but with a hunger for direct experience.
Reich’s political commitments as well as his eagerness to learn are well illustrated by
his involvement in one demonstration that had farcical overtones.
In the midst of the growing civil unrest, the leaders of the Heimwehr scheduled a
large march for October 7, 1928, in Wiener-Neustadt. The leaders of the Social Democratic
Party felt that they, too, had to act lest their restive membership become even more embit-
tered. So they scheduled a countermarch in the same city and on the same date.
The small Communist group had decided that it should participate in the demon-
stration with the express purpose of disrupting the marches of the other groups. As Reich
put it: “They ‘mobilized’ their workers’ defense for October 7 ... with all the earnestness of
revolutionary courage—I do not say this mockingly an organization of about two hundred
and fifty unarmed men undertook to fight armed and organized groups of a combined force
of about forty thousand men; that is ‘to preventtheir march.’ I can bear witness, for I was
among those two hundred and fifty men.”^9
Reich’s capacity for humor and self-irony is evident in the descriptions of his
adventures in Wiener-Neustadt Along with two other physicians, he was supposed to carry
knapsacks containing bandages; this little band formed the “medical wing” of the
Communists’“fighting troops.” Proceeding “inconspicuously,” the Communist phalanx was
to form the “spearhead” of a revolutionary movement to disrupt the proceedings—exactly
how, no one knew. To increase its camouflage, the 250-man army got off the train one stop
before Wiener-Neustadt. At the nearby village they were greeted by a party functionary also
trying to look “inconspicuous,” and taken to the local inn, owned by the Social Democratic
mayor of the village.
Early the next morning, the little band was betrayed by the mayor: they awoke to
find the inn surrounded by police. Thereupon the “phalanx” divided into two factions—one
in favor of immediately fighting the police, the other in favor of withdrawing to fight anoth-
er day. Reich, disliking surrender but fearing some senseless bloodshed, was chosen as mod-
erator for the militants.The majority voted to withdraw. So, flanked by the police, they all
marched back to the village station and Reich noticed the indifferent faces peering from the
windows of working-class homes. “ They are only taking away some Communists,’ we could
almost hear them say.”
The band of Communists managed to get off the train before it arrived in Vienna’s
Central Station,so they walked home without police escort. But that was small consolation,
especially for Reich, who would long wonder how he could ever have participated in such a
crazy venture. At the time one of his explanations for his actions that day was that if the
Communists were “right” and “set an example,” others would “have to recognize it.”^10 To
a marked degree Reich’s expectation that people would recognize what he recognized was
based on his conviction that what should happen wouldhappen. Again and again this char-
acteristic was to emerge, in spite of his deep awareness of why people could not recognize
what he did.
One also has to be aware of Reich’s tendency, as he recalled the late 1920s, to mix
10 : July 15, 1927, and Its Aftermath: 1927-1928 125