Staring at the ceiling from this unsanitary bed, Reich confided in someone for the first time the guilty secrets and horrible tragedies that had scarred his childhood.
Reich was born on March 24 , 1897, in the small village of Dobrzanica, an outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in what is now Ukraine. The nearby town of Drohobycz had about ten thousand inhabitants but was expanding rapidly as speculators were drawn to the area’s rich oil fields. Oil was in high demand for city lighting, and the crude oil mined from Drohobycz illuminated Vienna and Prague. As early as 1873 there were twelve thousand derricks holding the machinery that extracted the so-called black gold; the area was nicknamed “Galician California.”70
The writer Bruno Schulz, born in Drohobycz five years before Reich, would capture the resulting clash of cultures in his novel The Street of Crocodiles (1934). The oil works on the outskirts of the town polluted the Tysmienica, the river that ran through it, and seemed to infect the place with greed and corruption. Shoddy new houses with garish façades sprang up in the gray suburbs to house the oilmen. Existing alongside it, though seemingly doomed to obsolescence by the brash modernity that choked it, was the town’s crumbling core with its wild gardens and musty shops. In his novel Schulz describes with great accuracy the exotic treasures these contained: Bengal lights, magic boxes, mandrakes, automatons, microscopes, homunculi in jars, salamanders, and rare folios of engravings. It was at this juncture between the old and the new that Reich was born.
Soon after his son’s birth, Leon Reich moved the family to Jujinetz, south of Drohobycz in the province of Bukovina, where he leased a cattle farm that supplied beef to the Austrian army. He ran it like a feudal fiefdom, and was felt by his son to be a large, sadistic, bruising presence. “I cannot remember my father ever having cuddled or treated me tenderly at that time,” Reich wrote in Passion of Youth, “nor can I recollect feeling any attachment to him.”71 He did recall being beaten by him, and also witnessed his father hit his workers. Reich remembered how his father used oppressive rage when he home-schooled him and his younger brother.
In one of Reich’s photographs of his father, Leon Reich is shown to be a burly man with a handlebar mustache, his fat face held up by his stiffly starched collar. Reich scrawled over the image, “His ideal was the German Kaiser.” In contrast, Reich described his mother, Cäcilie Reich (née Roninger), as “slender, her face round, with a beautiful, gentle profile and delicate features. She had thick, jet-black hair, which fell in natural waves all the way to her knees when she let it down. Her eyes were also black, her nose small and straight, her complexion as white as snow.”72 Though she may well have been attractive for the era, the surviving photographs of a plump haus-frau don’t correspond with his memories, although it is clear that Reich inherited her black hair and eyes. According to Ilse Ollendorff, Reich’s third wife, who felt she failed to live up to Reich’s idealized memory of his mother (and her cooking), Cäcilie was “much subdued by her husband” and “rather unintellectual”— she was nicknamed das Schaf, the sheep, which, as Ollendorff explained in her biography of her husband, “very definitely has the connotation of the ‘dumb one.’ ”73
Reich lived an isolated life, cocooned from the farmworkers’ children and prevented from playing with the Yiddish-speaking children in the nearby village. Reich wrote of having looked longingly over the fence at the other children’s games. Robert, his younger brother, was his only playmate. Despite his sense of isolation, Reich retained a rose-tinted vision of his lonely semifeudal childhood in the Bukovinian countryside. He collected butterflies in the fields of his father’s estate, rode, hunted, swam, fished, and would remember this privileged, austere, rustic experience as the happiest time of his life.
Reich’s parents were well-off; they had a housemaid, a nurse, and a cook. Each was to play a role in Reich’s precocious sexual awakening, the story of which the supposedly sex-obsessed Sadger no doubt drew out in his analysis. Sadger encouraged him to publish an account of his childhood. Reich’s diaries of the time of his analysis— from February 25 , 1919, to October 5 , 1922— interspersed with his memories of his upbringing, would be released only in 1988 as Passion of Youth.
Reich wrote that he was four and a half when he eavesdropped on the housemaid having sex with the coachman; at five he masturbated his younger brother’s nurse; at eleven and a half he lost his virginity to Sosha, the cook. His memoir describes these scenes with the detailed relish of a sexologist (“Diaries,” he wrote, “are the receptacles of filth!!”)— how he stumbled across his father’s pornography collection, discovered and devoured his parents’ sex guide, The Marriage Counselor, and repeatedly pleasured the family horse with a riding crop.74
When Reich was ten his father arranged for him to have a tutor. Reich’s mother, then thirty-three, began an affair with this teacher, Dr. Sachter, a much younger man, when her husband was away. Reich witnessed snatched moments of indiscretion night after night, which both horrified and aroused him. In Reich’s description of the primal scene, his mother had to tiptoe through his room to get to that of her young lover. “I heard them kissing, whispering,” Reich wrote, “and the horrible creaking of the bed in which my mother lay . . . And so it went, night after night. I followed her to his door and waited there until morning. Gradually I became accustomed to it! My horror gave way to erotic feelings. Once I even considered breaking in on them, and demanding that she have intercourse with me too (shame!), threatening that otherwise I would tell Father.”75
Leon Reich was a jealous man who already suspected his wife of having an affair with his own brother. Leon and Arnold Reich looked almost identical, their only distinguishing feature seeming to have been their mustaches— Leon’s twirled up, Arnold’s drooped down. Leon became convinced that she was consorting with another of his sons’ tutors when he startled them alone together. “What were you doing with him alone in the hall, you whore?” he screamed, as Reich recalled the scene. “Tell me! Why did he jump back a few steps when I came in!? Why did he jump back, I ask you?”76 He dragged her upstairs, where his children could hear him continuing to shout in a crazed voice, “You tell me everything or I’ll murder you— every detail of the love affairs you’ve had up to now.”77
Leon Reich soon reappeared, with beads of sweat on his forehead, and threatened to beat confirmation of his suspicions out of the trembling twelve-year-old Reich, who soon confessed that he’d witnessed the earlier affair. His father then took him off to confront his mother.
Cäcilie Reich had locked herself in her bedroom to escape her husband’s fury; a “deep groan” was heard through the door, and she was discovered in the dark, writhing and foaming at the mouth, having downed a bottle of household cleaner. Her husband force-fed her an emetic and saved her, only to subject her, in Reich’s account, to almost a year of taunts and severe beatings. Leon Reich accused her of having slept with almost every man they knew; he even began to doubt that the blond Robert was really his son (later in life Reich often fantasized that he, too, was illegitimate, the result of his mother’s affair with a Ukrainian peasant).
Cäcilie sought refuge in a hotel for several days to escape the barrage of abuse. Soon afterward she