Julius Mändle (1899-1968) – From Dachau to São Paulo

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On the biography of a Jewish psychoanalyst persecuted under National Socialism

On 6 May 1938, a two-column advertisement appeared in the Jüdisches Gemeindeblatt für Rheinland und Westfalen: ‘Back. Psychoanalyst Maendle (Nervous Disorders)’. It puts the spotlight on a psychoanalyst about whose work and life in the history of psychoanalysis in Germany nothing is known [1]. Julius Mändle presumably belonged to the group of – at that time not unusual – ‘self-appointed’ psychoanalysts [2].

The first reference to this psychoanalyst working in Cologne came in connection with the laying of Stolpersteine (stumbling stones). Since 1992, the artist Gunter Demnig has been laying these ten-by-ten centimetre brass memorial stones in front of the last place of residence or work of victims of National Socialism throughout Europe [3]. The Psychoanalytische Arbeitsgemeinschaft Köln-Düsseldorf e.V. had taken on the sponsorship of a stumbling stone in memory of Hans Erich Haas (1896-1990), who was driven into exile. His psychotherapeutic practice opened in 1927, and Haas is considered the first psychoanalyst in Cologne [4].

The return to the early history of Cologne psychoanalysis led to traces of Julius Mändle. Between 1927 and 1929, Hans Erich Haas had his practice at Riehler Straße 13, only a few houses away from the Institute’s headquarters at Riehler Straße 23. In Julius Mändle's advertisement, the address is given as Riehler Straße 21. The proximity to the domicile of the working group, as well as the realization that this seemed to be a life-story buried by National Socialist persecution, prompted us to compile some basic information on Julius Mändle. This article cannot completely reconstruct his biography, but summarises the results of initial research in archives and publications in order to stimulate further research.

Julius Mändle was born on 7 August 1899 in Kriegshaber (since 1916 a district of Augsburg) [5]. His father, David Mändle, was a merchant and came from a long-established family there. The Mändles belonged to the Jews who had settled in the nearby community of Kriegshaber after the expulsion of all Jews from Augsburg in the 15th century, and had risen to become privileged merchants. Thus, in the 17th and 18th centuries, the widely ramified Mändle family dominated the horse trade and was highly respected socially [6]. At an imperial coronation in Frankfurt am Main, the Abraham and Josef Mändle company from Munich and Kriegshaber is said to have provided the fleet of carriages with cavalry and equipment [7].

Julius Mändle obviously came from a self-confident German-Jewish milieu. This may explain why he was at least temporarily close to the ‘Association of National German Jews’. On 2 June 1917, Julius Mändle had been drafted into the Reichswehr as a soldier. On 15 July 1919, he wrote to his parents ‘from Reichswehr, Batterie Rosenbusch’. The ‘Batterie Rosenbusch’ was the name of a number of Free Corps-like volunteer units named after Paul Rosenbusch, the later banker. They were intended to be used in Munich for counter-revolutionary operations against the Soviet republic, but then operated in Augsburg until they were disbanded in July 1919 [8].
 
University education
At the end of 1919, Julius Mändle went to study in Munich until the summer semester of 1921 [9]. He was enrolled as a medical student at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich in the winter semester of 1919/20 and in the summer semesters of 1920, 1921 and 1925. He studied at the University of Erlangen in the winter semesters of 1920/21 and 1921/22, where he had lessons in dissection, physiology and anatomy, among other things. In the summer of 1922, he transferred to the University of Würzburg, where he took physiology, microscopy and biology.

On 25 August 1922, his father David Mändle died. After that, his mother Fanny Mändle, née Marx (born on 4 July 1874 in Züntersbach, Hessen-Nassau), continued to run the family furniture business together with her brother Salomon Marx. Julius Mändle moved to Freiburg for the winter semester of 1924. His ‘Studien- und Sittenzeugnisse’ (study and attendance certificates) from the Medical Faculty for 1925 and 1929 have been preserved in the Freiburg University Archives. It is not known how long he studied there. He does not appear to have studied in Berlin, where he then spent several months. He stayed in Augsburg at the turn of the year 1928/29 and finally left there for Cologne in January 1929. In the summer semester of 1929, Mändle enrolled at the University of Cologne in medicine and philosophy, having completed twelve semesters of study by then. However, he does not seem to have pursued his studies there, and in May 1930 he was deleted from the register. A leaving certificate for 16 December 1938 is noted on his registration card.

