Hello.
How come your French is so much better than mine?
I think everybody's friends?
Why is that?
Because we listen? We don't listen?
I mean I was in French immersion with all you guys.
What you're either daydreams or you're talking.
Do you know what it sounds like? You're on all those French immersion teachers sides that I had throughout the years, That's what they used to say, lune, which means your head in the class the avoir.
Jackie, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna you know, you know, I'm getting close to the hangoup eh.
You could feel like coming.
When you start getting on my nerves right about now, right right now.
From Gimlet Media, I'm Jonathan Goldstein and this is Heavyweight today's episode Doctor Mueller. Growing up, a single question dominated my thoughts. What was the use? What was the use of getting out of bed, of combing your hair, of breathing all that breathing? What was the use of anything when all of life inevitably came grinding to an end. By seventeen, I was waking up in the middle of the night, seized by the meaninglessness of it all. By
eighteen I started to lose my hair. At nineteen I dropped out of college, and at twenty I knew I had to do something, so I began seeing a therapist. Initially, the idea felt romantic, like something out of JD. Salinger or Hitchcock. At our first appointment, I might have even worn a blazer. My new therapist extended a hand and introduced herself as doctor Mueller, and for the next six years, that was the only name by which she was known to me. Doctor Mueller never referred to me by my
first name either. Instead, she called me mister Goldstein, which, because she spoke with a heavy German accent, she pronounced Goldstein. The first and only time I tried correcting her, she simply said, it is Goldstein. Doctor Mueller was raal Thinn. Appeared to be in her late sixties and wore her hair in a grayish bowl cut. She favored turtlenecks and macrom vests and sat behind an imposing desk, empty except for a telephone and a neat stack of small note papers.
At the end of our first appointment, she asked me to write up a one page family history. Instead, I took a deep dive into my childhood. I wanted her to have all the source material she'd need to get to the bottom of my morbid disposition, and so the following week I proudly presented her with a book length memoir. Doctor Mueller skimmed through it and then silently stuck my tone in a drawer and never brought it back up.
So several sessions later, I did, I am not very interested in the past, she said, I'm more interested in the present. What are you going to do now?
She asked?
What I was going to do now? I hoped was talk about my past, but doctor Mueller could care less. A therapist uninterested in the past ran contrary to everything I thought I knew about therapy. It was like a carpenter who refused to work with wood. More than that, it was like a carpenter who hated wood, and if you brought them wood, they'd throw it in a concrete drawer and never mention it again. Wasn't excavating the past pretty much a therapist's whole job. Where else does one
find answers? Doctor Mueller's unwillingness to even acknowledge my past was confounding, but so were a lot of things about her Sometimes she'd inexplicably show up wearing a neck brace. Other times she'd spend frantic minutes buffing out an invisible scuff mark from a waiting room chair. Then there were
the long anecdotes about car trouble, a trip. She was planning, stories that went nowhere and were illustrative of nothing I could fathom, And all the while, whole precious expensive minutes elapsed in which I could neither whine nor complain my way to mental health. It felt positively wasteful. Doctor Muller's office was in a large old echoe building downtown. Our appointments happened around dusk, and in my memory it's always
the dusk of winter, cold and wet Montreal winter. From behind her desk, lit by a desk lamp, she spoke of giving birth to one's authentic self, a self that wasn't all tangled up and regrets about the past or consumed by anxiety over the future, AKA a self that didn't sound very Jonathan Goldsteiny. In every session, doctor Muller repeated the same refrain, you must give birth to yourself.
