the prophet the world of karl wilhelm diefenbach - Wien Museum

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“The exhibition offers a remarkable juxtaposition of micro and macro perspectives,” says Wolfgang Kos, Director of Wien Museum. “We get a close-up, monographic view of Diefenbach's life and work with its inherent conflicts and contradictions, but also a sweeping panorama of all the novel doctrines of salvation that were so trendy around 1900 and gave mainstream society ample opportunity for gossip and outrage. This is why we decided on the subtitle ‘The world of Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach’ for the exhibition.” Commenting on the exhibition venue, Kos points out: “Hermesvilla is located on the fringes of the Vienna Woods. From here, a 20-minute walk along a footpath will get you to Himmelhof, where Diefenbach’s group of social dropouts took up residence. Originally built as a refuge where Empress Elisabeth could drift off into a symbol-laden dream world, Hermesvilla provides a fitting genius loci for the Diefenbach exhibition.” Milestones in the life of an outsider Diefenbach was born in Hadamar, a small town in the German state of Hesse, where he grew up in a provincial Catholic household of moderate means. In 1872 he began to study painting at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. After a severe bout of typhoid fever, Diefenbach renounced the consumption of tobacco, alcohol and “lumps of animal flesh”. He engaged in free love relationships early on and left the Catholic Church (an “institute of satan”) in 1881. The following year, he married Magdalena Atzinger, with whom he already had a son; two more children were to follow. Deserting his bride on their wedding night, Diefenbach walked up the Hohenpeißenberg mountain in Upper Bavaria, where he experienced a spiritual awakening while watching the morning sunrise. This inspired him to pen the ode Sonnen-Aufgang (“Sunrise”), a kind of literary credo in which he called upon man to “know yourself [...] God is within YOU [...] Recognise, humanity, your mother – NATURE”. From then on, Diefenbach let his hair grow long, wandered the streets of Munich’s Bohemian neighbourhood Schwabing in sandals and a cowl and gave highly controversial lectures on how to live in harmony with nature. He founded his first commune in the Höllriegelskreuth quarry in 1885, where the Art Nouveau painter Hugo Höppener, alias Fidus, was one of his closest companions. Höppener also organised the first Diefenbach exhibition in Munich, but the latter’s authoritarian personality soon gave rise to serious quarrels between the two friends. Diefenbach also came under attack from government authorities on charges of “neglect of his children”, and after members of the commune were observed to be sunbathing in the nude, he had to defend himself in the first “nudist trial” in German history. On top of these problems, his financial situation was becoming more and more untenable. A fiasco in Vienna Diefenbach therefore accepted an invitation from the Österreichischer Kunstverein, an Austrian artists’ association that wanted him to supply “sensational paintings as quickly as possible” for an exhibition in Vienna – a financial rescue operation for the Kunstverein, which was on the verge of bankruptcy. The eccentric artist painted eleven large murals which, although not quite the erotic-voyeuristic stuff the organisers had hoped for, managed to attract 78,000 visitors within five months. Nevertheless, the exhibition culminated in a fiasco for Diefenbach, as Kunstverein board members embezzled money from a loan which Kunstverein had taken out using his paintings as collateral. Eventually, the ten biggest paintings were sold at auction, but Diefenbach came away empty-handed and was forced to register with the authorities as a homeless person of no means.
After a hiking tour through the Alps and a brief “flight” to Egypt, Diefenbach founded the rural commune “Himmelhof” in Ober St. Veit, on the outskirts of Vienna, in 1897. With a mixed population of eccentrics and proletarians, numbering up to 24 in its heyday, the commune became a forerunner of innumerable reform-minded “alternative” living and working communities in the 20 th century. Diefenbach again ruled the commune in exceedingly authoritarian style, with a system of iron rules and regulations; among other things, all members had to submit journals of their daily activities to the “Master”. This resulted in tension and conflicts within the group, and members repeatedly dropped out of the commune. It was in this period that Diefenbach painted his monumental 34-panel frieze Per aspera ad astra. Heralded as the artist’s “painted manifesto”, the frieze was first put on public display in 1898. However, the provocative lifestyle of the Himmelhof commune triggered an avalanche of invective in the press. Under the headline “The master of doing nothing yet living nonetheless”, the daily Neuigkeits-Weltblatt fulminated “against the ‘immoral’ activities of the company of ‘scroungers’ and ‘fools’ at ‘Himmelhof’, which constitute a ‘public danger’ and abuse the charitable nature of the Viennese, engaging in ‘whimsical ... charlatanry,’ in ‘a life of shameless idleness’.” When the commune went bankrupt in 1899 and was dissolved as a result, Diefenbach intended to go on a journey to the orient; after a brief sojourn in Trieste, however, he ended up on the island of Capri, where he spent his last years without achieving a breakthrough as an artist. He tried to get celebrities such as industrialist Alfred Krupp, physician Axel Munthe and writer Maxim Gorki interested in his paintings, but these attempts failed. Diefenbach and the “life reform” movement around 1900 Diefenbach is regarded today as an influential forerunner of reform movements around 1900, whose protagonists in Vienna included figures such as writer Peter Altenberg and Florian Berndl, the “father of the [public bathing institution] Gänsehäufel”. Diefenbach was not the only reformer who engaged in “free love” in his communes and walked around in shapeless garments in practical application of his teachings about liberation from physical restraints. However, his rather harmless naked sunbathing was enough to land him in the dock in 1888 in the first “nudist trial” in German history. With his attacks against the Church and rejection of the notion of a Christian redeemer-god, he shared the ideas of an influential contemporary: philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, author of Thus Spake Zarathustra. With respect to nutrition and personal lifestyle, the rejection of tobacco, alcohol, coffee and meat, combined with the practice of nudist sunbathing, were an amalgamation of various strands of vegetarianism. According to the teachings of naturopathy, this lifestyle would heal all ills of mind and body. Later on, arguments for vegetarianism were increasingly based on ethical considerations, focusing on respect for all living beings. At the same time, vegetarianism began to tend towards a more generalised pacifism, aiming at a state of conflict-free coexistence of all humankind, not just of man and beast: vegetarianism would help prevent war, it was argued. The most prominent thinkers of this period were Magnus Schwantje, who founded the “Bund für radikale Ethik” (“Society for radical ethics”) and Eduard Baltzer of the “Deutscher Verein für natürliche Lebensweise“ (“German Association for a natural lifestyle”), both of whom engaged in frequent exchanges with Diefenbach, as did peace activist Bertha von Suttner.
Page 1: Hermesvilla, Lainzer Tiergarten, 11

the prophet the world of karl wilhelm diefenbach - Wien Museum

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