In the autumn of 1900, six young Northern Europeans in loose linen, sandals, and long hair walked into the village of Ascona on the Swiss shore of Lake Maggiore, looking for land. They were the children of prosperous families and they had money, and above the village they found an abandoned vineyard on a hill called Monte Monescia and bought it outright, along with the hill it stood on. They renamed it Monte Verita, the Mountain of Truth, which sounds insufferable until you learn what they meant by it: not that they possessed the truth but that they intended to live truthfully, which is a rather more modest claim than the name suggests.
What they founded there over the following twenty years is, by a very wide margin, the most influential utopian settlement of the twentieth century. Modern dance was invented on that hill. Psychoanalysis held some of its most consequential arguments there. Dada, the Bauhaus, Jungian psychology, European anarchism, vegetarianism, naturism, environmentalism, and the entire postwar counterculture all pass through it. And yet as a community it was small, quarrelsome, and finished within two decades, its founders selling up and emigrating to Brazil. The reason for that combination is a structural feature the other great communal experiments did not share, and it was there from the first year: Monte Verita was a paying business, its product was the experience of a utopia, and its real output was never its residents. It was its guest register. That places it in an entirely different category from most entries in the record of communities that endured or the self-declared enclaves such as the free town in Copenhagen.
The Hill Above Ascona
The founding group had met the previous year at a natural-healing sanatorium at Veldes, now Bled, in what was then Austria-Hungary, which is worth noting because it means they met as patients at a health resort and then went and built one. Henri Oedenkoven was the son of an Antwerp industrialist and supplied most of the money. Ida Hofmann was a pianist and music teacher, born in 1864, who had taught the daughters of the nobility in Vienna, Russia, and Montenegro, spoke several languages, and became the intellectual force of the enterprise and a forceful advocate of women’s emancipation. With them were Ida’s sister Jenny, an opera singer; the brothers Karl and Gustav Gräser, the former an ex-officer of the Austro-Hungarian army and the latter an artist and wandering poet who went by Gusto; the teacher Lotte Hattemer; and Ferdinand Brune, a theosophically inclined landowner’s son from Graz.
The name they chose has been misread ever since, generally by people who find it pompous. Monte Verita means Mountain of Truth, and the founders were explicit that the claim was aspirational rather than proprietary: not that truth resided on the hill but that the people on it intended to live truthfully, in the specific sense of aligning their daily conduct with what they professed. That is a considerably humbler programme than the name implies, and it also sets an unusually demanding internal standard, since a community organised around not lying to itself has no way to accommodate the ordinary compromises that keep an institution solvent.
They constituted themselves as a vegetable cooperative, and the founding agreement is more revealing than the manifestos. Each member’s movable property was to be contributed toward founding a natural healing institute; the main part of the expected profit would be reinvested in the project and the remainder distributed among the members; and a member who later left would have their paid-in capital returned once it was liquidated. That is not a communal charter in the tradition of the American experiments. It is a partnership agreement with a profit-sharing clause and an exit provision, and it was drafted before a single hut was built, which tells you that these people were not economically naive in the way that the founders of intentional communities usually are, and that whatever else they were building it was not a settlement existing mainly on paper or an industrial fantasy of the kind that collapsed at Ford’s plantation in the Amazon. They wrote the business plan first. The philosophy came afterwards.
The Sanatorium
The critical decision came almost immediately, and the sources are entirely unembarrassed about it. In order to finance the settlement and simultaneously make it known to a wider public, the group established a natural sanatorium on the site: the Sonnen-Kuranstalt, the Sun Cure Institute, which grew into the Sanatorium Monte Verita. Within a year of arriving, Hofmann had built a health retreat founded on natural healing, vegetarian and vegan nutrition, sun and air bathing, and a programme of physical and spiritual reform, and it began taking paying guests.
It is worth appreciating how well the model matched its market. The Lebensreform movement had been building across German-speaking Europe since the middle of the nineteenth century, promoting natural healing, vegetarianism, dress reform, outdoor exercise, and a general retreat from industrial modernity, and it had produced a large, affluent, and receptive audience of people who already believed most of what Monte Verita was selling and wanted somewhere to go and do it. The founders were not creating demand from nothing. They had identified an existing constituency, correctly judged that it would pay for a residential experience, and built the facility.
