t a clue why he thought I�
��d be inclined to help him out.
At this he exploded. ‘Don’t play games with me!’ he shouted. ‘Here you are, pretending to be a Jew of all things. I doubt you’ll want your patients, friends, wife, daughter, and in-laws to find out who you really are.’
In response I peered at him with great curiosity. ‘Who do you think I am?’
Oh, he was certain he knew the answer to that! I was Dr Ernst Fleckstein. He’d interacted with me several times a day for four years. We would greet one another when I arrived every morning, and wish one another goodnight every evening when I left for home. There were many important people among my patients – noblewomen and generals’ wives. And then suddenly, too suddenly, I closed my practice. People said I’d been transferred to the Eastern Front. Karl didn’t believe it. He’d heard whispers I was a spy. And now here I was, in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, carrying on life as a Jew! Such a transformation! So ingenious! But then he’d always suspected I was a clever fellow.
I let him rant like this for some time. When finally he ran out of gas, I asked if I’d ever treated him poorly.
He was quick to acknowledge I’d always been gracious and polite. ‘A damn good tipper too!’ He added, ‘Unlike some who worked in that building who held their noses in the air like they thought they were better than ordinary folk.’
I gazed at him then, a sad expression on my face. ‘You say all that, Karl, and yet here you are trying to extort money from me.’
He hung his head. He was sorry I’d put it that way. Clearly I was rich and he was in need, and he was only suggesting that I share a little of my new-found wealth.
‘I gather you want a loan?’ I asked.
He snickered. ‘If that’s how you want to view it.’
I opened my desk drawer, pulled out my checkbook, uncapped my pen prepared to write. I asked him if five hundred dollars would tide him over, mentioning that of course he’d have to repay me when his lot improved.
Again he turned angry, warning me of serious consequences if I failed to pay him a proper sum.
I studied him. ‘Why do I feel you’re threatening me, Karl? Do you really expect that will get you anywhere?’
‘Call it a threat if you like,’ he said. ‘Meantime you can write me a check for five thousand to start things off.’
I gave him a pitying look, told him I found him pathetic and assured him he’d not get a solitary cent out of me. He glared back as I calmly shut my checkbook.
‘And by the way,’ I asked, ‘why do you keep calling me Fleckstein?’
‘Because you are Fleckstein!’
I shook my head.
He was insistent. ‘You’re Fleckstein! I’d know you anywhere.’
I shook my head again. ‘You have it all wrong, Karl. I was always Foigel, even back when I pretended to be Fleckstein.’
He stared at me in amazement as I explained:
‘I was always Samuel Foigel, a Jewish psychoanalyst practicing under the false name of Ernst Fleckstein. That was how I hid myself from little men like you who pranced the streets despising and disparaging Jews, calling us names, beating us up, in many cases killing us. You didn’t just greet me when I walked into the building, Karl. You didn’t just say, “Guten Morgen, Herr Doktor.” No, you clicked your heels and shouted, “Heil Hitler!” in my face … and despite my disgust, I had to respond in kind to maintain my disguise.’
I smiled at him, explaining that everyone in Cleveland knew my past, that I was even regarded as something of a hero – the Jewish doctor who hid in plain sight in the center of Berlin, the one who treated the wives of some of the highest officials of the Third Reich and then revealed all he could squeeze out of them to Allied Intelligence.
‘So, you see,’ I told him, ‘you have nothing on me … but now I have something on you, a nasty little Nazi who somehow lied his way to America, and is now trying to blackmail one of the few surviving members of the German-Jewish resistance.’
I told him I was recording our conversation, and, depending on his attitude, might turn the tape over to the authorities. On the other hand, I told him, employing a more compassionate tone, if I helped him out with the five hundred dollars he’d spat upon a few minutes before, and if he humbly thanked me for my generosity and then left my office never to show his piggish little Nazi face to me again, then, maybe, just maybe, I might choose to be merciful and recall him as the convivial elevator operator with whom I’d exchanged those thousands of friendly greetings, and not the sniveling little turd of a blackmailer he had today shown himself to be.
Karl stared at me speechless, deflated, confused, all swagger drained away. His eyes shifted in panic as he struggled to rethink his position. He was also to my delight no longer questioning whether I was Fleckstein or Foigel, rather desperately trying to figure out how best to beat a hasty retreat.
I waited him out. Finally he spoke.
