Esther Bertschinger-Joos: Frieda Gross und ihre Briefe an Else Jaffé. Ein bewegtes Leben im Umfeld von Anarchismus, Psychoanalyse und Bohème.

• Dieter Mehl

What makes this lively though unsystematically – to the point of neglecting the needs of the reader – presented collection of letters so fascinating and in a strange way so instructive for the literary chronicler of the early twentieth century is a direct and seemingly unguarded revelation of souls, female and male alike, haunted, or rather obsessed by psychological, predominantly sexual, relationships. The author of the narrative introducing these documents was a close friend of Otto Gross’s daughter (Verena Schloffer, 1910-2005), fathered by a man (Otto Gross) she never met, but in truth begot by one of the miscellaneous partners of his wife (Frieda Gross, 1876-1950), the painter Ernst Frick (1881-1956). It was Verena who gave the author access not only to the correspondence between Frieda Gross and Else Jaffé (1874-1973), but also to many memories, links to archives, and witnesses of a colourfully mixed circle in the shadow of Sigmund Freud and some of his more controversial disciples, especially Otto Gross (1877-1920). He and his infectious idea of reckless sexual liberty seem to have had a charismatic influence on a surprising variety of women and men, intellectuals, artists, frustrated spouses or failed revolutionaries. This is what makes the group of letterwriters so emotionally dramatic, see-sawing between intimacy, despair, disappointment and blind devotion. The biographies behind these intimate exchanges and confessions appear to be struggling with a complex muddle of relationships, separations, betrayals, changing loyalties and eventual loneliness, disentangled by the faithful narrator only with some effort.