Read that sequence again, because it is the whole mechanism in two sentences. The utopian community did not fund itself by farming, by manufacture, by craft sales, or by a founder’s endowment, all of which are the usual answers. It funded itself by charging outsiders to come and experience the utopian community. The product on offer was the community itself, which meant that from the first season Monte Verita had customers as well as members, and that its survival depended on a continuous inflow of people who were not staying. Wealthy Europeans of the period were suffering from what was then called civilisation sickness, a diffuse complaint of nerves and exhaustion attributed to urban industrial life, and there was real money in treating it. Building an enterprise whose commodity is an experience rather than a good has particular consequences, familiar to anyone who has studied businesses whose value sits in reputation and access rather than inventory, as in the history of trading on position and relationships, and structuring an ideological project as a revenue-generating institution creates the incentive conflicts examined in the anatomy of organisations serving two masters. The settlement financed itself by selling itself. That was the plan from the beginning.
Paying to Commune
The guest experience deserves description because it makes the arrangement unmistakable. Visitors paid to stay in the light and air huts, the Luft-Huetten: small south-facing wooden cabins, deliberately spare, built to admit as much sun and moving air as possible, since the therapeutic theory held that light and air on bare skin were the active agents. There was a central house with dining rooms, a library, and common space. Guests ate the vegetarian regime, took sun baths, walked, danced, and abstained from alcohol, tobacco, and meat.
The physical regime was demanding and the early years were genuinely hard. Members worked up to twelve hours a day laying out vegetable gardens, planting fruit and olive trees, and building huts from timber, stone, and lime, because a return to manual craft was itself part of the doctrine rather than merely a necessity. The site had been an abandoned vineyard on a steep hillside and had to be terraced and planted before it produced anything. Whatever one concludes about the commercial structure, nobody was lounging: the founders were doing hard physical labour on a mountainside while simultaneously running a hospitality business for invalids.
And they spent part of each day communing with the founding members. That was an advertised feature of the stay. The founders were not merely the proprietors of the establishment; they were the attraction, and the daily encounter with people who had genuinely renounced bourgeois Europe was part of what a guest was purchasing. It is difficult to overstate how unusual this is in the literature of intentional communities, where the members are ordinarily the point of the exercise and outsiders are at best tolerated. At Monte Verita the members were the exhibit. The dietary and ethical convictions underneath were serious ones, and the arguments the Monteveritans were making about eating animals now sit inside a substantial scientific literature on what animals actually experience, but they were also, unavoidably, the menu. Guests were paying, in the end, for access to the founders themselves. The founders had become the amenity.
The Gräser Split
Not everybody accepted this, and the objection came from precisely the people whose convictions were most thoroughgoing. Karl and Gusto Gräser had proposed the Ascona site in the first place and had come to Monte Verita to live without constraint, meaning without property, without contracts, and as far as possible without money at all; they wanted barter, subsistence, and a life stripped to essentials. Oedenkoven, meanwhile, was building bungalows, and the carpenters who built them expected to be paid, as did the suppliers of the running water and the electricity that a sanatorium catering to wealthy invalids was going to require.
The disagreement was not really about money as such but about what kind of thing was being built. A subsistence commune and a residential health institute are different enterprises with different requirements, and the second one needs capital, buildings, staff, sanitation, and a reliable food supply for guests who are paying for comfort as well as principle. Oedenkoven’s position was that without the institute there would be no settlement at all, which was almost certainly correct. The Gräsers’ position was that with the institute there was no settlement either, only a business wearing a settlement’s clothes, which was also, in a sense that became clearer over the following decades, correct.
The split was inevitable and it happened early. The Gräsers withdrew from the enterprise, Gusto taking up an itinerant life in the surrounding valleys and hills as a kind of wandering ascetic poet, living in caves and grottoes and turning up periodically to reproach the settlement he had helped found for having become a hotel. He is the most purely utopian figure in the story and he had, by the standards of the movement, the strongest claim to consistency; he is also the one who left. This is the recurring shape of such disputes, in which the members whose principles are least negotiable exit first and the enterprise continues under the management of those willing to compromise, which is why organisations founded by radicals so reliably end up run by administrators, a dynamic visible across the record of experiments in building new institutional arrangements. The purists, in the end, left within the first few years. The business is what stayed on the mountain.
