* * *
The meticulous nature of Viktor’s act – the simultaneous shooting and hanging – was proof enough of absolute nihilism. It was a lot more than disappointment or giving up on everything. The pedantics of the gruesome endeavour ceaselessly amaze me. Reasons may vary, but one thing is certain: the man had no doubts. He did not leave anything to chance. It was not a hesitant suicide. He was not one of those who change their mind at the last minute and want to cry for help if only they had more time. He did not go about it in a histrionic way either, exposing his suffering only to be saved in the nick of time.
“Who was Viktor Tausk, really?” That is a question my friend Tvrtko and I are trying to answer. He is interested in life.
He wants to know: “What did this man live for?”
He wanted to know his motives, the forces in motion that influenced his actions, the twists and turns of life. My angle is different. For a start, I am interested in his death.
I just wonder: “Why? Why like that?!”
* * *
Sigmund Freud was on a train to Dubrovnik, with “some stranger”, according to his own words, on his way to a “place in Herzegovina”, and while they were travelling, the coincidental passenger – very young, extremely well-mannered, and, it could be said, very highly educated – and himself were killing time and talking about Italy, about charming little Mediterranean towns that one had to visit. He recommended to the stranger to visit Orvieto and have a look at the frescos. But wait? What was the painter’s name? The painter’s name was on top of Sigmund Freud’s head, and a lot of names popped up, including Botticelli and Boltraffio – but he could not recall the actual name. As these things usually happen, the conversation continued, but the thing that he could not remember was still very much on his mind, and the more he strained his thinking muscle, the more his flow of thought led him further and further away from it.
Shortly before the talk about Italy, they discussed Bosnian Muslim tradition. Freud told the stranger how one of his colleagues, a doctor who practiced medicine in those parts, described the locals in comparison to Europeans and their peculiar ways regarding medical authority; complete resignation written all over their faces, accepting whatever fate may have in store for them, although they have every confidence in their doctor. The belief in kismet, what and how fate determines their lives, does not prevent them to pay a visit to their doctor. If you say to the patient’s relatives that there is nothing more to be done, they will respond: “Oh, well, Mister, what can I tell you? If he could have lived a while longer, we are sure you would have saved him!”
* * *
Somewhere on his way from Dalmatia to Herzegovina in 1898, Freud happened to have an utterly trivial encounter with an ordinary, although civilized and handsome young man who spoke fluent German. The young man was awe-struck by the authoritative figure of his travel companion, so much so that he could not even turn the conversation around and talk about what he knew better than him, the mind set of the local people. He knew it like the palm of his hand, because although he was a Jew born in Slovakia, he had lived in Sarajevo his whole childhood. That young man was Viktor.
* * *
“You made that up. Admit it,” Tvrtko says.
* * *
The next piece of information is unquestionably true: that same year, Freud published an article in Psychiatry and Neurology Monthly about “The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness”. A casual, superficial meeting with a young man, a complete stranger on top of that, was documented only because the famous psychoanalyst decided to explore the reasons of frequent forgetfulness regarding names we know very well most of the time. What is more, the process of remembering is so convoluted that, as a rule, we remain trapped in the web of an even bigger confusion. In the article, Freud explained the complicated mechanism of partial blocking of information where the conscious and the unconscious cross paths. On the basis of personal experience, he tried to analyse all the associations that led him to the names of people and places mentioned while incidentally conversing with a fellow traveller. He broke down the words such as Signorelli (for that was the name of a forgotten fresco master) into the Italian Signor and connected it to the German Herr when he translated a sentence from the story about the fatalistic Bosnian who shrugs his shoulders when his cousin is dying and forgives the doctor, Oh, well, Mister, what can I tell you? Salvation lays in the hands of our Lord the Father, or Allah, or whomever, Freud thought anyway, agreeing with the Bosnian from the anecdote.
Yes, another thing is that the German Herr audibly blended with Her, the first syllable in Herzegovina. To this bizarre line of thought, the great psychoanalyst playfully added Bo, the first syllable in Bosnia, which appears as the first syllable in the names of the artists that came to his mind while he tried to recall Signorelli’s name, to no avail. In Freud’s mechanism of forgetfulness, therefore, a secret link was created between things that were seemingly unrelated: Bosnia, Botticelli and Boltraffio as a magical trinity, dissected with Freud’s linguistic knife. He made another cut, severing – traffio from Bol – with a pang of guilt – he remembered that on that day in 1898, while he was getting ready for his trip to Bosnia, he had received the news of a patient’s suicide. The news got to him in a place called Trafoi. Deep down, he wanted to suppress the bad news and the failure to mend the patient, a man of violent and insoluble sexual urges, whose therapy had a deadly outcome, instead of offering a cure. He wrote down: “Unconsciously, I was forgetting one thing, while I consciously tried to forget something else. While my repulsion was aimed at the contents of an idea from a memory, my helplessness to recollect appeared in an entirely different context.”
* * *
“It is unlikely that Freud would recognize Tausk, a close associate, as the young man from the train, but Viktor would have remembered their encounter for sure. He would have told Freud. Reminded him.”
“Are you sure he would’ve reminded him?” I ask Tvrtko.
