Part One: Bruno Bettelheim: The Worst Psycho-therapist

Robert tells Allison Raskin about Bruno Bettelheim, a concentration camp survivor who revolutionized child mental health care by trying to create a GOOD concentration camp for small children.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Alsome Media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Oh my gosh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards. I'm
Robert Evans, and I am again alone without my producer,
Sophie Lichterman.

Speaker 3 (00:12):
Today.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
She is recovering from a health thing of a jig
and we all wish you the best. She will be
back soon. But you know who's not back soon, because
they're here today, Alison Raskin. Allison, welcome to the show.

Speaker 4 (00:29):
Oh, thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
Yeah, thank you for being on. You and I are
going to have a long conversations about a very weird
dude today. But before we get into that, we should
talk a little bit about you. You are a writer, director, comedian.
You are the co author of the book I Hate
Everyone But You, which was a New York Times bestseller. Yeah,
is there anything else you want to kind of plug

(00:52):
up at the top here?

Speaker 5 (00:53):
Oh? Yes, that feels like an outdated bio a little bit.
I do a lot of a lot of different stuff
these days. I primarily prote myself as a writer still
and then a relationship coach, a mental health advocate. So
I've had two nonfiction books come out about sort of
the intersection of mental health and relationships and then I

(01:15):
have a rom com novel coming out in April called
Save the Date, which is loosely based off of a
multiverse version of my own broken engagement, so a fictionalized
version of what could have happened afterwards.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
Well, that is very appropriate that you work in mental health,
because the guy we're talking about today is one of
the worst things that ever happened to the mental health
field in the.

Speaker 3 (01:41):
Entire really bad at that.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
We are talking about a fella named Bruno Bettelheim. Have
you heard of Bruno Bettleheim.

Speaker 4 (01:55):
No, I don't.

Speaker 5 (01:55):
I actually do have a master's in psychology. But he
did not come up along that journey.

Speaker 3 (02:01):
Yeah, he was.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
He would have described himself as, and was usually described as,
an expert in child psychiatry and the treatment of autism. Now,
oh no, here's the thing. Number one, absolutely not in
any like legitimate way an expert in child psychiatry, and
also not at all an expert in the treatment of autism.
His primary thing was to declare kids to have autism

(02:27):
and then treat them in a way that we would
just describe as hitting them. Primarily, that's the way this
guy worked. There's a lot more to him than that.
Even he was a very very strange man. It's kind
of important that you know that the outset that when
we talk about again, the kids that he was working
with were described as having autism and schizophrenia. Today, most

(02:48):
of them we would just describe as kids with like
mild behavioral problems like like twitching a little bit in
class or something, or not being good at doing math.

Speaker 3 (02:56):
Right.

Speaker 2 (02:58):
These were not terms that meant the same thing that
they do today, because diagnostic criteria in the early nineteen
hundreds was just not what it is now.

Speaker 5 (03:07):
So it's just a history of misdiagnosing children and also
a lot of racism when it comes to misdiagnosing children.

Speaker 2 (03:16):
Oh, and a lot of racism in the Bruno Bettlelheim's story.
I'm sure there is, yeah, both as a victim and
as a perpetrator, because Bruno came He's an Austrian like
most of the really fascinating like early twentieth century mental
health professionals, and his family he came from this like
wealthy subset of the Austro Hungarian Jewish population. That's like

(03:38):
his family comes from money and comes from money within
like the Austro Hungarian Empire's Jewish population, which is like
a whole separate subset of like the imperial population. He
would later claim, because he makes a lot of statements
about his background, again almost none of which are true,
that his paternal grandfather had been an orphan who had

(04:01):
been raised and educated as a rabbi, and like he
got the attention of the Baron Rothschild, who made him
a tutor to his heirs, and he was so good
at teaching these kids that they gave him command of
the family bank, and he made the family fortune doing that.
Definitely not true, almost certainly is not what happened. That said,

(04:21):
the actual real story of his family name is.

Speaker 3 (04:23):
A lot cooler.

Speaker 2 (04:24):
And I don't know why he tells this bullshit story
about like him being a banker, because the name Bettelheim
came from sometime in the seventeen hundreds, the Slovakian nobleman
named Count Bethlin fell for the wife of a Jewish
citizen and tried to kidnap her on his horse, and
her husband charged in and beat the count in hand
to hand combat. And given like the racial politics at

(04:47):
the time, this was a ballsy move right for this
guy to come in and just like wail On, a
major member of the nobility, and so he got the
nickname Bethlen from the guy he beat up Judah, which
is like you know Jewish, right, And that was like
where the name Bettelheim came from. After a few decades later,
the Habsburg's decreed everyone had to have a last name,

(05:08):
and so that became Bettelheim for reasons I'm not that
don't entirely make sense to me, but it's a pretty
cool origin story.

Speaker 4 (05:15):
It's very cool.

Speaker 2 (05:17):
Yeah, beating the hell out of account, beat it like
a guy on horseback too, which.

Speaker 4 (05:22):
Is like, you have some sounds like a tall Jews
itself guy.

Speaker 5 (05:28):
Yeah, I did disclaim here that I am Jewish.

Speaker 2 (05:35):
So that's where probably where the name Bettelheim cut. Like
any sort of this is a mid seventeen hundred's family
last name origin story. Maybe none of this is true, right,
we'll never really know whatever the case. Bruno's father and
grandfather kind of make their fortune trading wood. That's where
the family money comes from, right, They like own forests

(05:55):
that they plant and chop down.

Speaker 6 (05:58):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (05:58):
And they're in just kind of like the wood product business,
you know, and they do very well as a result
of that, the Bruno's dad, Anton, starts a lumber business
in nineteen oh seven with another guy, and Anton and
Paula Bettleheim, Bruno's parents. They first have a daughter, Margaret,
in eighteen ninety nine, and then on August twenty eighth,

(06:18):
nineteen oh three, they welcome Bruno into the world. By
this point, Anton's lumber business was doing very well and
the family was probably maybe not in the top one
percent because like this is an empire and they're not
in the nobility, but like that super far from the
top one percent, right, They're very wealthy, as is customary
for the rich in this period of time. Bruno's mother

(06:39):
refused to nurse him. He suffled from a professional wet
nurse for the first three years of his life, and
later wrote that his mom was too much the Victorian
lady to do it herself. This is again super normal
at the time, although it also seems to have kind
of messed with Bruno because he's never he's never cool
with his mom, and he will later project a lot

(07:00):
of his issues with her onto mothers in general.

Speaker 5 (07:04):
Yes, that is also a common theme in early psychology early.

Speaker 3 (07:09):
Yeah, exactly, especially for Austrians.

Speaker 2 (07:12):
Yeah, maybe a whole deal going on there.

