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

²⁴) Austria, mired in war debt, was severed from its surrounding empire and, as a result, lost 80 percent of its industry and much of its trade and natural resources to its successor states. Freud’s eldest son, Martin, who had read law at the University of Vienna before the war and who, like Reich, had served on the Italian front, noted in his autobiography that the end of hostilities saw thousands of lawyers suddenly unemployed. Austria-Hungary’s huge bureaucracy (satirized by Kafka) crumbled and left few contracts for Austrian lawyers to draw up.

      The 261,000-square-mile-dominion some called the “China of Europe,” which encompassed eleven countries, fourteen different languages, and fifty-two million inhabitants, was dismantled, cut down to an eighth of its prewar size. Postwar Austria was now just a “truncated torso,” as Freud called it, compared to its former self, cut off from its major sources of coal, oil, and food. Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Hungary were created out of the ruins, and Italy, Poland, and Romania laid claim to huge chunks of territory. Reich’s birthplace in Galicia, the poorest and largest province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his childhood home in Bukovina, also on the eastern border of the empire— places to which he’d never return— were now parts of Poland and the Ukraine, respectively. “More or less the whole world,” Freud complained from his apartment in the former imperial city, “will become foreign territory.”²⁵

      The Republic of German Austria was proclaimed on November 12 , 1918, the day after the Armistice. The name of the nascent state reflected the popular desire for annexation to Germany, but the Entente powers, preparing to meet in Versailles the following year to discuss the terms of peace, forbade this strategy of reenlargement for fear of restrengthening Germany, preferring a policy of divide and rule. (The then-popular idea of Anschluss— merging with Germany— would, of course, be realized by Hitler under different circumstances twenty years later.) Freud never forgave President Woodrow Wilson for carving up the map of Europe forever, guaranteeing self-determination to Austria-Hungary’s “captive peoples” in his famous fourteen-point plan for peace, while reneging on his other promises. In 1930 Freud cooperated with William Bullitt— a former ambassador to Russia who had once been a patient of his and who had resigned in protest from the American delegation at Versailles— on a book-length character assassination of the ex-president; they accused Wilson of having a “Christ complex” and of suffering a complete “moral collapse” at the peace conference. (The book, which attempts to psychoanalyze someone Freud never met, is widely thought to be Freud’s flimsiest work, so much so that many orthodox Freudians have tried to deny the extent of Freud’s involvement with it and it is omitted from the standard edition of his writings.)

      Hoping for greater concessions at Versailles, Austrian politicians declared that their bankrupt nation was lebensunfähig, not viable on its own, a notion that served only to cement a national lack of confidence. As Freud bluntly put it in a misanthropic letter to his colleague Sándor Ferenczi, the Habsburgs had “left behind nothing but a pile of crap.”²⁶ The population of Vienna was half starved, Freud explained to his Welsh disciple Ernest Jones, reduced to the position of “hungry beggars.”²⁷ Jones visited Freud in late September of that year and was struck by the sight of Vienna’s skinny citizens and ragged dogs. He took a gaunt Freud out to dinner with some other analysts: “It was moving to see what an experience a proper meal seemed to mean to them,” Jones wrote.²⁸

      “It was in the great hunger winter of 1918,” Reich recalled of his arrival in the city, “an eighth of a loaf of bread for a whole week, with no meat or milk or butter.”²⁹ The official rations were so paltry that in order to survive, people supplemented them by purchasing on the black market, where they were at the mercy of tough profiteers. Reich lived off a monotonous diet of oatmeal, watery soup, and dried fruit served in the student canteen, where he had to queue for up to two hours every day. He got a piece of jam cake every Sunday. Others weren’t so lucky. In November 1918, the International Herald Tribune reported on the appalling conditions in Vienna from one of the city’s numerous soup kitchens, each of which fed about six thousand people a day:

      Each person receives half a litre of soup daily. The soup is made from rotten cabbage and flour. On Sundays a small portion of horse-flesh is dropped into the soup. I have a sample of the flour beside me. It looks like sand, but a closer inspection reveals a quantity of sawdust which it contains. All these human wrecks, with their bones protruding through their skin, exist on this soup. Hundreds die daily and are buried in paper coffins, because wood must be used for [cooking] food.³⁰

      Until 1920, when the Inter-Allied Commission on Relief of German Austria took over the distribution of food and prevented famine, conditions only got worse: it would be five years before Schlagober, fresh whipped cream, reappeared in the city’s cafés. On top of the shortages of food, there was a dearth of fuel, homes, and jobs. To cause even greater devastation, that October the influenza virus reached Vienna, killing tens of thousands, mostly within three days of their being infected (the virus would ultimately kill more people worldwide than had died in the war itself ). Freud lost his daughter Sophie to the flu.

      Before the war, Vienna had been the most sophisticated, multi-cultural, modern, and decadent of cities— the so-called City of Dreams. The capital of glamour, hedonism, and experimentation was embodied in the ornate, highly decorative style of the Viennese Secession, in the paintings of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka. While the avant-garde gave expression to the city’s excesses, beneath the opulence there was a sense of sturdiness and certainty. The Viennese novelist Stefan Zweig described the prewar “golden age of security” in which he grew up as characterized by a sense of permanence, duty, stability, and optimistic belief in technology and progress. “The nineteenth century was honestly convinced,” he wrote in his autobiography, The World of Yesterday, “that it was on the straight and unfailing path towards being the best of all worlds.”³¹ However, the First World War, which resulted in the deaths of 10 million people (1.2 million of them from Austria-Hungary), dispelled this delusion, leaving behind a spiritually crushed and apathetic populace.

      “We of the new generation,” Zweig wrote, speaking for the survivors, “who have learned not to be surprised by any outbreak of bestiality, we who each new day expect things worse than the day before, are markedly more skeptical about a possible moral improvement of our culture . . . We have had to accustom ourselves gradually to living without the ground beneath our feet, without justice, without freedom, without security.”³² Freud, who wrote about the thin layer of ice that insulated civilization from an ever-present destructive force, became the spokesman for this dejected generation. “He enlarged the sincerity of the universe,” Zweig wrote in praise of his friend.³³

      The Vienna that Reich first encountered was a ghost of its sumptuous past; it was now a huge poorhouse, full of itinerant soldiers returning from the battlefields and homeless beggars who had drifted in from the provinces. With agricultural production at half its prewar levels, and with Czech, Yugoslav, and Hungarian food blockades in place, a starving rural population emigrated to the city, leading to severe overcrowding and unsanitary conditions; a third of Austria’s population crowded together in the faded grandeur of the capital.

      Twenty-five thousand of Reich’s fellow Galician Jews were among these new arrivals to Vienna. Though he shared their provincial roots, Reich didn’t identify with this group. He recalled that when he was a child, his grandfather pretended to fast at Passover— Reich was once sent to the local temple to fetch him for dinner, and indiscreetly shouted out his message— but his own family didn’t even feign observance of Jewish customs. He was raised in a secular, German-speaking household, and his father, who thought assimilation was the key to social advancement, used to punish him for using Yiddish expressions (a census report from as late