The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (6 page)

While Nietzsche’s identification of the nihilist predicament was a starting point, people swiftly moved on. They sought a transformed civilization that encouraged and reflected a new
übermenschlich
type, creating excitement, authenticity, intensity, and in all ways superior to what had gone before. “What I was engaged in,” recalled Ernst Blass, the Expressionist poet, referring to café life in imperial Berlin, was “a war on the gigantic philistinism of those days. . . . What was in the air? Above all Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Freud too, and Wedekind. What was wanted was a post-rational Dionysos.”
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Freud and Nietzsche had in common that both sought to remove the metaphysical explanation of experience, and both stressed “self-creation” as the central meaningful activity of life. While Freud strained for respectability, Nietzscheanism reveled in notoriety, but in most ways they were compatible, being stridently anti-scientific and anti-rationalist; and, with its Dionysian rhetoric, the artistic production of the Nietzscheans sought to unlock the wild reaches of the unconscious.
Übermensch
strongmen feature prominently in the novels of Gabriele d’Annunzio and Hermann Conradi, where the characters are involved in often brutal searches for innocence and authenticity, as often as not destroying in order to create.
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ALL ARE EQUAL IN REGARD TO INSTINCT

More than one critic has remarked on the general mood, in the wake of Nietzsche, as being in some ways not unlike that among the “counterculture” of the 1960s and ’70s (see chapter 22). Martin Green, in his book on
the Nietzsche generation, concentrates on one noteworthy home, located in the small Swiss village of Ascona. There, a remarkable number of feminists, pacifists, literary figures, anarchists, modern dancers and Surrealists came together to consolidate their radical ideas and initiate certain “life-experiments.” Green says Ascona was part-Tolstoyan and part-anarchist, with a decidedly naturalist—at times occult—orientation. Among the better-known luminaries who passed through were D. H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, Carl Gustav Jung and Hermann Hesse.

Nietzscheanism was a pervasive presence, not so much the “will-to-power” form of Nietzscheanism but the Dionysian kind, where the aim is ecstatic dynamism. “They sought to create beauty in motion and to affirm life-creating values—above all that of eros. This found its most dynamic physical expression in the idea and development of modern dance.”
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Ascona had all the elements of the counterculture that would develop later, mainly in America. Adherents sought intensity through an erotic freedom, which included nudity, sometimes orgies, and at other times embraced a cult of masculinity. There was vegetarianism, sun worship, occultism, black magic, mysticism and Satanism and a cult of festivals. What united these groupings was a belief in the irrational and in instinct, one unifying idea being that “all men are equal in regards to instinct.” By the same token, the worship of nature that was so popular in Ascona was practiced there because nature worship was understood as meaning “the worship of the nature to be found in human beings as much as in the nature of animals, plants, the soil, the sea, the sun.” That, says Green, is the Asconan form of piety, “whether peaceful or ecstatic.”
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However, the most important—and best-established—elements of the Asconan idea were its withdrawal from city life in an effort to establish a “new human type,” a post-Christian secular type who expressed a full humanity, and “vagabondage” and dance.

A NEW HUMAN TYPE: THE VAGABOND AND THE DANCE

The adoption of Ascona began around the turn of the century when Gusto Gräser, known to history primarily as a vagabond, took part in a meeting
in Munich at which seven young people like him decided to withdraw from the world of cities and nations to found a community of their own. In the year of 1900 the Western world had mounted spectacular shows of the technological triumphs that had marked the success of the nineteenth century. But Gräser and the others had a distaste for the world of science, technology and modern medicine. Several of them were craftspeople, in wood, metal or leather, and they wandered through Switzerland in the last months of 1900, looking for the right place to settle and form a community of their own. They found what they were looking for in Ascona.

