The honoree, which died in 2009, would have been, on September 20, 2016 a hundred years old. To commemorate his work and his lovable personality several events are planned in Vienna and Zurich, which deal with the various aspects of his work as a physician, neurologist, psychoanalyst ethno-psychoanalyst and writer. We psychoanalysts, who came afterwards, are grateful to him especially for the renewal of psychoanalysis and for his lifelong socio-critical commitment. He was a fearless fighter against fascism and Stalinism and also a gifted storyteller.
As an adolescent he read Hitler´s “Mein Kampf" on his father´s estate in Nowikloster in Slovenia and henceforth knew what was coming. Shortly afterwards he experienced the first Jewish persecutions at his high school in Graz. Attending the university he studied the classics of Marxist and became an unorthodox Marxist. Clear-sighted he interrupted his medical studies before the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany and moved as a Swiss Abroad to Zurich. Here he frequented antifascist circles and met his future wife, originally from Graz, Goldy Matthèy, who also had to flee after the collapse of the Spanish Republic, where she had joined the International Brigades. It was not long until the two encountered the like-minded young Swiss doctor Fritz Morgenthaler, resulting in a lifelong friendship....