History and Hypnosis

 The inner shape of a feeling

“A lot of time well spent with Dr Weiss,” Franz Kafka confided to his diary in 1914. Later in the year, dealings successfully concluded at the “tribunal” in the Askanische Hof hotel in Berlin that terminated his first engagement to his fiancée, the long-suffering Felice Bauer, he and Dr Weiss holidayed at the Danish resort of Marielyst. A photograph shows them grinning as they squat in the sand in front of a large bathing establishment. Weiss had acted as Kafka’s advocate in the relationship with Felice, supporting his friend’s decision to break off his engagement, though he was unable to attend the so-called tribunal. Only seven months before, Kafka had helped Weiss to redraft his first novel, Die Galeere (The Galley), which had been turned down by twenty publishers. “Artificial constructions in Weiss’s novel,” Kafka recorded in his diary. “The strength to abolish them, the duty to do so. I almost deny experience”—which says more about Kafka’s editorial instincts than Weiss’s artificial constructions. In a letter to Felice, his observations of his friend were more directly personal: “A very kind, very trustworthy, in certain respects—but only in certain respects—highly insightful and in happy moments a splendidly lively person.”

Born into a Jewish family in the Moravian capital Brünn, now Brno, in 1882, Weiss was the second of four children, two of whom were to become physicians. His father, a textile handler, died when he was four. He studied at the universities of Prague and Vienna, encountering psychoanalysis in its “wild” pubertal phase, at a time when the more thoughtful citizens of fin-de-siècle Vienna had some difficulty accepting that they were liberals, although they had absolutely no difficulty at all in believing they were “Viennese”, having acquired that belief, according to Karl Kraus, from the theatre.

Despite an initial enthusiasm for the methods of Dr Freud of Berggasse 19, Weiss opted, following graduation in Vienna in 1908, to pursue an internship in surgery. These might seem to be polar disciplines within medicine, but Freud himself compared “cathartic psychotherapy” with surgery: the operation, he suggests in Studies on Hysteria (1895), is not the cure but its prelude: by removing pathological material the surgeon creates the necessary conditions for recovery, a process that demanded of the psychotherapist a kind of technical dexterity as well as knowledge of all the forms of life in society. It is not without interest that one of the people most responsible for popularising Freud’s ideas in the United Kingdom was actually a head-and-neck surgeon, the remarkable Wilfred Trotter (1872–1939), author of The Instincts of the Herd in War and Peace: he had a major influence, in his turn, on both the writer Elias Canetti, in his unclassifiable book Crowds and Power (1960), and the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, renowned for his studies of group relations.

Weiss’s teachers included such illustrious figures as Julius Schnitzler, brother of the more famous writer Arthur; August Bier, founder of spinal anaesthesia (and principal model for “The General” in Weiss’s story “Heart Suture”); and the famous Theodor Kocher in Bern. Kocher—who has left his name on several surgical techniques, clinical signs and a four-point manoeuvre for the reduction of dislocated shoulders which is still in use in the emergency room—was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his work on the thyroid gland in 1909, the year Weiss was one of his clinical assistants.

Written in 1918, after his period of intimate friendship with Kafka, service as a ship’s doctor aboard the liner Austria, and military service, when Weiss was called up by the Linz infantry battalion of the Austrian army to serve as a regimental doctor on the Eastern Front, “Heart Suture” brings together his seemingly divergent interests in psychoanalysis and surgery. This depiction of a surgical intervention is one of his most accomplished stories. Not only is the operation described with unerring—as we would now say “surgical”—precision, especially the attempts to forestall intraoperative shock, but the patient, whose self-inflicted stab wound to the heart is repaired in the nick of time, is “put under” by her former lover, a medical student doubling as anaesthetist. The spectacle of the chief surgeon togging up to do battle against such a literary act of self-destruction rather telegraphs its irony, yet the story is noteworthy on several counts.

As the surgeon points out in his closing remarks to the audience in the amphitheatre, a bare hundred years separates this early attempt at cardiac repair from the horrific spectacle of surgical procedures during the Napoleonic campaigns, when the mark of a good surgeon was his rapidity with the bistouri or scalpel; and less than fifty from the cordial butchery of the surgeon Jules-Emile Péan, who was sketched by Toulouse-Lautrec and described at work by Léon Daudet:

After two hours of this activity, he was drenched in blood and sweat, with his hands—or rather his clubs—as red as a murderer’s, his feet dyed crimson, and he was always very cheerful … This scientific massacre was at once butchershop, scaffold and bullfight … Never have I seen such a mincemeat of human flesh, such a mountain of torsos, trunks and stumps.

