Description
"Saving Freud is the dramatic true story of Sigmund Freud's last-minute escape to London following the German annexation of Austria and of the group of friends who made it possible. In March 1938, German soldiers crossed the border into Austria, and Hitler absorbed the country into the Third Reich. Anticipating these events, many Jews had fled Austria, but the most famous of them remained in Vienna, where he had lived since early childhood. Sigmund Freud was eighty-one years old, ill with cancer, and still unconvinced that his life was in danger. Several prominent people close to Freud thought otherwise, and they began a coordinated effort to persuade Freud to leave his beloved Vienna and emigrate to England. The group included a Welsh physician who was president of the International Psychoanalytical Association; Napoleon's great-grandniece, a princess of Greece and Denmark; an American ambassador who had cowritten a book with Freud; Freud's devoted youngest daughter, anna, who would herself become a major figure in psychoanalysis; and his personal doctor, a Viennese Jew like Freud, who delayed his own emigration from Austria to attend to Freud. Andrew Nagorski tells how this remarkable group of people finally succeeded in coaxing Freud, a man who seemingly knew the human mind better than anyone else, to emerge from his deep state of denial about the looming catastrophe. They extricated him and his family from German-occupied Austria so that they could settle in London, where Freud would live out the remaining sixteen months of his life in freedom. Saving Freud is both an incisive new biography of Freud and a group biography of the extraordinary friends who saved his life." --