Speaker 1 (07:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (07:17):
Now again it's kind of he's going to later talk
a lot about his mother being cold and like not
a very kindly person, but in other writings from a
like while he's a young man, he'll describe her as
loving and attentive. And again, he's a guy who makes
up a lot of stories about the past. So I
don't know if he actually had his mom was actually
cold to him when he was a kid, or if

(07:37):
something happened later that made him kind of retroactively decide that.
But it's very different from how like other people who
knew them when he was a little kid described their relationship. Too,
We'll never know. Like most boys in the late Victorian era,
he had several brushes with death. He like, he has
this classic thing where he eats poison berries. No, and

(07:59):
this doctor just gives him a shitload of coffee to
fix it. I think the idea is that, like, we
just need to have him pee all of this out
right old time.

Speaker 5 (08:08):
So wait, so other people thought that his mother was loving,
hecounts was that okay? Got it?

Speaker 1 (08:13):
Got it? Yes?

Speaker 2 (08:13):
And he will describe at varying points very different kinds
of relationships with his mom, like as a young man,
he writes that quote, while he was sick, my mother
sat up my bedside, sponging my feverish body and changing
the cold compresses to give me relief. In moments like these,
I learned to understand and appreciate that a mother makes
all the difference in the world when one is in need,
in great pain, deeply worried, or even desperate. Now this

(08:38):
is noteworthy, the fact that he has these kind of
two different attitudes about his mom, because, as his biographer
Richard Pollock notes, no prominent psychotherapist of his time was
as antagonistic to mothers. And that is.

Speaker 6 (08:49):
Saying something, Wow, Freud, He's beating Freud in the issues
mom game.

Speaker 2 (09:01):
Yes, yeah, that's like dunking on Jordan's. So again, there's
not really a clear explanation forthcoming as to this. Bruno
does recall later being raised as an older boy by
his aunt as much as his mother, and often hiding
at her place to avoid his sister Margaret, who he
described as.

Speaker 3 (09:20):
A busy body.

Speaker 2 (09:21):
This is all pretty normal kids stuff, you know.

Speaker 3 (09:25):
At any rate.

Speaker 2 (09:25):
The overwhelming recollections of the people who knew Bruno and
his family was that his parents were doting and involved
and if anything, his mother may have smothered him a bit.
His father, Anton was a peculiar man. For the era.
Germanic fathers are known as being stern and strict, often
like well past what we would describe as abusive. What's
weird about Anton is that, like even today we would

(09:47):
call him kind of a permissive dad, like we would
say today, like this guy could have maybe could have
stood to be a little bit more like strict with
his kids, which is very rare for an Austrian father.
One anecdote Bruce later gave was that he got in
trouble for cursing in front of his mother and she
like went to it. She was like, Anton, your son
just you know, cursed in front of me and her father.

(10:08):
His father became upset, not that Bruno had cursed, but
that he now had to punish his son, and he
even asks Bruno, do I really have to punish you
to get you to stop cursing in front of your mother?
Which you know, the norm would have been probably to
smack him right like, just based on sort of the
standards of the time. Bruno's education is fairly strict, but
that's normal for his social class and the era. He

(10:30):
attends the finest school in Vienna, and he was an
excellent student, one of five out of fifty four in
his year to be noted as having been excellent. He
spent the war years World War One, that is, in school,
which is another mark of his good luck. You know,
he's born in this sweet spot where he doesn't have
to go die in on the Italian border, or in
Serbia or in Russia, all of which were like beloved

(10:53):
pastimes of Austrian teenage boys in these years.

Speaker 4 (10:57):
And he's just like, my mom's too nice.

Speaker 3 (10:59):
My mom, my mom's two is too nice to me.

Speaker 4 (11:04):
My dad let me get away with.

Speaker 2 (11:05):
Stuff, just daydreaming about charging a machine gun nest. No,
he's not a super militant kid, but he does get
very lucky right now. The war years are difficult even
for the rich. Bruno is better off than most of
the populace. He's never he and his family are never
in danger of starving to death, but they do go hungry.
Everybody does right with it, with the exception of like

(11:26):
the top of the royal family. Everybody in Austria is
going hungry at least a little bit during the war years.
It's just a terrible time, right this. The war is
bad for his family fortunes. Huge tracks of their Bettelheim
land get lit like burnt down own by artillery bombardment
right at the start of hostilities. But his family doesn't

(11:46):
lose everything, and Anton seems to have been an unusually
tenacious and brilliant businessman. By the time the war ended
and the Habsburg Empire with it, the Bettelheims were still
comfortably wealthy, right, which is takes a lot that's not
easy to maintain in this period of time. So it
says a lot about Anton.

Speaker 4 (12:05):
This guy seems great that that seems he seems.

Speaker 2 (12:07):
Like a pretty good dad for the era, about as
good as you get out for Bruno's schooling was mixed
as a again that he is not going to he's
going to an integrated school, which in itself in Austria
is a pretty new thing. That like you would have
Jewish and Christian boys at the same school. There were
some like you have religious education as part of your
normal schooling. Obviously, the small number of Jewish kids have

(12:30):
a rabbi. Most of the other boys are being talked
to by like members of the Catholic clergy because it's
a majority Catholic country. Bruno would later describe most of
his fellow classmates as anti Semitic bastards, which is almost
certainly accurate.

Speaker 3 (12:46):
Austria.

Speaker 2 (12:47):
And yeah, yeah, probably kinds of racism that you would
need like a NASA calculator to rate today. He recalled
often the case of a classmate who he had consented
ORed a friend and walked to school with daily, who
out of nowhere one morning, punched him in the face
in revenge for the crucifixion of Christ. So that kind

(13:09):
of racism. Yeah, your best friend just hits you one
day because of something that happened two thousand years ago.

Speaker 5 (13:17):
But it does like bring up this thing that I
think is happening now, where like these kids will just
be friends with kids, but then they go home and
their parents tell them things and then suddenly they're acting
out and they're deciding this is someone needs to be
punched in the face.

Speaker 2 (13:30):
I guess I need to be a huge asshole now,
Okay he.

Speaker 4 (13:34):
Learned that somewhere that day.

Speaker 2 (13:36):
Before, right, Yeah, that kid didn't come up with the
idea on his own. It was a parent or like
probably a member of the Catholic clergy who was talking
shit one day. Now, this was the tip of the
iceberg in terms of the racism that Bruno endured as
a kid. He would later say, quote, there were the
boys who extorted money, who beat us if we handed
it over because we were dirty cowards, and who beat

(13:56):
us if we didn't because we were miser le Jews.
So really can't win, you know. One of the key
moments of Bruno's education came when he and several other
boys attacked one of their school teachers, again very different era,
who he described later as a simpering fool who spoke
with the voice of a eunuch.

Speaker 6 (14:15):
Right.

