At the end of the 19th century, the Viennese doctor Christoph von Hartungen founded a sanatorium in Riva on Lake Garda, which quickly became a favorite haunt of aristocrats, diplomats, scientists, artists and writers. The special attraction of the place was the ancient combination of southern nature, healing climate and humanist cultural tradition, with reminiscences ranging from Virgil to Dante and Nietzsche. Before the First World War, prominent personalities such as Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka and Max Brod, Christian Morgenstern, Rudolf Steiner, Magnus Hirschfeld and Hermione von Preuschen stayed here.
Willi Jasper, born in 1945, lived as a cultural scientist and publicist in Berlin. He studied at the Free University of Berlin from 1968 and was a founding member of the Maoist KPD/AO in 1970. He was Professor of German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History at the University of Potsdam until 2010. He published numerous books, including a memoir about 1968: Der gläserne Sarg. He died in 2023.
"This book has long been overdue. To be the first one to focus on the importance of this place [Riva], to basically have it added to our intellectual atlas – this is the outstanding service of cultural scientist Willi Jasper, who has already proven to be a well-informed empathic autor. A great success." – Deutschlandradio
“Rare are books like this, in which a place that has repeatedly flickered like a distant, fascinating will-o'-the-wisp suddenly becomes firmly anchored in European cultural history.” – Florian Illies, Die Zeit
