Picture us briefly illuminated by the headlights of a passing truck as it circles the roundabout on Greenwood Avenue: a thirty-three-year-old psychologist from New York who once smoked a cigarette with Bob Dylan on Clinton Street and a six-foot-three bespectacled Old World analyst in his seventies who’d been friendly with Einstein. We’d stroll through the punishing August humidity discussing my interns against a backdrop of cicadas. On the one hand, Klaus, surely the only man in Topeka outfitted in white linen, could not take these kids—with their refrigerators full of food, their air-conditioning and television, their freedom from stigma or state violence—seriously; what could be more obvious than the fact that they did not know what suffering was, that if they suffered from anything it was precisely this lack of suffering, a kind of neuropathy that came from too much ease, too much sugar, a kind of existential gout? And then, on the other hand, Klaus took them very seriously indeed; they are told constantly, the culture tells them, although “culture” is hardly the word, Klaus said, patting his forehead with a handkerchief cut from the same linen as his suit, that they are individuals, rugged even, but in fact they are emptied out, isolate, mass men without a mass, although they’re not men, obviously, but boys, perpetual boys, Peter Pans, man-children, since America is adolescence without end, boys without religion on the one hand or a charismatic leader on the other; they don’t even have a father—President Carter!—to kill or a father to tell them to kill the Jew; they have no Jew; they are libidinally driven to mass surrender without anything to surrender to; they don’t even believe in money or in science, or those beliefs are insufficient; their country has fought and lost its last real war; in a word, they are overfed; in a word, they are starving. These kids, Klaus said, just need a good whipping and some physical labor; these kids, Klaus also said, are undergoing a profound archaic regression. Boys will be boys, Klaus dismissed them, and spoiled boys will be spoiled boys, but then, handkerchief held to the back of his neck: the abyss of non-belief, the vacuum, cannot be filled with stuff (Klaus loved the word stuff, which sounded German to me, but wasn’t; from the Greek stuphein, “draw together”), and the violence will recur periodically—like cicadas. Then we’re raked by somebody’s rotating sprinkler, pleasant shock of cold water on my shins.
If I said, Klaus, you’re claiming the problem is they have it too easy, but you’re also saying having it too easy is too hard; you’re saying that it’s always been this way, but that it’s also the sign of a specific imperial decline, this vacuum at the heart of privilege, then Klaus would respond by delivering his signature quotation from Niels Bohr, the quotation he always quoted when he seemed to contradict himself, a saying his conversation was inexorably working toward, one he loved so much he’d stop and stand still, smiling, to deliver it: “The opposite of a truth,” Klaus quoted, “is a falsehood; but the opposite of a profound truth”—pause for emphasis, sound of sprinklers, insects, push mowers, felt absence of city noise, Kenny Rogers from a passing car—“may be another profound truth.” It either is or is not August (Klaus removes his anachronistic glasses, round lenses, wipes his face, replaces them, resumes walking); if I assert it’s August when it isn’t—simply false; but if I say that life is pain, that is true, profoundly so; so, too, that life is joy; the more profound the statement, the more reversible; the deep truths are sedimented in syntax, the terms can be reversed, just as there is no principle of noncontradiction, no law of excluded middle, governing the unconscious. Then, briefly serious, Klaus would touch my shoulder: A quote like that can save your life.
I wasn’t sure how much Klaus helped his patients—his analysands tended to be women, late middle-aged or older, although Sima, who was in training, was also being analyzed by Klaus—but I was sure he did no harm, letting his accent, which his patients associated with great psychoanalytic authority, do most of the work. What Klaus was known for at the Foundation were his “test reports,” which all staff were required to submit at regular intervals—two- or three-page documents that were then disseminated and discussed at meetings. Klaus’s were famous, or infamous, for their literariness; they brought something of the Weimar feuilleton to the Foundation bureaucracy. If he weren’t an analyst, if Stanford hadn’t bought his correspondence with Anna Freud, if he didn’t speak four languages (although Klaus was surprisingly dismissive of his Yiddish), if he weren’t old and elegant, weren’t a survivor, he would have been reprimanded; instead, my colleagues and I could look forward to the single-spaced documents his secretary typed but that Klaus then often modified in his florid hand—not to correct typos or errors of fact, but to add an additional adjective or improve a sentence rhythm. “When the first snow falls in Topeka, transforming the out-of-doors into a vast interior, B— turns her head to the flakes accumulating on the sill, and her memories turn to her white-carpeted living room in Ann Arbor, to her childhood’s primal scene”; “When a trout rising to a fly gets hooked and finds himself unable to swim about freely, he begins a fight which results in struggles and splashes; in the same way, G— is struggling on the hook of infantile personality disorder.” Sometimes they reminded me of Sportsmanlike Driving crossed with Freud: “Human history, like the history of the individual, can be understood as a slow passage through conflicts of a sexual-aggressive nature. It is as part of this journey across millennia that we must understand K—’s disinhibited and egotistical traits”; etc. I could do a good imitation of Klaus’s voice, would use it to crack up Jane and Eric and even his devoted analysand Sima (“One might say this marinara sauce came from a jar; but did not the jar, in a deep, perhaps deeper, sense, receive its identity from the sauce?”), but Klaus’s charm, at least for me, was that his voice already sounded like an imitation of itself; Klaus was an actor bemused to be playing Klaus. And yet the effect of this doubling was generous, self-deprecating; it reminded me of how Charlie Chaplin—when the rich woman he loves enters the bistro—pretends, out of embarrassment, only to be playing a waiter for her amusement.
Klaus was always joking; Klaus was never joking—what underwrote the irony was a sense of the absurdity of having survived, or the absurd suggestion that anyone survives, even if they go on breathing, or the absurdity that language could be much more than noise after the coop, after the camps. Once, in the Foundation cafeteria, I watched him walk to the wall to adjust a slightly crooked painting of a sunflower, the work of a patient. Somehow—again I was reminded of a star of silent film—Klaus’s gestures proclaimed that this was theater; without making a sound, he attracted the gazes of those eating at the tables. He overcorrected the painting—now it was too low on the left; he scratched his head; there was a little laughter; then he overcorrected it on the right, pretended not to notice, adjusted his bow tie, miming self-satisfaction, which produced more laughter; then, as if only the laughter drew his attention to his mistake, he held his chin in his hand, thinking. Suddenly an index finger shot up; instead of tinkering further with the sunflower, he walked to the other three paintings (bluebells, geraniums, coneflowers) on the wall and lowered their left edges until all the frames were equally askew; he sat back down to general applause.