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PREHISTORY
On May 3, 1913, Heinz Kohut was born to Felix and Else Kohut in old Austria's great city of Vienna. Both parents were talented and financially comfortable members of the city's assimilated Jewish elite and lived in the Ninth District at Liechtensteinstrasse 121. Felix, dashing at twenty-four, was a brilliant pianist in active training for a concert career. The First World War, however, was to shatter such dreams and force him into business, while leukemia would end his life prematurely at forty-nine in 1937. Else, twenty-two at the birth of her only son, was a beautiful, very, dramatic, and determined young woman who sang well and later ran her own business. In 1940 she would follow her son into immigration to escape the Nazis and live several decades in Chicago before dying in 1972 at eighty-two years of age.
The prehistory of the family exists more in myth than fact. Take the patrimonial name itself. "Kohut" is a fairly common Jewish name that is probably derived from the Hebrew name [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (Kohath), the son of Levi (one of the sons of Jacob) mentioned in Genesis 4-6:11. There was, furthermore, a distinguished line of Rabbi Kohuts from Hungary in the nineteenth century, including Alexander Kohut (1842-1894), a great philologist who came to America in 1885 and wrote a prodigious eight-volume study of the Talmud; his son, George Alexander Kohut, who became a learned rabbi and, like his father, was an important figure at the Jewish Theological Seminary of New York City; another Hungarian writer, Adolf Kohut (1848-1917); and several other Hungarian Kohuts who were leaders of the Jewish community.
Kohut himself, however, never said his name came from the biblical son of Levi and certainly never mentioned any rabbinic forebears. On the contrary, his story, as woven in the family, was that "Kohut" means "rooster" in Czech and that most Bohemian Kohuts were Christian. In fact, the Czech word for rooster (kohout) is similar, though the likelihood that any of Heinz Kohut's ancestors were Christian Kohuts in Bohemia is slim indeed. His maternal family, furthermore, the Lampls, was descended from Jews in Slovakia, a fact about which Heinz Kohut, as best one can tell, never once commented in his adult life. Both sides of Kohut's family were almost certainly, then, part of the vast migration of Jews to Vienna from the provinces of the Austrian Empire after mid-century; Kohut once told an interviewer that both the Kohuts and the Lampls had been in Vienna for several generations, which would put both families in that first wave of Jewish immigrants in the 1850s and 1860s. Some Jews had been in Vienna for nearly a millennium, but after the revolution of 1848 the government lifted the traditional restrictions on Jewish residence. Jews flocked to Vienna from the shtetls and towns of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They helped transform the arts, commerce, and banking in the old capital. From a population of 2,000 in 1847, by the First World War there were about 200,000 Jews in Vienna, or 10 percent of the total population of two million, and by the mid-1930s the number of Jews in Vienna had risen to nearly 300,000, with the population of the city rising accordingly. Jews helped transform the culture of Vienna within a generation. Things had never been better, as the Viennese say, and they had never been worse.
Kohut's paternal grandfather, Bernhard (or, in the Jewish records, Bernat) Kohut, born in 1842 to Ignaz Kohut and Ester Hupka Kohut, was an English teacher in a gymnasium, having worked his way up from elementary-school teaching. A gymnasium teacher was accorded a greater degree of status in society than we would associate with a high school instructor. They were called "professor" and bore themselves with some dignity and stiffness, as Heinrich Mann captured in his novel Professor Unrat, made famous in the movie The Blue Angel with Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich. Bernhard, who politically yearned for the ideal of a united Germany that included Austria, was true to his professorial stereotype. Two stories about him became part of family lore. One concerned a ritual he had on Sundays. The family, including Bernhard and his wife, Sophie Fischl Kohut, and the children, Felix, Anna (born 1879), Richard (born 1883), and Friedrich (born 1891), all of whom, except for Felix, died in the Holocaust, would gather for their main meal of the day. There would be talk and chatter as the children tried to contain themselves as they waited for the climactic end of dinner. Then, with much pomp and circumstance, the father would call the child to his side who had behaved the best. He would give a key to that child, who would go to a designated box, put the key in, and open it. Inside would be an apple. The child would take the apple to the father, who would ceremoniously peel it according to his mood. In a good mood, he would peel the apple thickly, in a bad mood he would peel it thinly. In any event, the favored child got the peel and the father ate the apple. The wife got the core. The other story about this ornery patriarch is that when he was dying he made his children stand and slam the door to his bedroom as loud as they could to keep him from slipping away. That haunting sound of the door slamming stayed with Felix the rest of his life as a metaphor for death.
