Amelia Rund Perls came from an orthodox Jewish family. An attractive daughter of a lower-middle-class tailor, she lacked much formal education. Nonetheless, she developed an interest in the world outside the ghetto because of her youthful passion for art, theater, and opera. In meeting and marrying Nathan Perls, she was to go further away from Jewish tradition, as Nathan was far ahead of Amelia on the path toward becoming “assimilated.”
Nathan was an impressive figure of a man. A wine salesman, he was witty, charming, entertaining, exceptionally handsome, and sported a magnificent beard. He was a popular companion for most men and irresistible to innumerable women. Amelia, when they first met, was no exception. Yet, once married and after suffering through several of Nathan’s affairs, his charm and appeal waned for her.
Marriage, in the late 1800s in Germany, whether for ghetto dwellers, “modern” Jews, or even Aryans, was a sacred institution. Separations were rare, divorces unheard of, and most disillusioned couples struggled through life, chained to one another, as best they could. Amelia and Nathan were no different, in this regard, from countless others. Already alienated from one another at the time of Fritz’s birth, the gulf between them widened steadily for the rest of their lives.
Amelia had trouble delivering Fritz, so that his entry into the world required the assistance of a physician’s forceps. In the earliest weeks of his life, he fell gravely ill with a near fatal bout of vomiting, diarrhea, and dehydration, the result of nursing problems that arose when Amelia developed a nipple infection. He recovered, however, with no apparent residual effects and, for his first nine years, thrived both physically and psychologically.
Else, his eldest sister, was three years old at the time of his birth. Legally blind (actually half blind) and particularly unattractive, she clung a great deal to her mother. Undoubtedly resenting the extra attention and partiality that Amelia, of necessity, offered Else and fearing, as they grew older, the possible burden of his filial obligation to eventually care and provide for her, Fritz never liked Else. He would eventually write, with great candor, that “when I heard of her death in a concentration camp, I did not mourn much.”
He did enjoy and was close to Grete, his second sister, who was one and one-half years his senior. Grete, described by Fritz as a “tomboy, a wildcat with stubborn, curly hair,” must have viewed him as a live doll—someone not only to play with but to play mother toward, just as her mother was involved in the extra special mothering of Else. Fritz’s chief references to Grete in Garbage Pail concern those mothering qualities of affection through sustenance: how they loved one another and how Grete “was always sending me the most expensive and delicious European candies,” or how she sent him some marzipan—one of his favorite treats. Also, during the decade Fritz lived in New York, Grete lived with him and Laura, where she cooked, served, and waited upon the family.
When Fritz was three, the Perls family moved from their Jewish neighborhood to the fashionable center of Berlin, occupying an apartment at Ansbacherstrasse 53. The city, in 1896, afforded more space for a growing child than it does today. The age of electricity had not yet dawned. Horse-drawn trolleys provided transportation, and small apartment houses, with courtyards and gardens, provided respect and opportunity for outdoor living.
Fritz called his childhood a happy one. There was the camaraderie that existed between himself and Grete as they romped and played through the city’s streets. In the winter there was ice-skating, and in the summertime, swimming. His early remembrances of school were happy ones, as were those of his mother’s parents. “He is made from such stuff as gathers praise from God and Man,” his grandparents would say, as young Fritz poured through the books in his grandfather’s library. There were visits, with his mother, to the theater, the opera, and the art museums. An older neighbor boy, Theo Freiberg, would invite Fritz to take part in plays that were staged in the alcoves of their living rooms. There were Hebrew lessons in the temple, in preparation for his bar mitzvah, and the excitement of watching the first halting flights of the Wright brothers on the Tempelhof Field.
During these same years, while the family was achieving middle-class respectability and financial security, he became acutely aware of his parents’ ever-increasing alienation from one another. Nathan, away from Berlin quite often, peddling Palestinian wines as “a ‘Chief Representative’ of the Rothschild Company,” when home, was unavailable to his children. His attitude was that of an honored guest, who was to be waited upon and treated with respect. Amelia, hurt by his peccadilloes and outraged by his stinginess with money, was apparently unwilling to pay him the homage he desired. Arguments would frequently lead to bitter fighting, with Nathan beating Amelia and cursing at her while she, in turn, yanked his impressive beard.
Fritz came to hate his father “and his pompous righteousness. . . . How much my attitude was influenced by my mother’s hatred of him, how much she poisoned us children with it, I could not say.” Beginning with young adulthood, he even began to doubt his paternity, suspecting that his actual father might be Herman Staub, an uncle, the pride of the family and Germany’s leading legal authority. Whether this idea, first offered to him by psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, reflected an actuality, appealed to Fritz’s vanity, or represented his dismissal of Nathan’s person, it remained an open question for Fritz until his death and resisted all his attempts to answer it.
The origins of his rebelliousness can be traced to his being conceived by parents who did not love one another and by a father who was stern, autocratic, and most uncaring, a man who frequently referred to young Friedrich as a stück scheisse—”a piece of shit.” But his father was also away a lot, selling merchandise in the provinces. This gave his son plenty of opportunity to express his dissatisfactions toward Nathan free from discipline—dissatisfactions that mirrored those of his mother, who tacitly accepted and very likely encouraged Fritz’s growing contentiousness.
