“Father, don’t you see I’m burning?”

Antisemitism had been a miasma covering Vienna for its entire history, and it permeated the German culture that many Viennese—both Christian and Jewish—emulated and aspired to join. Psychoanalysis was a response to the particular situation of these socially ostracized but economically well-established Jewish intellectuals. It offered new insights for living their lives in a subculture of intellectual excitement and social reform, within the larger culture of antisemitism. Jewish homes and land in the area were confiscated and converted into a parsonage and Catholic cemetery, both consecrated in 1671. Vienna was burning from the inside with the fever of its own hysterical contradictions. Vienna had long been a place of immigration and refuge for Jews going back to the early middle ages when Austria was a part of Bavaria under the Holy Roman Empire. Antisemitism had been a miasma covering Vienna for its entire history, and it permeated the German culture that many Viennese—both Christian and Jewish—emulated and aspired to join.