“Open air school” – A “new” space for educational school reform and life reform in the interwar period in Czechoslovakia (Sudeten German and Czech examples)

The study analyses two examples of so-called open air schools in Czechoslovakia in the interwar period – a Czech and a Sudeten German example of “new education”. The article presents selected examples of school reform as a place of “new education” and analyses their architecture with regard to the educational concept, the problem of education of the “new man” within the framework of life reform and with regard to the architectural conception and arrangement of the space intended for learning. The text analyses both the “external” form of the school building and the “internal” architecture of the educational thinking of the main protagonists of both school reform examples – Eduard Štorch and Karl Metzner. The analysis of the examples of school reform is carried out in the socio-political context of Czechoslovakia in the interwar period and in the context of the efforts to reform the school architecture at the beginning of the 20th century and in the interwar period in Central Europe.

Subversions of Ethnicity in Yokomitsu Riichi’s Neo-Sensationist Writings

This chapter examines Yokomitsu Riichi's urban fiction, as well as his modernist treatise, in the context of the rhetoric of urban renewal that emerged in the wake of the Great Kantō Earthquake. The earthquake, which precipitated a crisis in the ideology of progress that had fueled national modernization for the previous several decades, inflected the fervor over-consumption practices promoted in the language of daily life reform to focus much more intensively on the self and the spirit. Yokomitsu responded to this through his “Neo-Sensationist” (shinkankaku) literature. His essay of that title strategically employs Kantian phenomenology to complicate and subvert essentialist phenomenological models and expose the ideologies of ethnic purity they implied. His urban fiction employed perceptually disorienting language to narrate the experience of protagonists who become cognitively estranged from their environments. In this way, his fiction directly disputed the ethnic essentialism that was chauvinistically being posited as the foundation for a new imperial urban renaissance.

Fetishism of the West in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s A Fool’s Love

This chapter discusses Tanizaki Jun'ichirō's A Fool's Love, which was written in 1924 after the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923. The work responds to the rhetoric of social reform of the early 1920s that led up to that watershed event. Collectively referred to as daily life reform (seikatsu kaizen), these high-minded reform initiatives sought to discipline citizens, particularly women, to align their daily habits of consumption within the home with the interests of the state. The language of these reform efforts sublimated national geopolitical ambitions into consumer fantasies of efficient and sophisticated “Western style” living, as well as ideals of “love,” marriage, and “moral character.” Tanizaki's novel features a middle-class narrator who tells the story of how he fell in love with a young café waitress and divulges the details of their married daily life together. Thus, while the narrator's fantasy life is cloaked in the language of progressive reform, the actual life he describes turns out to be based in sadomasochistic pleasure and fetishistic desire. The chapter shows how the novel in this way subverts the language of daily life reform that was ubiquitous in the magazines and newspapers of the the late 1910s and early 1920s, exposing the contradictions of the ideologies embodied in that rhetoric.

Life reform, educational reform and reform pedagogy from the turn of the century up until 1945 in Hungary

Since the end of the 19th century, the modernisation processes of urbanisation and industrialisation taking place in Europe and the transatlantic regions have changed not only the natural environment but also social and geographical relations. The emergence of modern states changed the traditional societies, lifestyles and private lives of individuals and social groups. It is also characteristic of this period that social reform movements appeared in large numbers – as a «counterweight» to unprecedented, rapid and profound changes. Some of these movements sought to achieve the necessary changes with the help of individual self-reform. Life reform in the narrower sense refers to this type of reform movement. New historical pedagogical research shows that in the major school concepts of reform pedagogy a relatively close connection with life reform is discernible. Reform pedagogy is linked to life reform – and vice versa. Numerous sociotopes of life reform had their own schools, because how better to contribute than through education to the ideal reproduction and continuity of one’s own group. Our work ties in with this pedagogical research direction. The background to the first part of the study is a long-term project aimed at promoting contacts in life reform and reform pedagogy in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and later in Hungary. In the second part we analyse the process up to 1945, in which the ideas of life reform and the elements of reform pedagogy were institutionalised and integrated into the official pedagogical guidelines of the Hungarian universities.

War, Culture and Lebensreform. Germany’s way to itself? A few considerations on Simmel’s war writings

The paper explores Simmel’s writings explicitly dedicated to the war and uses them as sources for investigating the underlying social and cultural context with which Simmel interacted. In particular, it takes into account possible links between Simmel’s considerations on the relationship between war and the crises of modern culture and the multifaceted life-reform movements developed in pre-war Germany. The latter movements, which arose in the last decades of the 19thcentury, expressed a critical reaction to the negative characteristics of modern German society and a search for alternative lifestyles. The paper also investigates the sense of a few inconsistencies found when comparing specific passages that Simmel wrote on the same topics during the war. In the second part, the author considers how the development of Simmel’s narrative on the war affects several key elements of his thought such as qualitative individualism, subjective culture, identity and/or the issue of a new order of values. The author suggests that all these elements become part of an intertwined tissue of arguments which delineate Simmel’s attempt, as an individual, to react to a widespread cultural and spiritual distress.

Monte Verità (1900–)

During the first two decades of the 20th century, Monte Verità, a hill on the west side of Ascona in southern Switzerland, was the site of a ‘life-reform’ movement. An unprejudiced rural population made it possible for activists, writers, and artists to establish a non-hierarchical social model. The goal was to create community models of the future in the field of diverse reform movements. Monte Verità translates as ‘Mountain of Truth’.