Who Came
The guest list is the reason anybody remembers Monte Verita, and reciting it is the fastest way to make the argument. Hermann Hesse came, in 1907, to dry out. Carl Gustav Jung came and later held seminars regularly. The sociologist Max Weber came. The philosopher Ernst Bloch and the theologian Martin Buber came. Prince Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist geographer, came; so did the anarchist physician Raphael Friedeberg, and the playwright Erich Muhsam, who called Ascona the Republic of the Homeless. The socialist leaders August Bebel and Karl Kautsky argued in its rooms. The psychoanalyst Otto Gross came and planned a school for the liberation of humanity.
What is striking about the list is not merely its distinction but its composition. These were overwhelmingly people whose work consisted of producing and transmitting ideas: writers, painters, psychiatrists, theorists, choreographers, political organisers. A settlement that attracted farmers and artisans in the same numbers would have left no cultural trace whatever, because farmers and artisans do not write books, found schools, or teach students who found further schools. Monte Verita’s guest list was, by accident of its pricing and its subject matter, weighted almost entirely toward the professions that propagate ideas for a living.
The artists came in force, particularly after the First World War: Marianne von Werefkin and Alexej von Jawlensky, Paul Klee, Arthur Segal, El Lissitzky, and the Dadaists Hugo Ball, Hans Arp, and Hans Richter, whose movement was being invented ninety miles away in Zurich by people who moved back and forth. The writers included Gerhart Hauptmann, Erich Maria Remarque, Rene Schickele, and Franziska zu Reventlow. Isadora Duncan visited. There are persistent claims that Lenin and Trotsky passed through, which the site’s own history repeats with appropriate hedging and which should be treated as the kind of rumour that attaches to any place that hosted a great many exiled radicals in the years before 1917, and which belongs with the other durable stories in the archive of what revolutionaries were supposedly doing where. Several thousand people came through over the years. Almost none of them stayed.
The Dance School
The single most consequential thing that happened on the hill began in May 1913, when Rudolf Laban arrived to investigate the possibility of running a summer school for the arts. He found a place already established as a centre for experimental living, with a resident population accustomed to nudity, vegetarianism, outdoor exercise, and rhythmic movement, and a supply of visitors predisposed to try anything. He ran his summer courses there from 1913 through the end of the First World War, and it was there that he made his breakthrough.
The site was essential to the work rather than incidental to it, which is the strongest argument anyone can make for what the place actually provided. Laban needed somewhere his students could dance outdoors, unclothed, for hours, without interference, scandal, or arrest, and in 1913 there were very few such places in Europe. Monte Verita supplied not merely permission but an entire supporting environment: a community that regarded nudity and vegetarianism as unremarkable, accommodation, a receptive audience, and a steady traffic of visitors who would carry reports of what they had seen back into the German cultural world. The mountain functioned as a protected space in which something illegal-adjacent elsewhere could simply be practised.
What Laban developed at Monte Verita was the foundation of modern European dance: movement generated from the body’s own impulses rather than from codified positions, danced outdoors, frequently unclothed, in improvisations and expressionist dance dramas. His students included Mary Wigman, who became the central figure of German expressionist dance, along with Suzanne Perrottet, Katja Wulff, and later Sigurd Leeder. From that group descends an entire lineage: Wigman’s schools, Kurt Jooss, the Jooss-Leeder school that relocated to England in 1934 ahead of the Nazis, Labanotation as a system for recording movement, and through those channels a substantial fraction of twentieth-century concert dance and movement analysis. The body-centred theory of expression that Laban was working out has clear affinities with what is now understood about how movement, perception, and emotion interact in the science of nervous systems, and the transmission of a physical technique through a chain of students is exactly the mechanism by which any embodied skill survives, studied in the passing of practical knowledge between generations. An art form was born on that hill. It was practised everywhere else.
Throughput, Not Population
Here is the mechanism stated plainly, and it inverts the logic that governs every other case in this literature. Most utopian settlements are built on the assumption that influence follows from demonstration: construct the alternative society, let it work, and the world will observe and copy it. That model makes the resident population the critical variable, which is why such communities agonise over recruitment and why the ones that stay small consider themselves to have failed.
