Certainly the Nazis’ public health campaign was admirable, yet cancer became, in Hitler’s view, a symptom of everything that was wrong with modernity; by extension of his racist logic, Jews were converted into the embodiment of the disease, castigated as alien and cancerous tumors in the otherwise healthy Aryan body politic. In 1936 one SS radiologist gave lectures that included a slide depicting radium rays as Nazi storm troopers attacking hook-nosed cancer cells.
In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich had brilliantly diagnosed the way the Nazis exploited the irrational fear of syphilis for anti-Semitic and politically opportunistic purposes. Five years later, however, Reich was not able to see that the Nazis were exploiting cancer for the same purpose, or that he shared their rhetoric. Reich believed Nazism was spreading cancer, just as the Nazis believed the Jews were—they accused each other of the same thing. In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag made the point that “although he perceived sexual and political phobias being projected onto a disease in the grisly harping on syphilis in Mein Kampf, it never occurs to Reich how much was being projected in his own persistent use of cancer as a metaphor for the ills of the modern era.” Cancer was, Sontag wrote, a particularly flexible metaphor with which to charge that society was in danger, one that Hitler and Reich shared: it was “a good metaphor for paranoids, for those who need to turn campaigns into crusades.”91
The fight against cancer not only offered Reich—theoretically—a weapon against fascism, it was also aligned with his own individual psychology. While in Norway, Reich considered going into therapy with his pupil, Ola Raknes, thinking Raknes might cure him of his excessive dependency on Freud. It is tempting to interpret his search for a cancer cure as yet another way of trying to get closer to his mentor; it is notable that he thought the disease had struck him in the same place it had Freud, on the right jaw. Reich once remarked that his interest in finding a solution to the cancer problem stemmed from seeing Freud afflicted with the illness, with which he was diagnosed in 1923.
Reich thought that Freud had developed cancer as a direct result of his sexual stasis, rather than his habit of smoking a box of cigars a day: “[Freud] lived a very calm, quiet, decent family life, but there is little doubt that he was very much dissatisfied genitally,” Reich told Kurt Eissler in 1952. “Both his resignation and his cancer were evidence of that. Freud had to give up, as a person. He had to give up his personal pleasures, his personal delights, in his middle years…If my view of cancer is correct, you just give up, you resign—and then, you shrink.” Freud was “very beautiful…when he spoke,” Reich said. “Then it hit him just here, in the mouth. And that is where my interest in cancer began.”92
Freud himself implied a link between an improvement in his cancerous jaw and his renewed sexual health. Freud told the sexologist Harry Benjamin that he had undergone a “Steinach operation” the year he found out he had cancer, a then-popular vasectomy procedure that was thought to increase one’s sex drive and make one look and feel years younger by stimulating the production of hormone-producing Leydig cells (W. B. Yeats described the result of his operation as “a strange second puberty”). Freud thought his vasectomy had increased his vitality and helped his cancer of the jaw.