Speaker 2 (14:15):
In other words, he and a bunch of his other
students beat the hell out of a school teacher because
he was a feminate, you know. In the Creation of
Doctor b a biography by Richard Pollock, Pollock rights, so
weak and inadequate was the schoolmaster that one day Bruno
egged on several of his classmates and together they bodily
removed the offending instructor from the room. Bettelheim recalled that

(14:36):
he immediately began to tremble as he contemplated the consequences
of this rash act, and indeed, the next day the
schools authoritarian director castigated the class and especially Bruno, as
the leader in this unprecedented and nefarious deed. But the
director did not as the troublemaker feared, expel him. On
the contrary, at the end of the scolding, his demeanor
suddenly softened, and in a quiet voice, he said, of course,

(14:58):
I know that if doctor X had behaved as I
expect all masters of this institution to behave, nothing like
this could have happened. So again, he like beats up
a teacher, he like leads a mob to force a
teacher violently out of the classroom. And the director's like,
we yeah, but he shouldn't have been such a girl
about it.

Speaker 3 (15:14):
He was asking for it. And then we.

Speaker 5 (15:19):
Wonder, like, oh, how did this guy then go on
to perpetuate harm?

Speaker 7 (15:22):
Pardiculuses, Yeah, why was this guy a problem later in life?

Speaker 3 (15:27):
Well, and it's also.

Speaker 2 (15:28):
White in Austria get involved in so much fucked up shit,
you know. It really like the fact that this is
the country that is going to like produce Hitler and
that just like gets does the things it does in
World War One, it's like, oh yeah, everybody was like
like this. This is a culture that's kind of out
of its mind in a lot of ways.

Speaker 4 (15:46):
You know, I can't living in one of those.

Speaker 3 (15:49):
No, no, no, no, no. Thank god.

Speaker 2 (15:50):
We figured it fixed all of our mental health issues. Finally,
human beings are healthy. I haven't read the news in
about eight years, but I think it's going well. So
more than two thirds of a century later, Bruno would
recall this incident as key in his development as an educator,
because it was the first time a figure of authority

(16:10):
at his school had witnessed bad behavior and, in his eyes,
sought to understand its root cause rather than just punishing
it out right. So what he takes from this is
my headmaster punished me, because he does get punished, but
he sought to understand why I had acted out. And
this is like a revelation to him that you wouldn't
just hit a kid for not doing what you wanted

(16:31):
a kid to do. You would try to understand what
was the child thinking when it behaved When they behaved badly, right,
and then you hit him, and then you hit him
and then you hit me. Now, the fact that Bruno
just chose to describe the teacher he disliked as sounding
like a eunuch holds a little more meaning than you
might guess. As an adult, Bruno reserved special disgust for
the authority figures of his childhood who acted in ways

(16:53):
he considered effeminate, and his kind and retiring father was
one of these, and an excellent paper on Bettelheim for
Disability Studies Quarterly Griffin Epstein seems to tie this behavior
to Bruno's insecurity over anti Semitism. There was a strong
heteropatriarchal thrust to the stigmatization of Jews. According to Boyarin,
Jews were understood to defy Western European gender and sexual norms.

(17:15):
Jewish men were seen as effeminate sissies unfit for labor,
while Jewish women, when they appeared discursively at all, were
read as phallic monsters. Jews were perceived broadly as deviant, perverse,
and inbred sexual aberrations. So Bruno is really really sensitive
about the idea of men not behaving in a masculine
way because of the racism that he encounters right, and

(17:38):
this is further complicated by the fact that his dad
catches syphilis. In nineteen oh seven. So this idea and
another anti Semites will often link syphilis to Judaism in
this period, like it is a common aspect of racial politics.
Hitler does it a lot. And so the fact that
Bruno's dad, as kind as he is, catches this very

(18:02):
shameful disease is a big part of why Bruno is
going to be the way he is as an adult.
And it's like this kind of shame that is at
the core of his personality as a kid. Now, the
likely reason Anton catches syphilis is that his wife goes
away one weekend and he sleeps with a sex worker. Right,

(18:23):
That's generally how this thing happened. This was apparently the
only time he did it, although obviously we can't know that,
but the indiscretion has a shattering impact on the family.
His wife doesn't sleep with him for the last twenty
years of their marriage, and she doesn't because she would
get sick and die if she did, right, Like, this
is an uncurable fatal illness in addition to being a

(18:44):
stigmatized illness.

Speaker 4 (18:45):
So word Jilif for twenty years with syphilis.

Speaker 2 (18:48):
You do you off. And it takes about twenty fifteen
to twenty years to hit like the tertiary stages, Like
that's not it can it can go differently. But like,
one of the frightening things about syphilis is that you
after the quote unquote indiscretion as it would be, you
know you, so you have a break in your and
you and you you know, have an unrecommended liaison, you

(19:10):
don't know for years if you got sick from it, right,
And that's part of why this is such a massive
thing in Austrian culture and all in all European culture
in this period, is that like the entire all the
men in the in the society are like constantly scared
of getting syphilis, right, and so are their wives, because
if your husband is sleeping around and he catches it,
you'll get it.

Speaker 5 (19:30):
You know.

Speaker 4 (19:31):
One of the movies that shaped me so much as
a kid.

Speaker 5 (19:34):
Was this this movie called She's Too Young on Lifetime.
Oh god, that was about alis outbreak at a high school.

Speaker 3 (19:43):
Oh my god, it was.

Speaker 4 (19:45):
Look, it was one of the funniest things I've ever seen.

Speaker 5 (19:47):
Not that syphilis is funny, but Lifetime's execution of the
hit film She's Too Young.

Speaker 2 (19:52):
She's Too Young, a Lifetime movie about syphilis at high
school does sound pretty rad, but also.

Speaker 5 (19:59):
Like it's funny because at that point you just get
a shot like it's not the same because it was
for them, you know, yeah.

Speaker 2 (20:08):
No, and it's going to be a big deal until
nineteen forty three, right, Like so it is like, well,
like Bruno is a mature adult in like his thirties
by the time it stops being something that people are
terrified of.

Speaker 3 (20:21):
But you know what.

Speaker 2 (20:21):
Isn't syphilis is the sponsor of this podcast, not sponsored
by syphilis.

Speaker 4 (20:28):
That was a really good transition.

Speaker 2 (20:29):
Thank you, Thank you. A lot of people praise the
transitions on this show, not our sponsors, notably, and we're back.
I wonder like you could probably rebrand, given like rfk's
position in our society, you could probably rebrand syphilis as

(20:49):
a health tonic, right.

Speaker 5 (20:53):
And sort of a way to separate the week from
the week from the chaff, Like who can who can
maintain syphilis for as long as possible?

Speaker 2 (21:01):
That's right, You've got all these like Joe Rogan, guys
who really like taking ayahuasca. Syphilis causes hallucinations. I feel
like there's like a possibility here to make this work.

Speaker 5 (21:10):
And it's sad that that's probably more true than we think.

Speaker 3 (21:14):
In yeah, we're like.

Speaker 2 (21:16):
Six months out from this. So the fact that Bruno's
dad catches syphilis is going to deepen the rift that
he has with him, and Bruno will later claim that
he had quote no suitable masculine figures in his life
as a child. In their paper, Griffin Epstein suggests that
Bruno saw his father's sickness and jewishness as a threat
to his desire to assimilate to Austrian culture. Bruno is,

(21:39):
and this is not an uncommon thing at the time,
an assimilationist right like. He does not he's not particularly religious.
He does not feel a strong separate identity as a
Jew in Austria. He wants to be seen as Austrian,
you know, which.

