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.30
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.31 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.”32
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.33 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.”34
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.”35
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.”36
Martin Green goes so far as to claim that Laban was “an incarnation of modern dance,” like a figure from Nietzsche’s Die Geburt der Tragödie: “The original image of the Dionysian is the bearded satyr, in him existence expresses itself more truly, really, fully than in the man of culture . . . and in the festivals of this satyrlike Dionysiac man, Nature mourns her dismembering into individuals.”37 In Laban’s great plan to regenerate life, dancing was primary. He had a multifaceted mind, scientific as well as artistic (he devised an entire notation for his new form of dance). He naturally appreciated that dance was physical and genetic as well as imaginative and organic. “In the very depths lives the center of gravity. Around this is deposited the crystal of the skeleton, interconnected and directed by the muscles.”38 The ambition at Ascona to replace religion was insistent.
EURHYTHMICS AND ETHICS: THE DANCER SPIRIT
Laban also embraced the concept of eurhythmics. Because eurhythmics marries music and speed, he believed that one thinks with not just the brain but also the whole body, becoming an “equilibrium of will, feelings and intelligence,” thus intensifying bodily consciousness and, in so doing, “preventing any dictatorship by the brain or by the moral conscience.” “Beauty, aesthetics, good manners, conscience, ethical equilibrium, goodness, are for me synonyms.”
For Laban, the eurhythmist performed a new social function: “a special profession, which employs the methods of art for ethical ends.” However, eurhythmics did not aim to establish a church, still less a state: instead, “It awakens a non-religious and
non-legal conscience, and that will create the new social forms for itself.”39 For Laban, dancing was transcendental, the fusion of thought, feeling and will. “Men must rebel against the domination of abstract ideas and fill the world with the dance of the body-soul-spirit. The most significant human creations, in all ages, were born of the Tänzergeist, the ‘dancer spirit.’”40
At the height of his influence in 1913, Laban claimed that perhaps sixty families in the Ascona region were represented among his pupils.41 This was when Mary Wigman arrived. Born in Hanover in 1886, Wigman came to dance relatively late in life; she insisted that Laban “was the guide who opened for her the gates to the world she had dreamed of.” She has left us a record of the high spirits she encountered at Ascona. One of the dancers lived in a harmonium crate; and they sometimes danced all night to a gramophone, in grottoes or in taverns.42
The high spirits caught on. By 1914, the dance movement was spreading across Europe. There were, for example, seven thousand students enrolled in no fewer than 120 Jaques-Dalcroze schools. The claims made for these schools were ambitious—students were promised much more than the acquisition of rhythm: they would experience there “the dissolution of both body and soul in harmony.” And the Monte Verità Art of Life School promised each pupil “the regeneration of his or her life force.”43
According to Green, Wigman represented the Asconan values of life-body-gesture-movement-expression even more than did Laban. Others “regarded her as a feminine realization of the Nietzschean program of autonomous realization.” She studied movement in animals and in nature, and her own choreography tried hard to be anti-erotic, deliberately going beyond dance as “pretty girls entertaining men.” Fascinated by psychoanalysis and with an abiding interest in Nietzsche, she had more than one affair with the early analysts, Herbert Binswanger being the best known. She choreographed a version of Zarathustra and claimed a role in the origination of Dada, being a good friend of Sophie Taeuber, who was part of the Hugo Ball–Tristan Tzara set. In a notable comparison between Wigman and Isadora Duncan, the author Margaret Lloys related how Wigman would kneel, crawl, crouch and even lie down on the earth at the close of a dance. “She was like Isadora Duncan in that both were ‘womanly’ and both danced religiously the faith that was in them, a faith in the dignity and worth of individual man.” Wigman’s dance, modern dance, Lloys says, was a matter of wrestling and struggling—a matter of mass, not line—a matter of dynamic, Dionysian ecstatic struggle.44
Isadora Duncan, whom the cultural historian Karl Federn described as “the incarnation of Nietzsche’s intuition,” was another Ascona habituée. “The seduction of Nietzsche’s philosophy ravished my being,” she admitted in her memoirs, and she called Nietzsche “the first dancing philosopher.” How much in thrall she was to Nietzsche is clear from her 1903 lecture, “The Dance of the Future”: “Oh, she is coming, the dancer of the future: more glorious than any woman who has yet been: more beautiful than the Egyptian, than the Greek, than the early Italian, than all the women of past centuries—the highest intelligence in the freest body!”45
But the most extreme exemplar of these ideas was Valentine de Saint-Point (1875–1953), author of the 1913 Futurist Manifesto of Lust. Respected enough then to have her own creations performed at the Théâtre du Champs-Élysées in Paris and the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, her manifesto was addressed “to those women who only think what I have dared to say.” It read in part: “Lust when viewed without moral preconceptions and as an essential part of life’s dynamism, is a force. Lust is not, any more than pride, a sin for the race that is strong. . . . Lust is . . . the sensory and sensual synthesis that leads to the greatest liberation of spirit. . . . Christian morality alone, following on from pagan morality, was fatally drawn to consider lust as a weakness. . . . We must make lust into a work of art.” For her, Europe and the modern world were going through a feminine historical period: men and women both lacked masculinity. A new doctrine of Dionysian energy was needed in order for “an epoch of superior humanity” to be achieved. As she said elsewhere, it was “the brute who must become the model.”46
