Muriel’s War
An American Heiress
in the Nazi Resistance
Forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan
Muriel Gardiner is a forgotten hero. At the heart of some of the twentieth century’s most seminal moments, the heiress experienced first-hand the struggles of feminism, socialism, and antifascism. While contributing to the critical movements of her time, she raised a daughter as a single parent, conducted several love affairs and entered into three marriages - as she personally saved hundreds of people from the Nazis. As her last act, she became an eminent psychoanalyst.
Today, Muriel’s legacy includes a $40 million foundation that supports civil rights and justice, peace and arms control, birth control, and radical environmentalism. It also aims “to shrink and alter the nature of the American military.”
Born into a family that valued riches above all else - the owners of Chicago’s Union Stockyards immortalized in Upton Sinclair’s 1906 THE JUNGLE - Muriel quickly came to reject their value system. A child in a world where she only had to ring a bell to have every need and want satisfied, she early embarked on a different path.
Revolted by her family’s business practices and beliefs, the rebel soon became the black sheep. In reaction to her family’s greed and lack of concern for other people, Muriel developed humanistic values that would shape her lifetime of political and social activism, beginning in her teenage years and continuing until her death.
Never ambivalent, Muriel always knew her own mind. Those who were close to her describe her as decisive and idiosyncratic. For example, many years before living together became common for couples, Muriel saw no reason for legal marriages. Nevertheless, circumstances intervened in such a way that she actually married three times.
In Vienna during the late 1920s studying Freud, Muriel was present, too, during the following decade when Adolf Hitler unleashed his madness on Europe. Since the Nazis were the ultimate authoritarians, she felt passionately that opposing them was essential and soon she was participating in the underground resistance against the Fuhrer. In Austria, just before World War II, she worked side by side with her lover, the man who would become her third husband, Josef Buttinger, leading the Austrian resistance and saving countless lives.
During this same period, Muriel embarked on her medical studies. The best way to help people, she had decided, was by healing their minds and thus she would become a psychoanalyst. Her path was long: She would devote years to medical school and her internship before she could actually practice as a psychoanalyst, but she kept at it, amid the chaos of life around her.
Muriel’s willingness to reconstruct herself whenever the times demanded a revision – and her resolute heroism, flouting her wealth and family expectations - make her a compelling and singular hero for all times.
Research for MURIEL'S WAR incorporates copious quantities of previously unused material. Various sources include but are not limited to the Archives of the Resistance (DOW) in Vienna; unopened papers of both Muriel’s and Josef Buttinger’s at various universities; and my own interviews, including my talks with people whose lives she saved, or their descendants.