What could she possibly mean? I asked my girlfriend at the time, Barbara was working on her bachelor's in psychology, and in my darker moments, I felt certain her relationship with me was a part of her field work. It might be a gestalt thing, she said, uncertainly, but I don't know that gestalt therapy is even a thing anymore. Week after week, doctor Muller and I sat in a dark room as I tried in vain to birth myself. On a bad day, she would reprimand me for not
doing as she instructed. On a good day, she would say that I was very very close. My authentic self was crowning. Was this just her line, I wondered, something doctor Mueller told all her patients. I grew increasingly frustrated. I was still lost, still waking up at noon, still spending my days watching video rentals and smoking cigarettes in my parents' basement, Still showing up for appointments with doctor
Muller for conversations that felt as pointless as life itself. Finally, after being told for the umpteenth time that the miracle of birth was nigh, I grew at It's hard to hear this year after year, I said. I told her that we must be doing something wrong. It is not working, she said, because of you. She spoke the words quietly but firmly. I was taken aback. It had to be something more than just me, if only slightly, maybe a
tiny bit, because of her. I mean, she was sitting in the room as much as I was, Even in my insecure state. Her conclusion felt off, and I said, so it is because of you, she repeated. Was a therapist even allowed to say that? How could she refuse to share in this failure? I think maybe this should be our last session, I said. Ending things was something I'd been thinking of doing for a while. But you have yet to find a philosophy, she said, words to
live by that will ease self birth. Not everyone needs a philosophy. I responded, that is true, she said, but you do. At the end of the hour, doctor Mueller rose from behind her desk and opened the door for me. She smiled warmly, sincerely, no edge at all. The blame she'd cast, in combination with the simplicity of her goodbye, was chilling. She shook my hand, ending one of the most intense personal relationships I'd had up until that point in my life, And then just like that, I was
back in that echoee hallway. Wondering what the hell had just happened. It's a question I still don't have an answer for. When you're young, because the world is small and new, so many experiences confuse you. But as you grow older, the odd things fall into place and you look back with something approaching clarity. But after thirty years, my experience with doctor Mueller somehow feels more mysterious, more difficult to parse than it did when I was twenty.
You go to therapy to form a more coherent narrative out of your life, Yet paradoxically, the chapter of my life with doctor Muller remains one that I've never really been able to make sense of, and so I still find myself asking who was this person? And was she a bad therapist or was I a bad patient? Although doctor Muller died in two thousand and three, I recently realized there might still be a way to find out. In recent months, I find myself moving away from traditional
psychotherapy and towards a more improvisational mental health regimen. That is, I stay up late while drinking beer and watching old movies. It's while watching at close range a Shan Penn Christopher Walkin film from the nineteen eighties that I realized I'd already seen it in a college class, and with this recollection, I remember the professor who taught the class, and the one time i'd seen him outside of his classroom. It was in doctor Muller's waiting room. I'd seen him exiting
her office, or at least I think I had. The moment was long ago and so fleeting, But if true, this memory had the power to tear open a potential wormhole, connecting me to my past as a kid in therapy. For the first time, I had no perspective on doctor Mueller. But here was a full fledged adult patient of hers, a professor, no less, who'd have the experience and insight to cast the decisive vote in the was it me or was it Muller referendum? Was she just weirdly hung
up on this notion of self birth? Or was I just too young to get it? With the movie paused in the background, I paced the floor of my living room. A plan begins to take shape. All I have to do is break all the rules of therapy, of polite society and track down a now elderly professor who taught at a school I dropped out of to inquire if it had been him i'd seen exiting my therapist's office thirty years ago. Yes, I agreed, nodding my head to no one in particular, three beers into a six pack
of Tall Boys at two in the morning. This was an excellent idea, find the man who can supply context. What was wrong with a little context? The only problem was, after thinking as hard as I could, I could not remember the professor's name. How long has it been. It's been a while, oh man, Yeah, it has been a while. A visit to the school's website tells me nothing about my old professor, but I do discover that the present chair of his department is an old college friend. Dana
and I haven't spoken in close to twenty years. How are things with you?
They're good. They're good.
Yeah, things are?
You know what?
He?
Dana tells me how much he enjoys teaching English, and I tell her that i'd recently been guiltily reading Madame Bovary, a book on the required reading list back when we were in school that I never actually read, and I must have started it because I found some of my marginalia that makes me like hate myself when I was at a I underline this whole paragraph, and in the margin I wrote espanolism.
Question mark, and what could that even have possibly meant?
Eventually I explained the reason for my call, how I'm in search of a professor from her department, whose name I could not remember, but who may or may not have had a ringside seat to the development of my young psyche. I proceed to describe the professor the best I can. The guy had kind of like black, curlyish hair, maybe kind of balding. His first name might have been Rob, could have been Bob. I offer Dana all the detail I can. He seemed to enjoy chewing gum once during
the warmer weather. He might have taught while wearing a panama hat.
