John Rittmeister


John Karl Friedrich Rittmeister, often also abbreviated John F. Rittmeister, was a German neurologist, psychoanalyst and resistance fighter against Nazism. Rittmeister was a humanist and socialist who based his opposition to the Nazi state on moral grounds. Rittmeister was most notable for being a communist member of the anti-fascist resistance group that was later called the Red Orchestra by the Gestapo.

Life

John Rittmeister came from a Hanseatic merchant family that had lived in Hamburg for generations and that included politicians and artists. He was the eldest of three children. and had a younger brother called Wolfgang. As a child he attended the Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums in Hamburg where he became interested in the philosophers Giordano Bruno and René Descartes. To fight against an perceived inner weakness Rittmeister enlisted in the Germany army in 1917. He fought in last two years of World War I on the French Champagne and Italian high mountain fronts as a telephone operator and by the end of the war he had become a non-commissioned officer. Rittmeister like most men after the Great War was thankful that he had survived although some of his friends were killed. After returning from war he disappointed his family, particularly his father when he decided to not take up the trading house that was family business. Instead he decided to study medicine starting in 1918 at the universities of Göttingen, Kiel, Hamburg and Munich. In 1922 Rittmeister became interested in psychotherapy through the work of the neurologist and psychoanalyst Hans von Hattingberg after he sought psychological help. At this time he started to study the work of Carl Jung, Mikhail Bakunin and Karl Marx. Rittmeister decided to specialise in Neurology under Max Nonne at the newly founded University of Hamburg. After three years training between 1926 and 1929 at the Psychiatry clinic Schön Klinik Hamburg Eilbek in Munich, Rittmeister was promoted to a physician with a thesis titled: Ueber einen fall von staphylococcen myelitis.
In 1939 after returning to Germany, Rittmeister married Eva Rittmeister née Knieper, who was pediatric nurse and fifteen years younger than him. Rittmeister considered her life-affirming, who often enriched his depressed nature.

Career

Rittmeister decided to continue his education by studying in Paris and London. In England he studied at Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel and introduced to the settlement movement. In 1928, Rittmeister's moved to Zurich. Switzerland and after two years he obtained a voluntary position to work at the Burghölzli Institute in Switzerland where he stayed for three years between 1929 and 1931. From 1931 to 1935 Rittmeister worked as an assistant physician at the Polyclinic for Nervous Diseases at the University of Zurich, founded by the noted neuropathologist Constantin von Monakow. In 1935 Rittmeister began studying under the Swiss psychiatrist Gustav Bally. During the early period of his work at the Polyclinic, Rittmeister was tutored by the neuroanatomist and psychiatrist Auguste Forel at his home in Prangins. Through the efforts of Storch, Rittmeister found a position as a physician at the Münsingen cantonal sanatorium that was directed by the Swiss psychiatrist Max Müller. Müller had sought Rittmeister in November 1936 to conduct a joint study on schizophrenia with Alfred Storch that was to include an extensive catamnestic survey of the former patients of the Tübingen Psychiatric Clinic at the University of Tübingen. Rittmeister developed a professional relationship with Storch that eventually blossomed into strong friendship. In 1937 Rittmeister against the advice of friends, returned to Germany after being expelled from Switzerland. During the time he was there he became a convinced Marxist after attending communist meetings and becoming involved in communist activities that included a study trip to the Soviet Union. According to an entry in his prison diary on 24 January 1943, to both find a wife and seek a professional position that was aligned with his experience. In 1938 was appointed as a senior physician at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute at the Berlin Institute of Psychotherapeutic Research and Psychotherapy, that was run by Professor Matthias Göring, a relative of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. In 1941 Rittmeister was appointed the director of the clinic.

Analysis

Like many European psychoanalysts at the time, Rittmeister was on the social and political left and was much closer than his peers to the iconoclastic bent within psychoanalysis that had begun with Freud himself.
In the early 1930s Rittmeister, in contrast to his peers, accused Carl Jung of archetypal mysticism and seeing in Jungs ahistorical image-collectivism the symptoms of the frightened and confused bourgeois response to the massive social change of the 20th Century. In Rittmeister's critique of Jung, he classified Jung as a crypto-fascist in an approach that echoed German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch similar conclusion to German psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn and the German philosopher Ludwig Klages approach. Instead of turning to a kind of fuzzy romanticism as many as his peers did, Rittmeister started to construct a critique of modern civilisation in the Freudian manner that avoided the emotionalism, mysticism, and relativism that he found in his analysis of Jung. For Rittmeister, he understood that Jung taught the virtues of introversion, an immersion of the self to the exclusion of others, while Freud taught humanity in the ecumenical virtues of love.

Red Orchestra

Rittmeister hosted a small ideological, humanist and political discussion group that included his wives friends like the mechanic Fritz Thiel, the student Ursula Goetze and a soldier Friedrich Rehmer after he moved to Germany. It was through his wife, Eva Knieper who attended the Heilschen Abendgymnasiums in Schöneberg that their meetings eventually intersected with people who were members of the anti-fascist resistance group that was led by Harro Schulze-Boysen in Christmas 1941. Rittmeister didn't share the activist politics of the people around Schulze-Boysen, nor did he confess knowledge of the hard espionage activities that the group had undertaken in 1941 and 1942. However, Rittmeister did take part in the resistance activities of the group, becoming involved in leafleting. Rittmeister had a longing for a new humanism, so resistance was path that led away from the what he saw as the crass and heartless culture of the west.
The group started to produce leaflets that were signed with AGIS in reference to the Spartan King Agis IV. The name of the newspaper Agis was originally the idea of Rittmeister. These had titles like The becoming of the Nazi movement, Call for opposition, Freedom and violence and Appeal to All Callings and Organisations to resist the government.
On the 17/18 May 1942 Rittmeister took part in the most dangerous resistance action on the occasion of The Soviet Paradise exhibition. During the night Rittmeister along with nineteen other people, mostly folk who were his friends travelled across five Berlin neighbourhoods to paste handbills over the original exhibition posters with the message:

Arrest

On 26 September 1942, Rittmeister was arrested by the Gestapo along with his wife Eva. For his execution he was offered the dubious choice of being guillotined instead of hanging. On 12 February 1943 the 2nd Senate of the Reichskriegsgericht sentenced him to death ...for preparing for high treason and favouring the enemy. Rittmeister was executed on 13 May 1943 by the guillotine in Plötzensee Prison.

Working Group

In 1993 a working group was created in the Institut for Psychotherapy in Berlin at the project group of the DPG-AG to celebrate and honour the life of John Rittmeister. Two lectures are conducted yearly, one private to the institute and one public as well as a picture as slide event.

Papers