Ilse Ollendorff

From Philosopedia

Ilse Ollendorff (1915? - 19 December 2008)

- Sexologist Wilhelm Reich with his wife Ilse and their son Peter

Ollendorff, who was Wilhelm Reich's third wife, served as his secretary and laboratory assistant for many years. They had one son, Peter, author of A Book of Dreams, a memoir about his close relationship with his father, how they would go cloudbusting together, and his bewilderment when his father died in prison when Peter was 13 years old.

Ollendorff wrote Wilhelm Reich: A Personal Biography, which was a measured description of the scientist she knew so well, one thought to be mad by some and a savior by others.

Contents 1 Views About 2 Later Years 3 Reich’s Scientific Legacy 4 Ollendorff On Reich's Philosophic Outlook 5 An Obituary

Views About

John-Michael Battaglia is one of many who has written about Ilse and her husband:

Hoping to secure the support of a great mainstream scientist for his apparently momentous discovery, he visits Albert Einstein and presents his findings. Though initially intrigued, Einstein writes off Reich's discovery after the most cursory of examinations. The device is worthless, he says; the effects Reich got are merely subjective. Ilse consoles Reich by telling him that Einstein is too absorbed in his work on atomic energy to be tempted to follow an altogether new line of research. Like Freud did earlier, another leading thinker rejects Reich's work as too radical and refuses to support him. To Einstein, Reich was an inconsequential eccentric.

Reich is deeply disappointed by Einstein's rejection, but he pushes on regardless. He has unshakable faith in himself and his methods. Throughout the early and mid-forties Reich tests his orgone accumulators on human beings and finds that it has a remarkable ability to reduce and eliminate cancer tumors, heal burns, alleviate arthritic pains, relieve heart pains, and, in general, to charge up the body's natural immune system against disease. Use of the accumulator also reduces or eliminates the patient's reliance on prescription drugs. Knowing of the world's need for a cancer cure (as well his own personal need for recognition), Reich concentrates on researching the cancer problem. He eventually discovers that cancer is a psychosomatic disease caused by the putrefaction of body cells which are starved for life energy due to chronic sexual stasis and body armoring which prevents the healthy flow and discharge of emotional energy. Essentially, Reich says, cancer patients are shrinking and prematurely dying at the cellular level. He develops a blood test to diagnose cancer from the examination of cells in the body's secretions {12 years before classical cancer research developed an effective sputum test, and 15 years before cervical smear tests!}. He publishes "The Cancer Biopathy" to document his laboratory work and the path he took in the discovery of orgone energy, as well as to describe the etiology, prevention, and treatment of cancer.

Although Reich maintains a clinical practice in New York, he and Ilse move their base of operations to Rangeley, Maine, where Reich buys land and establishes Orgonon, a laboratory and research center devoted to the study of orgone energy. Several devoted followers accompany him and work in the lab, mostly medical doctors, psychiatrists, scientists from various disciplines, and assorted oddball types, who are attracted to his innovative ideas. Reich and Ilse have a son, Peter. While the move to Orgonon gives Reich the solitude and tranquillity he needs to do his work, it also insulates him from the scientific mainstream. Daughter Eva, now a medical doctor, joins her father and helps him in his work.

Dr. Alan Cantwell Jr. has described how in the early 1940s Dr. Reich arranged a dangerous experiment following the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings. Reich began to test the effects of orgnone energy (OR) or nuclear energy (NR, and named the experiment "Oranur." He supplies some details of their marriage:

During the Oranur experiment, radioactive radium was brought to Reich’s lab and housed in a special room containing orgone energy. The slow mixing of the two energies produced a nuclear chain reaction with devastating consequences. As a result of this nuclear accident, Reich learned that nuclear energy drastically changes orgone energy – converting it into “deadly orgone energy” (DOR). The laboratory accident seriously affected the physical, mental, and emotional health of Reich and his co-workers and necessitated a complete shut down of the lab until the dangerous radiation levels cleared.

