title: Wilhelm Reich

text: One of Reich's first patients was Lore Kahn, a 19-year-old woman with whom he had an affair. Freud had warned analysts not to involve themselves with their patients, but in the early days of psychoanalysis the warnings went unheeded. According to Reich's diaries, Kahn became ill in November 1920 and died of sepsis after sleeping in a bitterly cold room she had rented as a place for her and Reich to meet (both his landlady and her parents had forbidden their meetings).


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Two months after Kahn's death, Reich accepted her friend, Annie Pink (1902–1971), as an analysand. Pink was Reich's fourth female patient, a medical student three months shy of her 19th birthday. He had an affair with her too, and married her in March 1922 at her father's insistence, with psychoanalysts Otto Fenichel and Edith Buxbaum as witnesses. Annie Reich became a well-known psychoanalyst herself. The marriage produced two daughters, (1924–2008) and Lore (b. 1928), both of whom became physicians; Lore Reich Rubin also became a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Because he was a war veteran, Reich was allowed to complete a combined bachelor's and M.D. in four years, instead of six, and graduated in July 1922. After graduating, he worked in internal medicine at the city's University Hospital, and studied neuropsychiatry from 1922 to 1924 at the hospital's neurological and psychiatric clinic under Professor Julius Wagner von Jauregg, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1927.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: In 1922, Reich began working in Freud's psychoanalytic outpatient clinic, known as the Vienna Ambulatorium, which was opened on May 22 that year at Pelikangasse 18 by . Reich became the assistant director under Hitschmann in 1924 and worked there until his move to Berlin in 1930.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Between 1922 and 1932, the clinic offered free or reduced-cost psychoanalysis to 1,445 men and 800 women, many suffering from shell shock after World War I. It was the second such clinic to open under Freud's direction; the first was the Poliklinik in Berlin, set up in 1920 by Max Eitingon and Ernst Simmel.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Sharaf writes that working with labourers, farmers and students allowed Reich to move away from treating neurotic symptoms to observing chaotic lifestyles and anti-social personalities. Reich argued that neurotic symptoms such as obsessive–compulsive disorder were an unconscious attempt to gain control of a hostile environment, including poverty or childhood abuse. They were examples of what he called "character armour" ("Charakterpanzer"), repetitive patterns of behaviour, speech and body posture that served as defence mechanisms. According to Danto, Reich sought out patients at the Ambulatorium who had been diagnosed as psychopaths, believing that psychoanalysis could free them of their rage.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Reich joined the faculty of the Psychoanalytic Institute in Vienna in 1924 and became its director of training. According to Danto, he was well-regarded for the weekly technical seminars he chaired at the Ambulatorium, where he gave papers on his theory of character structure, arguing that psychoanalysis should be based on the examination of unconscious character traits, later known as ego defences. The seminars were attended, from 1927, by Fritz Perls, who went on to develop Gestalt therapy with his wife, Laura Perls. Several commentators remarked on how captivating the seminars were and how eloquently Reich spoke. According to a Danish newspaper in 1934:


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Reich's first book, "" ("The Impulsive Character: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Pathology of the Self"), was published in 1925. It was a study of the anti-social personalities he had encountered in the Ambulatorium, and argued the need for a systematic theory of character. The book won him professional recognition, including from Freud, who in 1927 arranged for his appointment to the executive committee of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. The appointment was made over the objection of Paul Federn, who had been Reich's second analyst in 1922 and who, according to Sharaf, regarded Reich as a psychopath. Reich found the society dull and wrote that he behaved "like a shark in a pond of carps".


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Beginning in 1924, Reich published a series of papers on the idea of "orgastic potency", the ability to release the emotions from the muscles and lose the self in an uninhibited orgasm, an idea that Freud came to call Reich's ""Steckenpferd"" (hobby horse). Reich argued that psychic health and the ability to love depended on orgastic potency, the full discharge of the libido: "Sexual release in the sex act must correspond to the excitement which leads up to it." He wrote: "It is not just to fuck ... not the embrace in itself, not the intercourse. It is the real emotional experience of the loss of your ego, of your whole spiritual self." He argued that orgastic potency was the goal of character analysis.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Whereas Reich's work on character was well received by the psychoanalytic community, Sharaf writes, his work on orgastic potency was unpopular from the start and later ridiculed. He came to be known as the "prophet of the better orgasm" and the "founder of a genital utopia".


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Reich's brother died of tuberculosis (TB) in 1926, the same disease that had killed their father. Turner writes that a quarter of deaths in Vienna were caused by TB in the 1920s. Reich himself contracted it in 1927 and spent several weeks in the winter of that year in a sanitorium in Davos, Switzerland, where TB patients went for rest cures and fresh air before antibiotics became widely available around 1945. Turner writes that Reich underwent a political and existential crisis in Davos; he returned home in the spring angry and paranoid, according to Annie Reich. Some months later he and Annie were on the streets during the July Revolt of 1927 in Vienna, when 84 workers were shot and killed by police and another 600 were injured. It seems that the experience changed Reich; he wrote that it was his first encounter with human irrationality. He began to doubt everything, and in 1928 joined the Communist Party of Austria:


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Partly in response to the shooting he had witnessed in Vienna, Reich, then 30, opened six free sex-counseling clinics in the city in 1927 for working-class patients. Each clinic was overseen by a physician, with three obstetricians and a lawyer on call, and offered what Reich called Sex-Pol counseling. Sex-Pol stood for the German Society of Proletarian Sexual Politics. Reich offered a mixture of "psychoanalytic counseling, Marxist advice and contraceptives", Danto writes, and argued for a sexual permissiveness, including for young people and the unmarried, that unsettled other psychoanalysts and the political left. The clinics were immediately overcrowded by people seeking help.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: He also took to the streets in a mobile clinic, driving to parks and out to the suburbs with other psychoanalysts and physicians. Reich would talk to the teenagers and men, while a gynaecologist fitted the women with contraceptive devices, and Lia Laszky, the woman Reich fell in love with at medical school, spoke to the children. They also distributed sex-education pamphlets door to door.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Reich published "Die Funktion des Orgasmus" ("The Function of the Orgasm") in 1927, dedicating it to Freud. He had presented a copy of the manuscript to Freud on the latter's 70th birthday on 6 May 1926. Freud had not appeared impressed. He replied, "That thick?" when Reich handed it to him, and took two months to write a brief but positive letter in response, which Reich interpreted as a rejection. Freud's view was that the matter was more complicated than Reich suggested, and that there was no single cause of neurosis. He wrote in 1928 to another psychoanalyst, Dr. Lou Andreas-Salomé:


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: In 1929, Reich and his wife visited the Soviet Union on a lecture tour, leaving the two children in the care of the psychoanalyst Berta Bornstein. Sharaf writes that he returned even more convinced of the link between sexual and economic oppression, and of the need to integrate Marx and Freud. In 1929 his article "Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis" was published in "Unter dem Banner des Marxismus", the German Communist Party journal. The article explored whether psychoanalysis was compatible with historical materialism, class struggle and proletarian revolution. Reich concluded that they were compatible if dialectical materialism was applied to psychology. This was one of the central theoretical statements of his Marxist period, which included "The Imposition of Sexual Morality" (1932), "The Sexual Struggle of Youth" (1932), "The Mass Psychology of Fascism" (1933), "What is Class Consciousness?" (1934) and "The Sexual Revolution" (1936).


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Reich and his wife moved to Berlin in November 1930, where he set up clinics in working-class areas, taught sex education and published pamphlets. He joined the Communist Party of Germany, but grew impatient over their delay in publishing one of his pamphlets, ' (1932) later published in English as "The Sexual Struggle of Youth" (1972) and so set up his own publishing house, ', to produce the pamphlet himself.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: His subsequent involvement in a conference promoting adolescent sexuality caused the party to announce that it would no longer publish his material. On 24 March 1933 Freud told him that his contract with the International Psychoanalytic Publishers to publish "Character Analysis" had been cancelled. Sharaf writes that this was almost certainly because of Reich's stance on teenage sex.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Reich published what Robert Corrington called his masterpiece, "Charakteranalyse: Technik und Grundlagen für studierende und praktizierende Analytiker", in 1933. It was revised and published in English in 1946 and 1949 as "Character Analysis". The book sought to move psychoanalysis toward a reconfiguration of character structure.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: For Reich, character structure was the result of social processes, in particular a reflection of castration and Oedipal anxieties playing themselves out within the nuclear family. Les Greenberg and Jeremy Safran write that Reich proposed a functional identity between the character, emotional blocks, and tension in the body, or what he called character (or muscular/body) armour ("Charakterpanzer").


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Reich proposed that muscular armour was a defence that contained the history of the patient's traumas. For example, he blamed Freud's jaw cancer on his muscular armour, rather than his smoking: Freud's Judaism meant he was "biting down" impulses, rather than expressing them. Dissolving the armour would bring back the memory of the childhood repression that had caused the blockage in the first place.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Reich had several affairs during his marriage to Annie Reich, which ended in 1933 after he began a serious relationship in May 1932 with Elsa Lindenberg, a dancer and pupil of Elsa Gindler. He was living with Lindenberg in Germany when Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933. On March 2 that year the Nazi newspaper "Völkischer Beobachter" published an attack on "Der Sexuelle Kampf der Jugend". Reich and Lindenberg left for Vienna the next day. They moved from there to Denmark, where Reich was excluded from the Danish Communist Party in November 1933 (without ever having joined it) because of his promotion of teenage sex and the publication that year of "The Mass Psychology of Fascism", which they regarded as "counterrevolutionary". There were multiple complaints about his promotion of abortion, sex education, and the attempted suicide of a teenage patient. According to Turner, when Reich's visa expired, it was not renewed.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: He tried to find support among psychoanalysts in the UK so that he could settle there, and was interviewed in London by Ernest Jones, Melanie Klein, Joan Riviere and James Strachey. They decided that he had been "insufficiently analysed" and had an unresolved hostility toward Freud. Anna Freud, Freud's daughter—whom Jones had contacted about Reich's desire to relocate to England—wrote in 1938: "There is a wall somewhere where he stops to understand the other person's point of view and flies off into a world of his own ... He is an unhappy person ... and I am afraid this will end in sickness."


