Muriel Gardiner (geb. Morris, verh. Buttinger)

Born:	11-23-1901
Faculty:	Medical School | Medical University Vienna
Category:	Expelled student

Muriel GARDINER (maiden name: MORRIS, married: BUTTINGER), born on November 23rd, 1901 in Chicago/USA (entitled residency ('heimatberechtigt') for Chicago/USA, Citizenship: USA), daughter of Edward Muriel (merchant, deceased), lived in Wien 9, Spitalgasse 17, was enrolled finally in the fall term 1937/38 at the Medical School in the 6th year of her studies ('Absolutorium' was certified on June 16th, 1938). She succeeded in finishing her studies and graduate on June 18th, 1938 - because she was a citizen of a foreign country, she couldn't be restricted by the 'Nürnberger Rassengesetze'. But nevertheless she was not allowed to practice as a physician in the territories of the Third Reich and had to hurry to leave the country because of her ongoing engagement in the resistance movement against fascism and National Socialism.
She emigrated to France and then back to the USA and worked as a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and in refugee organizations.


Lit.: GARDINER 1983; Marlene NOWOTNY, Eine Amerikanerin im Widerstand, in: science.orf.at, 21.08.2015; SILVERMAN 2012, 21; Portrait of Muriel GARDINER, in: POSCH/INGRISCH/DRESSEL 2008, 347f. Muriel GARDINER-BUTTINGER – Sketch of a Portrait:

Muriel Morris was born in 1901 in Chicago, USA, as the daughter of a rich meat processing magnate. She studied till 1922 at the Wellesley College for Women in Massachusetts and went on to spend a year abroad in Rome. She subsequently studied literature at Oxford and came to Vienna in 1926 to be analysed by Sigmund Freud. The latter referred her to his student, the American Ruth Mack Brunswick. After her psychoanalysis, a short marriage to Englishman Julian Gardiner, who studied music in Vienna, and the birth of her daughter, she stayed in Vienna as a single mother and started training analysis in order to become a psychoanalyst herself. She thus began studying medicine in 1932 at the University of Vienna, which would later enable her to practice psychoanalysis in the USA as well. Although the offspring of a rich family, she was a staunch socialist. Fascinated by the social achievements of "red Vienna", she joined the socialist underground after the Austrian fascists stifled democracy in 1934. Here she met her future husband, the leader of the Revolutionary Socialists, Joseph Buttinger. Under the nom de guerre Mary, Muriel Gardiner worked for the anti-fascist resistance, made her two apartments and her remote holiday house in the Vienna Woods available for secret meetings and put her own life at risk both before and after the "Anschluss", by helping numerous people who were persecuted for political or racial reasons with money, loan guarantees and counterfeit passports, so they could flee.
Muriel Gardiner finished her training analysis in 1937 and continued her study of medicine. In spite of growing peril and serious harassment, she stayed in Vienna even after the "Anschluss" and was awarded the title of medical doctor in June 1938. In view of her years of underground activity she was in grave danger and, though an American and a Protestant, she was regarded by the national-socialist authorities as a "half-breed Jew". It would have been understandable for her to follow the example of many of her compatriots and leave the country without wasting too much time – both for her own protection and for her daughter’s (...). In spite of all that and against all reason, she stayed – ostensibly to finish her studies, mainly however to support her friends’ political associates. Her readiness to help others and her sympathy spread from her friends to her friends’ friends (...), till she was surrounded by countless potential victims, whose sole hope for salvation she was. (Anna Freud in the preface to Gardiner’s autobiography.) Soon after receiving her doctor’s title, she left Austria for Paris, where she married Joseph Buttinger, who had fled to Paris previously. After the war broke out in 1939 they both went to the USA, where they were active for a long time in the field of refugee support. Her husband worked in the 1950s for the benefit of Vietnam refugees and was regarded, although he did not have a degree, as one of the leading authorities on the Vietnam War. Muriel Gardiner worked as a physician, writer and psychoanalyst in the USA and became famous for her review of Sigmund Freud’s notorious case of the "wolf-man" and infantile neuroses.

In 1978 she brought out a political autobiography co-authored by Joseph Buttinger: "Damit wir nicht vergessen - Unsere Jahre 1934 bis 1947 in Wien, Paris und New York" ["Lest We Forget – Our Years 1934 through 1947 in Vienna, Paris and New York"], but it wasn’t until 1983 that she published her recollections titled "Code Name 'Mary'. Memoirs of an American Woman in the Austrian Underground." Her biography is connected in a peculiar way with that of American writer Lillian Hellman. The latter published in 1973 a volume of memoirs under the title "Pentimento", whose most famous chapter "Julia" was made into a successful motion picture featuring Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave. Without proclaiming it, the story was based on parts of Muriel Gardiner’s biography, which Hellman interspersed with fictional testimonials of her own life. This unusual case of "appropriation of biography" later became the matter of a spectacular compensation trial in the US, in which Muriel Gardiner took no part, however.

Joseph Buttinger donated his private, socio-political library consisting of some 50,000 volumes to the future library of the University of Klagenfurt, which at that point was only being planned. He became the first honorary doctor of the new university, after he had been decorated with the Groszes Goldenes Ehrenzeichen fuer Verdienste um die Republik Oesterreich [Great Golden Medal of Merit for Services Rendered to the Republic of Austria]. In 1980, Muriel Gardiner was awarded the Cross of Honour for Science and Research, First Class; a square in Vienna’s 10th district Favoriten was given in 1989 the name of Muriel-Gardiner-Buttinger-Platz.

She died in 1985 in Pennington, New Jersey, USA.

Herbert Posch