Speaker 4 (21:55):
Is understandable given the environment.

Speaker 2 (21:58):
Of course, it's the most normal thing in the world.
Give In his childhood, as a teen, Bruno found himself
in the Young Wander Vocal movement, which is a it's
basically a hiking movement. This whole idea that you know,
what's healthy is moving your body out in nature, very
new and exciting, and so this is like a young
it's a quasi socialist movement. And one of the things

(22:20):
that's kind of noteworthy is they do a lot of
co ed hiking, right, so men and women are like
moving exercising outdoors together, you know, so there's both this
degree of like this is kind of a cutting edge
social This is like going to ravees. You know, was
when I was a kid, when you and I were
like like twenty something.

Speaker 4 (22:39):
This is wild stuff.

Speaker 3 (22:40):
Yeah, wild stuff.

Speaker 2 (22:41):
We're gonna go a hike, you know, we might all
camp together.

Speaker 4 (22:46):
Hey overnight. That is pretty risque.

Speaker 2 (22:48):
That is risque. And it is through this, at age thirteen,
that he first pursues a woman. But he is this
doesn't go well for him. He gets upstaged, in his
biographer's words, by an older boy, Auto Finishal, who was
a budding psychoanalyst and a few years older than him
and was already attending Freud's lectures at the University of Vienna.

(23:09):
And obviously this woman that that Bruno is interested in,
well not woman, she's thirty, but they're all kids. This
kid that he is interested in is like attracted to
the fact that this older boy is going to college
and listening to the great Freud's lectures. And Bruno initially
develops a hatred of psychoanalysis because he's so jealous of

(23:29):
this this older boy, which Pollock writes was quote so
great he could not sleep. He's just so angry about psychoanalysis.

Speaker 3 (23:37):
Furious about the idea of Freud.

Speaker 5 (23:42):
Look, I thought the you just fan of pure psychoanalysis.

Speaker 4 (23:46):
But at least it doesn't keep me up at night.

Speaker 7 (23:48):
It just wow, I'm so pissed people are getting therapy.

Speaker 2 (23:53):
Just reading Freud's book on cocaine and fuming. So eventually
he does settle upon method for winning the girl's heart.
He would study Freud's work obsessively in order to stage
this younger boy. This sparked what would become a lifetime obsession.
He changes his mind on psychle analysis. He does not
win this girl's heart, and in fact, she grows exhausted

(24:16):
because he in order to impress her, he spends like
a whole weekend talking to her about Freud, and she's like,
I'm not interested in Freud anymore.

Speaker 3 (24:24):
I'm done with this.

Speaker 8 (24:25):
He's fucked Freud up for me.

Speaker 2 (24:32):
Anton Bettelheim dies in April of nineteen twenty six from
a variety of illnesses and ailments that are all tied
to his syphilis, right, the final stages of syphilis literally
like it's boring holes through your brain like a shipworm
in wood, and it causes like it's pretty unpleasant like
to see. And Bruno would have been confronted directly with

(24:52):
the final stages of his father's illness. After his dad dies,
he's forced to take up his father's place running the
family lumber business in order to maintain his family's position
in society. He is twenty three years old, so you know,
he does get like a real childhood. He gets some time,
but at age twenty three, he is the head of
the family. He doesn't really want to do this job again.

(25:14):
He's very interested in psychoanalysis. He is a student at
the University of Vienna, focusing on art history at this point,
but he takes some business courses and he understands that,
like I need to keep my mom and my sister
in the kind of finery that they have become, right,
Like my family is used to being rich. I have

(25:35):
to maintain this style, right, Yes, yes, that's my job.

Speaker 3 (25:38):
You know.

Speaker 2 (25:39):
And he does this. He's a very like diligent head
of the family. He starts courting a young woman named
Regina Bruno is in love with Regina, and Regina kind
of tolerates him, right, She's not super into Bruno. She's
only available. There's this sexy young artist that she is

(25:59):
in love with, and he's like, I'm a sexy young artist.
I'm not getting married. It's the twenties. I am going
to probably like die of consumption after getting really into Heroin.

Speaker 4 (26:11):
You know, some love stories never die.

Speaker 2 (26:13):
Some love stories never die. So Regina settles for Bruno
because he's rich, right, She's like, well, he's not this
sexy young artist, but he does have a shitload of money,
and I guess that's as good as you can do sometimes.
And in the late twenties, it kind of is. In
near the end of the decade, she gets pregnant. She

(26:35):
gets an abortion to avoid marrying Bruno, which should give
you an idea of kind of where her head is
at at the time, considering how much less.

Speaker 4 (26:42):
Common that is, you know, right, and dangerous, yes.

Speaker 2 (26:45):
And much more dangerous.

Speaker 4 (26:48):
Wow, that's a real that's a real sick burn.

Speaker 2 (26:51):
That is kind of a burn to Bruno, right, Like
obviously I think like at the time he's going to
read it that way, right, because he wants a family
with this, with this lady. This feeds into a lifetime insecurity.
Bruno would express over his looks. He made frequent comments
about the fact that his mother had called him ugly
on the day he was born, and that he never
got better looking, which seems unfair to me. Because I

(27:14):
found a picture of him as like a young man
from like around the period we're talking about, and I'm
gonna show it to you. You wouldn't say, like, he's
not like a movie star or anything, but he looks
like fine, he's like a pretty I would say, like, well, judge,
this does dead man's looks as a child. But he's
like a pretty normal looking guy.

Speaker 4 (27:33):
Oh yeah, Yeah, that's a standard guy.

Speaker 2 (27:36):
That's a standard issue Austrian man.

Speaker 3 (27:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (27:39):
And you add a bunch of money to his.

Speaker 8 (27:41):
Portfolio, he's looking a lot better. He's looking good, no syphilis.
You know, he's doing about as good as you could
be doing in that period of time.

Speaker 5 (27:51):
Yeah, this is a people's insecurities can really end up
causing a lot of harm.

Speaker 3 (27:57):
Yeah. Yeah, and he is.

Speaker 2 (27:58):
He's super insecure about like hair, and he does kind
of he goes bald after this about his nose, and
his ears, and he will obsess over this.

Speaker 1 (28:06):
You know.

Speaker 2 (28:06):
I'm bringing it up not to shit on him, but
because this is like an important part of his self image,
and his self in image is further harmed by the
fact that Regina would vomit most of the time when
he visited her, which is not super good for your ego. No,
that's really just just and she would often get Yeah,
she would often puwe at his presence. I think she's

(28:28):
got like other stuff going on, Okay, she's probably. I
think it's some of it is that she feels stressed
out because she has to make a choice, right, Like,
she knows that I've got to make a decision about
whether or not to like pick this guy, and that's
kind of fucking with her. I don't think she's like
disgusted in him. I think it's literally just anxiety. Yeah,

(28:49):
but it fucks with his head, like obviously that's devastating. Eventually,
Gina finds herself out of other options and she marries Bruno.
Now she will always describe him as a wonderful friend.
She genuinely likes him. She's just not into him, you know.