With Europe on the brink of war and his mentor dying in London, forbidden from teaching or practicing in Norway, and afraid to go out in public, Reich isolated himself in his laboratory. It was there in January 1939 that he made a discovery he believed to be as dramatic as that of radium. One of his assistants heated a culture containing ocean sand by mistake; Reich thought that the resulting “sand packet bions”—or “SAPA-bions,” as he called them—glowed much more strongly than the blue forms he’d observed in his original bouillon. When he looked at these new cultures through his microscope “daily for several hours” he got severe conjunctivitis, which suggested to him that they were emitting radiation. When he held the slide to his wrist, he observed that the SAPA-bions caused a reddening irritation of the skin even through the quartz glass, which seemed to confirm this power. This also happened to his more suggestible friends, the loyal supporters who had not yet deserted him. Reich said of this skin test, “Those among them who were vegetatively strongly mobile regularly gave a strong positive result; those with less emotional mobility reacted only slightly or not at all.”93
In 1901 Pierre and Marie Curie had observed the same burning phenomenon when exposed to radioactive materials. (Reich no doubt empathized with the dedicated, humble, underfunded, and institutionally unrecognized work that lead to their Nobel Prize–winning discovery: Eve Curie’s biography of her mother, which created this romantic portrait, was published in 1937.) Reich therefore concluded that the SAPA-bions were emitting a radiumlike energy, and supposed that they could have a similarly powerful curative and paralyzing effect on cancer cells. In his journal he wrote the grandiose claim that he’d succeeded in freeing the solar energy that the sand had absorbed. He called this radiation “orgone”: it was a sexual energy, named in acknowledgment of the role the orgasm played in its discovery. “I yearn for a beautiful woman with no sexual anxieties who will just take me!” Reich wrote soon after his forty-second birthday. “Have inhaled too much orgone radiation.”94
Reich began injecting himself with cultures of SAPA-bions as a remedy for the growth on his cheek that he thought might be cancerous. He also held a test tube of the bions against his skin for several minutes at a time to clean up patches of psoriasis. Reich would then anxiously examine his “scales,” as he referred to his flaky skin, under a microscope, looking for evidence of deadly cancer cells. The growth miraculously seemed to disappear. An “erosion on the left side of his tongue” apparently also cleared up in the same way. Reich was so sure his treatment worked that he persuaded three of his female followers to experiment with inserting test tubes filled with the SAPA-bions into their vaginas as a security against cervical cancer.
A radium physicist at the Cancer Hospital in Oslo was persuaded to test a culture with an electroscope. He got no reaction and concluded that the SAPA-bions weren’t at all radioactive. A scientist at Niels Bohr’s Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen declared Reich’s claims to be “fantastic”; in January 1939 Bohr was in Washington, where he reported on a successful uranium fission experiment in Germany and raised the possibility of an atomic bomb. Reich, not keen to invite more criticism and questions about his sanity, dismissed the idea of further consultations with experts: “I preferred not to expose my new discovery to a kind of investigation which was biased by disbelief on principle.”95
“The final solution to the cancer problem” would be—if he could work out a way to fashion it—a thing he now termed an “orgone accumulator,” Reich wrote in his diary.96 He retreated to his basement, where he made a copper Faraday cage filled with SAPA-bion cultures. He thought the metal structure would amplify their power. He sat inside it.
Reich reported that he felt a “curious heaviness” when he spent even as little as ten minutes in the cage. When his eyes slowly adapted to the dark, the room appeared gray-blue, with “fog-like formations and bluish dots and lines of light. Violet light phenomena seemed to emanate from the walls.”97 His mind seemed once again to be unfurling. Reich admitted that when he closed his eyes the “surging and seething” continued, which would suggest he was having hallucinations, but he convinced himself the visions were real because they seemed to get larger and more intense when he held a magnifying glass to his eyes, and darkened when he put on the sunglasses that had been prescribed for his conjunctivitis.98 He drew pictures of the rhythmic pulsation and spiraling flight paths of these “ghostly” apparitions, which illustrate his book on the discovery of the orgone.
One evening Reich spent five hours naked in this subterranean space; he started to see a blue vapor emanating from his body. “I’m radiating at the hands, palms, and fingertips, at the penis…” he wrote in his diary. “Madame Curie may have died of it. I must not go to pieces. But I’m radiating.”99 E
rik Erikson claimed that when he visited Reich in Denmark in 1934, Reich told him that he’d seen a blue light being transmitted when he watched two people having intercourse.100
Reich’s long periods of self-imposed subterranean isolation, where he sat locked in his iron cage, are testament to his increasing alienation; his diary is full of references to his loneliness. After several years together, Reich had separated from Elsa Lindenberg. When she was out late one night, supposedly rehearsing a routine with her pianist at the National Theater, Reich suspected her of having an affair, all the more painful because they’d just decided to have a child together. He turned up at the man’s house unannounced and caused a scene (whether he was being paranoid or not is unclear: “She had taken her diaphragm along!” Reich noted in his journal).101 He ridiculed Lindenberg’s dancing, which he had previously so respected—she should be helping him with his more important work, he shouted—and he threatened to punch the composer in the face. He stormed out, knocking over some chairs and smashing a mirror. It didn’t matter that Reich had had several affairs himself; he handled his jealousy by immediately sleeping with a prostitute, oblivious to his double standard (“Sex must be free and unencumbered,” he wrote in his diary the next day). Lindenberg moved out after the fight.
