thing that had occurred. For all these reasons, he wanted to have complete, accurate docu-
ments for later historians to study—historians he fervently hoped would be objective in their
analysis.
During late 1951 and early 1952, I spent considerable time helping Reich to order
his material. He was a very careful archivist and did a great deal of painstaking work in set-
ting up the cataloguing system for his papers. Sometimes when he was carefully pressing out
a crumpled newspaper article from the 1930s or pasting up material, he would say with a
touch of irony: “When I retire, I can at least get a job at the Library of Congress.” Historical
work often brought out a mellow, musing side in him. His references to Freud were frequent,
especially when he went over the documents from the psychoanalytic years. He was still very
pleased by the warmth of some of Freud’s letters to him.
Some documents from Reich’s Marxist period made him wince, as he reread radi-
cal political utterances in his letters and publications with which he now violently disagreed.
But he insisted that however much he would love to tear some of them up, all must remain
unchanged as part of the historical record. If his emotions grew too strong, he would dic-
tate a note under the heading, “Silent Observer,” which recorded his present-day observa-
tions about the material.
From the historical material Reich published only one volume,People in Trouble
(1953). This work, which was mainly written in the 1930s and deals largely with Reich’s social
concepts, was described in Chapter n. During 1950 and 1951, I translated the manuscript
from the German and Reich added to it in English many of his “Silent Observer” com-
ments. I can thus vouch for the fact that he did not delete a line or change a phrase from
the German material, much as he may have liked to downplay his participation in the
Communist Party.
Oranur and the revived FDA investigation soon overwhelmed Reich’s time and
energies, but he did have the chance to put in order most of his archival material. I remem-
ber his wanting to get in touch with Harvard University with an eye to their storing his doc-
uments. I thought there was little likelihood of Harvard’s being interested. Perhaps my judg-
ment was correct at the time.Today, his papers are in the Countway Library of Harvard
Medical School,
Although The Murder of Christwas not published until 1953,it was written during
the summer of1951 at the height of the Oranur reaction. Reich had long been interested in
the Christ story, noting in 1948 when he wrote Ether, God and Devil: “It remains to be inves-
tigated from where the Christ legend draws its greatness, its emotional force, and its
endurance.”^21
Oranur jolted Reich into giving his version of this “legend” one he had been
preparing over the years by reading all the major books on Christ and his times that he could
find.The Murder of Christwas a long time in gestation, but Reich actually wrote it in a few
months. Oranur had impressed him as never before with the power of evil: evil in man and
evil in nature.Now he felt a special urgency to tell the quintessential story of human evil
and tell it quickly.
27 : Personal Life and Other Developments: 1950-1954 367