Weiss is not writing science-fiction, but he is writing about surgery at the cutting-edge of the possible: the first recorded attempt at a “heart suture” had been made in Frankfurt in 1896, only three years after the eminent surgeon Theodor Billroth asserted that “any surgeon who attempts an operation on the heart ought to lose the respect of his colleagues”. It was only in the 1930s that injuries to the heart began to be repaired with any success. The advent of extracorporeal circulation has, of course, made this kind of surgery fairly commonplace ever since.

His portrait of the character he calls “The General” is thoroughly convincing: it reminds me of a surgeon for whom I once acted as assistant in Paris: he was a flamboyant, talkative and domineering American whose experience had been gained in the Vietnam MASH, and who, likewise, “revelled in surgical optimism”. The General may be bullish, but he is no brute. He himself has assisted in the progress of his discipline, for, contrary to received opinion, technology has greatly humanised medical and especially surgical practice. His honorific is a constant reminder, however, that the entire story is a development of the parallel—the strategic parallel—between surgical intervention and a military “operation”. Under the artillery flares of “an almost pure white shadowless light”, a wounded body is turned into a battlefield. That the patient willed her own destruction is as incidental to the surgical procedure as it remains occult to the story; only the bobbing tip of the old-fashioned steel-nibbed pen which is lodged in her pericardium serves as an incongruously comic reminder of what is otherwise the plot of a penny-dreadful.

It is this same nexus of war, writing machines and pierced bodies that dominates Kafka’s 1914 story “In the Penal Settlement”, written just after the visit to Berlin: there the operator “gets the point” of his machine rather more personally.

“Vörwarts! Los! Narkose!” bellows the General, instructing his team to get on with it. Surgery is nothing if not scenic. In a painterly tradition that begins with Rembrandt’s famous painting Dr Tulp’s Anatomy Lesson and finds its apotheosis in Thomas Eakins’s canvases for the University of Pennsylvania, notably the The Gross Clinic and The Agnew Clinic, the operating table becomes the selective focus of attention, while around it spreads a penumbra that begins with “the lowest row of the audience” and dissipates among the upper tier of spectators, who are instructed by the General not to stand up lest they bring dust cascading down on the sterile operating field. “It seemed as if it were deepest night”—it is, in fact, eleven in the morning.

Weiss is showing us the inner shape of a feeling. It is a feeling that had already been sketched out in German literature. A few years before Weiss, Gottfried Benn, also a doctor, had burst onto the literary scene with a book of poems which caused a scandal: Morgue (1912), a collection of poems which thrust decay and dying into the reader’s face, has an expressionist “OP” poem “Blinddarm” (Appendectomy) also featuring a “Herr Geheimrat” and the same white-scrubbed atmosphere flecked with blood and perspiration. Grotesque rhyming couplets give the routine a sinister touch. “Narkose, ich kann nicht operieren, / der Mann geht mit seinem Bauch spazieren” (Give him gas: how can I operate if the patient goes walkies with his abdomen?”), complains the nameless surgeon, much in the style of Weiss’s forceful surgeon.

Weiss’s story makes the three principal personages seem expressive of different levels of reflective consciousness: the purposeful mind of the General, “whose face already bore that peculiar, almost serene, quite disengaged expression indicating that he had thought out the operation down to the last detail, including all possible complications, so that its technical execution was a mere formality”, proceeds on a different, almost windowless plane from the “somewhat thoughtless” medical student-anaesthetist whose actions are guiltily ponderous (at least to himself), and his jilted girlfriend, lying before him in a state of pure receptivity, defiant but utterly helpless. A weight of emotion seems to float free of her sensations as she goes under, only for it to land in her former lover’s lap as he presses the rubber anaesthetic mask to her mouth. Then, as the ether blunts her awareness of her chest being opened, the General, who has directed the various initial ancillary tasks “mainly with his gaze”, issues a string of simple nominal imperatives—objects have to be made available to him almost as soon as he has uttered the command. His is a monologue of method that swells and swells until it threatens to take over the story. This is for our benefit, the viewers in the gallery compelled to look down at the urgent scene on the amphitheatre floor:

