Adventures in the Orgasmatron: Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex. Christopher Turner

¹ The agitators seemed hopelessly outnumbered. Disguised in tourist attire so as not to attract the attention of the secret police, they met at the train station in Vienna, where they bought third-class tickets to Pottendorf, a small village within walking distance of Wiener Neustadt. Those who couldn’t afford the fare had set off the day before on foot to walk the twenty-five miles.

      When they arrived in Pottendorf, the Social Democratic mayor of the town offered them a large dance hall in which to stay the night. His apparent generosity was a trap. At 7:00 a.m. they woke to find themselves surrounded by armed police, and they were marched to the train station at bayonet point, proudly singing the “Internationale” as they went, and were packed off back to Vienna. When they got close to the city one of their members pulled the emergency cord and Reich and his comrades jumped from the train and marched the final few miles on foot. In Baden, which also neighbored Wiener Neustadt, the secretary of the German Communist Party was arrested along with ten members of the executive committee, accused of hindering the arrival of the Heimwehr with sabotage and of trying to incite railway strikes.

      In Wiener Neustadt the majority of the population had fled in anticipation of violence, closing and shuttering stores, removing electric signs, and barricading buildings. The Red Cross had set up field tents to treat the wounded. However, the government arranged for a third of the army to be deployed there, and under the watchful eyes of military machine gunners, four batteries of light artillery, and cavalry squadrons, both rallies took place without incident, and without Reich. The Heimwehr troops, dressed in olive green knickerbockers and green bonnets that were decorated with a Tyrolese feather, paraded the black, white, and red colors of pre-1918 Imperial Germany. The organization’s shock troops, the Frontkämpfer, wore military helmets and marched with drill-like precision. Two hundred yards away, behind a police cordon, members of the Schutzbund, wearing gray-green windbreakers and peaked caps with a red flower in the band, carried the scarlet banners of socialism. A reporter for The New York Times estimated the cost of policing the operation— which involved ten thousand troops and three thousand policemen— at $1 million.

      The few Communists who did make it through attempted to distribute leaflets among the Schutzbund and “received a terrible thrashing,” according to Reich, for their revolutionary efforts.² Sixty Communists, led by Victor Stern, the Moravian member of the Czech parliament, were arrested in the town. Even if they had managed to goad the Social Democrats into violent action, it is questionable whether Reich and his comrades would have succeeded in catalyzing revolution; the better-equipped Heimwehr hoped to provoke just such a clash, which they thought would cause a government backlash and a right-wing coup d’état. A document that was stolen from the Heimwehr headquarters in Graz and leaked to the press revealed that Ignaz Seipel had advised Austrian industrialists to fund the Heimwehr, which also received money from Italian fascists, and that he had ordered the police to arm and protect the militia. The police frequently raided Schutzbund armories and confiscated weapons, which were given to the Heimwehr.

      Reich and his revolutionary friends, he later explained, were full of belief in the “inevitable collapse of capitalism” and “the immutable course of history.”³ Whenever demonstrations were announced in the Communist newspaper, The Red Flag, Reich would join them, marching with the unemployed, of which there were now one hundred thousand in Vienna, shouting “Down with capitalism” and “Freedom and bread.” On such occasions, Reich admitted to feeling guilty about his six-room apartment and the two servants he employed; he contributed a large portion of his earnings to the party in an attempt to assuage this guilt. Among the raggedly dressed masses, Reich would try to blend in by wearing a leather jacket rather than his usual, more bourgeois overcoat.

      Reich glamorized the hungry and sex-starved working class. “Thievery, drunkenness, beatings and sexual brutality all occurred frequently,” he admitted of his proletarian friends, “but in relation to the misery in which [the workers] lived, they were more decent, moral, ready to help, honest and aware than the vain, fat-stomached, high-nosed and no-good spenders and phrase-makers who could generate no trace of humanity and who were sexually far sicker, only in a less honest way.”⁴ Reich spoke about society’s sexual problems at party meetings, and promised that if the cornerstone of sexual repression was removed, the whole edifice of class submission would crumble.

      After the failed action in Wiener Neustadt, Reich tried to convert a revolutionary faction within the Social Democratic Party to communism. Reich had met some members of the Social Democratic Party’s Youth Guard who had formed a secret machine-gun division and planned to take over the inner city. This was a sign of the increasing political desperation among Social Democrats: Ignaz Seipel had initiated emergency legislation that was deliberately intended to undermine Red Vienna’s considerable social achievements, and the Social Democrats’ neutered response was frustrating to its supporters. Reich used his own money to establish what he called the Committee of Revolutionary Social Democrats; he rented a meeting hall and gave a keynote speech in which he criticized the Social Democratic leadership and tried to recruit the two thousand Social Democrats in attendance, mostly members of the Schutzbund, to his own party: “There was much shouting; the atmosphere was explosive,” he recalled.⁵

      As at Wiener Neustadt, no alliance was forged, and the Social Democrats, who felt Reich was trying to sow dissent in their ranks, stormed out of the meeting en masse. “By openly confronting the leadership with almost no support in the party except among certain discontented elements among the youth and the Schutzbund,” wrote the historian Anson Rabinbach of this riotous meeting, “Reich clearly put himself in a position that courted expulsion.”⁶ Reich was indeed expelled from the Social Democratic Party, of which he was still also a member, a month later. The witnesses against him were two committee members who claimed they did not know that the meeting was to be attended by Communists. One of them, successfully arguing against his own expulsion, said that he’d met Reich after a long stint of being unemployed and was therefore especially vulnerable to Reich’s “seductive influences.”⁷

      In The Question of Lay Analysis (1926), Freud seemed to expand on his inspirational idea of free clinics when he imagined that social workers might “mobilize a corps to give battle to the neuroses springing from our civilization.”⁸ He thought that funding such a “new Salvation Army” was a worthy philanthropic project and he urged that “some American millionaire apply part of his fortune” to it. On his return from the sanatorium to which he had been confined in Davos, Reich poured his energy into mobilizing just such a force.

      “Go ahead, just go ahead,” Reich remembered Freud saying enthusiastically when he visited him in his country retreat and asked his permission to open free psychoanalytic clinics, modeled on the Ambulatorium, on a mass scale in poorer areas of the city and suburbs. (Wilhelm Stekel and Alfred Adler had already set up their own chain of clinics, which competed with the Ambulatorium for sexually disturbed patients, and Reich’s old teacher Julius Tandler had also instituted a network of marriage guidance centers in Vienna.)⁹ “Freud agreed wholeheartedly,” Reich said. “He knew as little as I where it would lead.”¹⁰ Reich believed that sexual repression, as encouraged by the institution of the family, was not an intrinsic part of the civilizing process, as Freud maintained, but that it functioned to support the existing class structure. In The Communist Manifesto Marx had argued that one of the main tasks of the social revolution was to abolish the nuclear family. At his meeting with Freud, Reich asserted the importance he attributed to “treating the family problem vigorously.” Reich, once again a father, declared the family to be “a factory for authoritarian ideologies” that suppressed the natural sexuality of children. He spoke of it as a disease— “familitis”— and proposed that children be brought up in collectives instead. Freud warned,