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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 as 1931 recorded that 79 percent of Jewish residents in the region spoke Yiddish as their first language).³⁴

      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. СКАЧАТЬ