Munich, Erlangen, Würzburg, Freiburg and Cologne were thus the universities at which Julius Mändle completed his academic education from 1919 to 1929. 

On 27 January 1929, Julius Mändle married Ida Luchs (born on 7 May 1901) in his home town of Augsburg. On his registration form, his profession is stated as ‘assistant doctor’ and ‘Dr.’ was prefixed to his surname. At which university and on what he did his doctorate could not be clarified.
 
Settlement and persecution in Cologne
Immediately after the wedding, the couple moved to Cologne. Their first residence in the cathedral city was Werderstraße 23 [10]. The Cologne address book provides the information that Julius Mändle identified as a psychoanalyst: in 1930 he is registered as Dr. Julius Mändle with the occupation ‘writer’, and from 1931 to 1935 as ‘psychoanalyst’. From 1936 onwards, he was also registered at Riehler Straße 21 with this professional title. The address books also suggest that Julius Mändle and Hans Erich Haas must have known each other: [11]. In 1936, Haas, who had previously practised on Hohenzollernring and then on Bismarckstraße, moved to Werderstraße 23. From there, Haas emigrated to Great Britain with his wife Lisbeth Haas, née Schult, in December.

It is not known whether Julius Mändle was also preparing to emigrate from the German Reich with his wife and their daughter Ruth (born on 4 July 1931 in Cologne). It also remains unclear from where he was announcing hisreturn to Cologne – with his newspaper advertisement quoted at the beginning – in May 1938. What is certain is that the family suffered under the persecution of National Socialism and was increasingly driven into a corner. The destruction of Julius Mändle’s professional existence is reflected in the address books: in 1937 he is listed without a doctorate and in 1939 it simply says: ‘Mändle, J., Heilkund’ (medical practitioner). In the course of the November pogrom of 1938, Julius Mändle was deported to the Dachau concentration camp [12]. He was released on 17 December 1938. As a rule, Jewish arrestees were only released at this time if they could present a certificate of imminent emigration.

Julius Mändle actually managed to emigrate to Brazil with his wife and daughter in 1940. Permission to enter the country was issued by the Brazilian consulate in Cologne on 29 February 1940 [13]. According to Julius Mändle's grand-daughter, who lives in Brazil, the family left Germany in August 1940 after a first attempt to leave via Italy failed. In an extremely arduous journey via the Soviet Union, Korea and Japan, they finally reached the port of Santos on 15 January 1941[14].
 
Theft of the psychoanalytical library
Earlier, the Mändles’ possessions in the German Reich had been completely plundered. In Cologne, Julius Mändle was only able to sell part of his library of around 4,900 volumes. His specialist library was confiscated by the Cologne State Police [15]. The items that were to be shipped to Brazil via Hamburg were also confiscated by the Gestapo in the Port of Hamburg. In addition, Mändle had to pay a ‘Jewish property tax’ and a ‘Reich flight tax’ after the pogrom.

Interestingly, the titles of Mändle’s specialist library, which was confiscated by the Cologne Gestapo, provide far more information about his professional orientation than the previous findings from the university archives. On 27 April 1961, Julius Mändle represented his interests in a public session of the ‘Chamber of Restitutions’ in Cologne and testified, among other things, as follows: 

On the occasion of the events in November 1938, I, like many other Jews, was taken to Dachau. After my release I prepared to emigrate. At that time I was still living in Cologne, Riehler Str. 21. Since I could not take all the books in my possession with me abroad, I sold my 1,000 books which were not specialist literature through a newspaper advertisement. A bookseller who did not want to accept my prices denounced me to the Gestapo, which was made aware of my specialist library. The Gestapo appeared and took 708 books. (...) The exact details were possible because I kept an exact inventory of my entire book stock. [16]