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Reich and Lindenberg moved instead to Malmö in Sweden, which Reich described as "better than a concentration camp", but he was placed under surveillance when police suspected that the hourly visits of patients to his hotel room meant he was running a brothel, with Lindenberg as the prostitute. The government declined to extend his visa, and the couple had to move briefly back to Denmark, Reich under an assumed name.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: From 1930 onwards, Reich began to treat patients outside the limits of psychoanalysis's restrictions. He would sit opposite them, rather than behind them as they lay on a couch (the traditional psychoanalyst's position), and begin talking to them and answering their questions, instead of offering the stock, "Why do you ask?" analyst's response. He had noticed that after a successful course of psychoanalysis his patients would hold their bodies differently, so he began to try to communicate with the body using touch. He asked his male patients to undress down to their shorts, and sometimes entirely, and his female patients down to their underclothes, and began to massage them to loosen their body armour. He would also ask them to simulate physically the effects of certain emotions in the hope of triggering them.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: He first presented the principles of what he called character-analytic vegetotherapy in August 1934, in a paper entitled "Psychischer Kontakt und vegetative Strömung" ("Psychological Contact and Vegetative Current") at the 13th International Congress of Psychoanalysis at Lucerne, Switzerland. His second wife, Ilse Ollendorf, said vegetotherapy replaced the psychoanalytic method of never touching a patient with "a physical attack by the therapist".


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: The method eliminated the psychoanalytic doctrine of neutrality. Reich argued that the psychoanalytic taboos reinforced the neurotic taboos of the patient, and that he wanted his patients to see him as human. He would press his thumb or the palm of his hand hard (and painfully) on their jaws, necks, chests, backs, or thighs, aiming to dissolve their muscular, and thereby characterological, rigidity. He wrote that the purpose of the massage was to retrieve the repressed memory of the childhood situation that had caused the repression. If the session worked, he would see waves of pleasure move through their bodies, which he called the "orgasm reflex". According to Sharaf, the twin goals of Reichian therapy were the attainment of this orgasm reflex during sessions and orgastic potency during intercourse. Reich briefly considered calling it "orgasmotherapy", but thought better of it.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Just before the crucial August 1934 Lucerne conference (13th International Congress of Psycho-analysis), Reich was (perhaps naively) ignorant of the ground-swell of opinion against him. At the meeting, he was asked to resign from the International Psychoanalytical Association, where Anna Freud was the "acknowledged leader" at the time, for prioritizing his revolutionary political-social (Communist) views over Freud's psychoanalytic ideas. Besides the theoretical differences, there was also, by that time, a significant level of "appeasement" to the increasing power of National Socialism. Reich had protested to Anna Freud (Secretary of the International Association) about the omission of his name from the list of German members of the Association, apparently on the spurious grounds that he was going to join the Scandinavian branch. Ernest Jones was the President of the International Association and he had also turned against Reich, combined with Paul Federn and Max Eitingon, who had all levelled personal attacks against Reich.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: According to Lore Reich Rubin, Reich's daughter, Anna Freud was responsible for destroying her father's career: "She got rid of him".


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: He arrived at the conference, relatively unconscious about his future treatment. He presented a significant paper and was then informed that he was to be excluded. Turner writes that he cemented his reputation as a madman, camping in a tent outside the conference hall and reportedly carrying a large knife in his belt. According to the psychiatrist Grete L. Bibring, Paul Federn declared, "Either Reich goes or I go."


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: In October 1934, Reich and Lindenberg moved to Oslo, Norway, where Harald K. Schjelderup, professor of psychology at the University of Oslo, had invited Reich to lecture on character analysis and vegetotherapy. They ended up staying for five years. During his time in Norway, Reich attempted to ground his orgasm theory in biology, exploring whether Freud's metaphor of the libido was in fact electricity or a chemical substance, an argument Freud had proposed in the 1890s but had abandoned. Reich argued that conceiving of the orgasm as nothing but mechanical tension and relaxation could not explain why some experience pleasure and others do not. He wanted to know what additional element had to be present for pleasure to be felt.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Reich was influenced by the work of the Austrian internist Friedrich Kraus, who argued in his paper "Allgemeine und Spezielle Pathologie der Person" (1926) that the biosystem was a relay-like switch mechanism of electrical charge and discharge. Reich wrote in an essay, ""Der Orgasmus als Elektro-physiologische Entladung"" ("The Orgasm as an Electrophysiological Discharge", 1934), that the orgasm is just such a bioelectrical discharge and proposed his "orgasm formula": mechanical tension (filling of the organs with fluid; tumescence) → bioelectrical charge → bioelectrical discharge → mechanical relaxation (detumescence).


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: In 1935, Reich bought an oscillograph and attached it to friends and students, who volunteered to touch and kiss each other while Reich read the tracings. One of the volunteers was Willy Brandt, the future chancellor of Germany. At the time, he was married to Reich's secretary, Gertrude Gaasland, and was living in Norway to organize protests against Nazi Germany. Reich also took measurements from the patients of a psychiatric hospital near Oslo, including catatonic patients, with the permission of the hospital's director. Reich described the oscillograph experiments in 1937 in "Experimentelle Ergebnisse über die elektrische Funktion von Sexualität und Angst" ("The Bioelectrical Investigation of Sexuality and Anxiety").


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: From 1934 to 1939, Reich conducted what he called the bion experiments, which he published as "Die Bione: zur Entstehung des vegetativen Lebens" in Oslo in February 1938 (published in English in 1979 and later called "The Bion Experiments on the Origin of Life"). He examined protozoa and grew cultured vesicles using grass, sand, iron and animal tissue, boiling them and adding potassium and gelatin. Having heated the materials to incandescence with a heat-torch, he wrote that he had seen bright, glowing, blue vesicles. His photographs and films of his experiments were taken by Kari Berggrav. He called them "bions" and believed they were a rudimentary form of life, halfway between life and non-life. He wrote that when he poured the cooled mixture onto growth media, bacteria were born, dismissing the idea that the bacteria were already present in the air or on other materials.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: In what Sharaf writes was the origins of the orgone theory, Reich said he could see two kinds of bions, the blue vesicles and smaller red ones shaped like lancets. He called the former PA-bions and the latter T-bacilli, the T standing for "Tod", German for death. He wrote in his book "The Cancer Biopathy" (1948) that he had found T-bacilli in rotting cancerous tissue obtained from a local hospital, and when injected into mice they caused inflammation and cancer. He concluded that, when orgone energy diminishes in cells through aging or injury, the cells undergo "bionous degeneration". At some point the deadly T-bacilli start to form in the cells. Death from cancer, he believed, was caused by an overwhelming growth of the T-bacilli.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: In 1937, Reich faced strong opposition from Norwegian scientists regarding his theories on bions, many deriding them as nonsense. To counter this, he allowed the Norwegian pathologist Leiv Kreyberg to examine one of his bion preparations under a microscope. Kreyberg wrote that, while the broth Reich had used as his culture medium was indeed sterile, the bacteria were ordinary staphylococci, and thus concluded that Reich's control measures to prevent infection from airborne bacteria were not as foolproof as Reich believed. Kreyberg accused Reich of being ignorant of basic bacteriological and anatomical facts, while Reich accused Kreyberg of having failed to recognize living cancer cells under magnification. Reich sent a sample of the bacteria to a Norwegian biologist, Theodor Thjøtta of the Oslo Bacteriological Institute, who also blamed airborne infection. As a result, "Tidens Tegn", a leading liberal newspaper, launched a campaign against him with support from scientists and other newspapers.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: By February 1938, Reich's visa had expired. Several Norwegian scientists argued against an extension, Kreyberg saying, "If it is a question of handing Dr. Reich over to the Gestapo, then I will fight that, but if one could get rid of him in a decent manner, that would be the best." The writer Sigurd Hoel asked: "When did it become a reason for deportation that one looked in a microscope when one was not a trained biologist?" Reich received support from overseas, first from the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, who in March wrote to the press in Norway that Reich's sociological works were "a distinct and valuable contribution toward science", and from A. S. Neill, founder of Summerhill, a progressive school in England, who argued that "the campaign against Reich seems largely ignorant and uncivilized, more like fascism than democracy". Norway was proud of its intellectual tolerance, so the "Reich affair", especially following the country's 1936 expulsion of Leon Trotsky, put Nygaardsvold's government on the spot. A compromise was found in which Reich was given his visa, but a royal decree was later issued stipulating that anyone wanting to practice psychoanalysis needed a licence, which Reich was not permitted to have.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: The affair drew much attention between March and December 1938, with more than 165 articles and letters appearing in 13 Norwegian newspapers denouncing Reich's work. The most prominent was published by the country's largest newspaper, "Aftenposten", on 19 and 21 April 1938, containing the views of both Kreyberg and Thjøtta, in which the former alleged that "Mr. Reich" knew less about bacteria and anatomy than a first-year medical student. When Reich requested a detailed control study, Kreyberg responded that his work did not merit it. Throughout the affair Reich issued just one public statement, when he asked for a commission to replicate his bion experiments. Sharaf writes that the opposition to his work affected his personality and relationships. He was left humiliated, no longer comfortable in public, and seething with bitterness against the researchers who had denounced him.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: According to Sharaf, 1934–1937 was the happiest period of Reich's personal life, despite the professional problems. His relationship with Elsa Lindenberg was good and he considered marrying her. When she became pregnant in 1935, they were initially overjoyed, buying clothes and furniture for the child, but doubts developed for Reich, who saw the future as too unsettled. To Lindenberg's great distress, Sharaf writes, Reich insisted on an abortion, at that time illegal. They went to Berlin, where the psychoanalyst Edith Jacobson helped to arrange it.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: In 1937, Reich began an affair with a female patient, an actress who had been married to a colleague of his. According to Sigurd Hoel, the analysis would stop because of the relationship, then the relationship would end and the analysis would start up again. The patient eventually threatened to go to the press, but was persuaded that it would harm her as much as it would Reich. Around the same time, Reich also had an affair with Gerd Bergersen, a 25-year-old Norwegian textile designer.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Despite the affairs, Sharaf writes that, as the newspaper campaign against Reich gained pace, he developed an intense jealousy toward Lindenberg, demanding that she not have a separate life of any kind. He even physically assaulted a composer with whom she was working. Lindenberg considered calling the police but decided Reich could not afford another scandal. His behaviour took its toll on their relationship, and when Reich asked her to accompany him to the United States, she said no.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: When Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938, Reich's ex-wife and daughters had already left for the United States. Later that year, Theodore P. Wolfe, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, traveled to Norway to study under Reich. Wolfe offered to help Reich settle in the States, and managed to arrange an invitation from The New School in New York for Reich to teach a course on "Biological Aspects of Character Formation". Wolfe and Walter Briehl, a former student of Reich's, put up $5,000 to guarantee his visa. Wolfe also pulled strings with Adolph Berle, an official in the State Department. Reich wrote in his diary in May 1939:


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: He received the visa in August 1939, and sailed out of Norway on August 19 on the "SS Stavangerfjord", the last ship to leave for the United States before the war began on September 3. He began teaching at The New School, where he remained until May 1941, living first at 7502 Kessel Street, Forest Hills, Queens, where he conducted experiments on mice with cancer, injecting them with bions. He built a small Faraday cage to examine the vapors and lights he said the bions were producing. In October 1939, his secretary Gertrud Gaasland introduced him to Ilse Ollendorf, 29 years old at the time. Reich was still in love with Lindenberg, but Ollendorf started organizing his life for him, becoming his bookkeeper and laboratory assistant. They began living together in the Kessel Street house on Christmas Day 1939. She was eight weeks pregnant, but according to Turner he insisted that she have an abortion. Five years later, in 1944, they had a son, Peter, and were married in 1946.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Sharaf writes that Reich's personality changed after his experience in Oslo. He became socially isolated and kept his distance even from old friends and his ex-wife. His students in the United States came to know him as a man that no colleague, no matter how close, called by his first name. In January 1940 he wrote to Lindenberg to end their relationship once and for all, telling her that he was in despair and that he believed he would end up dying like a dog.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: It was shortly after he arrived in New York in 1939 that Reich first said he had discovered a biological or cosmic energy, an extension of Freud's idea of the libido. He called it "orgone energy" or "orgone radiation", and the study of it "orgonomy". Reich said he had seen orgone when he injected his mice with bions and in the sky at night through an "organoscope", a special telescope. He argued that it is in the soil and air (indeed, is omnipresent), is blue or blue-grey, and that humanity had divided its knowledge of it in two: aether for the physical aspect and God for the spiritual. The colour of the sky, the northern lights, St Elmo's Fire, and the blue of sexually excited frogs are manifestations of orgone, he wrote. He also argued that protozoa, red corpuscles, cancer cells and the chlorophyll of plants are charged with it.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: In 1940, he began to build insulated Faraday cages, "orgone accumulators", that he said would concentrate the orgone. The earliest boxes were for laboratory animals. The first human-sized, five-foot-tall box was built in December 1940, and set up in the basement of his house. Turner writes that it was made of plywood lined with rock wool and sheet iron, and had a chair inside and a small window. The boxes had multiple layers of these materials, which caused the orgone concentration inside the box to be three to five times stronger than in the air, Reich said. Patients were expected to sit inside them naked.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: The accumulators were tested on plant growth and mice with cancer. Reich wrote to his supporters in July 1941 that orgone is "definitely able to destroy cancerous growth. This is proved by the fact that tumors in all parts of the body are disappearing or diminishing. No other remedy in the world can claim such a thing." Although not licensed to practise medicine in the United States, he began testing the boxes on human beings diagnosed with cancer and schizophrenia. In one case the test had to be stopped prematurely because the subject heard a rumour that Reich was insane; there were stories, which were false, that he had been hospitalized in the Utica State Mental Hospital. In another case the father of an eight-year-old girl with cancer approached him for help, then complained to the American Medical Association that he was practising without a licence. He asked his supporters to stick with him through the criticism, believing that he had developed a grand unified theory of physical and mental health.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: In December 1940, Reich wrote to Albert Einstein saying he had a scientific discovery he wanted to discuss, and, in January 1941, visited Einstein at his home in Princeton, where they talked for nearly five hours. He told Einstein that he had discovered a "specific biologically effective energy which behaves in many respects differently to all that is known about electromagnetic energy". He said it could be used against disease, and as a weapon "in the fight against the Fascist pestilence". (Einstein had signed a letter to President Roosevelt in August 1939 to warn of the danger of Nazi Germany building an atom bomb, and had urged the United States to establish its own research project.) Einstein agreed that if an object's temperature could be raised without an apparent heating source, as Reich was suggesting, it would be "a bomb".


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Reich was much encouraged by the meeting and hoped he would be invited to join Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. During their next meeting, he gave Einstein a small accumulator, and over the next 10 days Einstein performed experiments with it in his basement, which involved taking the temperature above, inside and near the device, and stripping it down to its Faraday cage to compare temperatures. He observed an increase of temperature, which Reich argued was caused by orgone. One of Einstein's assistants pointed out that the temperature was lower on the floor than on the ceiling. Einstein concluded that the effect was simply due to the temperature gradient inside the room. "Through these experiments I regard the matter as completely solved", he wrote to Reich on 7 February 1941.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Reich responded with a 25-page letter in which he tried to change Einstein's mind. To rule out the influence of convection he told Einstein that he had taken certain measures, including introducing a horizontal plate above the accumulator, wrapping it in a blanket, hanging it from the ceiling, burying it underground and placing it outside. He wrote that in all these circumstances the temperature difference remained, and was in fact more marked in the open air. Einstein did not respond to this or to Reich's future correspondence—Reich would write regularly reporting the results of his experiments—until Reich threatened three years later to publish their previous exchange. Einstein replied that he could not devote any further time to the matter and asked that his name not be misused for advertising purposes. Reich believed that Einstein's change of heart was part of a conspiracy of some kind, perhaps related to the communists or prompted by the rumours that Reich was ill. Reich published the correspondence in 1953 as "The Einstein Affair".


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Reich lost his position at the New School in May 1941, after writing to its director, Alvin Johnson, to say he had saved several lives in secret experiments with the accumulator. Johnson was aware of Reich's claims that he could cure cancer, and told him the New School was not an appropriate institution for the work. Reich was also evicted from Kessel Street after his neighbours complained about the animal experiments. His supporters, including Walter Briehl, gave him $14,000 to buy a house, and he settled into 9906 69th Avenue.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: On 12 December 1941, five days after the attack on Pearl Harbor and a day after Germany declared it was at war with the United States, Reich was arrested in his home at 2 a.m. by the FBI and taken to Ellis Island, where he was held for over three weeks. He identified himself at the time as the Associate Professor of Medical Psychology, Director of the Orgone Institute. He was at first left to sleep on the floor in a large hall, surrounded by members of the fascist German American Bund, who Reich feared might kill him, but when his psoriasis returned he was transferred to the hospital ward. He was questioned about several books the FBI found when they searched his home, including Hitler's "Mein Kampf", Trotsky's "My Life", a biography of Lenin and a Russian alphabet book for children. After threatening to go on hunger strike he was released, on 5 January, but his name remained on the "key figures list" of the Enemy Alien Control Unit, which meant he was placed under surveillance.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Turner writes that it seems Reich was the victim of mistaken identity; there was a William Reich who ran a bookstore in New Jersey, which was used to distribute Communist material. The FBI acknowledged the mistake in November 1943 and closed Reich's file. In 2000 it released 789 pages of the file:


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: In November 1942, Reich purchased an old farm for $4,000 on Dodge Pond, Maine, near Rangeley, with of land. Calling it Orgonon, he started spending summers there, and had a one-room cabin built in 1943, a laboratory in 1945, a larger cabin in 1946, and an observatory in 1948.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: In 1950, he decided to live there year-round, and in May that year moved from New York with Ilse, their son, Peter, and Reich's daughter Eva, with the idea of creating a centre for the study of orgone. Several colleagues moved there with him, including two physicians with an interest in orgone, and Lois Wyvell, who ran the Orgone Press Institute. The artist William Moise joined Reich as an assistant at Orgonon, later marrying Eva Reich. Orgonon still houses the Wilhelm Reich Museum, as well as holiday cottages available to rent, one of which is the cottage in which the Reichs lived.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Until 1947, Reich enjoyed largely uncritical attention from the press in the United States. One journal, "Psychosomatic Medicine", had called orgone a "surrealist creation", but his psychoanalytic work had been discussed in the "Journal of the American Medical Association" and the "American Journal of Psychiatry", "The Nation" had given his writing positive reviews, and he was listed in "American Men of Science".


