A Perfect Madness (5 page)

Politically, though, Theodore
Roosevelt himself had years earlier endorsed the eugenics effort to
save humanity (which did impress Erich considerably), while on the
social scene, the idea became quite fashionable with F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s snappy song “Love or Eugenics” floating melodiously
across nightclub dance floors all over America. Even the revered
Supreme Court muscled its way into the act in a sickening case
involving a state’s request to sterilize a young mentally disabled
woman. On a dismally cold and cloudy day when the sun refused to
shine, perhaps as an omen of terrible deeds to come, the great
Justice Holmes strode to the bench and, uttering the words “Three
generations of imbeciles are enough,” unhooked the moral reins
holding science and medicine back. Shortly thereafter the shameful
sterilization of 40,000 mentally disabled women rolled across
America like a giant tsunami.

What puzzled and bothered Erich more
than what the scientists were advocating, though, was the large
number of theologians and ministers, and even rabbis, who had lined
up behind Charles Davenport and his colleagues in science, when
what they were advocating was clearly wrong, at least in his young
mind. Perhaps America was not the stately and righteous guardian of
human rights the rest of the world believed it to be.

“
What is there to keep us
from crossing the line, from becoming far less than what God
intends us to be?” he asked his father boldly one afternoon, as
they were standing amid a crowd of American doctors.

Quickly silenced by his father’s cold
stare, he wandered outside the conference hall and looked eastward
across the harbor and ocean to where he imagined Europe might be.
Everything is changing, he mused. What we are today, we may not be
tomorrow. For a moment he thought of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
sorrowful story of the fanatical scientist who becomes obsessed
with his beautiful wife’s single flaw, a crimson birthmark on her
otherwise flawless cheek. Determined to rid her of this sinful
imperfection, he creates a powerful potion to make the mark
disappear, which it does, but his wife also dies. Hawthorne and
Emerson were the only two American writers Erich found any
enjoyment in reading, because they seemed to embrace Nietzsche’s
criticism of the paramount ideal of human perfection being so
eagerly embraced by science and society. He wasn’t ready for this
new world of medicine like his father was.

“
What a glorious day for
all of humanity,” Dr. Schmidt shouted out, while standing on the
deck of their ship, to a flight of sea gulls swooping low over the
tops of the breaking waves, searching for their morning meal.
“Darwin’s survival of the fittest can now be manipulated by
science, and we, the scientists, the keepers of the faith, will set
the moral bar for all of civilization to follow.”

Erich hardly knew his father at times,
and never before had he seen him so joyously arrogant as he was at
this moment. What seemed to impress his father most, though, was
the rapid enactment of laws throughout America providing for
compulsory sterilization of the criminally insane and other people
considered genetically inferior.

“
America, that bulwark of
liberty, is leading the world in preserving the human race, and
Germany must seize the lead in cleansing the Aryan race,” he would
repeat over and over to Erich, like a broken record, as they left
the conference for home. What was to follow would bring Erich to
Prague and to Julia.

The second morning at sea Dr. Schmidt
suddenly began humming Fitzgerald’s popular song. “We must find and
buy a copy of that song,” he said, stopping the incessant humming
for a second.

“
It is only a catchy song,
nothing more,” Erich replied, disgusted and embarrassed by his
father’s childish actions.

“
No, it sings out loud
what the American people are really thinking. They’re afraid that
the advanced races of mankind are skating backwards, sliding down a
slippery slope to be swallowed up one day by ignorance. We must
sing the same song to those who will listen.”

Erich shook his head. Never before had
such unbridled giddiness pushed out from his father’s strict
bearing. He seemed almost human. It was as if he had been suddenly
swept up in the “rapture.”

“
We too must become part
of this sacred mission,” his father continued babbling.

“
What are you talking
about? What mission?”

“
To save the great Aryan
race from extinction. What else? We will embrace the National
Socialist movement like Lenz, who is committed to such a
mission.”

