Wilhelm Reich: Twice Burned

Wilhelm Reich has a curious distinction: his books were burned by the Nazis in the 1930s and then by Americans in the 1950s. Born in 1897 in Austria-Hungary, Reich was a physician and a psychoanalyst of the second generation after Freud, who initially thought the youngster a wunderkind. Reich went on to author influential books such as The Function of the Orgasm (1927) and The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), which argued that fascism emerged out of sexual repression. As sex-radical psychoanalyst, anti-fascist, communist, and someone of Jewish parentage (he didn’t identify as Jewish), he would have been on multiple Nazi enemies-lists. The Nazis burnt his books, but he escaped to Norway in 1934.

Reich was one of some 40,000 Germans stripped of their citizenship by the Nazis for emigrating. (Reich was considered a German after the German takeover of Austria in 1938.) Scholars Philip W. Bennett and Andreas Peglau use Reich as a case study of the Nazi denaturalization process, which they call both “ideological and economic”; ex-Germans could have property legally seized. Reich’s German citizenship was revoked at the end of 1939, making him stateless until 1946, when he became a naturalized US citizen.

The FBI opened a file on Reich as soon after he arrived in the US in August 1939. Bennett and Peglau write that the FBI’s investigation of Reich “bears remarkable similarities to the Nazi’s case against him.” In both investigations, “rumors spread by anonymous sources played a key role, and both were motivated by anticommunism.” As a result, when the US entered the war against Germany, the famously anti-Nazi Reich was rounded up as a “German enemy alien” among 16,000 others so deemed.

Bennett and Peglau argue that the “Gestapo’s decision to denaturalize Reich made the FBI’s actions illegal. Wilhelm Reich could not be detailed as an enemy alien, since he was not a German when the United States declared war on Germany.”

“The irrationality of my arrest makes me feel bitter and helpless,” wrote Reich a week into his confinement on Ellis Island. His detention there lasted nearly a month. As one of the most forceful opponents of Nazism, he feared for his life among the actual Nazis also detained on the island. Though he was released—authorities claimed they mistook him for another Wilhelm Reich—he remained on the priority list of the Enemy Alien Control Unit.

Reich’s subsequent career was, to use the parlance of the Sixties he influenced so much, “far out.” Reich believed there was a cosmic life-force he called orgone energy. The name came “orgasm” and “organism”: it was the power of universal libido. He built versions of Faraday cages, which block some electromagnetic waves, first for mice and then for people, and called them “orgone accumulators.” Claiming all sorts of health benefits for these accumulators, Reich marketed them.

In 1947, following media exposes, the FDA obtained an injunction against the interstate shipment of Reich’s accumulators. The injunction also included literature associated with the devices. In 1956, Reich was charged with contempt for violating the injunction and sentenced to two years in prison. The court also ordered that Reich’s orgone-related publications be suppressed. Some six tons of his writings were burned by the US government as a result. Since he’d written about orgone in his new introduction to his classic works, like The Mass Psychology of Fascism, copies of these were included in the burning as well.

This seems to have been the only federal government-sanctioned book burning in US history. Publisher Roger Straus called it “one of the most heinous acts of censorship in US history,” and in response, his firm, now Farrar, Straus and Giroux, brought all of Reich’s published work back into print starting in 1960. Reich himself didn’t live to see this; he died of a heart failure in his prison bed in 1957 at the age of sixty. But as the man who coined the phrase “sexual revolution,” Reich became a posthumous liberating spirit of the Sixties. Reich’s critique of sexual repression was a mainstay of the counterculture, orgone boxes were a fad, and “Reichian” an adjective.

While Reich’s “orgonomy” and the “cloudbusters” he wielded in “Cosmic Orgone Engineering” and battling UFOs were off-the-charts pseudoscience, his early notions of sexual repression, especially its costs for women (his mother killed herself to escape her abusive husband), remain relevant today, as do the disturbingly parallel efforts to suppress his works.

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