Speaker 3 (29:06):
Anyway.

Speaker 2 (29:06):
They get married in nineteen thirty and during their years
because they are courting for what you would call an
abnormally long time, although not within their social Their social
circle are like kind of bohemians and artists and intellectuals,
so this is not super weird for the people they
socialize with. So Gina starts like kind of near the
right before they get married, taking therapy from a guy

(29:29):
called Richard Sturba and his wife, Edith Sturba, who are
a husband and wife psychoanalyst couple that are members of
Freud's inner circle. These are famous psychoanalysts right within the
psychoanalyst community. These are like, you know, they're big names.
Urged on by Edith, Gina convinces her husband to essentially
adopt a troubled young girl whose mom had abandoned her.

(29:52):
This girl, Patricia might actually have been someone we would
describe as having autism today, that's how she gets described
back then. But her like, she has a lot of trouble,
like you know, being social and sort of connecting and
you know, making eye contact and whatnot with people. Her
mom is this like wealthy writer basically who comes from

(30:13):
like a wealthy family and is like, I'm not going
to spend my time taking care of this troubled girl.
I'm going to go be a wealthy, famous person. Hey,
you want a kid, and you're interested in child development
and psychoanalysis, figure out my kid, right, That's essentially what happens.

Speaker 5 (30:32):
I think a lot of people don't want a kid
that deviates from what they expect a kid to be. Yes,
And then if that kid is different in any way,
it's like, well, this isn't what I signed up for, right,
So right, someone else take care of this child.

Speaker 2 (30:47):
And I will say this kid's mom comes through in
the clutch later in this story, but at this point,
she's like, yeah, would you raise my kid for me?
I gotta like do stuff, And Regina says like, yeah,
she really wants to do this. By all accounts, she's
very loving and does like really helps this kid out.
Is a good and Bruno is like Patricia will later

(31:10):
remember Bruno fondly. He does not really take any part
in raising her, which is interesting because he's later going
to be a child development expert quote unquote.

Speaker 4 (31:18):
He is just.

Speaker 2 (31:19):
Working and making money. But she recalls him as like
a nice man and their household as a pleasant place.

Speaker 4 (31:25):
How old was she when she went to live with that.

Speaker 2 (31:27):
I think she's like seven or eight something like that.
She's a little girl. Now he is working a lot,
six days a week, providing for the family, and at
this time, as kind of the twenties come to an
end in the early thirties start the Nazi movement is
winding its way closer to power in Germany. Now this
is not something that is initially of major concern to
Bruno or his wife. They are not politically involved. Instead,

(31:51):
he becomes obsessed with finishing his college degree so he
could start training at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. Well, he
focused on what had become a dream. Austria slipped towards
a nightmare. In nineteen thirty three, the same year Hitler
came to power in Germany, a Christian socialist politician named
Engelbert Dolphus suspended parliament in Austria and began ruling by

(32:12):
decree as a reaction to economic calamity and political dysfunction
in Austria's First Republic. Now Dolphus again, he's a Christian socialist.
This is not a Nazi party, but he is an autocrat. Right,
he's ruling by decree. He's cracking down on anyone who
is like this, and this provides fuel for the Nazis
because it's now been normalized, this autocratic rule right Bettelheim

(32:35):
recalled of the chaos at the time they the Nazis
released tear gas and department stores to frighten off shoppers,
smeared house walls with pro Hitler graffiti, set off firecrackers
and patards in many places to cause panic, and eventually
started outright bombings. So the Nazis are an illegal party
at this point. They are literally a terrorist party in Austria.
But Dolphus is not really a whole lot better. He

(32:57):
is more concerned with using the military to crack down
on left wing militias, which culminates on him using artillery
to shell hundreds of apartment buildings in the capitol. He
succeeds in destroying the Social Democratic Party and it's militia,
which had been like the most power, the only militant
force in the country that could compete with the Nazis.
He destroys them so completely that in June of nineteen

(33:19):
thirty four, when one hundred and fifty four Nazis attack
government headquarters, there is no organized left ring resistance against them,
and Dolphus is murdered by the Nazis.

Speaker 5 (33:30):
Now this has remind me of a headline I just
read about how the FBI is not going to be
focusing on white supremacists but instead the BLM movement Anti course.

Speaker 3 (33:42):
Of course, yeah, it's all good.

Speaker 2 (33:46):
You learned nothing, no, no, no one's ever I mean,
that's the lesson of history, is that no one's ever
learned a lesson from.

Speaker 4 (33:51):
History, truly.

Speaker 2 (33:53):
So Bruno does not react with great concern at first,
even though this is a concerning thing, right, he is
very much he's very good at focusing on just what
interests him.

Speaker 3 (34:04):
He does.

Speaker 2 (34:05):
He could have afforded to leave, right, he's got money.
He could have bounced, but doing so would have meant
he could have gotten his family out, but they wouldn't
have stayed super rich, right, you know, it would have
cost him too much, and so he opted to continue
running his business and working on his degree, which he
achieved in nineteen thirty eight. He gets a PhD in aesthetics,

(34:28):
which is a you know, it's an accomplishment, but that's
not a degree in psychoanalytics.

Speaker 4 (34:33):
Right, what is aesthetics?

Speaker 2 (34:35):
It's like art history, and you know that kind of stuff.
It's like art related shit. He would later lie and
claim his degree had been approved personally by a council
of Freud's closest confidants, including his daughter Anna, and then
add that Sigmund Freud had wandered into the room and said, oh,
you know what, a dude with an aesthetics degree is

(34:56):
just what psychoanalytics needs to develop as a science. He
is such a bad liar. And then Freud walked into
the room and was like, you're exactly what my field needs.

Speaker 4 (35:09):
Smoking a cigar.

Speaker 3 (35:10):
He was smoking a cigar. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (35:14):
Within days of Bettleheim getting his PhD, the aunchlass begins
and Germany annexes Austria. We're kind of YadA YadA ing
a lot of that history, because that's a story for
another day. But this is a major point at which
the life story that Bruno will tell later diverges from reality,
because the claim that he will give years later once
he gets to the US is that as soon as

(35:36):
the Nazis annex Austria, he joins the Jewish underground. Right,
he becomes an officer in the underground. He stands armed
guard at facilities. He's afraid the Nazis are going to destroy.
He helps to hide some of the first Jews targeted
by the Nazis and spirit them away to safety. He
describes himself as a significant figure in the underground army
and says that after demobilizing his men, he fled to Czechoslovakia,

(35:59):
where he is arrested and sent to doc Ou. Now
he definitely is sent to doc Ou, but there's no
evidence that he is a part of the resistance. Gina,
his wife, told Richard Pollack this story was nonsense. That like, no,
we were not like he was not doing that. That's
just not what was going on at the time. And
what he was doing was not like like cowardly. He