Fritz’s parents began to think of him as “bad” at age ten after he broke into his father’s secret room (an incredibly messy place where Nathan secreted his Freemason material), stole a gold coin that was being saved for Else, and spent it on stamps for a Christian boy whose friendship he hoped to buy. After this “crime,” he ran away from home for several days in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid punishment. On returning, he was shunned for his “terrible” conduct.
The conditions of his adolescence insured his belligerence. “I am a very bad boy and cause my parents plenty of trouble,” he wrote concerning his thirteenth year. Rebelling against the rigid discipline and anti-Semitism of the hated Mommsen Gymnasium, as well as the rote memory work it required, Fritz, who had graduated from elementary school at the top of his class, became unmanageable He was tolerated at the gymnasium for three years, until he was finally expelled for failing grades. The same youth who had been eager to please his parents was now untameable.
Amelia, believing that her ambitions for her son would never be realized, was driven to great despair. Fritz would steal from her purse, fail to prepare his school work, truant, and, in terror of his parents’ scoldings, intercept the school’s notification of his poor work and forge his parents’ signatures on these notices. He was, of course, caught at this.
The carpet beaters that an exasperated mother came to use on him broke, rather than broke him. He cut the thongs of her cat-o-seven-tails. Resenting her punishments and taking pleasure “in my bad years, playing and imagining myself Mephistopheles,” he once ran from her wrath, “locked the door, smashed the glass window of that door and made faces at her, enjoying her impotence to get at me.”
After his expulsion from school, Fritz worked as an apprentice for a soft goods merchant. His unruliness resulted in his dismissal from that job also. Another dropout from the Mommsen Gymnasium was Ferdinand Knopf, a close friend, who initiated Fritz into the rites of sex. Years earlier, capable of erections but not quite old enough to achieve orgasms, the boys would sit ab
out and simultaneously masturbate to Ferdinand’s stories of his elder sister’s escapades. Not long afterward, at age thirteen, Ferdinand, with the aid of candy bars, induced a prostitute to accompany them to Greenforest, a wooded area away from the city. When Fritz’s turn came, the girl, impatient with his tardiness in reaching orgasm, pushed him away. When Fritz caught Ferdinand looking at him, he felt betrayed, turning his first sexual experience into a humiliating one.
Fritz’s rebelliousness extended to his religion as well. Although Nathan might have felt his Jewishness to be progressive, to Fritz it represented hypocrisy. He saw his family’s attendance at temple on High Holidays not as a desire to preserve some ancient and cherished tradition, but as an undignified insurance policy lest there was some vengeful God lurking about. He declared himself an atheist and remained one until the end.
By age fourteen, Ferdinand found another school for them to enroll in, the Askanische Gymnasium. Quite liberal in outlook, the school employed teachers who were more concerned with children than programs. Fritz came to love quite a few of these people, who accepted his independent ways, welcomed and supported his burgeoning interest in the theater, and offered him the positive feedback he had been so sorely lacking.
From childhood on, the theater, theatricality, and dramatic tension held much fascination for Fritz. The shows staged for parents in the living room during prepubescent years were not abandoned with the coming of adolescence. Instead, Fritz trouped along to neighboring communities as part of a “company” that his older friend, Theo, directed. By mid-adolescence, Fritz began to serve as an extra at the Royal Theater. While only a silent member of a milling crowd or chorus, he nonetheless relished the costumes, the glitter, and the chance to be onstage. So enchanted was he with his walk-ons that he willingly refused the half-mark (twelve and a half cent) salary that such “extras” were offered.
By his late adolescence, he discovered the fabled director and teacher Max Reinhardt. “The first creative genius I ever met,” Reinhardt was to make a lasting impression upon his young student through his mastery of nuance, his use of dramatic silences, and for creating moving images. Reinhardt, a harsh disciplinarian, insisted that his actors abandon the stagey bravura style and project pain or laughter that was free of the melodramatic clichés then in vogue. Fritz, admiring the director’s passion, his dedication and commitment to his vision, and his artistry, spent many hours a week at the Deutsche Theater studying and working for him.
Words, for Reinhardt, had to be consonant with gesture and action. He was alert to subtlety, to the music in voices, and was quick to point out tone or motion that didn’t ring true. Painted props and other artifices were sacrificed for an interactional reality that stressed building a tension between the characters and between the actors and the audience.
Although admittedly not much of an actor himself, Fritz was undeniably impressed with the director’s role. His own great genius in being able to realize and read the importance of body language stemmed from this early apprenticeship with Reinhardt.
No longer dipping into his mother’s purse, he earned enough money from his evening performances to not only pay for acting lessons but to purchase a motorbike. He fell in love with Lotte Cielinsky, a fellow thespian who beamed when she saw Fritz backstage, costumed as a French nobleman. Learning from compassionate schoolteachers during the day and Max Reinhardt at night, Fritz redeemed himself scholastically. His improvement at school and positive theatrical involvement served to bring Fritz and his mother closer to one another, although the distance between his father and himself remained.