“Right. Please hold the probe underneath. And now the scissors above it, please, a straight line would be best, yes, and support it from beneath, hold the probe exactly under the scissors. Cut! Good. And now for the first time a clear view! Everything full of clotted blood. This has to go! Now we’re removing the clot. Gently wipe it away, don’t rub the pericardium, it doesn’t like that. Now we have a clear sighting, it won’t be long now, we must be at the wound. Don’t dilly-dally! It is probably straight ahead of us though it doesn’t have to be. Where’s the bleeding point? Where’s it bleeding from? Look at this sweat! Swab that. Head away, I need to have a look, get out of my way! Swab, don’t put your hand in, swab just with the forceps, more gently, energetically, gently I said, gently and energetically at the same time and don’t rub, don’t chafe! Be careful! Again! Soon we’ll have daylight! How’s the pulse? Something to feel? Nothing? Give her some saline then, as much as you can get in. Blood would be better, blood transfusion, would take too long, we need to know her blood group first, takes too long, saline into the cubital vein, as much as will go—life ersatz, trick blood! And can one of you gentlemen get the laboratory to work out her blood group fast, do we have any blood donors? You once gave us blood, Herr B. Which blood group are you? Watch out, only another hundred seconds! Quiet! Let go! Fixation of the heart! With the heart flouncing about like this we’ll never do a decent job. It has to be held. It needs to come out of its hiding hole! Out, you coward! I say. We really have to get a hold of it and make it accessible if we want to suture it. Sutures for fixation! Yes, that’s the right thread. Thin silk, curved needle, this size must be right, give here, what’s all this shilly-shally, don’t thread it too short and give me the needleholder at the same time: you hold the pericardium up, and take the end of the thread so that it doesn’t trail. Now watch: I’m going to insert it in the serosa of the heart, left ventricle, apex, in, and out again here; now we have a loop; colleague here will hold it for us, and the same again somewhat higher up and somewhat to the right and another loop on the side; now watch, I bring the needle up to the heart muscle, needle in, follow through, needle out, remove the needle and tie the ends, and we’ve done it. Cut the threads and carefully now bring the heart out of the cavity. Is it bleeding? Let it bleed. Of course it’s bleeding. Lift it up! Faster, more gently, higher! A little higher perhaps. Nothing to report this side. Nothing on this wall of the heart. Nothing there either. So the other way round! Lift a little please, and around the right side! Firmly and swab again, very finely, without pressing. Stop! Stop! Here it is! Here’s the wound! Finger in the wound, you, finger on the wound, I said. Bring the wound margins very gently together, give with your hand when the heart beats! That’s good. But we want to see something too! Don’t press. That’s enough. That’s good, fine. Ahead now to the heart suture! The same silk as before. First suture, obliquely inserted. Left wound margin, right wound margin, thread out, knot gathered, thread clamped and held. Correct. Take the upper layers. Registrar, take over the suturing and hold the heart wall up to me, no, turn it somewhat to the right, and continue to give with each pulsation of the heart. Good. Second suture. Go somewhat deeper to be on the safe side. In, out, gather the knot, pull together slowly and equally from both sides, and knot again. Less bleeding now, but we’re still not quite there! Any pulse to feel? Still nothing? And how is the breathing? Awful? Calmly now. Hand away. Third suture. Good. Bleeding stopped. The heart wound is closed. Scissors, cut the threads of the three sutures! Not too short! But no tail either! No. Good. A fourth? No, that’ll do. Leave it. The suture is solid enough, it’ll hold when the blood pressure returns and the vessels fill normally. Pulse? None? Come then! If the heart’s still beating, the man’s still living. Look, the heart muscle is recovering visibly, the beats are more prominent, we can see proper systole and diastole now, not the hysterical twitching and fluttering we had earlier. This was a patient in extremis, no doubt about it. So, give a good dose of saline into the cubital, but don’t disturb us up here and don’t come too close to us with that dirty stuff. Let the mediastinum slip back in, draw the threads out, everything in the right order. Do you see already how the heart muscle is jerking on the three reins like an untrained colt, it is growing stronger under our hands. Good, and the pulse? Hardly palpable. But we can correct that! Give the adrenalin now, we can simply inject the adrenalin solution directly into heart. Good. That was that. And now?”

                                                [my translation]

Soul surgery

Weiss became a writer, as he recalled in an article written in French for the Revue d’Allemagne in 1933, only because Theodor Kocher insisted he “write up” his cases (these Abendberichte would be read by Kocher—the surgeon-general doubling as literary critic—and sent back with a commentary). After a stint at the Prague General Hospital in 1920, however, Weiss gave up practising surgery altogether. Doctors continued to feature in his work, deputising for their author who eavesdrops on them from the private life, like a faintly disreputable psychoanalyst—although psychoanalysis has always bespoken a kind of puzzlement about the competence which ordinary people have for living. The protagonist of Weiss’s first published novel was a radiologist who, as a consequence of his pioneering attempts to develop X-rays as a diagnostic method, suffers the slow agony of a radiation cancer that slowly eats away his hands and arms.

The ability of medical imaging to alter imagination, morality and even the denseness of society itself, with Roentgen’s rays peering through even the most heavily accoutred “private parts”, is one of the themes of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain: after an early infatuation with expressionism Weiss adopted a more naturalistic style, falling increasingly under the influence of the writer he called “the firstborn”. Indeed, Weiss seems a prime candidate for the dilemma outlined by Mann in Meditations of an Unpolitical Man: when everything has been politicised, disaffection with politics is political too.