(36:19):
was trying to take care of his family, you know.
He urges his wife and daughter to flee ahead of him,
And at this point this is kind of like a
selfless gesture. His wife is cheating on him with a
married man, and he urges her to leave with that
guy and his wife, thinking that they'll have better odds
of escaping together at any rate. Gina and Patsy only

(36:41):
escape because Gina's biological mother, a wealthy New York woman
or not sorry, Patricia's biological mother, right, Like the woman
who had kind of abandoned her kid to this couple
is friends with the US Secretary of State Cordell Hull,
and pull strings for them. And to her credit, this woman,
I think Angie is her name, really like it puts

(37:02):
in a lot of work to rescue them. She's like,
these people save my kid. I have to get them
out of Austria. So she redeems herself and my eyes
there like she really does, like put in a lot
of effort here more complicated people are complicated. Not a
great mom, but a good friend. In nineteen forty five,
Bruno would later swear an affidavit for the Nurember of

(37:25):
War crimes trial that in which he discussed the terms
of his arrest and stated that he had not participated
in resistance activity. This is part of why we know
that this is a story he makes up later. Now
the reality is that he witnessed pretty titanic racial violence
in the wake of Nazi annexation. Jews were beaten and
murdered in the streets. One of a common thing was
that they would be forced to clean gutters on their

(37:46):
hands and knees, often with like toothbrushes and then would
be beaten by gangs of Nazi thugs. It was a hideous,
hideous time. And Bruno does not leave as soon as
he could because he's trying to take care of his
mom and his sister, and he's also managing There's this
thing that happens once the Nazis take over, Jewish businesses

(38:08):
are demanded to be handed over to arians. This is
a process called arianization. It is not a fair process.
You get pennies on the dollar, you know, based on
what your businesses had been worth. And Bruno is attempting
to handle this manner in the most financially advantageous way
so that he can get his family out, he can

(38:28):
buy their way out of Austria. He does, however, get
arrested and sent to Docou, which is a very normal
thing for Jewish men in Austria, Like during this period
of time, a lot of them get sent to the camps.
Docou is the first of like the formal camps. Right
right after Hitler takes power in thirty three, there's what

(38:49):
are called like wild concentration camps, which are like we
have occupied some government buildings and we're torturing guys there.
Basically right Docau is kind of like the first of
we have actually like built this camp, and while it
is an awful place, I need to like emphasize it's
not a death camp, right. Those are not operational yet.
Over the course of the Third Reich, about thirty thousand

(39:11):
of the two hundred and six thousand or so inmates
at Dacau will perish there, right, which is like terrible.
That's a nightmarish place. But it's not Auschwitz, right, those
are not operational yet. Is in a death sentence, No,
you probably live, right, And in fact, prisoners are generally
fed enough to survive and are rarely beaten to death.
It is closer to a prison camp than what is

(39:34):
going to come later. That said, the nicest stay at
a concentration camp is still among the worst things a
person can experience. Bruno and everyone who is sent over
with him spends days locked in a train with the
heat on full blast and the stifling summer. Just to
fuck with them, They're denied water during the journey. He
gets stabbed with a bayonet during the drive. Jewish prisoners

(39:56):
are regularly forced to stand at attention once they arrive
in the blaze and heat for hours at a time,
Bruno sees people executed for attempting to escape. When inmates
would fail to make their beds properly, they would be
strung from a tree by their wrists by SS guards
and left there for hours. Like many Austrian Jews. The
official reason for Bruno's incarceration was schutz hoftling yudah or

(40:18):
incarcerated for his own protection. Right, he's locked up to
keep him safe, right while he was from US.

Speaker 5 (40:28):
From just a general propaganda we've been viewing against that
you should kill all Jews.

Speaker 2 (40:34):
Yeah, yeah, he is. Now this is again he's allowed
communication with his family. He's able to send letters back
and forth. They're able to send him money, he's able
to buy food from the commissary. And while this is
going on, he's constantly talking with Gina, who is working
through her friend through Cordell Hole to try and secure
him a visa. So this is the whole time this

(40:55):
is going on, he is in communication with his family
who were talking with the US State Department trying to
get him a visa to get him out. After three
months at Dacau, he is transferred to Bukenvald, which is
a much worse place. Docou had had some amenities, sufficient
food and like it has a weirdly good library. None
of that is present at Bukenvald, and the guards are

(41:16):
on the whole a lot more violent now. Bruno survives
in part because he gets an indoor job mending socks,
which during the winter stops him from freezing to death
as much as everyone else. He gets frostbite that he
has to get cut off right, so he is still
freezing a lot of the time, but he doesn't freeze
entirely because he has this very rare indoor job, and

(41:38):
we don't really know why. Other inmates at the camp
who were friends of his will say that he was
somehow protected and that his indoor job was a very
very rare setup. We again, really have no idea why
this is the case. He would later allude to having
done things he regretted in order to survive. That is
a very normal story. A lot of people did. Other

(42:00):
inmates who knew him theorized that one of the capos
or prisoners that were authorized to handle managerial tasks by
the SS, had a soft spot for him. Another of
Bruno's friends said that there was a quote very very
nice SS officer who protected Bruno and you hear about
that stuff. That doesn't mean these are good people, but
it means that if you were, if you're interned at
one of these camps, you're going to note some of

(42:20):
these guys I can like work with, and some of
them are just satists, you know. So maybe Bruno just
kind of has one of these guys has a soft
spot for him. There's different stories. We don't really know
what the case was. Bruno credited foremost his luck, but
would later give some other stories. What's odd is that

(42:42):
Bruno is going to tell some stories that definitely aren't true.
Later he's going to claim that he was targeted over
the fact that he wore glasses and was beaten as
a result of it. Bruno's fellow inmates who were interviewed,
and again these are guys who were his friends, said
that no, no, no, the guards were like less agro
to the guys with glass. Again, I don't know who's

(43:02):
telling the truth here, but there's two different stories, right,
And this is not the only time Bruno is going
to sort of stretch truths about his time at the camps,
which is probably and we should probably get to why
that matters.

Speaker 1 (43:13):
Now.

Speaker 2 (43:14):
So Bruno spends eight months months at Boutglenwald. So he's
in camps for a little less than a year, about
eleven months, it's like ten and a half months something
like that, and he is released due to the relentless
pleading of his wife and their wealthy benefactor. He gets
a visa. There's also kind of a general amnesty around
this time for Jews who are willing to leave the

(43:35):
Reich immediately, and so he gets out during this period
of time. He makes his way to the United States
in short order. He is really eager to retake up
his marriage, but the marriage breaks up as soon as
he gets to the States, right like, they spend a
night together and it becomes clear this is not going
to work out obviously. The whole like spending a year

(43:56):
in a concentration camp and then your marriage breaking up
pretty stressful, like probably one of the worst things I
can imagine going.

Speaker 8 (44:05):
Through some long term damage that's gonna fuck you up
a bit.

