Many decades before the Beatles made their pilgrimage to India, long before the hype over gurus, communes, healthy food, and cries of “back to nature,” Germany already had its own prophet: Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach.
Dressed in a white robe, a simple leather bag over his shoulders, long hair and beard, often barefoot, Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach attracted much attention and was just as fascinating to writers and artists ranging from Herman Hesse to Egon Schiele as he was to the gossip columns and ordinary citizens. And, like so many self-declared prophets before him, Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach too had been purified: In 1873 the art student had been ill with typhus; while still in the hospital, he developed thrombosis. The years that followed, only a few months of which he spent at the art academy in Munich, were filled with personal setbacks of fate, illness, and frailties.
The newly emerged vegetarian movement promised him a way out; it was intended to be much more than just a way to recover his health through nutrition. The late nineteenth century in general was marked by a search for new ideas; the Christian church was no longer able to satisfy completely the yearnings of the faithful for identification, for an all-encompassing worldview. Several of these new ideas are still regarded as laughably failed marginal phenomena, like the story of the German emigrant August Engelhardt, whose search for meaning in a pure life with coconuts and sunlight was described with a good deal of cynical mockery by the writer Christian Kracht in his Imperium of 2012 (translated into English in 2015). Other ideas have proven to be more successful, finding a way to common sense by one path or another.
Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach made regular pilgrimages to the lectures of Eduard Baltzer, who combined his own Christian conviction with a great enthusiasm for human progress; he attended meetings of the Deutscher Freidenker-Verband (German association of freethinkers) ; and finally in 1882 he himself became a role model, a preacher to others. Shortly after getting married, unhappily for him, Diefenbach fled to Hoher Peissenberg. There he had a vision that would change his life forever--as well as the lives of numerous admirers and fellow commune members. In addition to renouncing meat and alcohol, the artist turned prophet advocated a complete withdrawal from sociopolitical life, which seemed so wrong to him. In the commune he founded near Munich in 1885--HUMANITAS: Werkstätte für Kunst, Religion und Wissenschaft (Workshop for art, religion, and science)--he preached not only a healthy lifestyle by the unconditional will to community, hard work, and dispensing with as much of one's private sphere as possible. Diefenbach later moved from Höllriegelskreuth to Vienna, where a community also quickly formed around the charismatic artist.His followers admired and feared his radicalness. Diefenbach cannot be accused of a lack of rigor: his ideals were for him direct instructions for action, though he was certainly capable of judging others more harshly than himself. There is no doubt that he was primus inter pares, or "first among equals," someone who often stylized himself as a sufferer, who could not complete paintings because of physical ailments, and who was disturbed by the presence of women, as Arthur Roessler, who was a follower for a time, reported on a letter about the maestro.
Despite, or precisely because of, his ambiguous character, Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach became a kind of living legend: People made pilgrimages to the charismatic prophet as if he were a guru. Several of them remained for a time, while others left after only a few days, disappointed and purified or inspired. Some of them continued in search of an even more radical or esoterically wild worldview; one of them himself became a prophet of Jesus. Diefenbach and his ideas, his life, and his work became seductive projection screens: together with him, so many hoped, one could find one's way back to harmony with nature, to complete identification with primal human nature and the external world. Diefenbach was also greatly admired for his paintings, which reflected his mythical understanding of humans, nature, and religion: The human being is small in the face of the power of nature, the divine vision, but even larger are the temples and the colossus that Diefenbach wanted to have built. Fog, storms, and darkness dominate his canvases, on which he focused on each object individually. His most famous work was Per Aspera ad Astra, a frieze sixty-eight meters long, on which people and animals make a pilgrimage to the temple on foot or in coaches, with trombones and trumpets in silhouette.Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach regularly found his own commune to confining, so that he made regular pilgrimages to, among other places, Egypt, where he produced many of his drawings of temples. From 1900 onward he lived on Capri, without his commune in Vienna, which had in the meanwhile gone bankrupt, but nevertheless admired by the local population. In Germany and Austria, the myths and legends continue to grow up around the mythical artist who had confused, vexed, and inspired so many. He died on the Italian island in 1913 at the age of sixty-two.