‘I sincerely apologize, Dr Foigel. I had no idea. None! A Jew named Foigel pretending to be a Nazi named Fleckstein – I can hardly believe it.’ He turned obsequious. ‘It turns out, sir, you were even more clever than I thought.’
‘And the five hundred – I’m still happy to loan it to you,’ I told him, ‘providing you give me a proper receipt.’
I could see him recalculating. ‘No, sir,’ he said, ‘I’m going to pass on that.’
‘Really? I thought you were in dire need.’
‘I believe I’ll be safer if there’s no record I approached you.’
‘Seems you’re clever too, Karl. You’ve made a good decision.’
‘I think I’ll go now, sir.’
‘Excellent idea.’
‘You won’t be seeing me again.’
‘No,’ I confirmed, ‘I expect not.’
When he reached out his hand to shake mine, I regarded it as one might regard the paw of a repulsive creature. Then I turned my back while he slunk his way out my office.
That evening I arrived home triumphant at having finessed the very situation I’d been dreading so many years. Rachel, noting my buoyant mood, greeted me with a loving embrace while little Eva ran to me and threw her arms about my waist.
‘You look cheerful,’ Rachel said. ‘Had a good day?’
‘Excellent in every respect,’ I assured her.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘better wash up. Dinner will be on the table in fifteen minutes.’
It’s been a year since I last added to this memoir. Every day since I have counted my good fortune: beautiful loving wife, charming loving daughter, rewarding professional life helping others in pain. And even though my doctors now tell me things look bleak, I thank the gods of destiny (such as they are!) for these last calm fruitful years.
Three months ago I closed my practice, referring my patients to several fine local practitioners. Since then I have turned my attention to literature. I’ve long wanted to catch up on works written in my native language by the authors Frau Lou mentioned during my 1934 visit: Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Robert Musil, Erich Maria Remarque, Arthur Schnitzler, Ernst Toller, Franz Werfel, as well as others with whom she had both loving, angry, and casual relationships: Rainer Maria Rilke, Frank Wedekind, August Strindberg, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gerhart Hauptmann, Stefan Zweig … and of course the great philosopher/poet/psychologist Friedrich Nietzsche.
Nietzsche wrote: ‘To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more. This is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, all-too-human principle. Without cruelty there is no festival.’
This from a man who fell madly for Lou Salomé, and who, upon being rejected by her, created an aesthetic of human cruelty.
I have lived in a violent cruel age. I believe my experiences as a matrimonial investigator and later as Bormann’s fixer gave me insights into the dark side of human nature, insights that have served me well in my career as an autodidactic psychoanalyst. From looking into the hard eyes of Bormann, the cold cruel eyes of Hitler, and then the knowing vulnerable eyes of Lou Salomé, I was able to shift m
y life from one dominated by selfish and amoral narcissism to one touched by kindness and compassion.
I have set down these memories of my life in an attempt to clarify my experiences and put them into perspective. As the reader can tell, many of the events described herein are entangled with what is now regarded as the great nightmare of the twentieth century. This memoir is not an apologia. I make no pleas for forgiveness for past actions, nor do I claim to feel great remorse for anything I have done. My life has been what it has been, it has now mostly passed, and today suffering a grave illness and with the end of life in sight, I have chosen to set these memories down in writing for the benefit of my soon-to-be widowed wife, my beloved daughter, and whatever progeny may come after.
With these words I end my chronicle.
TWENTY-FOUR
The day after my return from New York I set up the three versions of the Luzern photo side by side on my desk: the original showing Lou Salomé with Nietzsche and Rée; the copy Eva gave me of the supplicatory version drawn by Hitler; and Chantal’s amazing glamorous reenactment photograph. Now sitting at my computer working on my Chantal project I often turn to this trio and try to puzzle them out.
It’s essential to find out what frightened Chantal so much she felt she had to flee the building. To find an ending for my play I must know who killed Chantal and why.
When I’m not at my desk I take runs around Lake Merritt, wander downtown Oakland thinking up scenes, and enjoy evening trysts with Scarpaci at his apartment in Temescal. On Wednesday, the three ‘Luzern images’ in hand, I take the bus to Berkeley to see Dr Maude.
I lay out the three pictures in turn on the small table between our chairs. I can see she’s fascinated as she picks up each one and examines it.
‘Want to hear what I think?’ she asks.
I tell her of course I do, that her brilliant Freudian interpretation of the original Luzern image is the prism through which I now view it.
The Luzern Photograph Page 27