Speaker 2 (44:10):
But he gets an academic job with Rockford College in Illinois,
and in nineteen forty three he publishes the earliest influential
detailed account of life in a concentration camp. This is
like the first influential publication about life in a camp right,
and it is a huge yes. It is titled Individual
and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations, and it is a

(44:32):
work of titanic influence.

Speaker 3 (44:34):
Dwight D.

Speaker 2 (44:34):
Eisenhower is so impacted by it that it's made required
reading for all US military government officials in Europe after
the war. This is a big accomplishment, and that's a
problem because he makes some conclusions about what happens to
people in concentration camps that are problematic to say the least.

(44:57):
And we're gonna we're gonna get to that, but I
think it's probably time we transmit to ads one last time,
so we're back. Bruno has become probably the first academic
to establish himself as an expert on the concentration camp
system from the inside. And this is an issue because

(45:19):
number one, Bruno doesn't know much about the overall system
and he's going to fib about some of what he sees.
And I want to quote from that article by Griffin
Epstein again he attributed the success of camp tactics and
traumatizing Jews not to Nazi torture, but to inherent Jewish weakness.
Bettelheim claimed that Jewish prisoners were more likely than others

(45:39):
to regress under repression to types of behavior characteristic of infas,
infancy or early youth because of failings of the Jewish character.
He claimed that concentration camps disintegrated the personality of the prisoner.
In the final stage of disintegration, Jews would actually become Nazis,
changing their personalities so as to accept the various values
of the SS.

Speaker 5 (46:00):
Problem problemat Anti Semitism do a number on you.

Speaker 3 (46:07):
Oh, Bruno, you got fucked up, buddy.

Speaker 9 (46:09):
No, no, now, he would later claim, And this is
what's really problematic to me, is that he was the
unique inmate who is able to objectively analyze what was
happening in the camp.

Speaker 2 (46:21):
No one else could do it. They didn't have the
strength of mind, right, Only I had.

Speaker 7 (46:25):
The psychoanalytical Frankel didn't know what he was fucking.

Speaker 4 (46:31):
He was other people's lives. But you know, he was
really a wist.

Speaker 2 (46:37):
He is interned with in his friends at Buchenwald and
at Dacau are psychoanalysts, prominent ones like he's good. He's
there with them, right, and they survive, you know. Pollot
continues quote. He wrote that he asked hundreds of German
Jewish prisoners why they had not left Germany rather than
submit to the degradation inflicted upon them by the Nazis,

(47:00):
and he asked more than one hundred older political prisoners
if they would reveal the horrors of camp life if
they were freed and managed to reach safe territory, and
that in collecting data for his psychological observations, he came
into personal contact with at least fifteen hundred prisoners in
the two camps. He was able to interact with so
many inmates, he said, because he worked in at least
twenty different labor details and slept in five different barracks.

(47:20):
Given his sockmanning assignment. The first claim seems unlikely. The
second is untrue. Prisoners were required to write their block
numbers on their correspondence, and Bettlheim marked all his letters
from Dacou Block twenty two and from Bukenwald Block seventeen.
So again he makes this claim about I was at
all of these different locations, and so I talked to
and that's why that's why there's academic rigor, because I

(47:42):
talked to a representative sample and we just know that
he didn't, right, because we know where he marks his
letters from.

Speaker 4 (47:49):
When do people start to get skeptical about what he
had said it?

Speaker 2 (47:53):
Really there is a lot of the Jewish community is
immediately skeptical, Like people get pissed at this because he's
blaming them, right, But it's like kind of modern Holocaust
scholarship really starts to come after And we'll talk about
this some in part two in I think the seventies
is when that becomes much more common. But this is

(48:14):
this essay and Bruno, because Bruno writes other things about
the Holocaust, he is the primary source for the movie
Sophie's Choice. Really yes, yes, And one of the things
that's really problematic about that is Sophie's Choice is about
a death camp, and Bruno doesn't know anything about the
death camps, and he's very much generalizing his experience in

(48:34):
this period of time about it to a later period
of time in a way that transmits a lot of
inaccuracies down you know, as a result, because I've.

Speaker 5 (48:43):
Never seen Sophie's Choice, is it?

Speaker 4 (48:46):
Is it worth it?

Speaker 7 (48:48):
Don't?

Speaker 2 (48:48):
I don't know how to answer that question. It's not
my my I think the Holocaust movie that I find
like most intellectually interesting is this old Soviet era one
called The Shop on Main Street that is a out
the air like a village that gets taken by the
Nazis and the arianization process. But I don't know, like

(49:10):
that's such a Yeah, I.

Speaker 5 (49:12):
I feel like I prefer to get my examination of
like fascism through sci fi.

Speaker 3 (49:18):
Yeah, there you go.

Speaker 4 (49:19):
It's just too it's.

Speaker 5 (49:21):
Too upsetting to watch a thing that is actually about
the Holocaust. Yeah, Whereas like the lessons and the morals
and like the psychological dilemmas and stuff, I'd rather like
see through the frame of like Aliens the Cardassians.

Speaker 7 (49:34):
Yes, yeah, it's much easier to to just the Nazis
through Cardassia.

Speaker 2 (49:38):
Yeah. So very little complaint is made initially about the
time that all of these sources go unnamed. He'll just say, oh,
believe me because all these guys said this, right, I'm
not going to tell you who they were, even though again,
there's a lot of other people who survive and his
analysis of how camp inmates react to their situations. One

(49:59):
of the things people point out is that, rather than
comporting with other accounts from inside the camps. His analysis
of how people behave and why comports with Freudian psychiatry. Right,
and that's worth noting. In a critical article about Bettleheim
for Psychohistory Review, Paul Rosen writes, it is still memorable
and shocking how Bettelheim, in his nineteen forty three article

(50:21):
thought that a prisoner had reached the final stage of
adjustment to the camp situation when he had changed his
personality so as to accept as his own the values
of the Gestapo. In nineteen thirty six and a Freud
in a book written while her father was alive and
in the spirit of the work of his disciples, Sandor
Farinsky described the defense of identifying with the aggressor, and
Bettelheim was giving concrete illustrations of this unconscious, self defeating process.

(50:45):
So the allegation is he is massaging his experiences so
that they fit this psychoanalytic framework, right, that he is
already accepted as valid, and that he wants to be
respected in right, look.

Speaker 5 (51:00):
For evidence to support the ideas they already believe.

Speaker 2 (51:03):
Yes, yes, And one of the real issues here is
that you know, it's not It's not the case that
no one in the camps reacted this way, right, there
are there were prisoners who attempted to ingratiate themselves with
the SS who you know, who did stuff like what
Bruno describes. That is a thing that happens. You can
find cases like that in all of the camps. But
he one of the things so claim is that like

(51:24):
there isn't prisoner resistance, and there's a ton of prisoner resistance.
Prisoners are constantly acting to sabotage the camps, to sabotage
the SS guards. That is a thing that happens at
every camp. It's a thing that happens at Bukenvald while
he's there, Right, he knows that there's prisoner resistance, and
he he erases that from his story because it doesn't

(51:47):
comport with psychoanalytically what he thinks he should be reporting
on there.

