Word: reich
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...20th century artistic movements, German Expressionism is the most diffuse and the hardest to define. Germany's 300 years of political fragmentation encouraged the development of the arts in provincial cities, rather than in a single center. In the first two decades of this century, the Second Reich's self-deluding optimism provoked artists all over Germany into a stated rejection of bourgeois culture. Die Brucke (The Bridge), a group of young artists united by their opposition to contemporary standards of taste and by their desire for a new emotional intensity in art, coalesced at Dresden in 1905. Their manifesto...
Orgonon seems to have been a place where reality and the adventure fantasies of a boy could easily merge. Reich designated his son as a soldier in the Cosmic Engineers and even took him on missions. In Arizona, Peter operated a "cloudbuster," a gunlike device constructed of aluminum tubes that Reich believed could cause rain by directing the orgone in the atmosphere. Peter says it did rain; he also says he saw flying saucers (green and red disks) and even chased them with the cloudbuster...
Neither science nor fiction, A Book of Dreams inhabits its own special and highly vulnerable reality. The truth of what young Reich says he experienced is rooted in the timeless mysteries of fathers and sons, where the literal and the mythic cannot always be distinguished. Peter Reich the man makes no effort to do so. Molded by the overwhelming fact that the world did not accept and love his father as unquestioningly as he did, he cannot and does not want to intellectualize his past. "Until I learn more about what science does not know about Life Energy," he says...
Today Peter Reich lives in a rented farmhouse in Vermont with his cats, dog, a "companion-wife" and a few reminders of childhood. There are his father's prison letters, some photographs, including a closely guarded one of himself at age eleven, standing proudly in a cowboy hat beneath the cloudbuster. There is an old, well-kept Winchester carbine that his father, who was fond of guns, gave him. There is also an orgone blanket. Roughly 2 ft. by 3 ft., it is simply a layer of natural wool backed with steel wool that is kept in place...
Like his mother, Peter Reich repeatedly emphasizes that he is unqualified to judge the validity of his father's work. But he does share his father's idealism and social conscience. Peter has been a VISTA volunteer in Oregon, and worked with drug addicts in Boston for a while. He has been a journalist on Staten Island, N.Y., and, with two friends, even tried to start a daily newspaper in Manhattan. His book took six drafts and endless soul searches. "My father was afraid that his wives and children would write books about him, and they...