Heinz Kohut:The Making of a Psychoanalyst
By CHARLES B. STROZIER
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
CHAPTER ONE
PREHISTORY
On May 3, 1913, Heinz Kohut was born to Felix and Else Kohut in old Austria's great city of Vienna. Both parents were talented and financially comfortable members of the city's assimilated Jewish elite and lived in the Ninth District at Liechtensteinstrasse 121. Felix, dashing at twenty-four, was a brilliant pianist in active training for a concert career. The First World War, however, was to shatter such dreams and force him into business, while leukemia would end his life prematurely at forty-nine in 1937. Else, twenty-two at the birth of her only son, was a beautiful, very, dramatic, and determined young woman who sang well and later ran her own business. In 1940 she would follow her son into immigration to escape the Nazis and live several decades in Chicago before dying in 1972 at eighty-two years of age.
The prehistory of the family exists more in myth than fact. Take the patrimonial name itself. "Kohut" is a fairly common Jewish name that is probably derived from the Hebrew name [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (Kohath), the son of Levi (one of the sons of Jacob) mentioned in Genesis 4-6:11. There was, furthermore, a distinguished line of Rabbi Kohuts from Hungary in the nineteenth century, including Alexander Kohut (1842-1894), a great philologist who came to America in 1885 and wrote a prodigious eight-volume study of the Talmud; his son, George Alexander Kohut, who became a learned rabbi and, like his father, was an important figure at the Jewish Theological Seminary of New York City; another Hungarian writer, Adolf Kohut (1848-1917); and several other Hungarian Kohuts who were leaders of the Jewish community.
Kohut himself, however, never said his name came from the biblical son of Levi and certainly never mentioned any rabbinic forebears. On the contrary, his story, as woven in the family, was that "Kohut" means "rooster" in Czech and that most Bohemian Kohuts were Christian. In fact, the Czech word for rooster (kohout) is similar, though the likelihood that any of Heinz Kohut's ancestors were Christian Kohuts in Bohemia is slim indeed. His maternal family, furthermore, the Lampls, was descended from Jews in Slovakia, a fact about which Heinz Kohut, as best one can tell, never once commented in his adult life. Both sides of Kohut's family were almost certainly, then, part of the vast migration of Jews to Vienna from the provinces of the Austrian Empire after mid-century; Kohut once told an interviewer that both the Kohuts and the Lampls had been in Vienna for several generations, which would put both families in that first wave of Jewish immigrants in the 1850s and 1860s. Some Jews had been in Vienna for nearly a millennium, but after the revolution of 1848 the government lifted the traditional restrictions on Jewish residence. Jews flocked to Vienna from the shtetls and towns of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They helped transform the arts, commerce, and banking in the old capital. From a population of 2,000 in 1847, by the First World War there were about 200,000 Jews in Vienna, or 10 percent of the total population of two million, and by the mid-1930s the number of Jews in Vienna had risen to nearly 300,000, with the population of the city rising accordingly. Jews helped transform the culture of Vienna within a generation. Things had never been better, as the Viennese say, and they had never been worse.
Kohut's paternal grandfather, Bernhard (or, in the Jewish records, Bernat) Kohut, born in 1842 to Ignaz Kohut and Ester Hupka Kohut, was an English teacher in a gymnasium, having worked his way up from elementary-school teaching. A gymnasium teacher was accorded a greater degree of status in society than we would associate with a high school instructor. They were called "professor" and bore themselves with some dignity and stiffness, as Heinrich Mann captured in his novel Professor Unrat, made famous in the movie The Blue Angel with Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich. Bernhard, who politically yearned for the ideal of a united Germany that included Austria, was true to his professorial stereotype. Two stories about him became part of family lore. One concerned a ritual he had on Sundays. The family, including Bernhard and his wife, Sophie Fischl Kohut, and the children, Felix, Anna (born 1879), Richard (born 1883), and Friedrich (born 1891), all of whom, except for Felix, died in the Holocaust, would gather for their main meal of the day. There would be talk and chatter as the children tried to contain themselves as they waited for the climactic end of dinner. Then, with much pomp and circumstance, the father would call the child to his side who had behaved the best. He would give a key to that child, who would go to a designated box, put the key in, and open it. Inside would be an apple. The child would take the apple to the father, who would ceremoniously peel it according to his mood. In a good mood, he would peel the apple thickly, in a bad mood he would peel it thinly. In any event, the favored child got the peel and the father ate the apple. The wife got the core. The other story about this ornery patriarch is that when he was dying he made his children stand and slam the door to his bedroom as loud as they could to keep him from slipping away. That haunting sound of the door slamming stayed with Felix the rest of his life as a metaphor for death.