Moving to Berlin in 1921, Weiss entered his most productive period: during this time he wrote a number of theatre pieces, some of them for his mistress, the actress Rahel Sanzara, and a dozen novels including Franziska, Die Feuerprobe (Ordeal by Fire), and the prize-winning Boëtius von Orlamünde (1928), the only one of his fully achieved works to have been translated into English (as The Aristocrat, 1994). His Hamlet anagram Georg Letham, Arzt und Mörder (George Letham, Doctor and Murderer) appeared in its first incarnation in 1931 (Weiss was in the habit of completely rewriting his novels). Like Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, Weiss’s novel examines the ethics of laboratory medicine: his troubled doctor-hero first kills his wife and then, sentenced to hard labour on the bagnio in some unnamed Central American country, he seeks a kind of expiation by devoting his life to researching the cause of yellow fever. He is an unreliable, even deviant narrator. The notion of the criminal revamped as scientist hails from the Freudian casebook, too; and Kafka, in his short story “Ein Landarzt” (A Country Doctor)—an uneasy amalgam of traditional fable, Jewish wonder tale and blank nightmare—left an unforgettable portrait of a doctor who experiences a drastic reversal of roles: he ends up as his patients’ whipping boy.

Generally, however, Weiss seems attracted by doctors as father-figures, men confident in their social and personal lives and positively bestriding their professional ones: the superordinate point of view. But he knew his time was anything but a traditional one. Authority was dead, even if authority-figures have a strange afterlife. It seemed to the sons of the unbridled liberal patriarchs of the nineteenth century that their initiatives couldn’t amount to much: Kafka was famously to call his life “a hesitation before birth”. And if Weiss’s fictional doctors so often appear to be heroes with their triumphs laid out before them, there may be an element of truth in one critic’s assertion that Weiss abandoned medicine because he felt unable to measure up to the excellence of the surgeons he had trained with.

Although Weiss’s work was admired by his contemporaries, including Thomas Mann (who was never to meet him), his character prompted a note of reserve in those who knew him well. Kafka further qualified his assessment of his friend’s character, in a letter to Robert Klopstock, in 1921: “He obviously keeps himself healthy, and very healthy, by sheer dint of will. If he wanted to, he could be as sick as anybody else.” By all accounts, Weiss was not an easy man to get on with: there is a touch of personal remoteness in the brief memoirs he committed to paper (which were published by an East Berlin house in 1987). Joseph Roth eventually overcame his dislike of Weiss enough to offer him moral support when they were both exiled in Paris: they were, after all, two of the last genuine representatives of the lost world of the Dual Monarchy. Indeed, both of them were to elect to die in old Europe rather than wait out the chance of a visa to the United States. And both were loyal to the German language, although neither was a German national. Roth wrote to their mutual acquaintance Stefan Zweig in 1936:

Sometimes I see Ernst Weiss. He is bitterer than I am, and at the same time more reconciled. He puzzles me greatly. He is often sad, very sad. He likes you, one of the few who is sincere in his likes. He has a very strong sense of justice, which is why I hold him in esteem. But I can’t really warm to him.

In 1933, in face of the mounting Nazi threat, psychoanalysis was forced into emigration. The method invented by the new Erasmus (as Lacan dubbed Freud) for finding undiscovered continents in Vienna basements had been swamped by the wake from the returning Ship of Fools. Soon Weiss was in exile too. Like Robert Musil, who had taken his cue from Schiller, he had come to see stupidity as one of the elemental forces governing the new order, and his best non-fiction piece, Von der Wollust der Dummheit (On the Thrall of Stupidity), is a set of withering reflections on its modern apotheosis:

In the eyes of the stupid God is stupid. The people want a stupid God. A God who understood chemistry and relativity theory wouldn’t be one after their own heart. Luther said: Deus stultissimus. The quote could have come from Hitler—if he knew Latin.

It wasn’t easy being a German-speaking political exile in Paris in the 1930s, as we know from Walter Benjamin’s letters. Loss of readership, exclusion from political life, suspicious neighbours and chronic penury were the lot of even the most distinguished men of letters. To add to Weiss’s misery, his mistress died in 1936. In his article for the Revue d’Allemagne, he wrote with bemused passivity:

With the passing years, the emptiness is growing around me. I’m still alive and sentient, I have desires and expectations. I have no fear of death itself, only great dread of the hour when, out of sheer exhaustion at the struggle to stay alive, there is no more hope left within me for anything.

On June 15, 1940, the day the German troops marched into the city, Weiss took his life. He had reason to fear for it.

