Walter W. Marseille


Walter William Marseille was a German-American psychoanalyst and graphologist. In 1948 he corresponded with Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell, advocating world government.

Life

Walter Marseille was the son of Gustav Marseille, a leader in the progressive education movement. He studied psychology, mathematics, history, and philosophy at the Universities of Heidelberg, Freiburg, and Munich. In 1926 he took a doctorate under Martin Heidegger at Marburg University. Further information is given by his friend Karl Löwith. From 1928 to 1933 Marseille followed the workshops of Heinrich Jacoby in Berlin; his address was Dernburgstr. 34, Charlottenburg. He later claimed to have broken with Heidegger in 1932 over Heidegger's refusal to condemn Nazism. Löwith tells us that Marseille left Germany in 1933, went to Vienna where he married a woman of Jewish origin, and then emigrated to the United States. He trained as a psychoanalyst at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute and the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and took Ruth Mack Brunswick as his training analyst.
Marseille was hired by Paul Lazarsfeld in 1940 to analyse the handwriting of mail received by US Senators during the debate on the conscription bill, and developed an index for the cultural rating of handwriting.
In April 1948 Marseille sent a paper, "A Method to Enforce World Peace", to both Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein. A copy of the paper is in the Einstein archives along with correspondence with Einstein about it. See Einstein on Peace, edited by Otto Nathan. Einstein's four replies in the ensuing discussion were sold by Bloomsbury Auctions in October 2008. The lot description in the sales catalogue reads as follows:

84. Einstein 4 Typed Letters signed to Dr. Walter W. Marseille, in German, 4pp., 4to, Princeton, 8th April - 16th November 1948, responding to Marseille's paper “A Method to Enforce World Peace” and their subsequent correspondence on the establishment of world government and the Western world's relations with Russia,, last letter with small tear in margin; and 4 others including 3 typescript copies of Marseille's letters to Einstein expounding his opinions on World Government and Russia and a typescript, From Max Eastman: Excerpt from a conversation with Einstein, May, 1938, on Freud and Freudian ideas, pencil inscription at head: “From Max Eastman”, folds, browned, some with punch holes in left hand margins, some edges a little creased.

Marseille was the recipient of a well-known letter dated 5 May 1948 in which Bertrand Russell signalled his agreement with the paper. Russell's letter, of which Einstein may have been the first to have been sent a copy, was first published by Marseille in The Nation, 16 Oct. 1954, when he disagreed with Russell's changed views on nuclear disarmament. The letter and its lack of context have been of concern to Russell scholars.
By 1954 Marseilles was a Berkeley, California psychoanalyst. That year he contributed a series of radio broadcasts attempting a psychoanalytic study of Karl Marx. He published occasionally on nuclear weapons policy in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, from 1954 until 1962.

Works