Reich’s daughter, Eva, almost died in the mishap. Eva had been estranged from her father for years, but after finishing medical school, she joined him at Organon to help with the Oranur experiment. The stressful changes wrought by Oranur, and the increasing harassment by the FDA, put Reich under great pressure. He was never quite the same again.

The experiment undoubtedly contributed to Reich’s worsening relationship with Ilse. The marriage become more and more stormy as he tormented Ilse with accusations of infidelity and was physically abusive. Few people understood the clinical nature of feelings and emotions better than Reich; and yet he could be cruel, unyielding, and insanely jealous in his love relationships. He preached sexual freedom for all but he practised a sexual double standard in marriage that allowed him to be unfaithful, but never his mate.

While Reich was immersed in the problems of Oranur, Ilse developed uterine cancer. She was convinced her cancer was connected with the radiation experiments at Organon. While she convalesced from surgery, Reich cruelly filed for divorce. After it was finalised in September 1951, he began another relationship. The following month he suffered a major heart attack.

Ollendorff was convinced that her cancer had been caused by the Oranur experiments, according to David Boadella's biography of Reich, In the Wake of Reich (1979).

Wilhelm Reich's wife and mother of his son, as well as his secretary and assistant for many years, has written not a scientific or psychological evaluation, but a dignified and moving personal biography of her late husband. "I do not intend to defend him or his actions, Mrs. Reich explains in her preface, "nor to whitewash him; neither do I nor can I judge him or his work. By retracing his development, I hope to gain a better understanding of the man Reich, to bring him closer to people so that they may understand what drove him and why lie became such a tragic figure."

In Contact With Space, Reich described his sighting as "a brightly shining light" moving from west to east through the forest outside Rangeley, Maine. A second, similar phenomenon soon joined the first, both moving steadily in front of Spotted Mountain. He concluded that the objects were not stars due to their course and the mountain intervening between their apparent motion and the sky, but the possibility that they were military vehicles or other objects of a terrestrial type did not seem to occur to him.

In 1999, Ilse Reich participated in an oral interview by Bob Fetter for the Religious Society of Friends' General Conference.

At around the same time, Reich's secretary, Ilse Ollendorff, also reported seeing "a similar, but brighter and bigger, because closer, object." Like the aerial phenomena observed by Reich, Ollendorff's sighting hovered in front of a mountain, but then "was seen rising once vertically upward, settling down again and then disappearing."

The Air Force, for its part, was either unaware of Reich's running battle with the FDA, or was intrigued enough by his encounter to overlook the controversy. Lt. Steven J. Hebert, stationed at the Presque Isle Air Force Base, wrote back telling Reich that the "subject officer notified this organization to take whatever action necessary, since this unit is interested in investigating unidentified aerial phenomena."

Hebert enclosed a copy of Technical Information Sheet Form A, the Air Force's UFO reporting questionnaire, for Reich and Ollendorff to fill out and return. As Contact With Space ruefully notes, Reich received the letter only five days before the FDA obtained the injunction forbidding the distribution of orgone equipment as medical devices.

Reich returned the questionnaire along with a copy of a short essay, "Survey on Ea," providing background on other unusual occurrences around the Orgonon research facility, including the revelation that friends had told Reich "of saucers having been seen over Orgonon in 1951." However, he had taken little personal interest in the reports until 1953, when his discovery of Keyhoe's book made him wonder whether UFOs -- or, in his terminology, "Enigma Alpha" or "Ea" -- might be propelled by orgone.

The Air Force did not reply, perhaps put off by the impenetrable nature of the "basic orgonometric equations" included as an appendix to "Survey on Ea." In the book, Reich includes a rather coyly self-important note saying "not all can be revealed" about his relationship with the Air Force, but there is no evidence in Contact With Space that Reich was in communication with the military until October, a full six months later.

