Germany’s annexation of Austria and Freud’s exile in Britain

Germany’s annexation of Austria and Freud’s exile in Britain mark the final rupture in Sigmund Freud’s long Vienna life: in 1938 he left the city for London, where he died on 23 September 1939. The departure came after books by Freud had been burned in Berlin in 1933, and it brought the author of The Interpretation of Dreams into exile at the end of a career that connected clinical inquiry to literature and cultural history.

Background and Exile

Born in Moravia in 1856, Freud was brought to Vienna by his parents at the age of four and lived there until his flight to England in 1938. His education and professional work unfolded in Vienna: after a broad classical education, he trained at the Vienna Medical School and began his career studying the nervous system. The move to London therefore ended a residence that had shaped nearly his whole life, not simply a temporary professional posting.

The political break had an earlier warning. In 1933, after Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany, Freud’s books were burned in Berlin. Five years later, Germany annexed Austria, and Freud left Vienna for London. The evidence establishes the sequence and the resulting flight; it does not detail the immediate circumstances of his departure or his journey.

Freud’s Work and Cultural Ambition

Freud’s writing had moved from clinical practice toward an investigation of unconscious fantasy. His early interests included the nervous system, the therapeutic uses of cocaine, speech disorders, and hypnosis. In 1895, Studies in Hysteria, written with his older colleague Josef Breuer, argued that hysterical patients were troubled by recollections that could be recalled and discharged through the talking cure. By 1897, Freud had concluded that patients’ difficulties more often arose from childhood fantasies associated with their relations with their parents. The inquiry into that unconscious life produced The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1899, and later works on everyday slips and jokes.

The Interpretation of Dreams presents that inquiry not as a narrowly medical undertaking but as part of a broader cultural tradition. Freud surveys earlier theories and invokes classical authors, including Aristotle, Lucretius, and Cicero; its Virgilian epigraph further signals that reach. He also traces dream interpretation through the biblical account of Joseph, the ancient dream-book of Artemidorus of Daldis, and popular manuals. His aim is to give scientific footing to the belief that dreams have meaning, using free association to move from a dream’s remembered images to the thoughts and wishes behind them.

Literature as Psychological Evidence

Freud’s reading of dreams leads him to claim that even apparently trivial daily impressions can serve as material for a dream’s hidden content. He also argues that dreams may draw on childhood experience and that emotional conflict involving parents can persist beneath conscious life. To make the point, he turns to Sophocles’ Oedipus and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, treating familiar works of tragedy as powerful cultural expressions of conflicts also relevant to individual psychology.

In Freud’s account, the two dramas present related material in contrasting forms. The child’s wishful fantasy is openly realized in Oedipus, whereas in Hamlet it remains repressed and becomes legible through the hero’s inhibition. Freud interprets Hamlet’s delay in avenging his father not as a general inability to act—Hamlet acts decisively on other occasions—but as a conflict specific to the task of revenge. These literary readings show the scale of Freud’s ambition: dreams are not peripheral curiosities but belong to psychic life and, through that life, to the concerns of cultural tradition.

Departure and Final Years

In 1938, the annexation of Austria brought Freud’s Viennese life to an end and sent him to London. He died there on 23 September 1939, aged eighty-three. His exile thus forms the closing historical frame around a career that had begun in Vienna and developed into psychoanalysis, a therapeutic technique and a theory of unconscious life that continued to change in Freud’s work and in the schools established by later followers.