Lectures from the Allen Room & Wertheim Study: Watchmakers, Hippies, and the World Economic Summit: Three Magic Mountains and the Birth of Today's World in Switzerland

Damion Searls, writer and translator, will explore the surprising cultural, artistic, and scientific renaissance in early-twentieth-century Switzerland.

From Albert Einstein and Carl Jung to Rilke, Lenin, modern dance, and personality testing, Switzerland a century ago was a hotbed of innovative ideas that still shape our world today. This talk and extensive slideshow will focus on three of the “magic mountains” where these peaceful revolutions took place: La-Chaux-de-Fonds in the Jura, birthplace of the Swiss watch industry and, later, Swiss Art Nouveau, Swiss socialism, and the architect Le Corbusier; Monte Verità in Ascona, home to a countercultural community of nudist, vegetarian, free-love nature-worshipping dreamers; and Davos, Thomas Mann’s original “Magic Mountain” and currently the site of the annual World Economic Summit.

This research is part of Searls’s book Magic Mountains, currently being written in the Wertheim Study at The New York Public Library.

For more lectures from the Wertheim Study, click here.