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Who Betrayed John Rittmeister?: A Psychoanalytic Mystery from Nazi Berlin

Author(s) : A. Laurence Rickels

Reviews and Endorsements

'Laurence Rickels has been a guiding beacon for me for two decades now. Nobody thinks the intersection of media and mourning better, or more lucidly argues for the place of trauma at the centre of our understanding of history and the arts.'
Tom McCarthy

'This book widens the understanding of the complex and contradictory motives of psychoanalysts and scientists remaining in Nazi Germany and being forced to cope with it.'
Ludger Hermanns, Psychoanalyst in private practice in Berlin and member of the Karl Abraham Institute

'On 13 May 1943, the neurologist and psychoanalyst John Rittmeister was beheaded by the Nazis in Plötzensee Prison in Berlin following charges of high treason and favouring the enemy. His resistance and fate made him something of an icon in the post-war reconstruction of psychoanalysis in Germany. His story was complex, historically, politically, and ethically. Left leaning, Rittmeiseter had been affiliated with both the notorious Göring Institute and the anti-fascist resistance group Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra). In exploring Rittmeister’s fate, Laurence Rickels, the acclaimed historian of psychoanalysis in Nazi Germany, reopens this ‘cold case’, challenges previous reconstructions of the events, and offers new insights into his betrayal. In doing so, Rickels also reveals hitherto largely hidden sequelae of these events in a scandal in Brasil involving analytic training, torture, and the transmission of unacknowledged Nazi legacies. Building on close readings of archival research, clinical writings, postwar institutional histories, and literary fiction, Rickels has produced a nuanced work that is both a significant contribution to psychoanalytic history and at the same time a gripping detective / true crime page turner.'
Roger Willoughby, clinical psychologist and historian of psychoanalysis, Gradiva Award winner, author of Masud Khan: The Myth and the Reality (2005) and Freud’s British Family: Reclaiming Lost Lives in Manchester and London (2024)