None of that is ringing a bell with me.
After a while, I just give up. Well, thank you. It was nice. It was nice talking to you, no problem.
It was nice talking to you too.
It's as we're about.
To get off the phone, one more small, unhelpful detail pops into my head and immediately out of my mouth.
It's a surprise.
You know, he had a mustache at some point.
Is it possible his name was Maury.
Maury, that is the guy.
Oh, well, there you go.
After the break, Professor Moury.
Hello, Jonathan, Hey, Maury, I got through.
Yeah hear me. Okay, yeah, I can hear you.
Where where I am.
Where Moury is is Jamaica, sitting with his neighbors in the communal yard. And after all these years he's still professorial.
You know Bob's song and no Woman, no crime. You know Georgie lit a firelight in a tenement yard in French time. You can't really understand what that is, gonna that you've actually been in one of them.
Mary spends half the year in Jamaica, and as soon as he got my message asking if we could speak, he phoned right back. Every so often he's interrupted by the neighbor's daughter elect and her toddler's sister TESSI.
Alexi, your phone, n take her into the yark.
Please, no, no, no, Maury. A Jew has been working on a documentary with Bob Marley's granddaughter a Rosta about the relationship between Jews and Rostas and their cultural overlaps. Like what overlaps?
You know, the groups that are quite orthodox, they don't eat pork, while I.
Do find the subject of Mary's documentary semi interesting. The questions I'm asking are not in service to that semi interest, but rather to staving off the moment I have to announce the invasive nature of my phone call.
Dreadlocks are from the same Biblical injunction that leads to a Pacific Jews wearing beers.
The whole point of therapy is to have a sacred space separated from the rest of the world, free from the judgment of others. And here I was phoning up a stranger to ask, mind if I poke around in your sacred space a bit any hot takes on the therapist? Did she un crazy you? Or are you like still not? Maury would have every right to bang down the phone on my face, and so I keep deferring. Is the Rastafarian? Is it connected to the Lost Tribes?
Uh? There could be like, it's not really.
We go back and forth for almost half an hour, all the while Maury never asks why I'm phoning Testy come on to say hello, Hello, Jonathan, Hi, Tessy. Having exhausted every possible way to put off asking my question, every digression, every subject change, every attempt to keep Maury's two year old neighbor on the phone. I'm left with no recourse but to finally get to the point of
my weird, out of nowhere social call. So I just dive in anyway, so so so, yeah, should I'll tell you why I'm phone so I I have a pretty strange question and and I'm I'm just gonna say that right out the gate. Basically, the reason I'm calling you is because there was a moment where our lives crossed and just totally in a very coincidental way, and I was reminded of it. Yeah, just as I'm finally getting to it.
Tessie, she grabbed a tiny little plastic wrap bit of weeds, was running out with it. I didn't know what she would.
Do with it.
You know, She's not gonna smoke it.
She'd have to unwrap the plastic and build a split, which I can't do. I have a lot of problems doing it.
Yeah. Once the cheech and chong gask shenanigans are behind us, I resu merely mouthing my way through a procession of preambles. You know, don't I don't want to make you uncomfortable or anything. I want you to be you know, comfortable answering this, and if you don't want to, totally fine. I used to see this therapist and I have this memory, and it might be I might be misremembering, even is of being in the waiting room and seeing you leave
her office, doctor Mueller. Maury is so unfazed by my question, I'm inclined to wonder whether he's boguarded Little Tessie's joint. Without any ado, he just jumps right in, telling me he began seeing doctor Muller during a creative block and continued to see her for four years.
I found her very interesting, and I also found her very rude in some way. I don't I don't remember exactly what age she was, but she was kind of on the older side for deex diving. And then there was a thing of at the horses, which I can't remember.
Maury and I swap old memories. It's validating doctor Muller was odd.
Why does anybody wear two pired glosses unless they're an alien with six eyes? Is she just off a USO? You know something? I got that feeling that she was some sort of alien.
Murray remembers how angry she get if he was even a few minutes late, how harsh she could be in her.
