The legendary writer and traveler Annemarie Schwarzenbach wrote in her book about Switzerland published in 1932: “The curious come to Ascona and expect to find men with long beards and women dressed in sambenitos, they have heard something about Monte Verità, rumors of adventures, perhaps the name of that Belgian Oedenkoven – vegetarian, naturist, reformer of the world – who more than thirty years ago named the mountain and endured in a strange and dignified way the continuous disappointments, ridicule and contempt.”

At the dawn of the 20th century, in Swiss Ticino, near Ascona and Lake Maggiore, on a hill known as Monte Verità, a small group of restless minds set up a sanatorium and founded a colony in which they intended to live according to their convictions, free from the corsets of the time. They were fed up with life in the city, with the oppression of the State, with the conventions and constraints of a well-rounded society and with progressive technification. They practiced vegetarianism, naturism, pacifism, sexual freedom, spiritual and even esoteric search, communion with nature and a kind of primitive communism in which everything was shared. They had read Tolstoy and Thoreau and created their utopia in the Swiss mountains. They were hippies before such a term had been invented. They were somewhat visionary and over the years Monte Verità became a magnet that attracted eccentrics, rebels, anarchists and also restless artists and writers, eager to experience new ways of life and creation.

This is how the myth of that place was forged, which evolved over time – from a sanatorium it became a hotel – but maintained over the decades the aura of a space of freedom and alternative life. Its story continues to fascinate. Daphne du Maurier, the author of Rebeca, wrote a short novel titled Monte Verità, published by the El Paseo publishing house, which also released Against the established life of Ulrike Voswinckel, an essay about that place, focusing especially on the intellectuals from Munich. that they ended up there.

Last year, The Photographer of Monte Verità was released, a Swiss film by Stefan Jäger (available on Movistar) that tells the story of that community through a fictional character. A couple of years ago, Daniel Saldaña’s The Dance and the Fire was a finalist for the Herralde Novel Prize, in which there are various references to the place, and The Witches of Monte Verità, by the Argentine Paula Klein, has just appeared in bookstores. that a woman in crisis begins to investigate that unique microsociety that explored new vital perspectives that hippies would take up years later.

Four fundamental figures were involved in the founding of this utopia in 1900: the Belgian Henri Oedenkoven, the German sisters Ida and Jenny Hofmann and the Austrian brothers Karl and Gusto Gräser. The latter was a kind of wandering prophet, who came to live as a hermit in a grotto, had problems with justice for his radical anti-war stances in times of war and acted as a teacher and almost guru of Hermann Hesse, who revered and trained him. part of the Monte Verità universe, like other writers and artists. Several photographs of Hesse naked on that mountain record his presence there, where Rilke, Erich Maria Remarque, Paul Klee, Carl Gustav Jung, the poet and revolutionary Ernst Toller and the occultist Rudolf Steiner, among others, also passed by.

Isadora Duncan spent a season in Monte Verità, recovering from the crisis she suffered due to the death of her two children, drowned in the Seine. But in this artistic field the most relevant presence was that of the two creators of the so-called expressionist dance, Rudolf von Laban and Mary Wigman, who settled there with their dancers, as witnessed by multiple photographs of rehearsals in front of the lake. Wigman created his fundamental Hexentantz (the witches’ dance) there, which toured throughout Europe and had a crucial influence on the North American choreographer Martha Graham.

The outbreak of the First World War attracted pacifists and intellectuals to that mountain in Switzerland who did not want to participate in it, such as Hugo Ball, who passed through Monte Verità and in Zurich laid the foundations of the Dada movement; the rebellious poet Else Lasker-Schüler, who ended up emigrating to Palestine, or the poet Stefan George. Also arriving there, with the Blaue Reiter painter Alexej von Jawlensky, was the painter Marianne von Werefkin, who stayed to live in Ascona, where she died in 1938, becoming a kind of representative and reminder of what was an authentic vital laboratory, intellectual and artistic. Today, the Bauhaus-style Hotel Monte Verità, built by the German architect Emil Frarenkamp in 1927, is still active and perhaps the spirits of those visionary grandparents of the hippies still roam that mountain.

BOOKS

Daphne du Maurier Monte Verità El Paseo

Paula Klein The Witches of Monte Verità Lumen

Ulrike Voswinckel Against Established Life El Paseo

Daniel Saldaña The dance and the fire Anagram

MOVIE

Stefan Jäger Monte Verità Movistar photographer