Gustav Gräser (1879-1958), un sas transilvănean adept al mişcării „înapoi la natura”, co-fondator al coloniei Monte Verità
Gustav Gräser (1879-1958), a Transylvanian Saxon Follower of the Movement „Back to Nature” and co-founder of the Monte Verità Colony
Author(s): Gudrun-Liane Ittu
Subject(s): Cultural history, Social history
Published by: Editura Academiei Române
Keywords: industrialization; counter culture; ostracization; Hermann Hesse; hippie movement;
Summary/Abstract: The study aims discussing the counter-culture that developed in and around the Swiss village of Ascona and the Monte Verità (or Mountain of Truth) located there in around 1900. Ascona offered an alternative community and influenced later developments in politics as Ghandi and the hippie movement. One of the founders of the colony was the Transylvanian Saxon, Gustav (Gusto) Gräser, a talented person who refused to live “civilized”, preferring the status of an unadapted. Consequently he had to suffer lots of punishments as ostracization, imprisonment, interdiction to publish. As a kind of “guru” he influenced various authors, the most important of them being the novelist and Nobel Prize winner for literature 1946 Hermann Hesse.
Journal: Anuarul Institutului de Cercetări Socio-Umane Sibiu
- Issue Year: XIX/2012
- Issue No: 19
- Page Range: 15-23
- Page Count: 9
- Language: Romanian
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Utopian Thinking in Transylvania: German and Hungarian Case Studies
Utopian Thinking in Transylvania: German and Hungarian Case Studies
Author(s): Ştefan Borbély / Language(s): English / Issue: 02/2018
Keywords: utopian thinking; practical utopia; Monte Verità; Ascona; Gusto Gräser; vegetarianism; Béla Bicsérdy; Transylvania
The paper intends to recall two Transylvanian personalities from the beginning of the 20th century, who triggered—each of them in his personal, specific way—lifestyle and social revolutions within a typical bourgeois community embedded in cautiousness and conformity. The protagonist of the quiet revolution was the “Wanderprediger” Gustav (Gusto) Gräser (1879–1958), “the Gandhi of the Western World” (as he was remembered), who is generally considered the “proto-hippy” of Europe. Born in Kronstadt (now Braşov), around 1900 he joined Henri Oedenkoven, his wife Ida Hofmann and a few other pacifists in order to establish the Monte Verità hippy community near Ascona, in Switzerland, also visited by prominent intellectuals like Hermann Hesse. The initiator of the noisy revolution was Béla Bicsérdy (1872–1951), who spent the first half of his life in Făgăraş, which happens to be the native town of the presenter. Struck by syphilis in the early years of his professional career, Bicsérdy decided to overcome the disease by taking up radical vegetarianism and by preaching the necessity of a spiritual asceticism, freely decanted from Zoroaster’s Avesta. His lectures, attended by hundreds of frantic followers, ended up in a huge mass hysteria in Transylvania and in Hungary, aimed at “defeating Death,” as one of Bicsérdy’s books heralded. The Master (as he called himself) illustrated his bodily transformation by setting weightlifting world records at the age of 50, he edited books and leaflets in endless rows of several thousand copies (all sold out), and managed to promote his campaigns in a truly Hollywood style, before moving to Ada Kaleh island in the middle of the Danube (where he founded a vegetarian community), and later to the United States, where he nevertheless died before reaching the age of 800, a vague upper limit he had promised to his ecstatic disciples.