The two models also have opposite relationships to scale. A demonstration community is damaged by transience, because every departure is a vote against the proposition and a loss of accumulated skill, which is why such places treat turnover as pathology and put enormous effort into retention. A destination is damaged by permanence, because a guest who never leaves stops paying, occupies a bed, and joins the membership rather than the market. Monte Verita therefore had a financial interest in exactly the behaviour that would have destroyed the Icarians or the Zoarites, and its economics were aligned with dispersal rather than with settlement from the first season.
Monte Verita operated on the opposite principle without ever articulating it. Its influence was a function of throughput rather than population, because it was structured as a destination, and a destination’s output is the people who leave it. A guest who spent three weeks in an air hut, argued with an anarchist over a vegetarian dinner, watched a dance improvisation on the terrace, and went home to Munich or Berlin or Zurich carried the ideas outward and deposited them in a career. Multiply by thousands of guests over thirty years, weighted heavily toward artists, writers, psychiatrists, and intellectuals, and the settlement becomes a distribution network for a set of ideas, achieving a cultural reach that no community of two hundred farmers could approach regardless of how well it farmed. The scholarly assessment makes the point exactly: no lasting art form came into being on Monte Verita, and its guests created their greatest works elsewhere, yet its influence is reflected across nearly every work of the period. Ideas propagating through a mobile population of carriers behave very differently from ideas propagating through a settled one, a distinction that governs cultural transmission generally, as visible in the study of how behaviour spreads through social groups, and it means the correct metric for this project was never how many lived there but how many passed through, which is not how any founder in the catalogue of ambitious undertakings has ever wanted to be judged. The resident community was always small. The conduit running through it was enormous.
What Left the Mountain
There is a caveat worth entering before the accounting, which is that influence of this kind is genuinely difficult to measure and easy to overstate. A guest who spent a fortnight on the hill in 1912 and went on to do notable work cannot simply be counted as evidence that the hill caused the work, and Monte Verita has attracted more than its share of retrospective myth-making, some of it commercially motivated by a site that now sells its own history. Enthusiasms of this sort also spread through their own social dynamics, in the manner examined in the study of how ideas and behaviours propagate through populations. The honest claim is narrower than the legend: the place assembled unusual people repeatedly over three decades, and assembly is a real causal contribution even when it is not the whole story.
Trace the outflows and the scale becomes clear. Modern dance left, through Laban and Wigman and their students, and reshaped European theatre and eventually American choreography. Depth psychology left: Otto Gross carried his radical psychoanalysis into the German avant-garde, and Jung’s involvement led, after Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn established the Eranos conferences at Ascona in 1933, to the annual gathering that brought together Jung, Mircea Eliade, Gershom Scholem, Karl Kerenyi, and later Joseph Campbell, producing a body of comparative work on myth and symbol that ran for decades and shaped how the twentieth century thought about religion and the unconscious.
The Eranos meetings deserve particular attention because they are the purest distillation of the model and they outlasted everything else. The format was simply a gathering: scholars invited to Ascona each August to lecture and argue, with the proceedings published in an annual volume, no permanent institution, no faculty, no students, and no residents. It ran for decades, produced one of the most influential bodies of comparative scholarship of the century, and required nothing except a place, a season, and a guest list. That is the Monte Verita principle applied deliberately by people who had understood what the hill was actually good for.
Vegetarianism and naturism left, in a more diffuse way, feeding the German Lebensreform movement and through it the health-food, natural-medicine, and outdoor-education currents that eventually surfaced in the postwar counterculture; the American hippies of the 1960s were reproducing, largely without knowing it, a programme worked out on a Swiss hillside sixty years earlier. Anarchist and pacifist networks used Ascona as a node for years. Dada left, or at least circulated, through the traffic between Ascona and Zurich. Hesse left with material that shows up throughout his fiction. What did not happen was any of these things being institutionalised on the mountain itself, which had no school that outlasted its teacher, no press, no order, and no successor generation. The transmission mechanism was entirely personal, which is to say it worked by moving ideas from one mind to another through direct contact, the oldest and still the most effective form of the process now being approached technologically in work on direct communication between brains. Everything valuable left. That was the design, whether or not anyone intended it.
The Founders Sell
By 1920 Oedenkoven and Hofmann had had enough. Their long partnership had cooled, the war had disrupted everything, the sanatorium’s clientele had changed, and the compromises required to keep the business solvent had eroded whatever remained of the founding programme; meat had been introduced to the menu to attract paying patrons, which alienated the remaining believers about as completely as one would expect. They sold up and emigrated, first to Spain and then to Brazil, where Hofmann died in 1926. Karl Gräser had died in 1920. The community, as a community, was finished.