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: His reputation took a sudden downturn in April and May 1947, when articles by Mildred Edie Brady were published in "Harper's" and "The New Republic", the latter entitled "The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich", with the subhead, "The man who blames both neuroses and cancer on unsatisfactory sexual activities has been repudiated by only one scientific journal." Brady's ultimate target was not Reich but psychoanalysis, which according to Turner she saw as akin to astrology.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Of Reich she wrote: "Orgone, named after the sexual orgasm, is, according to Reich, a cosmic energy. It is, in fact, cosmic energy. Reich has not only discovered it; he has seen it, demonstrated it and named a town—Orgonon, Maine—after it. Here he builds accumulators of it, which are rented out to patients, who presumably derive 'orgastic potency' from it." She claimed, falsely, that he had said the accumulators could cure not only impotence but cancer. Brady argued that the "growing Reich cult" had to be dealt with. On his copy of the "New Republic" article, Reich wrote "THE SMEAR". He issued a press release, but no one published it.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: In July 1947, Dr. J. J. Durrett, director of the Medical Advisory Division of the Federal Trade Commission, wrote to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) asking them to investigate Reich's claims about the health benefits of orgone. The FDA assigned an investigator to the case, who learned that Reich had built 250 accumulators. The FDA concluded that they were dealing with a "fraud of the first magnitude". According to Sharaf, the FDA suspected a sexual racket of some kind; questions were asked about the women associated with orgonomy and "what was done with them". From that point on, Reich's work came increasingly to the attention of the authorities.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Reich established the Orgonomic Infant Research Center (OIRC) in 1950, with the aim of preventing muscular armouring in children from birth. Meetings were held in the basement of his house in Forest Hills. Turner wrote that several children who were treated by OIRC therapists later said they had been sexually abused by the therapists, although not by Reich. One woman said she was assaulted by one of Reich's associates when she was five years old. Children were asked to stand naked in front of Reich and a group of 30 therapists in his basement, while Reich described the children's "blockages". Reich's daughter, Lore Reich Rubin, told Turner that she believed Reich himself had been abused as a child, which is why he developed such an interest in sex and childhood sexuality.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: The sexual allegations apart, several people discussed how the vegetotherapy had hurt them physically as children, as therapists pressed hard on the body to loosen muscular armour. Reich's son, Peter, wrote in his autobiography, "Book of Dreams" (1973) about the pain this had caused him. Susanna Steig, the niece of William Steig, the "New Yorker" cartoonist, wrote about being pressed so hard during Reichian therapy that she had difficulty breathing, and said that a woman therapist had sexually assaulted her. According to Turner, a nurse complained in 1952 to the New York Medical Society that an OIRC therapist had taught her five-year-old son how to masturbate. The therapist was arrested, but the case was dropped when Reich agreed to close the OIRC.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Reich and Ilse Ollendorff divorced in September 1951, ostensibly because he thought she had an affair. She continued working with him for another three years. Even after the divorce, he suspected her of having affairs, and persuaded her to sign confessions about her feelings of fear and hatred toward him, which he locked away in the archives of his Orgone Institute. He wrote several documents denouncing her, while having an affair himself with Lois Wyvell, who ran the Orgone Institute Press.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: In 1951, Reich said he had discovered another energy that he called deadly orgone radiation (DOR), accumulations of which played a role in desertification. He designed a "cloudbuster", rows of 15-foot aluminium pipes mounted on a mobile platform, connected to cables that were inserted into water. He believed that it could unblock orgone energy in the atmosphere and cause rain. Turner described it as an "orgone box turned inside out".


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: He conducted dozens of experiments with the cloudbuster, calling his research "Cosmic Orgone Engineering". During a drought in 1953, two farmers in Maine offered to pay him if he could make it rain to save their blueberry crop. Reich used the cloudbuster on the morning of July 6, and according to Bangor's "Daily News"—based on an account from an anonymous eyewitness who was probably Peter Reich—rain began to fall that evening. The crop survived, the farmers declared themselves satisfied, and Reich received his fee.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Over the years the FDA interviewed physicians, Reich's students and his patients, asking about the orgone accumulators. A professor at the University of Oregon who bought an accumulator told an FDA inspector that he knew the device was phoney, but found it helpful because his wife sat quietly in it for four hours every day.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: The attention of the FDA triggered belligerent responses from Reich, who called them "HiGS" (hoodlums in government) and the tools of red fascists. He developed a delusion that he had powerful friends in government, including President Eisenhower, who he believed would protect him, and that the U.S. Air Force was flying over Orgonon to make sure that he was all right. On 29 July 1952 three inspectors arrived at Orgonon unannounced. Sharaf writes that Reich detested unannounced visitors; he had once chased some people away with a gun just for looking at an adjacent property. He told the inspectors they had to read his work before he would interact with them, and ordered them to leave.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: In February 1954, the United States Attorney for the District of Maine filed a 27-page complaint seeking a permanent injunction, under Sections 301 and 302 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, to prevent interstate shipment of orgone accumulators and to ban promotional literature. Reich refused to appear in court, arguing that no court was in a position to evaluate his work. In a letter to Judge John D. Clifford, Jr. in February, he wrote:


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: The injunction was granted by default on 19 March 1954. The judge ordered that all accumulators, parts and instructions be destroyed, and that several of Reich's books that mentioned orgone be withheld.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: According to Turner, the injunction triggered a further deterioration in Reich's mental health. From at least early 1954, he came to believe that the planet was under attack by UFOs, which he called "energy alphas". He said he often saw them flying over Orgonon, shaped like thin cigars with windows, leaving streams of black Deadly Orgone Radiation in their wake, which he believed the aliens were scattering to destroy the Earth.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: He and his son would spend their nights searching for UFOs through telescopes and binoculars, and sometimes, when they believed they had found one, they would roll out a cloudbuster to suck the energy out of it (the perceived-or imagined-UFO). Reich claimed he had shot several of them down. Armed with two cloudbusters, they fought what Reich called a "full-scale interplanetary battle" in Arizona, where he had rented a house as a base station. In "Contact with Space" (1956), he wrote of the "very remote possibility" that his own father had been from outer space.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: In late 1954, Reich began an affair with Grethe Hoff, a former patient. Hoff was married to another former student and patient of his, the psychologist Myron Sharaf, who decades later, with his "Fury on Earth" (1983), became Reich's main biographer. Hoff and Sharaf had had their first child the year before Hoff left him for Reich; the marriage was never repaired although the affair had ended by June 1955. Two months later Reich began another relationship, this time with Aurora Karrer, a medical researcher, and, in November, he moved out of Orgonon to an apartment in Alban Towers, Washington, D.C., to live with her, using the pseudonym Dr. Walter Roner.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: While Reich was in Arizona in May 1956, one of his associates sent an accumulator part through the mail to another state, in violation of the injunction, after an FDA inspector posing as a customer requested it. Reich and another associate, Dr. Michael Silvert, were charged with contempt of court; Silvert had been looking after the inventory in Reich's absence. Reich at first refused to attend court, and was arrested and held for two days until a supporter posted bail of $30,000.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Representing himself during the hearing, he admitted the violation but pleaded not guilty and hinted at conspiracies. During a recess the judge apparently suggested a psychiatric evaluation to Reich's ex-wife, Ilse Ollendorff, but this was not communicated to Reich. The jury found him guilty on 7 May 1956, and he was sentenced to two years' imprisonment. Silvert was sentenced to a year and a day, the Wilhelm Reich Foundation was fined $10,000, and the accumulators and associated literature were to be destroyed.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: On 5 June 1956, two FDA officials arrived at Orgonon to supervise the destruction of the accumulators. Most of them had been sold by that time and another 50 were with Silvert in New York, leaving only three accumulators at Orgonon. The FDA agents were not allowed to destroy them, only to supervise the destruction, so Reich's friends and his son, Peter, chopped them up with axes as the agents watched. Once they were destroyed, Reich placed an American flag on top of them.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: On 26 June, the agents returned to supervise the destruction of the promotional material, including 251 copies of Reich's books. The American Civil Liberties Union issued a press release criticizing the book burning, although coverage of the release was poor, and Reich ended up asking them not to help because he was annoyed that they had failed to criticize the destruction of the accumulators. In England, A. S. Neill and the poet Herbert Read signed a letter of protest, but it was never published. On July 23 the remaining accumulators in New York were destroyed by S. A. Collins and Sons, who had built them.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: On 23 August, six tons of Reich's books, journals and papers were burned in New York, at the Gansevoort incinerator, a public incinerator on 25th Street. The material included copies of several of his books, including "The Sexual Revolution", "Character Analysis" and "The Mass Psychology of Fascism". Although these had been published in German before Reich ever discussed orgone, he had added mention of it to the English editions, so they were caught by the injunction. It has been cited as one of the worst examples of censorship in U.S. history. As with the accumulators, the FDA was supposed only to observe the destruction. The psychiatrist Victor Sobey (d. 1995), an associate of Reich's, wrote:


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Reich appealed the lower court's decision in October 1956, but the Court of Appeals upheld it on 11 December. He wrote several times to J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, requesting a meeting, and appealed to the Supreme Court, which decided on 25 February 1957 not to review the case. On 12 March 1957 Reich and Silvert were sent to Danbury Federal Prison. (Silvert committed suicide in May 1958, five months after his release.) Richard C. Hubbard, a psychiatrist who admired Reich, examined him on admission, recording paranoia manifested by delusions of grandiosity, persecution, and ideas of reference:


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: On March 19, Reich was transferred to the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary and examined again. This time it was decided that he was mentally competent and that his personality seemed intact, though he might become psychotic when stressed. A few days later, on his 60th birthday, he wrote to his son, Peter, then 13:


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: He applied for a presidential pardon in May, to no avail. Peter visited him in jail several times, where one prisoner said Reich was known as the "flying saucer guy" and the "Sex Box man". Reich told Peter that he cried a lot, and wanted Peter to let himself cry too, believing that tears are the "great softener". His last letter to his son was on 22 October 1957, when he said he was looking forward to being released on 10 November, having served one third of his sentence. A parole hearing had been scheduled for a few days before that date. He wrote that he and Peter had a date for a meal at the Howard Johnson restaurant near Peter's school. Peter's mother Ilse, who was a Quaker, stated that Wilhelm attended some Protestant services during his imprisonment and sent his son various prayers.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Reich failed to appear for roll call on 3 November 1957, and was found at 7 a.m. in his bed. The prison doctor said he had died during the night of "myocardial insufficiency with sudden heart failure". He was buried in a vault at Orgonon that he had asked his caretaker to dig in 1955. He had left instructions that there was to be no religious ceremony, but that a record should be played of Schubert's "Ave Maria" sung by Marian Anderson, and that his granite headstone should read simply: "Wilhelm Reich, Born March 24, 1897, Died ... " None of the academic journals carried an obituary. "Time" magazine wrote on 18 November 1957:


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: The psychoanalyst Richard Sterba wrote in 1982 that Reich had been a brilliant clinician and teacher in the 1920s; even the older analysts had wanted to attend his technical seminars in Vienna. But according to Sharaf, they came to consider Reich as paranoid and belligerent. Psychologist Luis Cordon wrote that Reich's slide from respectability concluded with the consensus inside and outside the psychoanalytic community that he was at best a crackpot and perhaps seriously ill.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: There were inaccurate rumours from the late 1920s that he had been hospitalized. Paul Federn became Reich's second analyst in 1922; he later said he had detected "incipient schizophrenia" and called Reich a psychopath. Similarly, Sandor Rado had Reich as an analyst and in 1931 declared him schizophrenic "in the most serious way". Reich's daughter, Lore Reich Rubin, a psychiatrist, speculated that he had bipolar disorder and may have been sexually abused as a child.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Sharaf argued that psychoanalysts tended to dismiss as ill anyone from within the fold who had transgressed, and this was never done so relentlessly as with Reich. His work was split into the pre-psychotic "good" and the post-psychotic "bad", the date of the illness's onset depending on which parts of his work a speaker disliked. Psychoanalysts preferred to see him as sane in the 1920s because of his work on character, while political radicals regarded him as sane in the 1930s because of his Marxist-oriented research.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Despite Reich's precarious mental health, his work on character and the idea of muscular armouring contributed to the development of what is now known as ego psychology, gave rise to body psychotherapy, and helped shape the Gestalt therapy of Fritz Perls, the bioenergetic analysis of Reich's student Alexander Lowen, and the primal therapy of Arthur Janov.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Reich's work influenced a generation of intellectuals, including Saul Bellow, William Burroughs and Norman Mailer, and the founder of Summerhill School in England, A. S. Neill. The French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote in "The History of Sexuality" (1976) that the impact of Reich's critique of sexual repression had been substantial.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: The Austrian-American philosopher Paul Edwards said that the FDA's pursuit of Reich had intensified Edwards' attachment to him. He wrote in 1977 that for years he and his friends regarded Reich as "something akin to a messiah". Paul Mathews and John M. Bell started teaching a course on Reich in 1968 at New York University through its Division of Continuing Study, and it was still being taught at the time Sharaf was writing Reich's biography in 1983, making it the longest-running course ever taught in that division.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Several well-known figures used orgone accumulators, including Orson Bean, Sean Connery, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Goodman, Jack Kerouac, Isaac Rosenfeld, J. D. Salinger, William Steig and Robert Anton Wilson. Norman Mailer—who owned several orgone accumulators, including some in the shape of eggs—wrote about Reich enthusiastically in "The Village Voice", as a result of which Orgonon became a place of pilgrimage and the orgasm a symbol of liberation.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Reich continued to influence popular culture after his death. Turner writes that the evil Dr. Durand Durand in the feature film "Barbarella" (1968) seems to be based on Reich; he places Barbarella (Jane Fonda) in his "Excessive Machine" so that she would die of pleasure, but rather than killing her the machine burns out. A film about Reich and the implications of his ideas, "" (1971), was made by Yugoslav director Dušan Makavejev. An orgone accumulator made an appearance as the Orgasmatron in Woody Allen's comedy feature film "Sleeper" (1973). The use of orgone accumulators, a cloudbuster and representations of Reich's orgone therapy with patients, together with a snapshot of the FDA's hostile actions against Reich were dramatised in a short film called 'It Can Be Done', which was made by British director Jon East in 1999. The film screened at the 56th Venice Film Festival on 11 September 1999.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Patti Smith's "Birdland" on her album "Horses" (1975) is based on Reich's life. Hawkwind's song "Orgone Accumulator", on their album "Space Ritual" (1973) is named for his invention. In Bob Dylan's "Joey" from "Desire" (1976), the eponymous gangster spends his time in prison reading Nietzsche and Reich. Reich is also a character in the opera "Marilyn" (1980) by Italian composer Lorenzo Ferrero.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Kate Bush's single "Cloudbusting" (1985) described Reich's arrest through the eyes of his son, Peter, who wrote his father's story in "A Book of Dreams" (1973). The video for the song features Donald Sutherland as Reich and Bush as Peter. Robert Anton Wilson's play, "Wilhelm Reich in Hell" (1987), is about Reich's confrontation with the American government. "" (2013) is a compilation album on which Reich's writings are adapted to music. The Australian designer Marc Newson has produced a range of orgone furniture, most famously his Orgone Chair (1993). In James Reich's novel "Soft Invasions" (2017), a fictionalized Wilhelm Reich is treating a Hollywood mogul using an orgone accumulator.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: The mainstream scientific community dismissed Reich's orgone theory as pseudoscience. James Strick, a historian of science at Franklin and Marshall College, wrote in 2015 that the dominant narrative since Reich's death has been that "there is no point in looking more closely at Reich's science because there no legitimate science from Reich".


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: From 1960, apparently in response to the book burning, the New York publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux began republishing his major works. Reichian physicians organized study groups. In 1967 one of his associates, Dr. Elsworth Baker, established the bi-annual "Journal of Orgonomy", still published , and in 1968 founded the American College of Orgonomy in Princeton, New Jersey. According to Sharaf, contributors to the "Journal of Orgonomy" who worked in academia often used pseudonyms. The Orgone Biophysical Research Laboratory was founded in 1978 by James DeMeo and the Institute for Orgonomic Science in 1982 by Morton Herskowitz.


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: There was renewed interest in November 2007, when the Reich archives at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University were unsealed; Reich had left instructions that his unpublished papers be stored for 50 years after his death. James Strick began studying Reich's laboratory notebooks from the 1935–1939 bion experiments in Norway. In 2015 Harvard University Press published Strick's "Wilhelm Reich, Biologist", in which he writes that Reich's work in Oslo "represented the cutting edge of light microscopy and time-lapse micro-cinematography". He argues that the dominant narrative of Reich as a pseudoscientist is incorrect and that Reich's story is "much more complex and interesting".


title: Wilhelm Reich

text: Speaking to Christopher Turner in 2011, Reich's son, Peter, said of his father, "He was a nineteenth-century scientist; he wasn't a twentieth-century scientist. He didn't practice science the way scientists do today. He was a nineteenth-century mind who came crashing into twentieth-century America. And boom!"


title: Tacitus

text: Publius Cornelius Tacitus, known simply as Tacitus ( , ; – ), was a Roman historian and politician. Tacitus is widely regarded as one of the greatest Roman historians by modern scholars.


title: Tacitus

text: The surviving portions of his two major works—the "Annals" (Latin: "Annales") and the "Histories" (Latin: "Historiae")—examine the reigns of the emperors Tiberius, Claudius, Nero, and those who reigned in the Year of the Four Emperors (69 AD). These two works span the history of the Roman Empire from the death of Augustus (14 AD) to the death of Domitian (96 AD), although there are substantial lacunae in the surviving texts.


title: Tacitus

text: Tacitus's other writings discuss oratory (in dialogue format, see "Dialogus de oratoribus"), Germania (in "De origine et situ Germanorum"), and the life of his father-in-law, Agricola (the general responsible for much of the Roman conquest of Britain), mainly focusing on his campaign in Britannia ("De vita et moribus Iulii Agricolae"). Tacitus's "Annals" are of interest for providing an early account of the persecution of Christians and the earliest extra-Biblical reference to the crucifixion of Jesus.


title: Tacitus

text: Details about the personal life of Tacitus are scarce. What little is known comes from scattered hints throughout his work, the letters of his friend and admirer Pliny the Younger, and an inscription found at Mylasa in Caria.


title: Tacitus

text: Tacitus was born in 56 or 57 to an equestrian family. The place and date of his birth, as well as his praenomen (first name) are not known. In the letters of Sidonius Apollinaris his name is "Gaius", but in the major surviving manuscript of his work his name is given as "Publius". One scholar's suggestion of the name "Sextus" has been largely rejected.


title: Tacitus

text: Most of the older aristocratic families failed to survive the proscriptions which took place at the end of the Republic, and Tacitus makes it clear that he owed his rank to the Flavian emperors ("Hist." 1.1). The claim that he was descended from a freedman is derived from a speech in his writings which asserts that many senators and knights were descended from freedmen ("Ann." 13.27), but this is generally disputed.


title: Tacitus

text: In his article on Tacitus in Pauly-Wissowa, I. Borzsak had conjectured that the historian was related to Thrasea Paetus and Etruscan family of Caecinii, about whom he spoke very highly. Furthermore, some later Caecinii bore cognomen Tacitus, which also could indicate some sort of relationship. It had been suggested that historian's mother was a daughter of Aulus Caecina Paetus, suffect consul of 37, and sister of Arria, wife of Thrasea.


title: Tacitus

text: His father may have been the Cornelius Tacitus who served as procurator of Belgica and Germania; Pliny the Elder mentions that Cornelius had a son who aged rapidly (NH 7.76), which implies an early death.


title: Tacitus

text: There is no mention of Tacitus's suffering such a condition, but it is possible that this refers to a brother—if Cornelius was indeed his father.


title: Tacitus

text: The friendship between the younger Pliny and Tacitus leads some scholars to conclude that they were both the offspring of wealthy provincial families.


title: Tacitus

text: The province of his birth remains unknown, though various conjectures suggest Gallia Belgica, Gallia Narbonensis, or Northern Italy. His marriage to the daughter of Narbonensian senator Gnaeus Julius Agricola implies that he came from Gallia Narbonensis. Tacitus's dedication to Lucius Fabius Justus in the "Dialogus" may indicate a connection with Spain, and his friendship with Pliny suggests origins in northern Italy.


title: Tacitus

text: No evidence exists, however, that Pliny's friends from northern Italy knew Tacitus, nor do Pliny's letters hint that the two men had a common background. Pliny Book 9, Letter 23, reports that when asked whether he was Italian or provincial, he gave an unclear answer and so was asked whether he was Tacitus or Pliny. Since Pliny was from Italy, some infer that Tacitus was from the provinces, probably Gallia Narbonensis.


title: Tacitus

text: His ancestry, his skill in oratory, and his sympathetic depiction of barbarians who resisted Roman rule (e.g., "Ann." 2.9) have led some to suggest that he was a Celt. This belief stems from the fact that the Celts who had occupied Gaul prior to the Roman invasion were famous for their skill in oratory and had been subjugated by Rome.