The Hitler novel

In 1938, Weiss had submitted a hastily-written manuscript, Der Augenzeuge (The Eyewitness), for a literary competition sponsored by the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom, a trust that he hoped would support him in his attempt to get an entry visa for the United States. An unknown writer called Arnold Bender won the competition, but a copy of Weiss’s manuscript, submitted under the pseudonym Gottfried von Kaiser and deposited in a safe in New York City, survived the war—unlike the documents and manuscripts which were seized from his secretary’s flat in Paris by the Gestapo. It was published in its original German in 1963, and an English translation appeared in 1977.

The material is nothing if not sensational, although Weiss, to his credit, does not play it up: The Eyewitness is an expanded case report of a patient admitted to a sanatorium in Pasewalk, a Brandenburg village, in 1918 with eye problems after being gassed on the front at Ypres. Weiss had learned about the incident directly from the neurologist-psychiatrist Edmund Forster, a principled German of the old school, who had decided in the summer of 1933 to visit his diplomat brother Dirk in Paris and discuss a matter weighing on his conscience. At the Café Royale Forster handed over clinical notes to the coterie of emigrant writers around Leopold Schwarzschild, editor of the journal Das neue Tagebuch. The man he had treated back in 1918 was Adolf Hitler (“A.H.”).

Weiss was one of this group: it is possible that Forster, uncomfortably aware that he was not only ruining his name as a former officer but breaking the bonds of patient confidentiality, felt more at liberty to divulge details to a fellow doctor (as one of Germany’s leading neurologists Forster had also treated Hermann Göring for morphine addition and diagnosed Bernhard Rust, the Nazi Minister for Art, Science and Public Education as a psychopath). Only a few weeks after returning to his family in Germany, Forster was denounced by a student and suspended from his post as head of the university neurology clinic at Greifswald. After thirteen days of interrogation he was found dead in his bathroom of a gunshot wound, an apparent case of suicide. It was one of the scenarios he had predicted to the group in Paris might follow his decision to return. Every document concerning Hitler’s episode of psychiatric treatment in 1918 vanished from the clinic.

Now Weiss, in France, faced a dilemma similar to Forster’s: to use this material directly as the basis for a novel would have had a serious impact on the clusters of German refugees living in France, especially at a time when the French government was anxious to maintain good relations with an increasingly belligerent Germany. Walter Benjamin had commented wryly, years before, to his friend Gershom Scholem in Palestine: “the Parisians are saying that the émigrés are worse than the Boches”. Such a sensational revelation would also have compromised the situation of Dr Forster’s widow and family, still living in Berlin.

However, the novel Weiss finally wrote is, according to the historian Rudolph Binion, closely based on Forster’s account of events. In the closing months of the Great War, the war which Adolf Hitler, the man from Vienna without higher education or significant prospects was later to describe as “the greatest and most unforgettable time of my earthly existence”, his regiment, the Bavarian Reserve Infantry, was exposed to a cloud of caustic gas during a British offensive in October 1918. Retreating from a dugout during the attack on the southern front near Ypres, Hitler and his fellow soldiers were so incapacitated by the gas cloud that their only means of clambering to safety was to hold hands and allow a less severely affected member of the company to guide them. They were suffering the temporary blindness caused by the irritant effect of mustard gas (dichlorodiethyl sulphide) on the cornea and eyelids, and following protocol were sent for treatment to a military hospital in Brussels. But not Hitler. He was conveyed alone from the front to the neurological clinic at Pasewalk, north of Berlin, a few days later with a rather different diagnosis—“hysterical blindness”. His superiors wanted him isolated: he was showing the signs of the morally contagious condition that takes its name from women: hysteria (from the Greek word for the womb) is a gendered disease, although men can suffer its symptoms too. At that very moment, with the loss of 800,000 soldiers on the Western Front since April 1918, German High Command was facing the prospect of having to negotiate a peace settlement; the implication is that Hitler did not want to “see” Germany—his chosen land, his fresh start, his America—concede the war as a lost cause.

Forster, an expert on the phenomenon of “malingering” and author of a paper in 1917 on hysterical reaction and simulation, was faced with a conundrum: how was he to treat this patient? This was no malingerer, but a dispatch runner whose bravery in some of the most abysmal conditions ever known to soldiery got him decorated three times, earning him the Iron Cross, First Class—a rare distinction for a corporal—in August 1918. Shaming and steeling, Forster’s standard “tough love” techniques for dealing with those who were trying to shirk the trenches, were clearly not what was called for. So he decided to play along with his patient’s ferocious nationalism, and tell him a white lie. Examining his eyes again, Forster tells A.H. that his is no hysterical condition, no debility of the will: the cornea of both eyes has indeed been damaged by the gas, but through a supreme effort of will, the kind of will accorded to only a few individuals in history, he might succeed in regaining the ability to see. He has been singled out for great things.