Reich was waiting for an American visa that his former pupils in America had helped him secure, and also for the Norwegian alien’s passport that he needed in order to leave Europe. The German embassy had issued him a passport in the name of Wilhelm Israel Reich—Israel wasn’t his middle name—and stamped it “JEW.” When he begged Lindenberg to emigrate to America with him, she declined—“It was the hardest ‘no’ I ever had to say,” she later said.102 “I know what Elsa must have gone through in those days,” Ilse Ollendorff wrote in her biography of her husband, “because 15 years later I went through the same experience. No matter how much love, devotion and understanding one might bring to the situation, there was a point when it became a question of life or death, a matter of retaining one’s own integrity and individuality or submitting completely to Reich.”103
“He was aware of his gifts and he knew that he had an outstanding contribution to make,” Lindenberg remembered of her final days with Reich. But, she continued,
he was also afraid for himself, afraid of where his developments might take him. At times he believed that he would achieve fame and recognition in his lifetime; in other moods he feared that it would go “kaput,” that his life would end tragically in one way or another. Sometimes at night when he couldn’t sleep he would speak to me about his fears, including the fear that he might go mad. He also spoke to me about his guilt over feeling responsible for his mother’s death.104
America
Six
On a hot and humid day at the end of August 1939, the SS Stavangerfjord arrived in New York. Walter Briehl and Theodore Wolfe came to meet it, and waited for Wilhelm Reich to walk down the gangplank. Wolfe, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, had visited Reich in Norway for vegetotherapy, but Briehl had not seen Reich since he studied under him in Berlin in the early 1930s. Briehl noticed that Reich had put on weight over the intervening decade and, even though tanned from the nine-day crossing, looked weary and depressed. Reich’s mood is reflected in his laconic diary entry of that day. In contrast to many émigrés’ lyrical descriptions of the splendors of the skyscraper city, Reich simply wrote, “Uneventful arrival in New York. Children in the country. Gertrud [Gaasland] is well.”1
In an attempt to lift Reich’s spirits, Briehl took him to jazz clubs in Harlem, to see the neon lights in Times Square, and on a picnic to Jones Beach. Reich was impressed by New York’s ethnic mix and apparent egalitarianism—“New York is a real city,” he wrote in his diary after two days’ exploration. He elaborated in a letter to Elsa Lindenberg: “New York is huge and totally different from Berlin, simpler and more impressive. People are quiet, not rushed, as I expected; they are friendly and courteous; in a word, they are not yet disappointed and corrupted.”2
Reich’s hope was that he would be granted a fresh start in the United States, and that his ideas about sex and politics would be embraced there. Briehl and Wolfe had personally put up the five thousand dollars needed to guarantee Reich’s visa, and had arranged for him to teach a course called “Biological Aspects of Character Formation” at the New School for Social Research, which offered Reich a much-longed-for academic affiliation. The affidavits they’d provided to the Immigration and Naturalization Service were laudatory to the point of hyperbole—they declared Reich the inventor of a therapy that would revolutionize the world and hailed him as a new Pasteur. Having been on the intellectual fringes in Europe, Reich was now a colleague of the scholarly elite: nearly two hundred European academics—including Hannah Arendt, Bronislaw Malinowski, Erich Fromm, and Leo Strauss—had sought refuge from Nazism at the New School, which was known as the “University in Exile.”
Reich rented a large ivy-clad, Lutyens-style house with a ski jump of a roof in Forest Hills, Queens. It was a wealthy, leafy suburb half an hour from the center of the city that appealed to the nostalgia of many émigrés because it resembled certain suburbs of Vienna and Berlin. He put up a picture of Elsa Lindenberg on his study wall between photographs of his mother and Freud, and imagined, as he wrote to Elsa in a letter, that she might walk in at any moment.