title: Tacitus

text: As a young man, Tacitus studied rhetoric in Rome to prepare for a career in law and politics; like Pliny, he may have studied under Quintilian ( – ). In 77 or 78, he married Julia Agricola, daughter of the famous general Agricola.


title: Tacitus

text: Little is known of their domestic life, save that Tacitus loved hunting and the outdoors. He started his career (probably the "latus clavus", mark of the senator) under Vespasian (r. 69–79), but entered political life as a quaestor in 81 or 82 under Titus.


title: Tacitus

text: He advanced steadily through the "cursus honorum", becoming praetor in 88 and a quindecimvir, a member of the priestly college in charge of the "Sibylline Books" and the Secular Games. He gained acclaim as a lawyer and as an orator; his skill in public speaking ironically counterpoints his cognomen, "Tacitus" ("silent").


title: Tacitus

text: He served in the provinces from to , either in command of a legion or in a civilian post. He and his property survived Domitian's reign of terror (81–96), but the experience left him jaded and perhaps ashamed at his own complicity, installing in him the hatred of tyranny evident in his works. The "Agricola", chs. 44–45, is illustrative:


title: Tacitus

text: Agricola was spared those later years during which Domitian, leaving now no interval or breathing space of time, but, as it were, with one continuous blow, drained the life-blood of the Commonwealth... It was not long before our hands dragged Helvidius to prison, before we gazed on the dying looks of Mauricus and Rusticus, before we were steeped in Senecio's innocent blood. Even Nero turned his eyes away, and did not gaze upon the atrocities which he ordered; with Domitian it was the chief part of our miseries to see and to be seen, to know that our sighs were being recorded...


title: Tacitus

text: From his seat in the Senate, he became suffect consul in 97 during the reign of Nerva, being the first of his family to do so. During his tenure, he reached the height of his fame as an orator when he delivered the funeral oration for the famous veteran soldier Lucius Verginius Rufus.


title: Tacitus

text: In the following year, he wrote and published the "Agricola" and "Germania", foreshadowing the literary endeavors that would occupy him until his death.


title: Tacitus

text: Afterward, he absented himself from public life, but returned during Trajan's reign (98–117). In 100, he and his friend Pliny the Younger prosecuted (proconsul of Africa) for corruption. Priscus was found guilty and sent into exile; Pliny wrote a few days later that Tacitus had spoken "with all the majesty which characterizes his usual style of oratory".


title: Tacitus

text: A lengthy absence from politics and law followed while he wrote the "Histories" and the "Annals". In 112 to 113, he held the highest civilian governorship, that of the Roman province of Asia in western Anatolia, recorded in the inscription found at Mylasa mentioned above. A passage in the "Annals" fixes 116 as the "terminus post quem" of his death, which may have been as late as 125 or even 130. It seems that he survived both Pliny (died ) and Trajan (died 117).


title: Tacitus

text: It remains unknown whether Tacitus had any children. The "Augustan History" reports that Emperor Marcus Claudius Tacitus (r. 275–276) claimed him for an ancestor and provided for the preservation of his works, but this story may be fraudulent, like much of the "Augustan History".


title: Tacitus

text: Five works ascribed to Tacitus have survived (albeit with gaps), the most substantial of which are the "Annals" and the "Histories". This canon (with approximate dates) consists of:


title: Tacitus

text: The "Annals" and the "Histories", published separately, were meant to form a single edition of thirty books.


title: Tacitus

text: Although Tacitus wrote the "Histories" before the "Annals", the events in the "Annals" precede the "Histories"; together they form a continuous narrative from the death of Augustus (14) to the death of Domitian (96). Though most has been lost, what remains is an invaluable record of the era. The first half of the "Annals" survived in a single manuscript from Corvey Abbey in Germany, and the second half in a single manuscript from Monte Cassino in Italy, and it is remarkable that they survived at all.


title: Tacitus

text: In an early chapter of the "Agricola", Tacitus asserts that he wishes to speak about the years of Domitian, Nerva and Trajan. In the "Histories" the scope has changed; Tacitus says that he will deal with the age of Nerva and Trajan at a later time. Instead, he will cover the period from the civil wars of the Year of the Four Emperors and end with the despotism of the Flavians. Only the first four books and twenty-six chapters of the fifth book survive, covering the year 69 and the first part of 70. The work is believed to have continued up to the death of Domitian on September 18, 96. The fifth book contains—as a prelude to the account of Titus's suppression of the First Jewish–Roman War—a short ethnographic survey of the ancient Jews, and it is an invaluable record of Roman attitudes towards them.


title: Tacitus

text: The "Annals", Tacitus's final work, covers the period from the death of Augustus in AD 14. He wrote at least sixteen books, but books 7–10 and parts of books 5, 6, 11, and 16 are missing. Book 6 ends with the death of Tiberius, and books 7–12 presumably covered the reigns of Caligula and Claudius. The remaining books cover the reign of Nero, perhaps until his death in June 68 or until the end of that year to connect with the "Histories". The second half of book 16 is missing, ending with the events of 66. It is not known whether Tacitus completed the work; he died before he could complete his planned histories of Nerva and Trajan, and no record survives of the work on Augustus and the beginnings of the Roman Empire, with which he had planned to finish his work. The "Annals" is one of the earliest secular historical records to mention Christ, which Tacitus does in connection with Nero's persecution of the Christians.


title: Tacitus

text: Tacitus wrote three works with a more limited scope: "Agricola", a biography of his father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola; the "Germania", a monograph on the lands and tribes of barbarian Germania; and the "Dialogus", a dialogue on the art of rhetoric.


title: Tacitus

text: The "Germania" (Latin title: "De Origine et situ Germanorum") is an ethnographic work on the Germanic tribes outside the Roman Empire. The "Germania" fits within a classical ethnographic tradition which includes authors such as Herodotus and Julius Caesar. The book begins (chapters 1–27) with a description of the lands, laws, and customs of the various tribes. Later chapters focus on descriptions of particular tribes, beginning with those who lived closest to the Roman empire, and ending with a description of those who lived on the shores of the Baltic Sea, such as the Fenni. Tacitus had written a similar, albeit shorter, piece in his "Agricola" (chapters 10–13).


title: Tacitus

text: The "Agricola" (written ) recounts the life of Gnaeus Julius Agricola, an eminent Roman general and Tacitus's father-in-law; it also covers, briefly, the geography and ethnography of ancient Britain. As in the "Germania", Tacitus favorably contrasts the liberty of the native Britons with the tyranny and corruption of the Empire; the book also contains eloquent polemics against the greed of Rome, one of which, that Tacitus claims is from a speech by Calgacus, ends by asserting, "Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant." ("To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace."—Oxford Revised Translation).


title: Tacitus

text: There is uncertainty about when Tacitus wrote "Dialogus de oratoribus". Many characteristics set it apart from the other works of Tacitus, so that its authenticity has at various times been questioned. It is likely to be early work, indebted to the author's rhetorical training, since its style imitates that of the foremost Roman orator Cicero. It lacks (for example) the incongruities that are typical of his mature historical works. The "Dialogus" is dedicated to Fabius Iustus, a consul in 102 AD.


title: Tacitus

text: Tacitus's writings are known for their dense prose that seldom glosses the facts, in contrast to the style of some of his contemporaries, such as Plutarch. When he writes about a near defeat of the Roman army in "Annals" I,63, he does so with brevity of description rather than embellishment.


title: Tacitus

text: In most of his writings, he keeps to a chronological narrative order, only seldom outlining the bigger picture, leaving the readers to construct that picture for themselves. Nonetheless, where he does use broad strokes, for example, in the opening paragraphs of the "Annals", he uses a few condensed phrases which take the reader to the heart of the story.


title: Tacitus

text: Tacitus's historical style owes some debt to Sallust. His historiography offers penetrating—often pessimistic—insights into the psychology of power politics, blending straightforward descriptions of events, moral lessons, and tightly focused dramatic accounts. Tacitus's own declaration regarding his approach to history ("Annals" I,1) is well known:


title: Tacitus

text: There has been much scholarly discussion about Tacitus's "neutrality". Throughout his writing, he is preoccupied with the balance of power between the Senate and the emperors, and the increasing corruption of the governing classes of Rome as they adjusted to the ever-growing wealth and power of the empire. In Tacitus's view, senators squandered their cultural inheritance—that of free speech—to placate their (rarely benign) emperor.


title: Tacitus

text: Tacitus noted the increasing dependence of the emperor on the goodwill of his armies. The Julio-Claudians eventually gave way to generals, who followed Julius Caesar (and Sulla and Pompey) in recognizing that military might could secure them the political power in Rome. ("Hist." 1.4)


title: Tacitus

text: Welcome as the death of Nero had been in the first burst of joy, yet it had not only roused various emotions in Rome, among the Senators, the people, or the soldiery of the capital, it had also excited all the legions and their generals; for now had been divulged that secret of the empire, that emperors could be made elsewhere than at Rome.


title: Tacitus

text: Tacitus's political career was largely lived out under the emperor Domitian. His experience of the tyranny, corruption, and decadence of that era (81–96) may explain the bitterness and irony of his political analysis. He draws our attention to the dangers of power without accountability, love of power untempered by principle, and the apathy and corruption engendered by the concentration of wealth generated through trade and conquest by the empire.


title: Tacitus

text: Nonetheless, the image he builds of Tiberius throughout the first six books of the "Annals" is neither exclusively bleak nor approving: most scholars view the image of Tiberius as predominantly "positive" in the first books, and predominantly "negative" after the intrigues of Sejanus. The entrance of Tiberius in the first chapters of the first book is dominated by the hypocrisy of the new emperor and his courtiers. In the later books, some respect is evident for the cleverness of the old emperor in securing his position.


title: Tacitus

text: In general, Tacitus does not fear to praise and to criticize the same person, often noting what he takes to be their more admirable and less admirable properties. One of Tacitus's hallmarks is refraining from "conclusively" taking sides for or against persons he describes, which has led some to interpret his works as both supporting and rejecting the imperial system (see Tacitean studies, "Black" vs. "Red" Tacitists).


