Unterdeβ halten wir zusammen: Briefe an die Kinder (review)

Although Freud’s devotion to his children has long been recognized (Jones 1953,–57, 2:387–89), these letters to the five oldest movingly and abundantly testify to it.¹ With a few exceptions (mostly notes to his grandchildren), Freud wrote all of the letters in this collection when his children were taking their first steps towards independence or had become adults. Little of the children’s part of the correspondence is available, and what the editor excerpts justifies his decision to use it selectively. Consequently, this collection almost exclusively presents Freud as the writer of letters to his adult children and their spouses. Almost all of his letters to these family members are included; only a few published elsewhere (e.g., Freud 2002) that do not concern the father-child relationship have been omitted.

The inclusion of Freud’s letters to his sons- and daughters-in-law was a particularly happy decision because they reveal how thoroughly he accepted the partners chosen by his children. Convinced that his daughter should choose her own husband but anxious about her choice at an age earlier than he deemed appropriate for her to marry, Freud frankly told Mathilde his reservations about Robert Hollitscher. The extant correspondence with Math and Rob is not extensive but reveals that Freud, at the very least, graciously acquiesced in his daughter’s choice; in any event, by 1931 he was supporting the couple once Robert’s business affairs had collapsed (28).

Freud’s relationship with Max Halberstadt, Sophie’s husband, was much more cordial. Max, a distant relation of Martha Freud, had photographed Freud before meeting Sophie, and Freud’s first personal letter to him, on the superfluousness of parents once a daughter has chosen a husband (468–69), is deservedly famous for its charm and tact. After Sophie’s early death in 1920, Freud wrote a broken-hearted but stoical letter to Max, declaring it unnecessary to say that Max would remain his son as long as he desired (554). These words were not a conventional consolatory gesture, and Freud continued to correspond with Max for fifteen years until his son-in-law’s emigration to South Africa. Not only did Freud insist upon supporting his grandchildren and arrange at different times for both to move to Vienna; he continued to help Max financially until his emigration. Freud congratulated Max upon his second marriage (601) and the birth of his daughter (608). In 1926 Freud was still declaring Max “one of us” (der Unsrige: 611–12); in 1928 he reassured Max that he and Anna did not blame Max’s wife Bertha for her stepson Ernstl’s discontent (622), and in 1928 and 1929 Freud offered to pay Bertha’s expenses for a cure in Karlsbad (618, 623–24).

Freud also had affectionate relations with Ernst’s wife Lucie (his letter welcoming her into the family is particularly touching [304–5]), and with Oliver’s second wife, Henny.² Even with Martin’s wife Ernestine, Freud tried to remain on good terms after the couple separated while emigrating in 1938 (208–12). Although Freud shared Martin’s hope that emigration would put an end to the unhappy marriage, and he described Esti as “not only viciously nuts but mad in the medical sense of the word” (nicht nur bösartige meschugge, sondern im ärztlichen Sinn verrückt: 443),³ he acknowledged her right to a birthday check, reassured her that he never doubted her efficiency and competence, and refused to intervene in her marital difficulties, while frankly regretting her hasty judgments of people and ill-natured vehemence and attributing the breakdown of the marriage to her making living together too difficult (208–9, 212). The last letter, written not many months before Freud’s death, reveals honest but considerate firmness in a difficult situation.

Freud’s letters...