Erich rose from his deck chair and
walked to the railing, joining several other passengers looking at
the angry ocean surrounding them. The beckoning waters had been
there an eternity, he knew, churning and rolling and giving birth
to all life. They would still be there long after Germany and the
Aryan race had been erased by God and returned to dust.

Looking back at his father, Erich saw
nothing, only the tradition he hated. He had no desire to follow in
the footsteps of his father. Healing and touching sick bodies was
distasteful to him. Instead, it was the sick mind that roiled and
captured his interest. The growing field of psychiatry would bring
him the fame he had long imagined, and possibly a distinguished
professorship in a few years alongside the great German
psychiatrists at Berlin University and Munich, or even the German
University in Prague, where the great intellectual movement in
Prague had first reached out to him. Kafka and the other great
writers of the Prague Circle were there alongside the city’s
artists and men of letters. Philosophy and the metaphysical
presence of being were open for the world to see and study. What he
had to do was leave his studies at Berlin University to go
there.

Having looked at the rising and
falling horizon too long, Erich felt nauseated and returned to the
chair next to his father to rest.

“
You have turned green,”
his father said, amused. “A bouncing horizon is not something to
favor too long.”

“
Let me rest my head a few
minutes and we will talk some more.”

After a few minutes, Erich turned to
his father and picked up the disturbing conversation
again.

“
Father, you cannot join
the National Socialist movement. It is political; you are a doctor,
a physician, a defender of the Hippocratic Oath—not a
politician.”

“
You are so pitifully
young and wrong, Erich. Hereditary health is before us now, tugging
at us. It’s not something we must wait for. You saw with your own
eyes what is taking place in America. They are leading the way, but
soon they will follow Germany.”

“
And do what?”

“
Sterilize all of the
unfit, not just a few, and even develop a racial policy. The black
man has no standing there.”

“
And Germany?”

“
My boy, listen:
biological laws are the laws of life and National Socialism is
nothing more than applied biology. We must purify the Aryan race if
Germany’s health is to survive, and that will be the physician’s
task, yours and mine—don’t forget that.”

“
That is nonsense and
evil, Father. I’ve never heard you speak like this
before.”

“
Why? Treating the
hereditarily sick by sterilization should be seen as a God-given
blessing. Think of all of the mentally disabling illnesses that
will be eliminated. What a utopia to live in.”

“
What about the Jews? Will
we sterilize them, too?

“
No, I would think not,
though they do intermarry at times with other races, which they
shouldn’t do. Perhaps prohibiting them from doing so would be
enough. They are doing that now in America between the Negro and
the white person.”

Erich stood up, leaning against a
cabin wall for support. Not only was he deathly seasick, he was
sick of his father’s ramblings. Finally he said in a faint voice,
challenging his father, “I will not be a part of this nonsense.
Prague is where I will be in the fall to study philosophy and
psychology and finish my medical training, not Germany. They don’t
speak of such trash there, only of the liberation of the
mind.”

So Erich did go to Prague to finish
his preliminary medical studies for the coming years of clinical
training. There the great writings of Husserl and Freud and Jung
saturated his daily thoughts, leaving little time to think of home
and Germany. Never had his mind and soul been so free. His father,
now alienated from him, had joined the National Socialist party,
marching in lockstep with its racial ideology of cleansing the
Aryan race. But Erich had no time for such madness. He would go
home to Dresden only twice during his years away, then only to see
his mother whom he cared deeply for. And it was when he returned
from home the second time that he would seek Julia’s
companionship.