The Eyewitness recounts what happened next. Turning off the light in the consulting room, the doctor puts himself and his patient in the dark. He starts the induction procedure to evacuate everything from his patient’s consciousness other than the urgency of the here-and-now:

I had him enter, lighted two candles, and began to examine his eyes with my ophthalmoscope. The cornea was smooth and reflective; the conjunctiva a little inflamed due to his lack of sleep. Somewhat protuberant, the eyes were watery and blue-grey, with a remarkably piercing, captivating blue-grey expression. Tension was written all over his features. I could see he was afraid I’d tell him exactly what all the doctors and the Jewish medical aide had told him—that he was lying, that his eyes were healthy, that he only had to want to see to be able to.

But that wasn’t what I did. With a sigh, I laid the ophthalmoscope back in its case, extinguished the candles, and addressed him in the dark. In point of fact, it was dark only for me; for him it was as dark as it had been since his departure or flight from the front. I told him that my original hunch had, in spite of doubts, turned out to be right. His eyes had been badly injured by the mustard gas; he really couldn’t see. I heard a release of breath. I added for good measure that it have would been unthinkable for me that he, a pure Aryan, a good soldier, a knight of the Iron Cross, First Class, should lie and fake a non-existent condition.

Unfortunately, I continued, this made it impossible for me to help him. It would have been easy for me to free him of his sleeplessness had he been able to look at me or fix his own gaze on a shining object. Hypnosis works through the eyes. Blind people can’t be hypnotised, at least I wasn’t able to do it. We all have to accept the way things are; nothing can be done about fate. After these few phrases I fell silent. He made to stand up and leave the room, but I’d already caught his interest, and he sat down again. He shook his head. He was fighting my influence, but I was the stronger because I had appealed to his subconscious. He wanted to take a deep look down into his soul again, and he wanted me to make him do it. I felt a tremendous elation at my dominance. He was in my power. Without so much as commanding him, I concentrated my mind on making him fold his hands in his lap. He folded his hands. He should finger his Iron Cross as though he wanted to take it off. He fingered it. I ordered him to tell me his secret ways with women. His resistance overcome, he spoke. I told him to stretch out his right arm. He hesitated, but then he did that too.

Not a word more. I knew what I had to know. Everything progressed in silence, mind against mind. I saw he was thirsty. I didn’t give him water. Why should I have? It would have been crazy to interrupt the session at that point.

After I’d learned everything, it was time to act. I said, “The age of miracles is ended.” His head slumped on his chest and he didn’t answer. “But no,” I went on, “that’s true only for average people. Miracles still happen often to those who are chosen. There must be miracles, and there must be great men—great men for whom nature is subservient, don’t you think?”

“Whatever you say, Doctor,” he answered hoarsely.

“I’m no charlatan or miracle-man,” I said, “just a simple doctor. But perhaps you possess the rare power, which appears only once in a thousand years, to work a miracle. Jesus had that power. Mohammed. The saints.” He didn’t answer but stared ahead of him, his breathing heavy. “All I can do is indicate how you might be able to see even though your eyes have been burned by the mustard gas. An ordinary person with your condition would be blind for life. But for someone with particular willpower and strength of mind there are no limits, scientific knowledge no longer applies to him, and the spirit breaks its chains—and in your case, the chains are the thick white layer on your cornea … But perhaps you don’t have this power to work miracles?”

“How can I know?” he asked. “You as staff doctor must know.”

“Do you believe in willpower?” I replied. “Then try to open your eyes wide. I’ll light my candle with a match. Did you see it sparking?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “All I can see is a kind of round white glow.”

“That’s not enough,” I said. “That’s insufficient. You need to have a blind faith in yourself, then you’ll no longer be blind. You’re young; it would be a terrible shame if you were to stay blind. You know that Germany needs people with energy and blind self-confidence. Austria’s finished, but not Germany.”

“I know,” he said, in a quite different timbre of voice. He stood up and gripped the edge of the table. He was still trembling.

“Do you hear?” I said firmly. “I have here two candles, one to the right, one to the left. You must see. Do you see them?”

“I’m beginning to see,” he said. “If only it were possible!”

“Everything is possible for you. God helps those who help themselves. A touch of godhead is found in every human being—willpower, energy. Summon all your strength. More, more, more! Good. That’s enough! What do you see?”

“I see your face, your beard, your hand, your signet ring, your white jacket, the newspaper on the table, drawings on the wall above me.”

“Sit down,” I said. “Rest a while. You’re healed, you’ve restored your own sight.”

I stood up and walked around the room. A.H. followed me with his eyes just as a person with normal sight would. He looked at the table and tried to read the notes I had made about his case.

“You acted like a man,” I said, “and just as you’ve restored sight to your eyes through sheer force of will, I intend through my power to bring some healing slumber to your brain: as of today you will begin to sleep again. Until further notice you will do whatever I order for your well-being. Agreed?”

“Whatever you say, Doctor. Sleep! If you can make that happen!”