Method and the method. To me, the method always seemed like a bit you know, it's not interesting to talk about killing what happened to you when you're six years old? You know, It's like, what are you going to do now? What is your next step?
Yeah?
Yeah, And even she wasn't even really that interested in feelings. It was really more of a that's the term that she constantly use. What is your concept? What is your concept of how you are going to deal with this? You have to formulate a concept you haven't yet formula. I think she thought that I wasn't formulating enough concepts.
I tell Maury about the note that doctor Mueller and I had parted on how she'd been crossed because of my failure to birth myself. When I ask of self birth was something they'd also talked about, he says no.
But I had the same feeling with her. This isn't, you know, quite working the way it should. And eventually she just said, I don't think you need me anymore.
She didn't say, you.
Know, uh, this is useless either. We're not getting anywhere. She actually said, I think we've gone to where we want to get and maybe she was right. I don't know.
You know, well, that sounds kind of like a nice way to end therapy as far as those things go. Yeah, sure he wasn't handed a certificate with the word cured stamped on it. But getting to where you want to go is a more dignified end to therapy than I managed. Maybe it wasn't with honors, but at least Morey had
graduated rather than dropped out. Just as one of the strangest telephone calls of my life comes to an end, Maury casually mentions that he just so happens to be in touch with another of doctor Muller's former patients, and one who, unlike the both of us, wasn't confused by doctor Mueller at all. Mary encourages me to give him a call.
I've seen a couple of therapists over the years, Yeah, and she wasn't my favorite.
After a breakup left him devastated, Michael went to doctor Muller for help.
She wasn't crazy about listening so much. I mean, in fact, she did a lot of the talking, and it got into a kind of who's talking now competition. She sort of reprimanded me huh, which I thought was kind of strange.
Michael's memory spark one of my own. One day, during a fit of coughing, I asked doctor Muller for water. There was a sink in the corner of her room, but no cop I needed a glass of water, and she.
She told you to go to the sink and use your hands right, cupped your hands.
Yeah, how do you know?
Because she told me to do the same thing.
Hunching over the sink and cupping my hands together to catch the flow of water from doctor Muller's spout. I felt like someone from the Bible, like a bear. Until now I'd been alone with my b steal memories no more. But when I bring up the business of giving birth to myself, as in how nutty was all that, I'm surprised by his response.
I can't remember ever saying anything like that to me.
Hey you hi, Jonathan, Hey Judith, it's Judy.
Actually, oh Judy, Okay, Judy, I'm sorry. Michael has put me in touch with yet another patient of doctor Muller's, the person who recommended he see her in the first place. Because unlike Michael, Morey and me, which, by the way, sounds like a Jewish folk trio. Judy loved doctor Mueller so much so that she always refers to her as
the fantastic Doctor Mueller. Judy's a painter who began seeing doctor Mueller in the mid seventies because Judy's lack of confidence in her own work was threatening to derail her career. Hear me, yes, I could hear you, Nor how's that?
Is that better? Is that better?
Jonathan?
I think it is. I think it's a little better. I think so. Judy says, doctor Muller's approach went beyond talk, beyond even the confines of the office.
She went to my gallery to see my work, and the gallery dealer greeted her and showed her my work.
Sure, Judy had talked in therapy about her self doubts as an artist, but she never would have anticipated doctor Muller actually going to see her work.
Meanwhile, I had gotten a phone call from the gallery dealer saying, who is that to cut people off? I mean it was like really, but law, I mean it was. She had a very severe profile there.
But the point is, Judy says that doctor Muller loved what she saw that day, and hearing that at that particular moment in her life from someone has no nonsense, as doctor Muller gave Judy the confidence she was looking for.
I just accepted her, I guess idiosyncrasies because she was one hundred percent in my court. She stepped in in moments that were difficult.
