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Illustrated portrait of Dr. Dohmler

A character in Tender Is the Night

Dr. Dohmler

The old head of Nicole's clinic on the Zürichsee — the one man in the book who can make Nicole's father tell the truth, and who tells Dick Diver to choose.

What they want

The truth first, then a workable reality built around it — and the doctor–patient boundary held while that happens.

The book

Cover of Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the NightF. Scott Fitzgerald, 1934

The Riviera at its most enchanted, and the marriage underneath it — nine years after Gatsby, the deeper, sadder masterpiece.

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At a glance

In the book
Head physician and founder of the clinic on the Zürichsee
Founded the clinic
Ten years before the flashback — the first modern clinic for mental illness of its kind
Known for
Getting the truth out of Devereux Warren by telephone and patience
Working with
Franz Gregorovius, who brings him the Warren case
Where he appears
The 1917 Zurich flashback only
The real person
A composite — most often associated with Eugen Bleuler and with Auguste Forel, the elder of the two Forels · Bleuler 1857–1939; Auguste Forel 1848–1931 · Zollikon and Morges, Switzerland

Who they are in the book

Spoiler-free

Professor Dohmler founded his clinic ten years before the novel's flashback: three old buildings and a pair of new ones between a slight rise and the shore of the lake, the first modern clinic of its kind. The book draws him as very old and very dry — Warren talks at 'the dried old package of Doctor Dohmler' — with a face beautiful under straight whiskers, like a vine-overgrown veranda of some fine old house, and chink-like eyes. Dick knows individuals with more talent and no one of a class qualitatively superior.

His method is patience. He tells Warren to start at the beginning and tell him everything, and then waits. He notices the tears and, a beat later, the whiskey on the breath, and spends the rest of the interview wondering what the man is lying about, or what falsity is pervading the whole room. When Warren fails to return, Dohmler writes, and then does what was in those days a folly and telephones the Grand Hotel at Vevey. Reminded that the forty Swiss francs will show up on the clinic books, he presses anyway.

How Dr. Dohmler Is Portrayed

Appearance, manner, and tone — as the book sketches them, in our words.

  • Authority without charmHe has none of Dick's gifts and needs none of them. He listens, waits, and presses until the account across the desk stops holding together.
  • The valetTold that the trouble began with an idea Nicole got about a valet, he nods his venerable head as if, like Sherlock Holmes, he had expected a valet and only a valet to be introduced at exactly that point.
  • Money is no objectWarren offers it as reassurance. Dohmler agrees, dryly, that it certainly is not, and goes on with the questions.
  • The diagnosisEntered on the card in French with his colleague Franz Gregorovius: an acute and declining phase, the prognosis reserved — and the clinical insistence that her fear of men is a symptom of the illness and not at all constitutional.
  • It is a professional situationHis climax, delivered quietly rather than shouted. He raises himself like a legless man mounting a pair of crutches, cries it, then sighs himself back into the chair and waits for the reverberation to die out of the room.
  • The choice offeredHe proposes that the transference must be terminated: either Dick goes away, or Miss Warren is sent away. He also asks, laughing on the last syllable, whether Dick has got sentimentally involved himself.
Their ending, and the commentary — spoilers aheadHow the book leaves them, what happened after, and what the record says. Open when you're ready.

He does not last. The image is set into the scene itself, before the conversation has even finished, so that the reader is told the outcome while the advice is still being given.

The problem he identified becomes the architecture of the whole novel. Dick cannot indefinitely be Nicole's physician, rescuer, husband, and emotional foundation at once, and Dohmler is the only person with the standing to insist on it. With him gone, nobody says it again for fifteen years, and by then it is Kaethe Gregorovius saying it about the drinking.

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