1900

PETER MICHALZIK
1900. Vegetarier, Künstler und Visionäre
suchen nach dem neuen Paradies /
1900. Vegetarians, Artists and Visionaries are searching for Paradise
Cultural History, ca. 350 pp., Spring 2018

A lively panorama about the splendour and decline of the first alternative life-styles

The Discovery of Modern Life

In 1900, whether on Monte Verità on the shores of Lake Maggiore, in Leo Tolstoy’s Jasnaja Poljana where he founded his peasant school or in the Berlin artists’ colony “Eden”, utopias were founded and practiced. Here, modern life was invented, with its passion for health, the body and individualism.
Peter Michalzik tells stories of this movement, depicting a multi-faceted panorama of the beginning of the last century that is rich in imagery. Convincingly and most vividly, he makes the avant-garde thinking and life of diverse personalities accessible to us. Whether it was Else Lasker-Schüler or Friedrich Nietzsche, Hermann Hesse, James Joyce or Max Weber, they reinvented life and created a counterculture whose impact can still be felt today. Progressive education, the cult of the body, sunbathing or free love, psychology, wellness and vegetarianism – all this was discovered over one hundred years ago by artists, intellectuals and eccentrics who were critical of civilisation. And so, this is the inspiring story of the glamour, decline and life of an experiment which was about the true, whole life, narrated here by Peter Michalzik.

Featuring: Hermann Hesse, Gusto Gräser, Erich Mühsam, Johannes Nohl, Otto Gross, Max Weber, Gräfin Reventlow, D.H. Lawrence, the Zurich Dadaists, Ernst Bloch, James Joyce, Marianne von Werefkin, Alexej Jawlensky, Oskar Maria Graf, Fürst Peter Kropotkin, Reinhard Goering, Ernst Toller, Else Lasker Schüler, Franz Kafka, Claire and Yvan Goll, Friedrich Glauser, Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, Tu-cholsky, Klabund and many others.