Judy experienced a different side of doctor Muller, one that I never could have even imagined. And the more we talk, the more I realize how different our experiences had been. Well, my doctor Muller had been largely inscrutable. Judy's doctor Muller loved the Beatles. Judy got to know a doctor Muller who'd always wanted to be an actor, who took vacations alone to go scuba diving, and described swimming alongside a manta ray as one of the most meaningful encounters of
her life. Judy's Doctor Muller was the type of person who blushed after making a sly joke, who got a look of satisfaction when she hit on something deep. And this is why on the wall of Judy's art studio, beside pictures of her friends, her family, and her dogs, hangs a photograph of the fantastic doctor Mueller doctor Muller devised a treatment plan uniquely tailored to Judy. Judy had needed confidence and reassurance, and doctor Muller went out and gave it to her. If she'd done that for Judy,
perhaps she'd also done the same for other patients. With that in mind, I asked Judy if during the course of her therapy, doctor Muller had ever mentioned giving birth to herself. But Judy has no idea what I'm talking about. After thirty years of obsessing, it on me that doctor Mueller might have tailored this notion of self birth specifically to me.
My mother was a violent, bipolar, manic depressive.
This is Judy's husband, Neil.
Who also was very, very intelligent, brilliant. She's a painter, she was capable of a lot, but she was also very aggressive and unable to be a mother.
Neil and Judy were newlyweds when Judy encouraged him to start seeing doctor Mueller. For the most part, things in Neil's life were going great. His career was taking off, and he finally felt settled. But when it came to dealing with his mother, Neil says he had no control. She'd phoned at all hours, sometimes even threatening suicide. One night, she phoned saying she was about to jump off her balcony, and so that very night, Neil rushed to the airport
to fly to her. When he arrived at her home, he expected to see her body on the ground outside, but she was inside her apartment. She just wanted to see him. What finally pushed him to the breaking point was the time he called her from his hotel while away on a business trip.
And she says, you're having an affair. And she gets into this vile bile about me having an affair and betraying my marriage. I'm going to tell your wife.
Neil wasn't worried that his wife would believe his mother. He was worried about the Lanes' mother was willing to go to to assert control.
I told my wife, I said, don't worry. I'm taking care of it. You know, she's crazy again. She's leaving these messages, but I'm making it better. I'm taking care of it or whatever. I said that, and my wife began to cry. She said, you'll never take care of it. This will never go away.
Neil was a full grown man with no idea how to deal with his mother desperate, he played doctor Muller the threatening voice messages his mother had left.
Doctor Muller just she bowed her head and she just looked down and she said, oh wow. She was like really like, oh wow. And she gave me a script. She said, okay, say this.
Neil still has the original piece of paper upon which he dictated doctor Muller's words.
This is a little kind of yellowye, you know, two by four pieces of paper. It says here, dear mother, what you've done has done damage to my life. From here on. You can sustain a relationship with me if you behave in a positive, constructive way. But at the moment it's better that we don't talk. I think that's kind of world. I mean, there's nothing really more.
Neil acknowledges that it wasn't much, really, just a couple of lines, but for him, it was enough. It was the first time he'd ever dared talk to his mother this way.
It was hard for me to read this, you know, I was scared.
After he read it. Neil says he and his mother didn't speak for ten years.
Which sounds insane for people who have normal parents. And you know, I mean, I'm always measuring this, but she knew I was never going to come back until she started to behave better.
And so a decade passed and then one day.
My mother called me, huh, and she was totally cooled out. She just said, I'm really sorry. Wow, I get it, I understand you were right. I please forgive me, Please forgive me, And her voice had all of that in it. It wasn't she was. She really meant it. And from that day forward, if you can believe it, we had a relationship after that, a loving one.
Hm.
She never lashed out or was aggressive. It was over and I had that relationship with her up until my mother passed away a couple of years ago. Whatever it was that never would have had those final few years with her. I have it because of the sessions with doctor Mueller. So imagine, excuse me, so imagine how I think about doctor Mueller.
Toward the end of Neil's therapy, Doctor Mueller was diagnosed with cancer. It made her weak, and in the last year she would disappear during their sessions for long stretches in the bathroom.
The last time I saw her, she she shook my hand goodbye. It was a very brave gracious, dignified thing. The way she did it, she said good luck. I mean she meant that. She was like saying good luck with all of you, all of you, Neil, like just good luck. And she looked at me in the eye and anyway, so she shook my hand, and that forever is like burnt into my brain.