Instead, during that time, Reich writes that he busied himself with appealing the FDA injunction and preparing a research trip to Arizona, where he hoped to investigate the role played by orgone reactions in the formation of deserts.

Later Years

When Reich was investigated by the United States District Court in Maine, Ollendorff was listed as Clerk of the Wilhelm Reich Foundation - Judge John D. Clifford Jr. ruled that a 5 May 1954 application for intervention had not been filed in timely fashion and was denied.

In early March 1957 Reich was imprisoned at Danbury Federal Prison. The psychiatrist who examined Reich recorded the diagnosis: “Paranoia manifested by delusions of grandiosity and persecution and ideas of reference.” A few weeks later, Reich was transferred to the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

The United States government won. Officially, orgone energy did not exist. Reich was certified as a mentally ill, quack psychiatrist who tried to foist a sex box and a cancer cure on the American public. The Reich affair was terminated.

In his prison cell towards the end of October he began to feel poorly, but he was afraid to bring the matter to the attention of the prison officials. He told friends that his jailers would try to kill him in prison, and believed he would never get out alive. On November 3, 1957, Reich was found dead in his cell, an apparent victim of a heart attack.

Reich’s Scientific Legacy

The body was taken to Organon for burial. A small band of loyal followers, including Ilse, Eva, and Peter, paid their last respects. Elsworth Baker, M.D., who had studied with Reich for eleven years, gave the eulogy. “Friends, we are here to say farewell, a last farewell to Wilhelm Reich. Once in a thousand years, nay once in two thousand years, such a man comes upon this earth to change the destiny of the human race. As with all great men, distortion, falsehood, and persecution followed him. He met them all until an organised conspiracy sent him to prison and there killed him.”

Years later, Dr. Baker also wrote: “Reich’s attitude, in fact his entire life, was unconventional and as difficult for the world to understand as were his discoveries. Many legends, probably even religions, will develop about him. Already, some people look upon him as a superman who could not err, or as a spaceman come to earth; others have rationalised and written articles attempting to prove him insane, a charlatan, or a fraud, He was very human, natural, and open, and foremost, a great and genuine scientist. He could be as soft and warm as a summer breeze or as violent and angry as a thunderstorm.”

Cantwell, wrote of Reich,

Was he a genius or a madman? For those who consider Reich an enemy of the people, his official sins are duly recorded in the dusty archives of office buildings in Vienna, Berlin, Copenhagen, Oslo and Washington. For those willing to take the time to investigate Reich’s writings, a different sort of man emerges.

It is my feeling that Reich desperately wanted to show the world God existed in the realm of the orgone. Through the study of orgonomy, Reich believed man and science could prove, beyond doubt, that God is real. Like God, the orgone is indestructible. And like God, orgone energy exists everywhere in the universe. Man’s spirit constantly reflects the orgone, eternally imbued with new life rising from the ashes of death.

Ollendorff On Reich's Philosophic Outlook

Ollendorff wrote the following to Warren Allen Smith:

Reich never belonged to any organized religious community and, until the time he went to prison, he never went to any kind of religious services. I don’t know what he would have called himself, probably an agnostic or a humanist. His funeral was secular. He identified with Christ / Jesus the human, and I think he accepted not the Christianity of the Church but the teachings of Jesus. Dr. Elsworth Baker, who in my book was named as the person who gave a brief eulogy at the memorial service and ended with Reich’s version of the Lord’s Prayer from his Murder of Christ, was a psychiatrist who practiced Reich’s orgone therapy. He was a devoted “disciple” of Reich, and he organized after Reich’s death a group of orgone therapists into the “College of Orgonomy,” feuding with all those who in their own way believed they were the only true followers. Baker died a few years ago. Reich’s version of the Lord’s Prayer is only different from the original in the start: “Our Love / Life, who art from Heaven,” and he substituted “guilt” for debts and in the last two lines “and lead us not into distortion of love, but deliver us from our perversions.” He mentions “God-Father is the basic cosmic energy from which all being stems, and which streams through (the) body as through anything else in existence.” Murder of Christ was written in 1952.

