Walter W. Marseille

When he published his political articles, Dr. Walter W. Marseille was said to be a Berkeley, California psychoanalyst. He published occasionally on nuclear weapons policy in the "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists", from 1954 until 1962. Details of Marseille's personal and professional life are not public knowledge. However, he did, to a small extent, describe himself to Einstein: Ralph Fox of Princeton was a good friend; the mathematician, Hans Rademacher, was his teacher 30 years before in Germany (which would have been at the University of Berlin, or possibly, if after 1922, at Hamburg); and in becoming a psychoanalyst, Ruth Mack Brunswick was his training analyst.

Walter Marseille was a pupil of Martin Heidegger with whom he doctorated in 1926 at Marburg University. Further information is given by his friend Karl Löwith. He 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. (See Löwith, "Mein Leben in Deutschland", p. 59.)

Among Marseille's professional publications is a review of a book on handwriting analysis in "Psychosomatic Medicine", 5 (1943): 317-318. He himself developed an index for the cultural rating of handwriting; it is used in Rowena Wyant, "Voting via the Senate Mailbag", "Public Opinion Quarterly", 5 (1941): 359-82. He reviewed "Fifty Years of Psychical Research" by Harry Price, "The Psychoanalytic Quarterly", 12 (1943): 124-5.

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" (1960), edited by Otto Nathan.

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 has been of concern to Russell scholars. The letter may be read in R.W. Clark's "The Life of Bertrand Russell", pp. 523–4; the latter's "Selected Letters", vol. 2, pp. 428-9; "Yours Faithfully, Bertrand Russell", pp. 204–5; "Collected Papers", vol. 28, p. 72; and it is discussed in Ray Monk's biography, vol. 2, pp. 299–303.