Laban stated that the most significant human creations, at all times, have been “born of the dancer spirit.” He pointed out that we find dance doctrine—choreosophy—in Plato’s Timaeus and in the Sufis, for example. For him, the dance instinct consists of a need for change—that’s what movement is. It follows for him that no religion and no orality can last in its original form. “We are polytheists and all the gods we know are parts of the daemonic self-changing of the gesture power. A demon is born (or unchained) whenever a roomful of people concentrate their attention on a dancer.” (Green refers to novels by the Ascona authors Hesse and Bruno Goetz which contain scenes “in which a spirit of lawlessness is born among people watching a dancer.”) Laban saw individualism—of mind as well as of behavior—as a threat to modern culture: this is why dancing together is so important. On Laban’s sixtieth birthday, Kurt Jooss, the German choreographer, wrote a tribute praising his conception of the dance that “rose above the merely aesthetic to the ethical and metaphysical and gave us images of the various forms of life in their ever-changing interplay.”47
Dance is among the most evanescent of art forms (especially when it is the intention of the dance master to create an evanescent form). It is difficult to think ourselves back into that time, when film was in its infancy. But the theatre performances, dance troupes, dance festivals and congresses and the Tänzerbund and the Deutsche Tanzbühne of Laban together add up to a formidable array of activities and social manifestations, a widespread and coherent effort to put “life philosophy” into effect during the 1910s, ’20s and ’30s and on into the Third Reich. Moreover, the ideals and ideas of Ascona lived on to form elements in such phenomena as Nazism and the countercultural experiments in North America in the 1960s and later. Laban himself survives among us in, for instance, Joy of Movement, our contemporary cult of the body.48 Ascona has influenced many people who have never heard of it.
WHAT THE HERD CAN NEVER KNOW
Nor must we forget that, beyond Ascona, up until the First World War, Nietzsche’s views were clearly linked with Expressionism. Says Steven Aschheim: “In virtually every one of its manifold guises—painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, drama and politics—Expressionism and Nietzsche were linked.” Gottfried Benn, arguably the most talented if problematic German Expressionist writer, put it this way: “Actually, everything that my generation discussed, dissected . . . one can say suffered through . . . had already found its definitive formulation in Nietzsche; everything thereafter was exegesis . . . his . . . postulation of a psychology of instinctual behavior as a dialectic—‘knowledge as affect,’ all of psychoanalysis and Existentialism. They were all his achievements.” Nietzsche’s fundamental point, Benn maintained, was the replacement of content with expression; the strength or vitality with which views were held was as important as their substance.49 Life was feeling as much as fact.
Above all, pre–First World War German Expressionism reflected Nietzsche’s vision of “the sublime if painful” role of the elitist, isolated artist-superman, “who in creating experienced what the herd would never know.” In particular, the Expressionist artist typically subscribed to an elitist, Nietzschean immoralism. Aschheim again: “In the metaphorical landscape of the lonely Zarathustrian heights, in the shadow of the death of God, stood the artist beyond conventional notions of good and evil: a Nietzschean law unto himself. When Georg Kaiser, the Expressionist writer, was sued for debts he had incurred, he proclaimed that the assumption ‘All are equal before the law’ is nonsense.” On this understanding, the act of creativity by a genius, something producing new meaning in itself, was paramount, “even if his wife and children should perish because of it.”50 One defining aspect of German Expressionism was that its Dionysian anti-cerebralism was meant to proceed unchecked. In his drama Ithaka, Gottfried Benn’s spokesman Roenne murders a
professor who insists on the unparalleled value of scientific knowledge. Roenne’s rant, inciting his fellow students to commit the act, is laid out in terms undeniably Nietzschean. “We are the youth. Our blood cries out for heaven and earth, and not for cells and worms. . . . We want to dream. We want ecstasy. We call on Dionysus and Ithaca!”51
“More than any other Expressionist . . . it was Gottfried Benn who grappled with the consequences of the death of God.” His entire career, says Steven Aschheim, including his short but passionate attachment to Nazism, was an attempt to deal with that Nietzschean predicament.52 “He accepted Nietzsche’s nihilism,” Michael Hamburger commented, “as one accepts the weather.” Until 1933, Benn occupied a position of what might be called “theoretical nihilism,” denying the possibility of any metaphysical truth. He preferred what he called a return to the “preconscious, prelogical, primal and inert state.” This was an attempt to explore what life was like before language and self-consciousness had produced man’s “rift” with nature (others, like Paul Cézanne, pursued similar goals). This was what linked Expressionism and vagabondage as Nietzschean cults.
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