This list of Mändle's specialist literature, comprising 708 titles, has been preserved in a ‘restitution file’ – typed on thin carbon paper and in parts nearly or totally illegible [17]. It contains a wealth of German-language titles on psychoanalysis that were read and received in professional circles in the 1920s and early 1930s. Any psychoanalytic institution would be guarding a great treasure if it could have such a stock of first editions at its disposal today. The list includes 24 titles by Sigmund Freud published by Kiepenheuer, Deuticke and I.P.V. Verlag up to 1933. One also encounters the works of Karl Abraham, Franz Alexander, Helene Deutsch, Siegfried Bernfeld, Paul Federn, Otto Fenichel, Sándor Ferenczi, Anna Freud, Erich Fromm, Imre Hermann, Ernest Jones, Melanie Klein, Oskar Pfister, Otto Rank, Wilhelm Reich, Theodor Reik, Georg Groddeck, Wilhelm Stekel, Alfred Adler, Lou Andreas-Salomé. Such a collection indicates a professional engagement with psychoanalysis that goes well beyond the level of an interested layman and suggests profound expertise.

What happened to the books after they were confiscated is not known. It is possible that they were destroyed. But the value of this library makes it equally conceivable that the volumes were sold to interested parties and are possibly still in a library or in private hands today.
 
Emigration to Rio
After arriving in Brazil, the Mändle family lived for a few months in São Paulo and then in Porto Alegre, where Julius Mändle learned Portuguese intensively [18]. In 1944, the family returned to São Paulo. Mändle worked again as a psychoanalyst and Ida Mändle as a governess for a well-known Brazilian family. In his new hometown, Adelheid Koch, who, like the Mändles, had fled Germany to escape the Nazi regime, had been working as the first teaching analyst in Brazil since 1937  [19]. It is unknown to what extent Julius Mändle was professionally connected with the Brazilian Psychoanalytical Society of São Paulo, which was recognised in 1951. What is certain is that he was never a member of the Society [20].

There is evidence of active journalistic work. As Júlio Maendle, he apparently published frequently in a medical feature section of the daily newspaper Diario de São Paulo [21]. In the ‘Folha Socialista’ he regularly – at least in 1950 – wrote a column on ‘Crianças’ (children) [22]. He also published specialist articles in the São Paulo-based journal, Investigações [23]. In this way Julius Mändle achieved a certain prominence in his country of refuge after only a few years. The Deutsche Nachrichten congratulated the ‘renowned psychoanalyst Dr. Julius Mändle’ on his 50th birthday with the following words:

His publications on psychoanalytical matters in local papers and journals have quickly made him known in professional circles and place him among the foremost pioneers of a science whose practical results come to the aid of people in psychological distress and bring blessings. [24]

Julius Mändle worked as a psychoanalyst in Brazil until his death on 22 March 1968. His professional as well as private connections to Germany were apparently cut due to Nazi persecution. His mother Fanny Mändle was deported, together with her brother, to the Theresienstadt ghetto on 5 August 1942, from there to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp and murdered on 18 May 1944. His brother Siegfried Mändle, born in 1900, also had had to flee Germany and emigrated to the USA. Julius Mändle stayed in Germany at least once after 1945 – in 1961, to bring his compensation claims.

A certain connection with Cologne appears again and again in the publications in Brazil, for example when Mändle is referred to as ‘professor da Universidade de Colônia’ or, as in an article in a newspaper published in Rio de Janeiro in December 1948, as former director of the ‘Instituto Psicoterapêutico de Colônia’ [25].

The biography of Julius Mändle shows once again how great was the loss for psychoanalysis in Germany as a result of the National Socialist persecution and expulsion of Jewish analysts. It is therefore all the more welcome that the Psychoanalytische Arbeitsgemeinschaft Köln-Düsseldorf e.V. initiated the laying of stumbling stones for Julius, Ida and Ruth Mändle. They were laid in front of the house at Riehler Straße 21 on 4 October 2016 [26].