Reich’s house was only a short walk from Flushing Meadow Park, the 1,200-acre site of the 1939 World’s Fair. Attended by 45 million people, the fair was dedicated to “The World of Tomorrow”; visitors could take a simulated rocket trip to London, be televised on one of the first-ever small screens, and watch a seven-foot golden robot called Elektro as it walked, told jokes, and smoked cigarettes. America was emerging from the Great Depression, and Roosevelt’s anti-business policies, with its attacks on monopoly power and endorsement of strikes, was thought by many businessmen to be slowing recovery. The large corporations that contributed to the fair sought to represent themselves, rather than a paternalistic government, as the confident custodians of the future. One of the fair’s attractions symbolized this hoped-for convergence of citizen and consumer: a monumental cash register the size of a three-story house.
There was no German pavilion in Flushing, but there was a Czechoslovak one—it stood unfinished as a reminder of the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia that March. A “Freedom Pavilion” that would highlight the plight of all those whom Hitler had exiled had been proposed but was never built. When he opened the fair, President Roosevelt delivered what the Herald Tribune called “a polite but pointed lecture to Chancellor Adolf Hitler on the advisability of peaceful co-operation among nations.”3 Like many of his European peers, Reich held President Roosevelt in extremely high regard (Thomas Mann enthusiastically described the president as “a match for the dictators of Europe”).4 Roosevelt was, according to the historian Anthony Heilbut, virtually canonized by refugees who generally regarded themselves as instinctive skeptics.
Roosevelt’s domestic enemies on the right represented the New Deal as a breeding ground for radicals and Communists. Many on the left asked whether the New Deal was Roosevelt’s solution to fascism or a sign of contamination by it. Nazi propaganda portrayed Roosevelt as an authoritarian leader who was following a trail Hitler had blazed. In November 1940, Reich wrote to a shocked A. S. Neill: “I feel myself completely confused and inclined to revise most of the things I learnt in Europe about what socialism should be. If you hear socialists and communists who have come over here claiming that Roosevelt is a dictator or fascist, then your stomach turns around. I have started to hate them.” Reich thought Roosevelt had “done more in the field of social security than any communist in Russia would dream of getting.”5
Since Hitler’s takeover in 1933, America’s most famous German émigré, Albert Einstein, had been living in Princeton, where an institute had been set up in his honor. He also gave a short talk at the World’s Fair on its opening day. In a heavy German accent, Einstein spo
ke for five minutes about cosmic rays, subatomic particles that bombard the earth with energy. It was promised that at the end of Einstein’s presentation ten rays from outer space would be harnessed by a device in the Hayden Planetarium, but when the great physicist switched on what should have been a dramatic light display, the electrics overloaded and the power failed.
The most popular attraction at the fair was Futurama, which had hour-long queues up the spiraling ramp to the tall, narrow cleft that served as an entrance. Inside, visitors stepped onto a moving platform and sat on pewlike seats before being taken on a gentle roller coaster ride over a utopian vision of 1960s America: “You somehow get an almost perfect illusion of flying,” The New Yorker reported.6 A loudspeaker built into the winged headrest of each seat boomed, “All eyes to the future!” as people were launched out over what was claimed to be the largest model ever built, a monumental landscape punctuated by glass domes, elevated walkways, revolving airports, and clusters of skyscrapers, all crisscrossed with seven-lane super-highways (Futurama was sponsored by General Motors). “Atomic energy,” the ride’s relentlessly optimistic narrator told the time travelers, “is being used cautiously.”7
One can imagine Reich, a newcomer to America, looking down over Futurama’s idealized United States, enraptured by the utopia depicted and daydreaming of the people who might inhabit it. (He visited the World’s Fair at least three times.) Did he imagine it to be neurosis and disease-free, populated by the sexually liberated? What did he make of cosmic and atomic rays, which must have seemed to him no more likely to power the future than the orgone energy he’d discovered? As the ride ended, the train deposited visitors on a full-scale mock-up of an imagined metropolitan street intersection in two decades’ time. Suddenly, it was the spring of 1960: the dawn of a decade that would be propelled by the aftershocks of Reich’s ideas, in ways no one in 1939 could have guessed. As people stepped off the moving platform, they were handed a blue and white lapel pin that boasted I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE.
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