Adventures in the Orgasmatron: Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex. Christopher Turner
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According to the historian Anson Rabinbach, although the Orthodox Galician Jews formed a small fraction of the 200,000 Jews in Vienna, they were especially prominent in their long black silk caftans and broad-brimmed hats and became scapegoats for preexisting resentments: “No one had any use for this army of impoverished peddlers,” Rabinbach writes, “[and] their presence in Vienna was exaggerated in the upsurge of an already established anti-semitism.”35 It is sometimes forgotten that anti-Semitism in Austria predated fascism; indeed, Hitler, an Austrian, learned much of his hatred of the Jews from Karl Lueger, founder of the Christian Social Party, who was mayor of Vienna when Hitler lived there as a struggling artist from 1908 to 1913. As early as 1916, Vienna was so inundated with Jewish refugees that some Viennese were calling for special camps to be established in Moravia to house them.
There had been little anti-Semitism in Bukovina when Reich was growing up— more than a third of the 800,000-strong population in the province’s capital, Czernowitz, where he went to school, was Jewish— but, in Vienna, Reich witnessed thugs harassing and beating up his Jewish classmates.36 He claimed that because he himself didn’t look like a stereotypical Jew, he was able to walk down the steps of the Vienna Anatomical Institute “amidst howling crowds of nationalistic students” without eliciting their racist taunts.37
When Martin Freud returned to Vienna in August 1919, after spending six months bulking up on spaghetti and risotto in an Italian prisoner-of-war camp on the Riviera, he was struck by the atmosphere of simmering violence, vandalism, and disorder in his home city. There were frequent street protests against the desperate food and housing shortages, demonstrations that were often accompanied by the looting of shops and cafés in the city center. He was shocked when he saw someone rip down a curtain in a train and pocket it, in full view of the other passengers and without shame, something that would have been unimaginable before the war; and the leather straps on the carriage windows had all been cut off so that people could repair their shoes. Inflation meant that the money he’d saved in his four years of military service was now no longer enough to pay a Viennese cobbler to mend his own boots, he wrote in his memoir. Money, Stefan Zweig put it, “melted like snow in one’s hands.”38 “This inflation, so devastating to the foundations of middle-class life, was bad enough,” Martin Freud complained, “but the sense of insecurity, caused by an absence of discipline which permitted the mob to get out of hand, was the hardest to bear.”39
In 1919 there were uprisings in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Germany, and Hungary, where Béla Kun’s Communist government held power for one hundred violent days. Many in Vienna thought that the Russian Revolution would have a domino effect throughout Europe. In Vienna, Martin Freud felt that he was observing an almost carnivalesque inversion of social hierarchy: “At my return one could still hear hooligans fearlessly singing in the Vienna streets: ‘Who will now sweep the streets? The noble gentlemen with the golden stars [military decorations] will now sweep the streets.’ Ex-officers like myself found it wisest to wear a scarf over their golden stars or risk having them torn off, and not too gently.”40
However, in Austria, neither the Social Democrats, who had won the majority of the vote in the first national elections in February 1919, nor the conservative Christian Social Party (and Pan-Germans) wanted a Bolshevik state. The Social Democrats planned a peaceful and democratic social revolution, and the backward-looking Christian Social Party were committed, at least initially, to the restoration of the monarchy. In an atmosphere of deprivation and near anarchy, the two main parties formed an awkward coalition in which Social Democrat politicians held almost all the key positions, putting aside their differences in order to prevent civil war or complete national collapse. With the real threat of a popular uprising, the Christian Social Party was particularly dependent on the Social Democrats to curb the threat of the sizable workers’ and soldiers’ councils, which wielded power over the unemployed and the demobilized military, and thereby to prevent the Communists from exploiting the dissatisfied and revolutionary mood.
In April 1919, the newly formed Austrian Communist Party organized a demonstration in front of Parliament and attempted a putsch. The Communist Party had only three thousand members at that time, and even though a few of the agitators had rifles, most were armed just with lumps of coal, and were easily crushed by the police. The majority of the workers identified more with the Social Democrats, and the Communist Party membership slumped after this unsuccessful action.
The Christian Social Party assumed a tough and popular stance against what they considered the Bolshevist menace, which they largely attributed to Jews, and they made substantial gains in the 1920 elections. When they assumed power that year, their nineteen-month coalition with the Social Democrats ended, and the Social Democratic Party never regained power at the national level. However, the Social Democrats still had a stronghold in Vienna, where they won 54 percent of the vote in 1919 and formed the first Socialist administration to run a major capital. Red Vienna, as the city they transformed with their social projects came to be called, became an isolated laboratory for their brand of left-wing socialism, and a fertile ground for the politically engaged expansion of psychoanalysis.
In the flux of postwar Vienna, Freud, who also had little sympathy for communism, threw in his lot with the Social Democrats. The party’s leader and the country’s first foreign secretary was the Marxist mathematician Otto Bauer, the brother of the patient Freud wrote about as Dora, his most famous case history. Victor Adler, a physician and one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party, had lived in the apartment now inhabited by Freud, and Freud had once visited him there. Freud admitted that he had thought at one time of becoming a politician himself, claiming that his school friend Heinrich Braun, a prominent Socialist in later life, “awakened a multitude of revolutionary trends in me.”41 Freud used whatever influence he had to help Socialist politicians like Julius Tandler, Reich’s anatomy teacher, who as undersecretary of state for public health in the coalition government and then as city welfare councillor for Vienna applied his much-needed surgical expertise to Austria’s body politic, developing programs for child welfare, recreation, and the control of infectious diseases.
“We related to him as a teacher,” Reich said of Tandler, “not as a socialist . . . Everybody was totally taken up with his own studies, and keeping alive as best he could.”42 Reich’s apparent indifference to politics was perhaps understandable, considering the more immediate concerns in Vienna at the time; he was so malnourished that he collapsed from hunger during one of Tandler’s lectures. It was only later that Reich would absorb the lesson from Tandler that academics, and in particular medics, could bring about real social change.
As a student, Reich shared an unheated, erratically lit room with his eighteen-year-old younger brother, Robert, of whom he was now sole guardian, and another undergraduate who sometimes received care packages from his mother, which made Reich feel jealous and homesick. A friend of Reich’s recalled seeing a note pinned to the icebox by the brothers’ flatmate that read, “Willie, I left a dish of potatoes, but don’t eat them all, leave some for Robert.”43 Their room was so cold that Reich had to wear gloves and his military overcoat indoors, and even then he developed frostbite on his fingers. (It wasn’t just students who suffered; Freud was no better off. He had to wear an overcoat and thick gloves as he worked in his unheated study, where his ink froze, and he accepted payment in potatoes from the patients he treated.)
Reich’s future sister-in-law, Ottilie Reich Heifetz, remembers Reich’s mood at this time as “open, lost, hungry for affection as well as food.”44 Reich and his brother were sent the occasional precious ten dollars by an aunt who lived in the United States, and his father’s