After asking Julia to have coffee with
him, Erich was indeed summoned, as he later would laughingly refer
to it, to her home for a formal introduction to her father, Dr.
Jiri Kaufmann, a distinguished professor of psychiatry at Charles
University. The confidence Erich initially felt as he set out for
the encounter quickly abandoned him the moment he crossed the Old
Town square and entered Josefov, the ancient Jewish quarters.
Though many Jewish families lived outside the quarters, Dr.
Kaufmann resided in the same small house on Kaprova Street that his
father had, and his grandfather before him, only a stone’s throw
from Maisel Synagogue, where his family had worshipped the Hebrew
God for over 150 years. He had met and married Julia’s mother
there, a good and gentle woman by everyone’s account. Together they
represented ten generations of Jewish blood in Prague.

Erich stood in front of the small
stone house looking up and down Kaprova, which seemed empty of all
life except for an ugly stray dog on the corner, barking loudly at
him. He wondered how many secret eyes had been watching from behind
the drawn curtains as he walked past the row of houses leading to
Julia’s. Tomorrow, Mrs. Kaufmann would spend the day explaining his
evening presence in their neighborhood.

Julia opened the front door as he
started through the walkway gate.

“
I was afraid you might
not come. But believe me, to Father some traditions are still worth
holding on to, even though it is 1938.”

“
It’s a stretch for just a
cup of coffee,” Erich said, laughing as he followed Julia into a
small study where Dr. Kaufmann stood alone in front of dark wooden
shelving stacked with medical texts and journals.

“
Father, this is Erich
Schmidt, one of my classmates at the university.”

Erich stepped forward with his hand
extended but was met with a disarming silence by Dr. Kaufmann.
Unnerved by the awkward moment, Erich glanced nervously around the
study, then at Julia. This wasn’t what he had expected. Dr.
Kaufmann’s rudeness would be the easiest way to dismiss him from
Julia’s life, Erich thought, just as Dr. Kaufmann turned to face
him.

“
Please forgive my
manners, Erich. My mind has been running back and forth between
German and Czech, trying to find the appropriate words. While I
prefer Czech, it seems everyone is speaking German these days in
Prague, which perhaps is trying to tell us something,” Dr. Kaufmann
said, leading Erich by the arm into the living room, where Mrs.
Kaufmann was busily filling magnificent gold-rimmed cups with
freshly brewed coffee.

“
Please sit down, Erich.
We will speak German.”

Erich sat down on a small settee
facing Dr. Kaufmann and Julia, who was sitting next to her father.
He still couldn’t fathom the formality of what was happening.
Everything seemed so weirdly strange to him. It was as if he should
now ask for Julia’s hand in marriage. In his twenty-eight years of
living, being here visiting in Julia’s home was only the second
time for him to be in a Jewish home. Few Jewish families had lived
near his home in Dresden, and those that did, kept mostly to
themselves. He knew only a few of the neighbors by name, and one
Jewish boy who lived several streets away. It was in his house that
he sat the one time drinking a cool glass of water on a very hot
afternoon. One day during summer recess with his father away, he
had journeyed through the neighborhood, wandering several streets
away from home. Benjamin Keiler was tossing through the air a small
airplane made of balsa, when he came upon him. Watching the futile
efforts of Benjamin to make the plane sail farther then a few feet
before plunging to the ground, Erich asked if he might try, which
he did. But he had even less success with his flying skills and
felt ashamed he had asked to try. In a while, Benjamin’s mother
called him to come inside for a cool drink, and he took Erich with
him. They had become friends for the afternoon, that was all, and
Erich never saw Benjamin again, nor his family. When he returned to
his own house that day, he said nothing to his mother about where
he had been. Not that she would have minded, but that she would
tell his father, who cared even then nothing for Jews, even those
holding prestigious professorships at Berlin University. Erich
thought more about Benjamin’s house that night in bed than he did
about trying to fly the plane. While there he had been intrigued
with a lone candle burning in the living room where they sat
drinking the cool water, and believed it must be some kind of
witchcraft, but was afraid to ask. The Lutherans burned candles,
too, he knew—in church, though, where it made some sense to do so,
not in the home. Sensing Erich’s uneasiness, Julia smiled and
leaned forward to offer him a bagel that her mother had baked
earlier in the morning.