Читать книгу Fritz Perls in Berlin 1893 - 1933 - Bernd Bocian - Страница 23

After finishing elementary school, Fritz Perls entered the »classically oriented« Mommsen Gymnasium in the Charlottenburg section of Berlin, as befitted his social status. Several years later, Herbert Marcuse would also attend this institution. The curriculum focused on ancient languages, studying the authors of classical antiquity, and the history of ancient Greece and Rome. Latin and Greek were the dominant languages, and ancient literature was read in the original. Perls himself remembered reading texts by Sophocles and Plato in the original Greek (see Perls 1977, 75). Additional subjects included French and naturally German, religion, mathematics, the natural sciences, history, writing, drawing, geography, gymnastics, and singing.

Due to its location in one of Berlin’s more affluent middle-class neighborhoods, the percentage of pupils of the Mosaic faith at Mommsen Gymnasium was quite high, so that it was later closed by the Nazis.²⁷ Nevertheless, this changed nothing about the fact that the originally humanistic educational concept underlying this type of school had long since been replaced by the insemination of German-nationalist values. The authors of German classical literature (Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Hölderlin, etc.) had to a large extent been stripped of their cosmopolitanism and humanism. They were subjected to national-chauvinistic interpretation and were accordingly introduced foremost as great Germans.

Although in a less crude manner than in elementary schools, secondary schools such as this prepared youths for veneration of the Emperor, obedience, subordination, and confluence with the state, while at the same time instilling arrogance toward other nations and peoples. Referring to the Wilhelminian school system, Albert Einstein remarked that the most horrible thing was »when a school works with the methods of intimidation, violence, and artificial authority as a matter of principle. Treating pupils with such methods destroys their healthy emotions, forthrightness, and self-confidence, thereby producing subservient subjects« (in Friedrich 1973, 202).

This is the mentality that Heinrich Mann described in his novel »Man of Straw.« It identifies with the authority of state, grovels under what’s above, and treads on what’s below. That style of dealing with other people, together with cruel teachers who used physical blows, classroom seating changes, and detention as punishments, encouraged not only servility and a willingness to conform, but also the potential rebels, as many autobiographies from those times attest. In ninth grade, George Grosz returned the blows and was expelled from school, John Heartfield participated in a pupils’ revolt and landed in a correctional school, and Bertolt Brecht’s rebellious insolence caused a school scandal. Looking back, Kurt Tucholsky later wrote of »the murder and the theft of souls« (in Hepp 1999, 47 f.) and of the character strength required to say a clear, loud »No« in that kind of atmosphere. Here, we would like to underscore the importance Perls later assigned in Gestalt therapy to a clear »No« as a means of creating stability and ego boundaries.

Hermann Hesse described this other kind of strength of character in 1919 in his brief essay on the virtue of self-will (Eigensinn) (see Hesse 1988). In no other country were as many novels written about school and education as in Germany. »Often they involved tragedies of despair and student suicide, but they always included incriminations of a school system that praised disobedience in the heroes and warriors of history, but generally punished young school rebels without mercy« (Hepp 1999, 47).

Apparently, Perls had been lucky with his teachers in elementary school, but in an atmosphere like this it was almost certain that the performance of the former top student in his class would decline. School turned into a »nightmare« (Perls 1977, 178), the above conflicts and battles at home broke out in parallel, and he was threatened with being put into a correctional school. The headmaster of Mommsen Gymnasium was a Dr. Alfred Przygode, ²⁸ and Perls recalled that »the director had a Polish name, and possibly to prove his Aryan blood he was very, very nationalistic. The school was new and he gathered a staff that can best be described by paraphrasing Churchill: Seldom have so few teachers tortured so many children for such a long time« (ibid., 251).

A further and without doubt profound experience from his school years is mentioned in one sentence only: »The basic attitude was discipline and anti-Semitism«²⁹ (ibid.) Nationalistic values themselves defined the Jewish minority as not belonging, which implied foreignness and inferiority. For young minds who came from assimilated liberal homes and took their German identity for granted, this must have been confusing and unsettling. With respect to her brother’s experience with manifest and latent anti-Semitism at the Mommsen Gymnasium, Perls’s sister, Grete, remarked, »And, being a sensitive boy, he felt it and he was infuriated by it« (in Gaines 1979, 3).

