 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 : 