In his sixteenth year, the family moved from Ansbacherstrasse. Fritz was able to continue attending his gymnasium, however, and upon graduation he entered the University of Berlin and began the study of medicine. At the ripe old age of twenty-one, he found his studies interrupted by the First World War.
If this is all we know of Fritz’s early years, what are we to make of it? What light might it shed upon his later development?
Fritz’s Gestalt Therapy would come to focus on the present moment and avoid the psychoanalyst’s intrigue with early history. It is possible that Fritz’s disinterest in the past was related to his not wanting to rekindle many painful memories of childhood. His constant hunger for affirmation may have stemmed from his early feeding problems at his mother’s breast, from his getting less “nourishment” than his eldest sister, and from his father’s denigrations of him. “I am sure,” he wrote, “that most of my showing off is overcompensation . . . for my unsureness, . . . to hypnotize you into the belief that I am something extra special.”
Fritz as an adult was always sexually preoccupied, having a “compulsion to look at female genitals, to touch them, to manipulate them.” One might attribute this to an identification with a lecherous father, to an unsettling initial sexual experience, and to his doubts concerning his paternity—doubts that left an abiding curiosity regarding the twin mysteries of conception and birth.
Throughout his life Fritz had a penchant for the short-term relationship as opposed to more sustained and longer-term involvements. This could have sprung from his lack of belief in himself and his need to prove himself, again and again, to countless others. His never experiencing a trusting, loving, enduring relationship with any woman might have resulted, as well, from his fear and mistrust of females, beginning with a mother who punished him with whips and carpet beaters.
There is, finally, the fact of Fritz’s belligerent outspokenness. It emerged as a clear response to the hypocrisies that existed at home, against the rejection of an unloving father, and as a challenge to the authoritarianism he encountered both at home and in school.
And yet, was Fritz’s background so very different from that of many others? Was his mother any more ambitious for her son than most? Was corporeal punishment uncommon at that time? Was his parents’ unhappy marriage so peculiarly unique? Was it unusual, in Germany, to have an authoritarian, remote father? Or a father who had numerous affairs? Did Fritz see any more hypocrisy in his own home than any other intelligent youngsters might see in theirs? I doubt that any of these questions can be answered affirmatively.
Certainly, the tree grows as the twig is bent. The environment of childhood of necessity helps shape and influence a man’s later life. Yet, it is never clear why we are affected by certain things. Psychological explanations, be they glib or profound, often miss the mark. Some children, raised in adversity, develop into loving and affectionate people. Others—even siblings raised under similar circumstances—become aloof, cruel, or heartless adults. To state, as some interpreters would, that one child imprinted the parents’ attitudes and the other rebelled against them might be an accurate description. Still, such descriptions explain nothing, for they are not predictive. The fact of the adult’s attitude might just as well speak for itself.
Part of the desire for historical explanations stems from our having grown up in the age of Freud. It is, though, just as likely that the reason for Fritz’s special development lies hidden, forever, within the chemistry of his genes, or, perhaps, in the position of the stars at the time of his birth. In 1968, while working on Garbage Pail, he opened an astrology book, looked up his sign—Cancer—and read: “The moon gives desire to touch, to collect, it encourages curiosity and affects emotions strongly. It indicates ability to draw people toward you.”
“How amazingly that fits,” he wrote. “Add a ‘strong stubborn intellect’ and you have covered much of my identity. Astrology, another mystery.”
To best understand Fritz requires that we dispense with the explanations offered by analysts and mystics alike. Pure description of what occurred is sufficient. Such phenomenology is not only closer to what Fritz taught, but is more attuned to late-twentieth-century science. If we simply follow events, Fritz’s life and development make sense. What we then see occurring is a natural and logical unfolding of given traits within a given context.
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3. From the Kaiser to the Führer
When the First World War erupted, Fritz was studying medicine. Becoming a physician seemed a reasonable enough occupation considering his gifted interest in mathematics and the sciences and family pressures to choose a profession that afforded a decent livelihood. Although the theater remained his first love, it was clearly not a suitable occupation for a middle-class Jewish youth seeking to make his way in the world.
Fritz had no taste for killing. His army physical had already classified him as “fit for landstorm,” which was even below “fit for reserve” status, due to a bad stoop and an elongated heart, which resulted in a lack of stamina. Yet, with the general mobilization, he chose, in 1915, to volunteer for Red Cross work. Most of the time he remained in Berlin and continued his studies.
On one occasion, he was sent to Mons, on the Belgian border, and was assigned to pass out coffee and refreshments to the trainloads of wounded returning from the front. He was shocked and dismayed to find that the wounded Germans would not let him comfort the wounded English. After four weeks there, bored and disheartened, he left his post without permission, returning to Berlin and his studies.
In 1916, with the front lines frozen, both Germans and Allies were being slaughtered by the tens of thousands. As replacements were needed for front line troops, standards for fitness declined. Fritz and his long-time friend, Ferdinand Knopf, decided to enlist in the army before they would be called up. Ferdinand enlisted in the supply brigade. Fritz chose the Luftschiffer battalion, whose work with Zeppelins played a minor part in the war.
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