Move through the centuries and meet the lives lived in each.

Adolf Hitler

1942 - Germany / occupied Europe

Germany, 1942.

Open this life

Nikola Tesla

1942 - New Yorker Hotel, New York

Watched by maids, creditors, and memory alike, the inventor who lit the world reflects on the difference between vision and vindication.

Open this life

Benito Mussolini

1944 - the Salò Republic (Lake Garda; the offices at Gargnano)

A deposed dictator, reinstalled as figurehead of a puppet republic by the foreign power that rescued him, performs the rituals of authority he no longer holds, issuing decrees and communiqués into a regime that exists only as German-dependent theatre.

Open this life

Adolf Hitler

1945 - A sealed command bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery garden, Berlin, late April 1945 (the Führerbunker; the Soviet 1st Belorussian Front under Zhukov closing on the city centre; days before the figure's suicide on 30 April 1945).

In a sealed command bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery garden in Berlin in late April 1945, with the Soviet armies closing on the city centre and the relief attack he ordered found not to have been made, the head of a collapsing state moves formations that no longer exist across a situation map, routes the catastrophe onto the treason of others, and goes on issuing the orders that are still killing above him.

Open this life

Franklin D. Roosevelt

1945 - Warm Springs

Concealed weakness, wartime reassurance, and the private cost of calm.

In the final weeks of the war, a president whose body has been failing for years faces the cost of leading from a wheelchair.

Open this life

Orville Wright

1947 - Dayton, Ohio

In Dayton, in rooms that have outlasted the century, the surviving Wright brother reflects on the twelve seconds that changed the world — and the decades of argument that followed.

Open this life