Two other incidents occurred. A Danish Communist journal, Plan, had published
an article by Reich, “Where Does Nudist Education Lead To?” which had originally been
published in 1928 in the Journal for Psychoanalytic Pedagogy. A zealous Minister of Justice in
Denmark had brought a suit against Plan’s editor, charging him with pornography. At least
part of the alleged offense turned on a translation of the German word Wipfi, a children’s
term for the genitals. Questioned by a Danish journalist, Reich commented that the transla-
tion ofWipfiand a few other terms was careless, but there was no question of pornogra-
phy. When the editor of Plan received a jail sentence of forty days, the Danish Communist
Party accused Reich of betraying the editor with his slight qualification^28.
The other charge against Reich concerned The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Its first
sentence read: “The German working class has suffered a severe defeat” (i.e., the victory of
Hitler). But according to the party line, the working class had only suffered “a temporary
setback in the revolutionary surge,” so when the book appeared, the party journals charac-
terized it as an attack on revolutionary politics^29.
On November 21, 1933, a notice appeared in large print in the Danish Communist
newspaper Arbeiderblatt, announcing that Reich had been expelled from the party. The bases
for the expulsion were Reich’s “party-inimical and uncommunistic” behavior and his pub-
lishing a book with “counter-revolutionary” content. Writing in 1952, Reich made much of
the point that he could not have been expelled from the Danish Communist Party because
he never belonged to it. Nor could he have been excluded from the German Communist
Party because it had ceased to exist in March 1933. This was not his view at the time. Even
after his exclusion he continued to consider himself a member of the Communist move-
ment, if not of the party: “My position was that of a badly mistreated and misunderstood
opposition.”^30
Why did Reich stay so long in the party, and why did he refrain from attacking it for
some time after his expulsion? Why did he put up with party officials “criticizing” his man-
uscript? He once said admiringly to his friend Lia Laszky with regard to her membership in
the Communist Party: “You were the smartest of us—the first to join and the first to leave.”
Part ofthe reason for Reich’s lengthy, if partial, acceptance of Communist leaders
he considered to be blockheads was his overall commitment to Marxism as a socioeconom-
ic philosophy. More immediately, for Reich the Communists seemed to provide the only
political answer to the threat ofNazism. And even as late as 1933 he regarded the Soviet
Union, the Marxist experiment, as the most progressive society in the world.
Perhaps, too, some of his reasons were more personal. Reich alluded to these fac-
tors in People in Trouble(about 1936) when he stated that he remained in the party despite
misgivings because it had become a “second home.”^31
“A second home”—Reich had used a similar phrase to define how he perceived the
psychoanalytic movement, which he also had a very hard time leaving. Reich’s early home
life had been unhappy. In many ways his marriage with Annie had been unhappy. Not sur-
prisingly, he felt a strong need for family, not just his own private family but a family of fel-
low fighters,scientists, revolutionaries. And a part of him still wanted pater familiasand a
166 Myron SharafFury On Earth