By around 1900 Weimar had already become an arena of Modernism. Around the cult surrounding Friedrich Nietzsche, colourful personalities like Harry Graf Kessler and Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche took up the idea of the New Man. Henry van de Velde looked to the future as he created a functional and elegant world in design and interiors. Succinct texts describe the beginnings of Modernism some twenty years before the Bauhaus.