The Student Who Went Too Far
In 1927, Wilhelm Reich was one of the most promising figures in Vienna’s psychoanalytic circle, a man Sigmund Freud once called a “wunderkind.” That year Reich published The Function of the Orgasm, arguing that repressed sexuality lay at the root of most psychological disorder. In 1933, he went further: The Mass Psychology of Fascism argued that authoritarian family structures trained children into sexual repression, producing the obedient, fearful adults fascist movements needed.
The book made enemies on two fronts. The Nazi party, consolidating power that same year, had no use for a psychoanalyst tracing its appeal to sexual repression. Freud’s own circle, growing uneasy with Reich’s politics and direction, was pulling away from him too.
Burned Once, Then Erased
At some point in the 1930s, Nazi authorities burned Reich’s books as part of broader purges of politically suspect writing. He had already fled to Norway in 1934, but exile did not settle his legal standing. Germany annexed Austria in 1938 and reclassified Reich, Austrian by birth, as a German national. At the end of 1939 that same government stripped him of his citizenship outright, one of roughly 40,000 emigrants denaturalized by decree, a program scholars describe as both ideological and economic in intent. Statelessness meant no passport and no government obligated to protect him. He carried that status when he sailed for the United States in August 1939.
An Enemy Alien Who Wasn’t
The FBI opened a file on Reich shortly after he arrived, drawing renewed attention in December 1941, days after Germany declared war on the United States. Reich was arrested as a German enemy alien and held at Ellis Island for somewhere between three weeks and nearly a month; accounts differ on the exact length. A week into his confinement, he wrote that “the irrationality of my arrest” left him “bitter and helpless.” He was held alongside genuine Nazi sympathizers and reportedly feared for his safety among them.
Historians Philip W. Bennett and Andreas Peglau point to the legal problem underneath it all: Germany had already revoked Reich’s citizenship two years earlier, so by the time the US classified him as a German enemy alien, he was not, technically, German at all. Officials released him after citing a case of mistaken identity with another man of the same name, returning his seized papers with an apology from the agent in charge of his file in February 1942. He stayed on the Enemy Alien Control Unit’s watch list regardless. The mistaken-identity explanation is the official account and has never been independently confirmed.
A Citizen at Last, A Target Again
Reich became a naturalized US citizen in 1946, closing out seven years without a country. The peace did not hold. During the war years he had developed what he called orgone energy, a hypothesized universal life force (the name fuses “orgasm” and “organism”), and built “accumulators” modeled loosely on the Faraday cage, boxes he claimed could concentrate the energy for therapeutic use. In 1947, The New Republic and Harper’s ran critical pieces on the devices. The Food and Drug Administration opened an investigation, and by 1954 secured a federal injunction broad enough to bar not only interstate shipment of the accumulators but circulation of Reich’s written work describing them. Selling the machine and publishing the theory behind it were now, legally, the same offense.
Six Tons of Paper
Reich kept his accumulators in circulation anyway. In May 1956 he stood trial for contempt of the injunction, defending himself alongside associate Michael Silvert, and was sentenced to two years in prison. A federal appeals court upheld the sentence that December, and the Supreme Court declined to review the case in February 1957.
Before Reich reported to prison, the court’s order took a second form: that summer US officials destroyed an estimated six tons of his writing, including new introductions he had added to earlier books like The Mass Psychology of Fascism, works with nothing to do with the accumulator itself, except that their forewords mentioned orgone theory. It appears to be the only instance of federal government-sanctioned book burning in American history, though that claim rests on secondary accounts rather than one definitive record. Reich began serving his sentence at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania in March 1957 and died there of heart failure on November 3, 1957, at age 60.
Putting Him Back Into Print
Publisher Roger Straus called the destruction of Reich’s writing “one of the most heinous acts of censorship in US history.” Starting in 1960, his firm, later Farrar, Straus and Giroux, began reissuing Reich’s complete works. It was not a full accounting, six tons of paper cannot be replaced page for page, but it meant Reich’s ideas went back into circulation after two governments, in sequence, had tried to burn them out of existence.
Two Governments, One Method, Or Not
Bennett and Peglau argue that the Gestapo’s case against Reich and the FBI’s case against him ran on genuinely similar logic: surveillance built on rumor, seizure of papers, destruction of the written word, and prosecution aimed less at silencing an idea than at making an example of the man who held it. Other historians read the resemblance differently, as two governments in the same anxious century reaching for the same blunt tools, not one following the other’s script. What is documented is simpler: Wilhelm Reich lost his citizenship once, his freedom twice, and in the end his life, in two countries that agreed on almost nothing except what to do with his books.