I said nothing more, but got him to stand up again and then lie down on my examination table. I pushed back the lock of hair plastered on his forehead, stroked his damp, cold forehead, and suggested to him, without a word but gazing at him resolutely, that he close his eyes and not open them again, even if I tried to prise them open, and that he sleep dreamless until the next morning.

Everything happened as I intended. I had played fate—God—and had given a blind man back his eyesight and the ability to sleep.

The next day I wrote to Helmut, who served in the War Ministry, asking him to try to find an easy position for Corporal A.H., where a case such as his could recuperate.

                                                [my translation]

Here the psychiatrist (another of Weiss’s doctor-heroes) confesses his own blindness: he has cured his patient’s symptom by flattering his sense of self-importance and instructing him to have a “blind faith in himself”. It is only evident with the benefit of hindsight that he has failed to heal the greater sickness of his patient’s political views. Well, could he have? That would require omniscience in addition to omnipotence (and no doctor has ever enjoyed access to either). The narrator holds himself guilty of having had designs on his patient, though it is clear that his designs are no more exuberant than those of the General and certainly not alien to modern medicine itself. The passion that has seized him is perhaps akin to one that Freud felt when dealing with one of his more recalcitrant patients—Dora’s defiance of his powers moved him to write a rejoinder to himself (Fragment of a Case of Hysteria): “I keep the fact in mind that there must be some limits set to the extent to which psychological influence may be used, and I respect as one of these limits the patient’s own will and understanding.”

Perhaps we can put it like this: if motives are more than interpretations and yet not quite facts, the motive made explicit in The Eyewitness is his, not A.H.’s—and Dr Edmund Forster was no Svengali. His patient didn’t leave the clinic as an automaton, obeying a half-hallucinated summons to revenge the infamous “stab-in-the-back” myth. Forster didn’t invent Hitler, as one psycho-historian recently claimed, even going so far as to adopt the lurid phrase The Man Who Invented Hitler as the title of a book-length account of the strange goings-on in Pasewalk. But perhaps we can still entertain the notion that with Forster as its unwitting professional mediator, the zeitgeist authorised Hitler—the politician whose ultimate answer to social problems was always biological—in ways we still barely understand.

Career of a confidence man

The structural flaws in Weiss’s novel—written hurriedly and in the face of gathering doom—become apparent when it is compared to other works dealing with charisma and consciousness in the Weimar period, that decade in which the social contract in Germany was broken so drastically and cynically. One of the most memorable of them, Thomas Mann’s Mario and the Magician (1930), transplants the Munich of his day to Mussolini’s Italy, and features a travelling conjurer, mountebank and “scientific hypnotist”, Cipolla, who, without “a trace of personal jocularity, let alone clownishness, in his pose, his expression or his behaviour” seems able to bend all wills, simple and sophisticated alike, to his own.

It is this notion of the will—unbending, hypostasised, written large—which seems so characteristic of the period, and which receives its apotheosis in Leni Riefenstahl’s notorious propaganda film in which one person’s will—Adolf Hitler’s—is represented as a force of nature.

In 1924, G.K. Chesterton observed that psychology “was becoming the leading parlour game of the day”: the Nancy psychotherapist Emile Coué had become famous in that same decade (and worked himself to death, it appears, trying to satisfy the demand his method had generated) through his simple conviction, based on his earlier observations as a pharmacist, that by repeating a daily mantra the self-persuader could become better and better. The Coué self-mastery method, which leaned on the development of hypnosis as a therapeutic technique in Nancy a generation before (and had given the city a worldwide reputation as a centre for the progressive treatment of neurological disorders), involves making ourselves feel what we think we ought to feel in order to become the persons we feel we ought to be.

If self-hypnosis is a cultural oddity, it is striking that its use as a therapy is historically inflected—as popular beliefs about its nature (and about the nature of things in general) change, so too do the ways in which people respond to it as a practice. Anton Mesmer at the end of the eighteenth century had patients writhing and coiling under the influence of what they thought was a cosmic fluid being channelled into them by the “magnetiseur”; a few decades later, as phrenology gained in popularity, people began in a trance-state to diagnose their own illnesses: pressure over a phrenological “bump” would cause the subject to manifest the quality associated with it. The three stages of hypnosis—catalepsy, lethargy and somnambulism—defined by the great Parisian neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot resemble nothing seen before or since. If subjects are primed to respond to hypnosis by their cultural beliefs, how are hypnotised subjects likely to disport themselves if—like Melville’s confidence man on his steamship on the winding Mississippi—they believe hypnotism to be a wilful state in which “merely human” concerns, like doubt and humour, have no place? If Nature’s will—a common enough personification in the nineteenth century—is also working itself out behind the scenes in bringing subjects to therapy, wilfulness is always going to have its victory.