About a year after Neil stopped singing her, at the age of seventy seven, doctor Mueller died of cancer. As with me, doctor Muller wasn't very interested in learning about Neil's past, but unlike me, from time to time Neil did learn something about hers, particularly towards the end as the bigger issue and his therapy receded and a sort of friendship emerged. They just talked sometimes about a family life back in Germany.
I think they were fairly wealthy. I think a very professional wealthy family. I think her father was a doctor. They had a beautiful home, many stories, and then the Nazis came and they absconded their home and used it for the headquarters. And her bitterness about the war is that as a German she was regarded as the enemy. So I think that kind of smarted. She constantly talked about Jews were not the only victims, and it was
confusing for her to work with Jews. I think she never said that, but I think that, you know, she saw a lot of Jewish people in Montreal, and you know, in the attitude towards sermons. So I think that had to play back on her own wounds, because she exposed her wounds. And I think I always thought that her we were also we were a part of her therapy.
Was her Jewish clientele merely a coincidence? Or were we, as Neil believed, a part of doctor Muller's own therapy. And if we were, what was she trying to heal? Was there some part of her past that she couldn't simply stick in a desk drawer and never bring up again? Will Doctor Muller had never been very interested in my past, I was now quite interested in hers. Doctor Muller's obituary mentions the son Bruno. He's a retired computer systems consultant.
He agreed to talk but didn't want to be recorded. When I ask about his mother's life during the war, he tells me all he has are snippets the past. Bruno tells me didn't come up much as dinner conversation. Given his mother's feelings about the past, it makes sense what he does know is this. She was born Enna Corolla Kumpe, and she was an athlete. She played tennis competitively and was a strong enough swimmer to attempt an escape during the Allied invasion by swimming across the Rhine.
As she swam, Bruno says, snipers from the other side fired at her. Bruno tells me his grandfather was a doctor who was eventually captured by the Russians and sent to a Soviet prison camp. These camps were notoriously brutal, with hundreds of thans thousands of German captives dying from violence, malnutrition, or forced labor. For years, doctor Mueller didn't know whether
her father was alive or dead. On the day of an Allied bombing campaign that would devastate her hometown, doctor Muller's family didn't have time to make it to the local bomb shelter, which was fortunate because it was destroyed. Instead, the family hid in their garden shed, which turned out to be the only part of the house that survived the devastation.
The bombing wasn't supposed to hit Efheren that hard.
Annika is a journalist who lives near Ephren, where doctor Mueller grew up.
They were actually aiming at the harbor and Cologne, but they had the order not to return with all the weapons, like get rid of all your bombs before you get back home. Don't go around flying with all the bombs, but just drop them somewhere, and so unfortunately they were dropped on Efevn.
I'd commissioned Danika to find out anything she could about the Muellers, so she'd wandered the streets of Ephrin looking for traces of the family, but most of the people who lived in Ephin during the war are now gone. I asked if she was able to find out anything about doctor Muller's father, anything that might elaborate on his capture by the Russians.
What I did come across, and that kind of struck me, was that he was a Nazi doctors' union at the time. So the doctors in this union, their job was it to tell people from a medical perspective why one race would be superior to another.
Race, eugenics exactly. The mission of the National Social Asterbund, as the union was called, was to make sure doctors were aligned with the Nazi spirit. We can't know for certain that doctor Muller's father wasn't forced to join, but we do know that by the end of the war, half of the ninety thousand doctors in Germany were not members of the Asterbunt. In other words, you didn't have to be in the union to practice medicine.
On top of that, there's this he wasn't just a member, but he is listed as like the kreismslitter, which, okay, how do I translate this?
The rough translation is that doctor Muller's father was an upper level manager in the Nazi Physicians League. He oversaw a district of two million people. While it's impossible to know his private intentions and beliefs, given the prestige of his position, it's unlikely he was a secret hero of the resistance. A leader of his rank, let alone a medical leader, would at the very least have been aware of the systematic sterilization and execution of those deemed undesirable,
among them the so called mentally ill. No wonder, doctor Mueller might have felt compelled to leave the past where it was. What are your recollections of Herbert and his wife.
Oh good people. I'm proud to know how I'm glad to be their friend.