Even at an advanced age, Perls remembered exactly which of his classmates were Jewish in origin. »We were four Jews in our class. Krafft became a psychoanalyst. Schildkraut made a name for himself in the movies, and Hollaender composed many lovely songs for Marlene Dietrich« (Perls 1977, 252).³⁰ In my opinion, what Perls experienced here contributed to his lifelong sense of not belonging anywhere. Moritz Goldstein, a native of Berlin, recalled the Christian classmates who were his friends at school. »I hoped that a relationship that included mutual visiting would develop with these new classmates, whom I admired, but nothing came of it. (…) They simply didn’t want it, or their parents had given strict orders not to bring the Jew home with them. In our day-to-day contacts, I never felt any anti-Semitic sentiments« (in Rürup 1995, 159). In principle, every Jewish child had this experience during its school years. Something similar applied on the family level. In the business world, for example, dealings between Germans of the Christian and the Mosaic faiths were thoroughly cordial, but in their private lives German-Jewish families mingled almost exclusively with other families of Jewish origin. In her memoirs, Lore Perls explicitly confirms this and points out that social contacts within the Posner home were restricted to »upper-class Jews« (see L. Perls 1997, 28). As a result, there was yet another sensory experience that could mean stimulation of a tendency toward obsequiousness and confluence or, as in Perls’s case, toward rebellion and egocentricity. Walter Rathenau, the successful industrialist who became foreign minister of the Weimar Republic and was assassinated by a German nationalist university student, summed up this collective wound with the words: »During the younger years of every German Jew there is a painful moment that he remembers for his entire life: the first time he becomes fully aware that he has entered the world as a secondclass citizen and that no amount of diligence or merit can free him from that situation« (in Rürup 1995, 133).

This must be borne in mind when we reflect on Perls and evaluate him. The personal weaknesses and emotional disturbances that he freely revealed, say, his fluctuation between a feeling worthlessness and a sense of grandeur, cannot be traced exclusively to early childhood experiences within the family environment. Such reactions are field phenomena and overdetermined, with cultural, social, and family conditions impinging on the individual simultaneously.

Perls’s school career was interrupted because he had to repeat a class three times, and he was taken out of the Gymnasium. Much like Victor Klemperer and Max Horkheimer, he was initially placed in a commercial apprenticeship with a cloth merchant. He behaved poorly, played jokes on his boss, and was fired (see Perls 1977, 253).

Ferdinand Knopf, likewise a »failure« at school and a friend of Perls’s whom the latter accepted as a kind of leader, found a new school for both of them. It was the Askanisches Gymnasium, where a number of teachers with a reformed pedagogical orientation apparently took an interest in the well-being of their charges (see ibid., 253 f.). His scholastic intelligence blossomed once again, and his final written exams were so good that his orals were waived (see L. Perls 1997, 46). In the 1913/14 school year, which ended at Easter in 1914, he received his »Abitur«³¹ at age 20 after attending the school for four years. According to that, he had entered the school in the academic year of 1910/11.³²

When Perls mentions that he liked some of his teachers, that probably also means that he felt liked by them. Here, a theme emerges which is the polar opposite to rebellion, namely, a yearning for belonging that could also lean toward subordination in his early friendships. Subordination also allows one to experience a sense of belonging and security, and it is a form of total experience to which huge numbers of individuals surrendered in Germany after 1933. For Perls as a pupil at school, this was commingled with an attempt to assure himself the affection of his »handsome« Aryan classmates as a means of counterbalancing the »ugly« Jewish part of himself. He put the gold piece he had stolen from his father’s locked room to use for this purpose. »I extricated that gold piece and with it I bought stamps for my handsome blond Christian friend, hoping to buy his friendship or as a token of my friendship« (Perls 1977, 251). In general he remarks: »The friends I had in my earlier and later youth were always boys to whom I could surrender« (ibid., 236). In terms of family history, this is a question of lacking triangulation, the complementation of the dyadic relationship with the mother through a third, male individual who supports a different orientation and thereby reduces the ambivalence of the son’s detachment from the mother. The lack of positive affirmation by a man, a father, manifested itself in Perls as a lifelong yearning for acceptance by a male father figure, from which he was never released. The curt reaction Perls experienced when he visited Freud in Vienna in 1936, made the painful experience of rejection in the past come alive again in massive terms and probably accelerated his decision to make himself independent of the psychoanalytic organization. Family therapist Virginia Satir, who worked at Esalen together with Perls in his later years, formulated a valuable impression after Perls told her of his painful experience with Freud: »I got so much the feeling that Fritz couldn’t do good fathering, because he himself didn’t have a good fathering. (…) I often thought that he was a great man who really never felt loved by another man. (…) The thing that kept coming through was an expectation that he wouldn’t be understood« (in Gaines 1979, 269).

As a man over 70 years of age, Perls wrote the following about Selig Morgenrath, who was a sculptor and the architect of the Esalen Institute:

To watch him and his involvement and understanding with humans, animals, and plants, to compare his unobtrusiveness and confidence with my excitability and primadonna-ishnes, to feel at last the presence of a man to whom I feel inferior, and finally the feeling of mutual respect and friendship that came about – all of this has helped me to overcome most of my pompousness and phoniness. (Perls 1977, 70)