What Adolf Hitler had grasped instinctively (nothing in Mein Kampf suggests that he analysed it intellectually) was that through the suggestive power of the German language he could engineer a certain kind of fascination, even stupefaction. Language, being rooted in the body—as Kleist had suggested at the beginning of the nineteenth century—is in advance of thought. Nazi tyranny could even be said to rest on the single syllable difference between hören (hearing) and gehören (obeying). When the Führer talked it was in the absolute expectation of being understood: the authentic “voice of the people” said nothing other than what most of the people wanted to hear. And who was he? He was the man sent by providence. His fits, his occult ravings, his sheer outlandishness—these were the signs that he was the Heiland or healer, the man of higher irrationality who had come to rescue the nation. Hitler never made any bones about his methods, which relied on organised excitement and mass hypnotism; he even boasted about just how easy it was to impose “the lie of genius” on the masses. His radical novelty was realising that nobody would take him at his word. The invitation to trust turned into something else entirely. And once he had gained power, he made a cult of his own “adamant will” that was to be the guide in all matters.

In pre-modern cultures voices are at the top of the hierarchy: they are the majesties that own people, head, heart and hand. Voices are so commanding they exist for their subjects only in the singular, as the Voice. And the Voice, as Shakespeare suggested, may return when we least expect it. In the now classic phase of modernity, that period between mass public assemblies and the television age, the radio was the ideal means to allow its emanation: the Voice was unhindered by distance or walls, so forceful it could impose itself against the background noise of a household squabbling and wrangling. A family clustered around the Telefunken wireless set is one of the most telling images of that era, especially in the way the family’s frontal devotion seems to funnel out of the loudspeaker. What the Voice was saying was utterly familiar. It was an emotion that could talk. And as Arthur Koestler observed:

The individual is not a killer, but the group is, and by identifying with it the individual is transformed into a killer. This is the infernal dialectic reflected in man’s history of wars, persecution and genocide. And the main catalyst of that transformation is the hypnotic power of the word. The words of Adolf Hitler were the most powerful agents of destruction at this time.

Yet his speeches sound ridiculous today—it is impossible to recapture with a naive ear the charisma that they must have once had. Hitler wouldn’t have stood a chance in the television age (even though Charlie Chaplin recognised him as his only serious competitor in the cinema): his tirades are too untamed for the decorum of the small screen. In a brief window of opportunity, when the auditory was abstracted from the visual, as Marshall McLuhan liked to suggest, the Voice moved a technologically highly advanced society back to the imperatives of tribalism.

As Weiss himself bitterly realised in Paris, people wanted to be deceived. The psychological power of a hypnotic relationship is equally dependent on the showmanship of the hypnotist—the hypnotist has to play along with his subject and step back from a rational understanding of what is going on, for the very success of his performance depends on his belief in his own powers—and the trust he is able to inspire in his subjects. Credulity, not critical thinking, is called for in their folie à deux. Ian Hacking puts it nicely: “Perhaps the best word for two people in a hypnotic relationship, the hypnotiser and the hypnotised, is that the two are extremely accommodating to each other’s needs and expectations.” Weiss saw how sinister and roomy the accommodations were, and despaired when he realised that those who thought they were being cleverer than the masses by mastering the forces of history were manifesting only another form of the same stupidity.

In the last instance, what needs explaining in The Eyewitness is not A.H’s imaginary illness or the staff doctor’s unwittingly malign goodness, but the massive failure of judgment that brought an entire people under the spell of one man, who, as Thomas Mann wrote in an article of 1938, was “one of us”—an artist. Mann was hardly suggesting that pure evildoing (and Hitler had done plenty of harm before the war) ought to be considered a talent. He saw that Hitler had succumbed to the artist’s temptation: to assume that he was a superior human being to whom ordinary ethical standards did not apply. Hitler’s way of behaving, even in the 1920s when the National Socialists were dismissed as a political joke, was always that of the criminal: getting away with things. And once he did acquire power he was cunning enough to dress his wrongdoings up in the language of white coats—“half-gods in white” as they say in German—and pretend to be just another statesman, if somewhat more radical and hygienic than the others. Even when the truth came out, the ranks closed around him protectively. Ron Rosenbaum suggests why, in Explaining Hitler:

it was not that that he was nothing without his spell: they were nothing without believing it. Or worse than nothing—the gullible dupes of a defeated mass murderer. But if they kept the faith, then even in defeat, they could believe they were living out a noble Wagnerian Götterdämmerung.

The German knight prophesied by Nietzsche had awoken, and not even Wotan’s spear was able to bar his way. But it wasn’t dragons he had come to slay.

Dr Iain Bamforth is the author of The Good European: Arguments, Excursions and Disquisitions on the Theme of Europe (Carcanet).