Once again, I find myself speaking to a German psychiatrist in Montreal. His name is doctor Gert Morgenstern, and he was close to doctor Mueller and her husband Herbert, both his friends and colleagues. They would gather at doctor Morgenstern's home in a quiet neighborhood in Montreal, where doctor Muller's husband, Herbert, and he played music together, Herbert on the flute, doctor Morgenstern on the piano. Doctor Mueller would wander in and out listening to them play. She spent many hours in
doctor Morgenstern's home. Doctor Morgenstern's son Mark explained at the beginning of the conversation that his father might not have much to offer. In recent years, his memory has begun to falter and much of Morgenstern's past has become lost to him. But since this might be the only chance I get to talk to someone who actually knew doctor Mueller, who can speak to her as a friend, we decide to give it a try. I asked doctor Morgenstern if he remembers spending time with the Muellers.
Yes, I think so. It was pleasant and he looked forward to it.
Mark says, as his father's memory fails, he's held on to the happy memories and allowed a lot of the painful ones to go. Like the Muellers, Doctor Morgenstern was a German who immigrated to Canada, but unlike the Muellers, he was a Jew. He fled Germany in nineteen thirty seven, a year before Christelnacht. You both immigrated from Germany. Was that a subject that came up?
I don't remember it.
Life during the war, No, I don't remember any of that. So she never talked with you about what she went through during the war.
Not that I remember. What we talked about was what we were doing and what we were planning to do.
Doctor Morgenstern says they never talked about the past, that they didn't talk about their religions, didn't even talk about psychology, and they never discussed Germany. Mark says that after fleeing, his father never spoke a word of German again. So if they didn't talk about the past, what did they do together?
Make music and talk? What did you like to talk about the music we were playing.
Because he was a fellow therapist as well as her friend, I asked him what he knows about doctor Muller's practice, her approach. Throughout our conversation. Doctor Morgenstern's answers are brief, a few words at most, But when I asked him about doctor Muller's insistence on self birth and whether it was an idea that she tailored to my situation or some obscure therapeutic method, doctor Morgenstern grows animated.
Oh, she wasn't doing a method. She invented what she said. It's a continual process, an attitude toward life. In other words, you're actively producing your future in your presence. You have decisions to make, you have memories to select, and you're building your future that way. You never actually finished giving birth to yourself. It never is a completed act.
While I'd taken my inability to give birth to myself as a failing of either myself or of doctor Mueller, it wasn't really. Maybe doctor Mueller telling me over and over that birth was imminent was her way of saying, there is no end point. It's just living, and that's
the point. Ana Corolla Kumpel, the daughter of a doctor who served a regime that treated the mentally ill as a blight upon humanity, left Germany to become Ana Corolla Mueller, who became not only a doctor but a psychiatrist, and one who tended to Jews or anyone else who needed her help. You are not your past. You are not your father or your family, or at least you do
not have to be. You are the thing that you make, which is a lesson Doctor Muller must have had to learn for herself before she could pass it on to others, before she could pass it on to me. Even though I still don't have what doctor Muller might call a philosophy, I eventually came to see that what's the use was never the right way question. The most important things in life have no use. And maybe this is the closest I've come to words to live by.
Now that the furnitures returning to its goodwill home, now that the last month's rent is skating with the damage to pros, take this moment. Thank you, I too.
Acid.
This episode of Heavyweight was produced by me Jonathan Goldstein along with Stevie Lane b a Parker and Khalila Holt. The show is edited by Jorge just Special thanks to Emily Condon, Tim Howard, Annako Vitzel, Sir Richard Evans, doctor Robert Proctor, Alex Bloomberg, Luisa Beck, Emmanuel Barry, David Berman, and Jackie Cohen. Bobby Lord mixed the episode with original music by Christine Fellows, John K. Sampson, Blue Dot Sessions, and Bobby Lord. Additional music credits can be found on
our website, gimletmedia dot com slash Heavyweight. Our theme song is by the Weaker Bands courtesy of Epitaph Records, and our ad music is by Hailey Shaw. Follow us on Twitter at Heavyweight or email us at Heavyweight at gimlipmedia dot com. You can listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.