FZ345 – Sanatoria
The history of the sanatoriums intertwines with the history of Europe at the turn of the 20th century. Its architecture and interior design has been the backdrop of iconic events in countless works of fictions and visual arts. Most famously perhaps is Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) or Monte Verita's collection of visitors such as Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung, Isadora Duncan and Paul Klee. The first Alpine sanatorium was built in Davos in 1860. At the beginning of the following century galvanized by modernist enthusiasm, practitioners developed holistic therapies focussing on fresh, uncontaminated air, sun, rest and alimentation – mainly to overcome tuberculosis. But, with the isolation of streptomycin, the first antibiotic cure for tuberculosis, the sanatoriums began their fall from grace. The once magnificent and respected facilities would be abandoned and deserted. Today, most are gone, transformed into hotels, rehab clinics, or perhaps reopened as ‘modern’ wellness centers.
Along this fifty-year span of healthcare, we observe how such well-intended movements known as the Lebensreform and Vitalism, make the move from a liberated body in close relation to nature to a worship of fascist sympathies, how the sanatorium was also a meeting place for extreme political ideologies, were ‘the natural’ was suddenly equal to ‘the pure’.