* * *
Finally, in the text on mechanism of forgetfulness, Freud concluded that although we forget names, sometimes for very simple reasons, there are other times when we repress memories on a subconscious level.
In view of Viktor and Sigmund’s relationship, a lot of it is still unclear; something was buried in the dark of the subconscious, and some of it lost forever, not only from Freud’s memory, but the collective, historical memory as well. The first real encounter between them happened much later – in autumn of 1908 – almost by mistake, it could be said. It happened in a way that would seem strange even if it belonged to an excerpt from a novel. Both versions of Viktor and Sigmund’s first meeting, from the ones that are possibly true to the ones that have been documented in correspondence, feature the exact amount of chance, or a little less, contained in the idea of kismet – just enough to illuminate a brief and sceptical glance of a European intellectual. While mocking the indifference with which an Easterner accepts even the worst of fates, a Westerner cannot fully hide the fascination. Although he is not able to accept the idea of kismet, he admires a foreign, frightening idea of appeasement, even when it is based on partial misunderstanding, it still leaves an indelible trace on a Western intellectual, especially the one such as Viktor Tausk who had been exposed to frontal collisions of various creeds and cultural heritage, not to mention the monstrous concoctions of utterly dissimilar traditions, which culminated in atheism.
Meddling with fate, which after all, includes suicide, becomes a necessity, a natural solution for people like Tausk, who see it as a rational answer to not becoming a manipulatory device. Even though he had spent most of his life fighting manipulation in its multiple forms: from sensory manipulation and imposition of values in traditional family upbringing, through the hypocrisy of romantic relationships and friendships, exploitation of patriotic and scientific ideas, to confronting more and more organized political madness that fuels the masses – Viktor suddenly sees that he did not manage to be happy, let alone free.
Lou Salomé, Tausk’s short, but passionate affair, love of whom he shared with Sigmund, receives Freud’s letter telling her Viktor had killed himself. Freud’s news kept coming late, even months after Viktor’s funeral. He writes with an emotional distance that does not reveal a lot of intimacy with the deceased, perhaps only a tinge of well-disguised male jealousy, quenched now that Viktor, “the animal of passion”, is finally dead.
Poor Tausk, whose friendship, at one point, was incredibly strong, committed suicide in a very radical manner. He came back tired, daunted by the horrors of war, it must be noted that he tried to recover in Vienna under unfavourable existential circumstances when the troops returned from the battlefields. He tried to bring a new woman into his life, he was supposed to marry her in eight days’ time… but he decided differently. The suicide notes to his fiancée, first wife and me are touching; they prove he was completely lucid, he does not blame anyone and they point towards his shortcomings and a life of frustration, shedding no light on the suicide itself.
* * *
Blame it on the war – or perhaps not war, but post-war disillusion! At least, that is what it seemed to Freud, and possibly, it was the easiest way to interpret Viktor’s tragic case in the public eye.
Freud was right to a certain degree, although Viktor did know how to cope with the traumas of war – other people’s traumas as well as his own. As a field doctor, he had no time to think. His intellect was focused on helping the injured; there was no time for emotional outbursts. He shared the shocks and tremors with those poor, highly agitated fellows under gunfire – a topic open to psychoanalysis and academic discussion a couple of years later. If it had been different, Viktor could have already killed himself in August of 1915, or would have found another way to escape the absurdity of war. In any case – his health was weak, but he came back alive. In Belgrade, March 3rd, 1917, at the Ninth Symposium of Medical Officers, he finally had the opportunity to elaborate on the psychology of deserters. He could approach the subject from two angles, both of which he knew well: as someone with a doctorate in law and a doctor from the first line of battle. He offered a classification of war deserters with a sense of pioneer pride. However, while he was calmly explaining the issue of war deserting in front of medical and military experts, inside he was hiding a feeling of unease, a terrible feeling that he was forced to participate and continues to participate in an immoral act, that he took part and is taking part in an absurd act of cruelty that he could not prevent, firstly, because he was in no position to react, secondly, because he was dangerously alone in thinking that way, and thirdly, he lacked the necessary power of persuasion. Viktor was knowledgeable, bright and intuitive: he was an attractive, handsome man, he drew attention in many respects and made a lot of people jealous, but – unlike his famous role model Freud – he had no charisma. If Viktor had been a prophet instead of a doctor, he would have been Cassandra – no one would have believed him. The worst thing about the war did not happen in the midst of it all, but in court, when he was a jury member that had to reach a verdict regarding a couple of young, scared and stupid deserters. And it was a well known fact that no matter how substantial the psychological, legal, medical or simply human arguments may be – those poor men would end up in front of a firing squad. He was outvoted, and the worst moment was when circumstances required him to cut into the dead deserter’s brain with a scalpel. The man whose brain he was cutting into was his patient. Viktor’s scalpel reached into absolute nonsense, as if the transcendental in all its complexity boiled down to nothing but absurdity, hoisted up by the grotesque, perverse and utterly pointless need to satisfy academic curiosity. The secret that became clear when he opened up a deserter’s brain was not, of course, measurable according to scientific parameters. It was more like a Pandora’s box.
Translated by Una Krizmanić Ožegović