Speaker 4 (51:52):
Right, he's a very unethical, unreliable guy.

Speaker 3 (51:57):
Yes and yes, yes in ways.

Speaker 5 (52:00):
There's like not enough other voices to be able for
people to be able to recognize that as quickly as
you would hoped they would be able to.

Speaker 3 (52:09):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (52:09):
And he's also going to he does a lot of
victim blaming. He will repeatedly criticize Jews for taking acts
that provoke anti Semites, and in nineteen forty seven work,
he describes anti Semitism as being caused in part by
the failure of Jewish people to see anti Semites as
individuals and to understand them. One scholar, Peter Bloss, Doctor

(52:32):
Peter Bloss, has stated many Jews were offended because he
felt that to some degree the Jews provoked the actions
of the Nazis. So he is criticized again at the time,
but a lot of folks like Eisenhower, who certainly aren't
plugged into the community of Jewish survivors, are like, this
sounds right to me.

Speaker 4 (52:48):
You know, yeah, I am misunderstood.

Speaker 3 (52:52):
Now.

Speaker 2 (52:53):
The issue here isn't that Bruno has no right to
a different opinion about these things. Right, Every inmate has
a different experience, and everyone reacts. And I'm not even
blaming if prisoners attempt to befriend SS guards to survive.
I'm certainly not blaming anybody for doing that. You do
whatever the fuck you have to do to get it
through that experience, and that's going to include a lot

(53:14):
of ugly things, you know, and.

Speaker 5 (53:15):
Also acting like you support them is different than what's
maybe going on internally.

Speaker 3 (53:21):
Yes, I am.

Speaker 2 (53:23):
I am strongly of the opinion that when it comes
to what people do in the camps, we certainly can't
judge any what it was in that position that said,
I think we can judge the stuff that Brunoa is afterwards, right,
And he's going to give a lot of contradictory stories
enough that we can't really say in every instance what happened,

(53:43):
but we can safely say he twisted his experiences later
in recollection to make points that he wanted to make.
And again, this is going to have a big influence
on early Holocaust scholarship. The film Sophie's Choice is heavily
based upon his recollections of camp life, and much of
writing on the matter seems to exist not to reveal
truths about the Holocaust, but to separate himself as an

(54:06):
individual from the massive Jews who suffered and were annihilated.
Bruno even admitted later that the quote main problem for
him during his time incarcerated was to safeguard his ego
in such a way that, by if any good luck,
he should regain liberty, he would be approximately the same
person he was when deprived of liberty.

Speaker 5 (54:25):
I wonder though also that he knew that people were
working on the outside to get him out. Yes, yes,
but that probably really impacted how he viewed himself in
the camp because he was like, no one else has
like this into the American government trying to get them
a visa, Like I am special, I do deserve to
be freed in this way that other people don't, because
that's been sort of his m his whole life is, yes,

(54:47):
you know, to view himself as better than those that
other people assimilate him or view him as being like.

Speaker 2 (54:55):
Yeah, and I think that's a really good like this
this need for him to feel special and better even
than like his fellow inmates. Colors how he writes about
this in a very interesting way.

Speaker 4 (55:08):
And it allowed him to keep that belief.

Speaker 5 (55:10):
Yeahs, because there was an element that he was special
and different because he had these people working for him.
So it was it completely unfounded.

Speaker 2 (55:18):
And that's another reason why. Also it's so problematic that
because obviously his experiences this is a portion of the
Holocaust that's super important to understand the period of time
when he's in these camps, that's a part of the
concentration camp story. But the experience of this guy who
number one has a good chance of surviving, knows that

(55:39):
from the outset pretty much, and has people working for
him on the outside, as opposed to Hungarian Jews in
nineteen forty four, right who there's no one coming, right like,
we have fallen off the edge of the planet.

Speaker 3 (55:53):
You can't.

Speaker 2 (55:54):
His experience is as different from that person's as a
regular person not in camps is from his Bruno's experience, Right.

Speaker 4 (56:03):
Like these are you're not forced to face the same thing.

Speaker 5 (56:06):
You're not forced to face the same level of despair
and yeah, and certain death and abandonment. And you know,
you can avoid this stuff that I think creates it
makes you different in your brain that just like fundamentally
changes who you are.

Speaker 4 (56:26):
He was able to like avoid that, and.

Speaker 2 (56:28):
He's He's going to come to one other very weird
conclusion because one of the results of this is he
becomes obsessed with the idea of the total institution, which
the constant tration camp is a total institution, right, one
that completely dominates your life right while you're in it.
And he starts to wonder, obviously, the Nazis created a

(56:49):
total institution to destroy people. What if you did the
same thing for what if you made a good concentration camp.
Oh god, and this is going to be his chief
motivation as a child development expert.

Speaker 3 (57:06):
That's a leap. I don't know that I'd go there.
Seems kind of problematic.

Speaker 4 (57:13):
Buddy's but I can't.

Speaker 2 (57:16):
I did a good one. Well that sucked, but I
think I can fix it.

Speaker 3 (57:25):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (57:26):
That is the end of part one. How are you feeling, Allison?

Speaker 5 (57:33):
I feel like I know where we're going and I'm
and I'm terrified.

Speaker 2 (57:38):
Well, yeah, it's uh. Next episode we will be Bruno
in the United States and we will be talking about
how he redefines the care of children with autism. And again,
he is not treating kids with autism almost exclusively. Not
I mean, presumably some of them are are children with autism,
but most of them are just rich kids that he

(58:00):
is abusing. He's abusing all of the kids. Let's be
clear about that.

Speaker 5 (58:05):
And I think it's also I would urge people to
look into rfk's wellness farms that he has been speaking about.

Speaker 4 (58:13):
And there is a there is a an.

Speaker 5 (58:17):
Instinct that that remains throughout history, that that we could
just shake certain things out of certain people, and it
is incredibly harmful and false.

Speaker 2 (58:28):
Yeah, and that is that is absolutely like the tactic
he is going to take, is that, like, if you
this is because that's that's his attitude about the total institution.
I saw how concentration camps altered the personalities of the
people interned there. You can alter a child who is
acting in a way that you see as problematic by

(58:49):
creating a total institution to reform them, right, And that's
his attitude towards what he calls autism, what he calls schizophrenia.
We can cure all of these by changing by creating
a total institution, you know, So that's problematic? All right, Allison,
do you want to plug anything right at the end?

(59:11):
Here for where people can find you.

Speaker 5 (59:13):
Yes, you can order my new romcom novel Save the
Date anywhere books are sold.

Speaker 4 (59:18):
And you can also follow my.

Speaker 5 (59:20):
Substack Emotional Support Lady for weekly writings about all things
mental health. And I'm also available as relationship coach seeing
individuals and couples.

Speaker 2 (59:30):
All right, awesome, Well Alison, thank you so much. We
will be back on Thursday. Until then, everybody, try not
to do this.

Speaker 1 (59:46):
Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media.
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(01:00:07):
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