Ascona was then a backward peasant village of about one thousand people, on the Swiss side of Lake Maggiore, in the canton of Ticino. This area never played much of a role in Switzerland’s heroic history. Instead, its attractions included the climate, which allowed for both pine and palm trees, snowcaps on the nearby mountains and roses on the lakeshore, and a unique variety of other trees including oak, birch, lime and olive. And then there were the local peasants who, for the artists and intellectuals who came to Ascona, were the complete and joyful antithesis of modern mankind in the cities. The population spoke Italian, practiced Roman Catholicism, cultivated vineyards, fished and smuggled (it is near the border). The land was poor and cheap, and people were steadily migrating to the cities or to America.

For the next twenty years, Gräser lived in this landscape. He was outdoors and moving all the time; he lived off the land; his lifestyle was his work, his creation, and he worked at it by adapting his needs and his appetites to the climate and the caves, to the fruit and the edible leaves. He was a vegetarian who revered life and refused to eat what had been killed. His principles were assertions of freedom, not renunciations, were humanist, not religious, hearty, not pious.
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Gräser was in and out of jail for his beliefs (anarchist, radical pacificist, “theoretical nudist”) but found support in Hermann Hesse, who in 1918 wrote an essay based on Jungian ideas, called “Artists and Psychoanalysis,” in which he proclaimed that artists like Gräser have special ways—socially privileged ways—to declare their faith: they are exempt from the ordinary obligations.
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Workshops were set up, to manufacture handmade objects—from jewelry to furniture—for people who were dissatisfied with mass-produced
factory goods.
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Activities at Ascona were supposed to be carried out not for economic reasons, or for any particular aim—which might spark ambition—but simply for the joy of activity, for maintaining as much as possible a festival spirit. One needed just enough, it was argued, to support one’s
minimal
needs, in that way avoiding being sucked into the social system that was the origin of the malaise in the first place.
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They enthusiastically embraced concepts like “full humanity,” and followed Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: “The world and man are not here to be improved, but to become themselves.” For example, Eugen Diederichs, Hesse’s publisher and publisher of the cultural and political magazine
Die Tat
(The Deed), suggested that a “third and new stage of human development” might be at hand, which would not just bring with it greater freedom but would also bring back dignity (the quality Simmel had made so much of).
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It was observed that Gräser “may be said” to have created a new human type, which had its influence mainly on youth movements.
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For Rudolf Laban, “the whole meaning of life is to foster the growth of the human, of men (as opposed to mere robots).”
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The idea of vagabondage appears to have crystallized with Gräser (it had been known in the East, of course, since at least the time of the Buddha). It profoundly influenced Hesse, who was himself drawn to the vagabond life. One proof of this is the book that was his most popular before
Demian
was published, which was
Knulp
(1915). The story begins in the 1890s. Knulp is an amiable vagabond who lives in a world of play and sensuality. An erotic venture first sets him on the road, and women always fall for him. But Hesse’s stress falls on Knulp’s delicacy, good manners, gaiety, lightness of touch. He refuses to tie himself to any trade, place or person.
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Ascona was Gräser’s home. He was offered a piece of land by villagers who thought he would attract other vagabonds, but he refused the gift, not wanting to own anything. He had a large number of practical skills, being known around Ascona as a “plumber” or general fixer. His early “home” was formed by two slabs of rock, with a few boards to lie on. He is credited with creating the headband and poncho which many vagabonds wore; he made his own tunic and his own rope sandals. He often lived on pickups and throwaways and later inhabited a cave decorated with “bits and pieces,” using twigs for hooks and hollow logs as storage containers. At
other times he lived in a motor home, traveling with up to eight children and various women. In 1912, he was the guest of a Leipzig group of
Wandervögel
, young wanderers who were part of the
Jugendbewegung
(German Youth Movement). Some of his poems appeared in the
Wandervogel
magazine. In 1913, Alfred Daniel, a jurist and an enthusiast for Whitman and Tolstoy, met Gräser in Stuttgart and described him as looking like John the Baptist. Fifty or sixty people at a time, he says, would go to see Gräser and his family in their caravan.
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In 1922, when mass unemployment returned to Germany as a result of the collapse of credit all over the modern world, people began to turn back to vagabondage. Being a vagabond is not easy, if it is to carry you through winter nights. And at that time there were many attempts to link vagabonds (tramps) with the idle, the perverse, and with revolutionaries.