The introduction of meat is worth dwelling on as the moment the arrangement showed its hand. A vegetarian cooperative that begins serving meat to retain paying guests has, whatever its members tell themselves, resolved the ambiguity in its own constitution: it is a hospitality business with an ethical theme rather than an ethical community that happens to take guests. The remaining believers understood this perfectly and reacted accordingly. It is the same clarifying moment that arrives in any organisation whose stated purpose and revenue model finally issue contradictory instructions, and the revenue model wins with dispiriting regularity.
The property did what valuable property does. In 1926 it was bought by Baron Eduard von der Heydt, a German-Swiss banker who had been banker to the former Kaiser Wilhelm II and was among the most significant collectors of contemporary and non-European art of his generation. He commissioned the architect Emil Fahrenkamp to build a hotel on the site, constructed between 1927 and 1929 in an austere Bauhaus idiom, and turned Monte Verita into an elegant retreat for a wealthy and cultured clientele, which is what it had always been becoming. The transition from an ideological settlement to a piece of desirable real estate held by a financier is an ordinary sequence, and the passage of significant property into the hands of banking families is documented well enough in the histories of institutional finance and in the great investigations of who actually owns what. The hotel is a genuinely fine building, and it belongs in the record of what gets built when money meets a view. The utopians had gone. What arrived in their place was the architecture.
Monte Verita in 2026
The site today is owned by the Canton of Ticino and operates as a conference centre, principally for ETH Zurich, alongside the hotel, a restaurant, a museum, and the preserved Casa Anatta with its exhibition on the colony’s history, assembled originally by the curator Harald Szeemann in 1978. Von der Heydt’s art bequest is displayed through the buildings. An Arp sculpture stands at the entrance to the Bauhaus block, and a sculptural installation marks the ground where Laban’s students trained. The Monte Verita Foundation maintains its own account of the hill’s history and its extraordinary roll of visitors, and the Swiss federal government’s cultural service treats the colony as a significant episode in the country’s history in its account of the early Ascona settlement.
Which is to say that Monte Verita is now, formally and institutionally, a venue: a place where groups of interesting people come for a limited period, talk intensively, and disperse. That is precisely what it was in 1905, and precisely what it was in 1913, and precisely the thing it was best at throughout. The setting still does the work it always did, a hillside above a lake in a mild climate with views that reliably loosen people up, in a landscape whose value has always been bound to the water below it, and the conference attendees are ferried up a hill that once required a walk, in an era when even the surrounding agriculture runs on autonomous machinery. The founders wanted a new society. The site is a conference centre, and always essentially was.
The Venue
Strip Monte Verita to its structure and the finding is uncomfortable for the whole genre. Its founders set out to build a permanent alternative to industrial civilisation and they did not build one; the community lasted about twenty years, never numbered more than a few dozen committed residents, alienated its own purists within the first years, compromised its dietary principles to keep the beds full, and ended with its founders selling the freehold and emigrating. By the standards every intentional community sets for itself, that is a failure, and a fairly quick one.
The test this suggests is worth applying before anyone founds anything. Ask whether the project’s purpose is to demonstrate a way of living or to transmit a set of ideas, because those two goals require opposite structures and almost nobody distinguishes them at the outset. A demonstration needs residents, retention, and permanence, and is destroyed by turnover. A transmission needs visitors, throughput, and dispersal, and is destroyed by everyone staying. Founders routinely announce the second goal and then build for the first, and then measure themselves by a population figure that has nothing to do with what they said they wanted.
By any external standard it is among the most successful projects in the entire catalogue. The ideas it incubated propagated further and lasted longer than those of any comparable settlement, and they did so precisely because the place was organised as a destination rather than as a home: because it took money from visitors, needed a continuous supply of them, and therefore built a machine for exposing large numbers of unusually influential people to a coherent set of unconventional ideas and then sending them away. That is why it earns a permanent and slightly awkward place in the catalogue of utopian societies, as the case that got the wrong result by the wrong method and did more good than the ones that did it properly. Nobody sets out to found a conference centre. It may nonetheless be the most effective instrument for changing a civilisation that anyone on that hill ever built.