“I don’t know,” continued Ilse, herself a Quaker, whether he distinguished between Christ the supernatural and Jesus the natural. I do think that the concept of Christ was for him a universal concept, continuing through the ages, but that Jesus was for him the natural, exceptional human being who, because of his message of love and his understanding of human nature, had to be murdered. I do know that during his imprisonment and until shortly before his death he attended the Protestant services in prison. He sent our son Peter some prayers that he must have found in those services. This “conversion” seemed to me utterly strange, almost unbelievable in view of his past anti-church attitude. I had, of course, no way to find out why and how this change came about.

An Obituary

No obituary was published. However, she had written an obituary that Peter Reich sent to friends, saying, "This obituary was written, for the most part, by Ilse. A few small changes have been added by her family."

ILSE OLLENDORFF REICH

1909 – 2008

Ilse was born March 13, 1909, in Breslau, Germany, daughter to Georg Ollendorff and Margarete Muhr. Growing up in Germany, Ilse became an ardent anti-Nazi Socialist; later, in the United States, she became active in the American Society of Friends and the Peace Movement.

She was educated and lived in Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) until March, 1933, when she fled Nazi Germany for France. She lived in Paris until her emigration to the United States in February, 1939. She met and married Wilhelm Reich later in that year, and started to work for him in early 1940. Dr. Reich moved to Rangeley, Maine, in 1949, and Ilse lived there until 1954, when she separated from Reich. Wilhelm Reich died in 1957.

Ilse began her studies for a career in education in 1954, earning a B.S. (summa cum laude) from University of Hartford in 1960, an M.A. in Childhood Education from Teachers College, Columbia University in 1962, and a Professional Diploma in Teaching Foreign Languages from the same institution in 1965. She taught both French and German in elementary, junior high and high school in Connecticut for 17 years, before retiring in 1974. While living in Connecticut, she was a volunteer visitor and teacher at Danbury Federal Prison, under the auspices of the American Friends Service Committee. At the same time, under the auspices of the Connecticut Prison Association, she visited Connecticut jails, prisons and reformatories.

After her separation from Reich, she renewed her activities in the League of Women Voters and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She sought contact with Quakers, became a very active and involved member of the wider Quaker fellowship, holding many positions of responsibility. Most recently, she belonged to the Mt. Toby Quaker Meeting and was a board member at Woolman Hill.

In 1969, her biography of Wilhelm Reich was published by St. Martin’s Press. This was later issued in French, German, Spanish and Japanese editions. Ilse also published a pamphlet on angels.

Ilse moved to Clark House, Amherst, in 1989. In January, 2001, she moved to The Arbors at Amherst, an assisted living facility. She was to become, at 99, the Arbor’s oldest living resident. She moved to her son’s home in Leverett in mid-December. Ilse died there, in hospice care, on Friday, December 19, 2009.

Ilse is survived by her son, Peter Reich, and daughter-in-law, Susan Gulick, both of Leverett; a stepdaughter, Lore Reich Rubin, M.D., of Pittsburgh, PA; a grandson, Nicholas, of Baltimore, MD; a granddaughter, Cecilia Van Driesche, of Ashfield, MA; several great-grandchildren, nieces and nephews, and by members of her extended family in the United Kingdom.

In lieu of flowers, friends are encouraged to make contributions to Mt. Toby Meeting, 194 Long Plain Road, Leverett, MA 01054, or to VNA & Hospice of Cooley Dickenson Hospital, 168 Industrial Drive, Northampton, MA 01060.

For years, Ollendorff lived in New Canaan, Connecticut, where she taught German in the New Canaan High School for a short time.At the time of her death, she lived in Kittery Point, Maine, with her son, Peter Reich.