title: Tacitus

text: His Latin style is highly praised. His style, although it has a grandeur and eloquence (thanks to Tacitus's education in rhetoric), is extremely concise, even epigrammatic—the sentences are rarely flowing or beautiful, but their point is always clear. The style has been both derided as "harsh, unpleasant, and thorny" and praised as "grave, concise, and pithily eloquent".


title: Tacitus

text: A passage of , where Tacitus laments the state of the historiography regarding the last four emperors of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, illustrates his style: "The histories of Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius and Nero, while they were in power, were falsified through terror and after their death were written under the irritation of a recent hatred", or in a word-for-word translation:


title: Tacitus

text: Compared to the Ciceronian period, where sentences were usually the length of a paragraph and artfully constructed with nested pairs of carefully matched sonorous phrases, this is short and to the point. But it is also very individual. Note the three different ways of saying "and" in the first line ("-que", "et", "ac"), and especially the matched second and third lines. They are parallel in sense but not in sound; the pairs of words ending ""-entibus" … "-is"" are crossed over in a way that deliberately breaks the Ciceronian conventions—which one would, however, need to be acquainted with to see the novelty of Tacitus's style. Some readers, then and now, find this teasing of their expectations merely irritating. Others find the deliberate discord, playing against the evident parallelism of the two lines, stimulating and intriguing.


title: Tacitus

text: His historical works focus on the motives of the characters, often with penetrating insight—though it is questionable how much of his insight is correct, and how much is convincing only because of his rhetorical skill. He is at his best when exposing hypocrisy and dissimulation; for example, he follows a narrative recounting Tiberius's refusal of the title "pater patriae" by recalling the institution of a law forbidding any "treasonous" speech or writings—and the frivolous prosecutions which resulted ("Annals", 1.72). Elsewhere ("Annals" 4.64–66) he compares Tiberius's public distribution of fire relief to his failure to stop the perversions and abuses of justice which he had begun. Although this kind of insight has earned him praise, he has also been criticized for ignoring the larger context.


title: Tacitus

text: Tacitus owes most, both in language and in method, to Sallust, and Ammianus Marcellinus is the later historian whose work most closely approaches him in style.


title: Tacitus

text: Tacitus makes use of the official sources of the Roman state: the "Acta Senatus" (the minutes of the sessions of the Senate) and the "Acta Diurna" (a collection of the acts of the government and news of the court and capital). He also read collections of emperors' speeches, such as those of Tiberius and Claudius. He is generally seen as a scrupulous historian who paid careful attention to his sources.


title: Tacitus

text: Tacitus cites some of his sources directly, among them Cluvius Rufus, Fabius Rusticus and Pliny the Elder, who had written "Bella Germaniae" and a historical work which was the continuation of that of Aufidius Bassus. Tacitus also uses collections of letters ("epistolarium"). He also took information from "exitus illustrium virorum". These were a collection of books by those who were antithetical to the emperors. They tell of sacrifices by martyrs to freedom, especially the men who committed suicide. While he places no value on the Stoic theory of suicide and views suicides as ostentatious and politically useless, Tacitus often gives prominence to speeches made by those about to commit suicide, for example Cremutius Cordus' speech in "Ann." IV, 34–35.


title: The Man in the Iron Mask (1998 film)

text: The Man in the Iron Mask is a 1998 American action drama film written, directed, produced by Randall Wallace. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio in a dual role as the title character and the villain, Jeremy Irons as Aramis, John Malkovich as Athos, Gérard Depardieu as Porthos, and Gabriel Byrne as D'Artagnan. Some characters are from Alexandre Dumas's "D'Artagnan Romances" and some plot elements are very loosely adapted from his 1847-1850 novel "The Vicomte de Bragelonne".


title: The Man in the Iron Mask (1998 film)

text: The film centers on the aging four musketeers, Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and D'Artagnan, during the reign of King Louis XIV. It explores the mystery of the Man in the Iron Mask, with a plot closer to the flamboyant 1929 version starring Douglas Fairbanks, "The Iron Mask", and the 1939 version, directed by James Whale, than to the original Dumas book. The film received mixed reviews but was a financial success, grossing $183 million worldwide against a budget of $35 million.


title: The Man in the Iron Mask (1998 film)

text: In 1662, the Kingdom of France faces bankruptcy from King Louis XIV's wars against the Dutch, which has left the country's agriculture impeded by a heavy tax burden and forced the citizens to live on rotten food. Though the country appears to be on the verge of a revolution, Louis continues to spend his time preparing for war and seducing countless women. The three musketeers have gone their separate ways; Aramis is now an aging priest, Porthos has become a philandering drunk, and Athos is retired and living with his only son, Raoul, who aspires to join the Musketeers. Only D'Artagnan has remained with the Musketeers, now serving as their Captain.


title: The Man in the Iron Mask (1998 film)

text: At a festival, Aramis learns that the Jesuit order has declared Louis's wars unjust and the source of public hunger and outrage. Louis personally instructs Aramis to secretly hunt down and kill the Jesuit leader. Also in attendance are Raoul and his fiancée, Christine Bellefort. Louis immediately sets his sights on Christine, but, faithful to Raoul, she resists his affections. A Jesuit assassin attempts to kill Louis, but is killed by D'Artagnan instead. Louis immediately plots to seduce Christine by having Raoul sent to the battlefront. D'Artagnan visits Athos to warn him of the danger Raoul faces. But then Raoul arrives and informs his father he has been recalled to his regiment because he believes Louis desires Christine. Raoul nevertheless resolves to go because he will not risk making Christine a widow nor consider himself a coward. Athos angrily warns D'Artagnan that if Raoul is harmed, then Louis will become his enemy. He states D'Artagnan doesn't understand fatherhood. D'Artagnan tells Athos he will personally speak to Louis about Raoul.


title: The Man in the Iron Mask (1998 film)

text: An angry crowd from Paris attacks the Musketeers when they are fed rotten food, but D'Artagnan calms the crowd and says he will personally speak to Louis about public hunger. Louis assures D'Artagnan he will deal with the matter, and that Raoul will return soon from the war. Instead, Louis orders his chief adviser executed for distributing the rotten food (which Louis earlier ordered him to distribute), and orders that all rioters are to be shot from now on. Raoul joins the war and is killed at the battlefront by cannon fire. Upon learning of his son's death, Athos attempts to kill Louis but is stopped by D'Artagnan, and goes into exile. Louis invites Christine to the royal palace and coerces her into sex by promising to have his personal doctor treat her sick mother and sister and has them sent to recover at his country estate.


title: The Man in the Iron Mask (1998 film)

text: Aramis summons Porthos, Athos and D'Artagnan for a secret meeting in which he reveals that he himself is the Jesuits' leader and has a plan to depose Louis. Athos and Porthos agree, but D'Artagnan refuses to cooperate citing his oath of honor cannot be removed or betrayed. Athos angrily confronts D'Artagnan over his devotion and loyalty to Louis, but D'Artagnan still refuses to join their plot. Athos brands him a traitor and threatens him with death should they ever meet again.


title: The Man in the Iron Mask (1998 film)

text: The three musketeers enter a remote prison and smuggle out an unnamed prisoner in an iron mask, taking him to the countryside, where Aramis reveals that he is Philippe, Louis's identical twin brother. Aramis reveals that the night Louis was born, his mother, Queen Anne, gave birth to twins. Louis XIII, hoping to avoid dynastic warfare between his sons, sent Philippe away to live in the countryside with no knowledge of his true identity. On his deathbed, Louis XIII revealed Philippe's existence to Anne and Louis. Anne, having been told by her priest that Philippe had died at birth, then wished to restore Philippe's birthright. But Louis, now king and too superstitious to have his brother killed, had Philippe imprisoned instead in the iron mask to keep his identity secret, something Aramis reluctantly carried out. Aramis's plan is now to redeem himself and save France by replacing Louis with Philippe. The musketeers begin training Philippe to act and behave like Louis, while Athos develops fatherly feelings for him.


title: The Man in the Iron Mask (1998 film)

text: At a masquerade ball, the musketeers lure Louis to his quarters and subdue him, dressing Philippe in his clothes while taking Louis to the dungeons. D'Artagnan uncovers the ruse, after Christine accuses Philippe with evidence of Louis's role in Raoul's death and is not rebuffed. He forcibly escorts Philippe to the dungeons and they confront the musketeers before they can take Louis to the Bastille. They trade twins, but Philippe is captured before the musketeers escape. D'Artagnan is shocked to learn who Philippe is and begs Louis not to kill him, as does Anne. Louis refuses, but Philippe pleads with Louis to kill him rather than put him back in the mask, which convinces Louis decides to send Philippe to the Bastille and have the mask placed on him again, cynically stating Philippe will wear the mask until he loves it. He orders D'Artagnan to bring him the severed heads of Athos, Porthos and Aramis or Louis will have his head. Meanwhile, Christine commits suicide by hanging herself outside Louis's bedroom window out of grief and remorse.


title: The Man in the Iron Mask (1998 film)

text: D'Artagnan contacts his friends for help in rescuing Philippe from the Bastille. Louis, who suspected D'Artagnan would help his friends, ambushes them at the prison. Though he offers D'Artagnan clemency in exchange for surrender, D'Artagnan refuses, privately revealing to Philippe and his friends that Louis and Philippe are actually his sons from an affair with the Queen. He also reveals he never knew Philippe existed, and never felt pride as a father until now. They charge one final time at Louis and his men and are fired upon; their bravery compels the soldiers to close their eyes before firing and all miss. Louis attempts to stab Philippe but wounds D'Artagnan fatally and he dies in his friends' arms. Philippe attacks Louis but stops when D'Artagnan reminds him that Louis is his brother. Athos asks D'Artagnan's forgiveness realizing D'Artagnan's loyalty to Louis was out of fatherly devotion to his son, the same fatherly devotion Athos had to his son Raoul.


