Mountain of truth: the counterculture begins, Ascona, 1900-1920

In 1900 a group of disaffected intellectuals, preoccupied with their own unhappiness in a rapidly industrializing Europe, built he Nature Cure Sanatorium on a small hill outside the tiny Swiss fishing village of Ascona. Soon others joined them, erecting ramshackle cabins and villas on the hill, which they called Monte Verita, the Mountain of Truth. During the next twenty years Ascona became the place for many of Europe's spiritual rebels to visit, including D.H. Lawrence, Hermann Hesse, C.G. Jung, Rudolf von Laban, Isadora Duncan, Paul Tillich, and Mary Wigman. Seeking an alternative to the “iron cage" of European civilization, they embraced anarchism, pacifism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and nature worship, and developed new art forms, including Modern Dance, Dadaism, and Surrealism. Although their idealistic pursuit of an alternative life eventually was interrupted by the reality engulfing Europe, the ideas that emerged from Ascona lived on to inspire later counterculture movements and art forms. In this first thorough account in English of life in Ascona, its remarkable inhabitants, and their counterculture experiments, Martin Green approaches the Mountain of Truth from three per spectives. First, he describes the lives of the three most interesting and representative Asconans: Otto Gross, Gusto Gräser, and Rudolf von Laban. He then surveys the whole phenomenon of Ascona, showing who was there at different times and how their variety of interests and enterprises led them to invent a new religion, ethics, psychology, diet, art, and above all new relations between men and women. Finally, he examines the ideas developed at Ascona and their later influence on arts, culture, and politics. In particular, Green relates the counterculture in Ascona to the Gandhian movement in India and the 1960s counterculture in America. Because the story of Ascona is inseparable from the ideas embraced by its inhabitants—from paganism to Freudian psychology—this is a wide-ranging and evocative study in cultural history and the history of ideas. Martin Green is Professor of English at Tufts University. He has written numerous books, including The Von Richthofen Sisters (1974), Children of the Sun (1976), and Tolstoy and Gandhi, Men of Peace (1983).