LABAN’S DANCE FARM

Important as Gräser was for being the first singular—but in his way brave—figure to help fashion Ascona into what it would become, and for the distinctive nature of his post-religious ideas and way of life, it was really the impact of Rudolf Laban that was to kick-start the influence that Ascona would have. In Laban’s ethic for a modern, post-Christian civilization, one can find the same emphases as in Gräser’s. Working in Ascona up to 1919 and in various German cities after that, Laban turned the Ascona experiment into a dance art that won an honored place in European high culture. He had a vision of life as a kind of perpetual festival, the notion that dance would regenerate life as a whole, where the aim was “collective ecstasy,” “a mode of putting Nietzsche into practice.”
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His father was a soldier but also a butcher, “middle class at best.” But Laban Jr. was far from content with such a life and decided to move his dance pupils to Ascona for the summer of 1913. He returned in subsequent summers and created a “dance farm” there. The aim was to have his dancers rehearse and perform in contact with nature—within that lake and mountain landscape. His dancers needed nature, he believed, in order to discover, deep inside themselves, “the authentic dancer spirit.” He found
the perfect place for all this on Monte Verità, and from 1913 on he and his troupe were to be seen on those slopes in the summer months, he with his pipes or his drum, and around him the women (and a few men) leaping and writhing and rushing, each “evoking” her most hidden impulses. What they enjoyed most, and found most fulfilling, was the wild spontaneity.

A second aspect emerged through Laban’s aim to create a feminist modern dance in Ascona, and he gathered around himself a remarkable group. It was Laban who would develop what we call modern dance, and he did so there, with the help of Suzanne Perrottet and Mary Wigman.
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Laban’s work aroused great enthusiasm among those who visited Ascona, including George Bernard Shaw.

Before she joined Laban, Suzanne Perrottet had worked with Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, the Swiss composer, who had developed at Hellerau outside Dresden what he called “eurhythmics,” a method of musical education and appreciation through movement. He concentrated on a kind of dance/art that, he maintained, engaged a different side of the personality and took the form of festival plays,
Festspiele
. This was a kind of civic theatre, popular in French Switzerland, using civic themes and performed on civic or patriotic-historical occasions. Perrottet said she learned a great deal from Jaques-Dalcroze, in particular how to “listen exactly.” “But at that time I was looking for dissonance, in order to express my character, and that was not possible with his altogether harmonious structure.” For her, Jaques-Dalcroze was not modern enough. She had to go to Laban for dissonance, “for a way to express my rebelliousness and the stream of the will-to-deny in me; that he instinctively and most wonderfully did.” He told each pupil to find her own middle C, so that they “sang together as uncoordinatedly as the birds in the forest.” And the same was true of their physical movements: each had to discover her own way in her own body and her own emotional self. “And so with Laban one was reborn, in a bodily way too.”
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Perrottet was straightforward in her attitude to the new dancing: “One had everything to create, it was all so wonderful, so riveting, it was a religion for me, this new art.” As Laban explained in a letter, he had two main ideas: “first to give Dance and the Dancer their proper value as Art and the Artist, and second to enforce the influence of dance education on the
warped psyche of our time.” He did not think, at the time, that dancers got the respect other artists got: “they always get the
verdammte zweideutiger Lächeln
, ‘that damned ambiguous smirk.’” (He was a fighting man.) But at root, he insisted, “every artist is a dancer who speaks, with one or other gesture [
Gebärde
] of his body/soul, of that Highest which philosophers, theologians, dreamers, scientists and sociologists think they have appropriated.”
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Others did appreciate what he was trying to do. In her book
My Teacher, Laban
(1954), Mary Wigman described him as “the magician, the priest of an unknown religion . . . lord and master in a dance-born and yet so real kingdom.” Overwrought? So was Nietzsche. Some of this may have had to do with the fact that Wigman was as sensitive to landscape as was Laban. Like him, she fell in love with Ascona, where she always returned to charge her batteries. Modern dancers, she liked to say “do not belong in a theatre, but outdoors.”
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