title: The Man in the Iron Mask (1998 film)

text: D'Artagnan's top lieutenant, Andre, angered by his mentor's death, swears his men to secrecy and orders them out of the prison, siding with Philippe. They switch the twins' places again and Philippe orders Louis locked away, placing the iron mask in his head, and then names Athos, Porthos and Aramis as his royal counsel. A small funeral is held for D'Artagnan and Philippe admits to Athos that he has come to love him like a father, which Athos reciprocates. Philippe later issues Louis a royal pardon and sends him to live peacefully in the countryside, and goes on to become one of France's greatest kings. The tombstone of D'Artagnan has an iron mask imprint chiseled upon it by his friends, saying that due to his secret, he was the real man in the iron mask.


title: The Man in the Iron Mask (1998 film)

text: In this version, the "man in the iron mask" is introduced as prisoner number 64389000 based on the number related to his namesake found at the Bastille. The Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte acts as the primary residence of the king as Versailles was still early in its construction and years away from Louis establishing residence there.


title: The Man in the Iron Mask (1998 film)

text: The film grossed $17 million on its opening weekend in second place behind "Titanic", another film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. It eventually grossed $56 million at the domestic box office, and $126 million in international receipts, for a total of $183 million worldwide.


title: The Man in the Iron Mask (1998 film)

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 32% with an average rating of 5.50/10, based on 41 reviews. The site's critical consensus states, "Leonardo DiCaprio plays dual roles with diminishing returns in "The Man in the Iron Mask", a cheesy rendition of the Musketeers' epilogue that bears all the pageantry of Alexandre Dumas' text, but none of its romantic panache." On Metacritic, it has a score of 48 out of 100 based on 18 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.


title: The Man in the Iron Mask (1998 film)

text: Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave it 2.5 out of 4. Kenneth Turan of the "Los Angeles Times" wrote that while the "production values are not lacking", "Wallace, in his first try at directing, has been unable to unify the film’s disparate elements. There’s swordplay and tragedy, slapstick and romance, lots of DiCaprio for all those teenage girls--there’s everything but a consistent style. And events are handled so broadly it’s not surprising to learn that the director’s inspiration was the Classics Illustrated version of the Dumas novel he read as a youth."


title: The Man in the Iron Mask (1998 film)

text: The film was nominated for the Best Original Score for an Adventure Film by the International Film Music Critics Award (IFMCA).


title: The Man in the Iron Mask (1998 film)

text: Depardieu was nominated for the European Film Academy Achievement in World Cinema Award for his role as Porthos. DiCaprio won a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Screen Couple for his interactions as twins.


title: Robert Kubica

text: Robert Józef Kubica (; born 7 December 1984) is a Polish racing and rally driver. He was the first and, , the only Polish racing driver to compete in Formula One. Between 2006 and 2009 he drove for the BMW Sauber F1 team, promoted from test driver to race driver during 2006. In June 2008, Kubica took his maiden and only Formula One victory at the . That season he led the championship at one stage, before finishing fourth overall, his best career position. Kubica drove for Renault in and was set to remain with the team in . Several years later Kubica confirmed he had signed a pre-contract for the season with Ferrari, a move that was eventually cancelled by his devastating rally crash in early 2011.


title: Robert Kubica

text: On 6 February 2011, Kubica was seriously injured in a crash at the Ronde di Andora rally, in which his right forearm was partially severed. He was taking part to better his skills. Kubica told Italian newspaper "La Gazzetta dello Sport" in a bedside interview that he could feel the fingers in his right hand and was determined to make a swift return to Formula One in 2011. Since his return to good health, however, he initially stated that a return to Formula One would be "nearly impossible" because of his injury. Since then, he took part in tests with Renault and Williams, admitting that a Formula One return in the near future was not impossible.


title: Robert Kubica

text: Kubica returned to racing in September 2012, winning a minor rally in Italy. Kubica was named one of "The Men of the Year 2012" by "Top Gear" magazine for his return to auto racing. In 2013, he drove for Citroën in the European and World Rally-2 Championships. He went on to win the inaugural WRC-2 title, and moved to the WRC championship full-time in 2014, driving a Ford Fiesta RS WRC prepared by M-Sport.


title: Robert Kubica

text: On 16 January 2018, it was announced that Kubica would become the reserve driver of Williams for the 2018 season. On 22 November 2018, Kubica was announced as a Williams race driver for the 2019 Formula One season. He left the Williams team at the end of 2019, moving across to the Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters, while maintaining a Formula One presence as reserve and test driver for Alfa Romeo. He has made several appearances during practice sessions in his role as test driver, and he replaced Kimi Räikkönen at the Dutch and Italian Grands Prix in 2021.


title: Robert Kubica

text: Kubica developed his love for all kinds of cars at the young age of four when he spotted a small off-road vehicle, powered by a petrol engine. After long talks with his parents, his father Artur bought him the car and young Kubica spent long hours driving around plastic bottles. When he got older it became apparent that he needed better equipment, so his father bought him a go-kart. However, Kubica was too young to start racing in the Polish Karting Championship as he was under the age of ten. When he entered the championship, he won six titles in three years. After his third season, Kubica decided to switch to a more competitive series in Italy. In 1998 Kubica became the first foreigner to win the International Italian Junior Karting Championship.


title: Robert Kubica

text: Kubica also scored second place in the European Junior Karting Championship and won the Junior Monaco Kart Cup held on part of the Formula One Grand Prix track. A year later, he defended his title in Italy and also competed in the International German Karting Championship. He also won the Monaco Kart Cup for the second time in a row, as well as the Margutti Trophy and Elf Masters races. In 2000, his last season in karting, Kubica scored fourth places in both the European and World Championships.


title: Robert Kubica

text: Kubica started his professional career in 2000, as a test driver for a Formula Renault 2000 car. During his first professional season in Formula Renault, Kubica scored his maiden pole position and also became a member of Renault's driver development programme. In 2002 Kubica won four races and scored a second place in the Italian Formula Renault 2000. He was also seventh in the Formula Renault Eurocup. At the end of the year he took part in a Brazilian Formula Renault 2000 race held at the Interlagos circuit. This one-off appearance resulted in a dominant win.


title: Robert Kubica

text: After Formula Renault, Kubica moved to the Formula 3 Euro Series. However, his move was delayed by a road accident which left him with a broken arm, and titanium screws holding it together. At his delayed debut at Norisring, Kubica, driving with a plastic brace and 18 titanium bolts in his arm, won the race. He finished the season in 12th place. At the end of the year, Kubica won a street race in Sardinia and came fifth in races held in Macau and Korea. He ended his second season in the Formula 3 Euro Series, spent with the factory Mercedes team, in 7th position. In November 2004, he scored pole position in the Macau F3 Grand Prix, where he broke the lap record, but finished second in the race.


title: Robert Kubica

text: In 2005 he won the World Series by Renault championship with the Epsilon Euskadi team, earning Formula One tests with Renault.


title: Robert Kubica

text: In , Kubica became the official reserve driver for the BMW Sauber Formula One team. His results in both Friday testing and private test sessions, along with the words of BMW Sauber team principal Mario Theissen, led to speculation that he would become Poland's first ever Formula One racing driver in . In August 2006, Kubica's teammate, Jacques Villeneuve, complained about headaches after his accident during the ; he was deemed unfit to race by the team, against his own belief, and Kubica was chosen by the team management to replace him at the . Kubica qualified ninth, beating his more experienced teammate Nick Heidfeld. In the race, he finished in seventh place, but was disqualified after the race for having an underweight car. Villeneuve decided to leave the BMW Sauber team soon after the race, and Kubica's position in the team for the remainder of the season was confirmed by BMW.


title: Robert Kubica

text: Kubica had a disappointing race at the , finishing in 12th place after a mistake in tyre choice. Heidfeld, who was delayed in a first-corner accident, placed behind Kubica. In his third race, the , Kubica finished in third position, and became the first Polish driver to appear on a Formula One podium, as well as the first Polish driver to lead a Grand Prix. He was the first driver since Alexander Wurz in to finish on the podium within his first three Formula One starts.


title: Robert Kubica

text: In China, he finished 13th, again after a mistake in tyre choice. After going off track at the first turn of the race, he moved from 17th position to fifth, before pitting. He was the first to change from intermediate tyres to dry tyres after the wet track started to dry. This decision was made too early: a very slow next lap in extremely wet and slippery conditions and another pit stop to change back to intermediates cost him his place in the points.


title: Robert Kubica

text: Kubica performed well during the 2007 season, finishing consistently in point scoring positions. At the Kubica had a serious crash approaching the hairpin on lap 27, in which his car made contact with Jarno Trulli's Toyota, and hit a hump in the grass which lifted the car's nose into the air and left him unable to brake or steer. The car then hit the concrete retaining wall and rolled as it came back across the track, striking the opposite wall on the outside of the hairpin and coming to rest on its side. The car was heavily damaged and Kubica's feet could be seen exposed through the destroyed nose of the car. The speed measured when his car clipped the barrier was , at a 75-degree angle, subjecting Kubica to an average deceleration of 28 g. After data from the onboard accident data recorder had been analysed it was found that he had been subjected to a peak G-force of 75 G. Under safety car conditions, Kubica was removed from the car and taken to the circuit's medical centre, where he was announced to be in "stable" condition. Shortly afterwards, his manager Daniele Morelli said Kubica was conscious and talking. It was initially reported that Kubica could have a broken leg. However, Mario Theissen later confirmed that he was not seriously injured.


title: Robert Kubica

text: Further reports from late evening on race day, directly from the hospital, confirmed that Kubica had suffered a light concussion alongside a sprained ankle. After being kept in overnight for observation, Kubica left hospital the following day. On 14 June it was announced that as a precaution, Kubica would not race at the and would be replaced by test driver Sebastian Vettel. After missing Indianapolis, he returned for the where he qualified and finished in fourth place, receiving ITV broadcaster Martin Brundle's driver of the day award. He then went on to finish fourth again at the .


title: Robert Kubica

text: Kubica's retention as race driver for was confirmed on 21 August 2007. Over the first half of the season, Kubica qualified and finished strongly, including his and BMW Sauber's first pole position at the and second-place finishes at the Malaysian and Monaco Grands Prix.