Gigon/Guyer

For more than 150 years now, Davos has been a symbolic place, a focal point of European cultural history and political developments. Nowhere else did the hopes and yearnings, fears and threats of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries come together in such a concentrated form. Then as now, the ubiquity of health risks created a feeling of permanent crisis, yet at the same time medical and technological progress fuelled the desire for a long and healthy life.

The air in the high mountains promised a cure for the communicable disease of tuberculosis, which killed tens of thousands of people every year. Davos saw its chance and, from 1870 onward, the remote mountain village swiftly developed into a world-renowned pulmonary health resort. At the same time, people understood the new potential of sports and systematically promoted the town as the winter sports destination it is to this day. Time and again, Davos managed to reinvent itself.

Everybody who was anybody met in Davos, including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Katia and Thomas Mann, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Albert Einstein and the most successful figure skater of all times, Sonja Henie. The exhibition tells their stories, the tragic as well as the successful ones. The artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner turned his back on the metropolis of Berlin to stay in Davos for good. His paintings celebrated the alpine world as an Edenic place of peaceful coexistence. In Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain Davos is emblematic of the dreams and catastrophes of Europe.

The exhibition, a joint project of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg and the Kirchner Museum Davos, presents Davos for the first time as a place illustrating the complexity and turmoil of modernity and European cultural history. Various sections of the exhibition draw connections between medical history and the history of the spa, architecture, winter sports, art and literature, philosophy and politics. All areas of focus and individual aspects are discussed in depth and illustrated in a richly illustrated catalogue. Some of the most important masterpieces by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner from his Davos years open up a new perspective on European cultural life around the turn of the century. Also included are major works by Kirchner’s contemporary, Philip Bauknecht, as well as works from the collection of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg. Other loans, some on view for the first time, come from the Dokumentationsbibliothek Davos, the Heimatmuseum and the Sportmuseum Davos as well as the Medical Historical Collection in Davos. The story of Thomas Mann and the magic mountain is impressively documented by journals, notes and photographs from the writer’s archives at ETH Zurich.