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One of the many aspects of the Lebensreform was healthy reform clothing. This picture from 1911 shows probably a Dutch woman who wears a dress in so-called reform style without a tight-laced corset.
Lebensreform ("life-reform") is the German generic term for various social reform movements, that started since the mid-19th century and originated especially in the German Empire and later in Switzerland. Common features were the criticism of industrialisation, materialism and urbanization combined with striving for the state of nature. The painter and social reformer Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach is considered to be an important pioneer of the Lebensreform ideas. The various movements did not have an overarching organization, but there were numerous associations. Whether the reform movements of the Lebensreform should be classified as modern or as anti-modern and reactionary is controversial. Both theses are represented.[1]
The Lebensreform movement in Germany was a politically diverse social reform movement. There were hundreds of groups across Germany dedicated to some or all of the concepts associated with the Lebensreform movement. Representatives of the Lebensreform propagated a natural way of life with ecology and organic farming, a vegetarian diet without alcoholic beverages and tobacco smoking, German dress reform and naturopathy. In doing so, they reacted to what they saw as the negative consequences of social changes in the 19th century. Spiritually, the Lebensreform turned to new religious and spiritual views, including theosophy, Mazdaznan and yoga. Many late neo-romanticism elements were also taken up, along with a glorification of the "simple life in the country". Dozens of magazines, journals, books, and pamphlets were published on these topics. Some groups were made of socialists, some were apolitical, and some were right-wing and nationalist in outlook.[3]
The architectural form of the Lebensreform first came from settlement experiments such as Monte Verità, later in the garden city movement such as the Hellerau settlement and many others, the best-known representative of which was the reform architect Heinrich Tessenow (1876–1950), and the Bauhaus. The first establishment of a vegetarian settlement in Germany was the Vegetarian Fruit-Growing Colony Eden (Vegetarische Obstbau-Kolonie Eden) in Oranienburg near Berlin in 1893 formed by some 18 vegetarians from Berlin, later named the Eden Fruit-Growing Cooperative Settlement (Eden Gemeinnützige Obstbau-Siedlung[de]).
Lebensreform was a mainly bourgeois-dominated movement in which many women also participated. In the body culture (Körperkultur), it was about providing people with plenty of fresh air and sun to compensate for the effects of industrialization and urbanization.
Some areas of the Lebensreform movement, such as naturopathy or vegetarianism, were organized in associations and enjoyed great popularity, which is reflected in the number of members. To disseminate their content and principles, they published magazines such as Der Naturarzt (The Naturopath) or Die Vegetarische Warte (The Vegetarian Observer). Part of the Lebensreform movement also included the freikörperkultur (FKK, also naturism),[4] the physical culture, gymnastics and expressionist dance. By the 1920s, Germany had even produced a cinematic cultural feature film titled Ways to Strength and Beauty, which promoted and idealized health and beauty in conformity with nature.
The German researcher Joachim Raschke[de] compared the Lebensreform to other social movements and found some specifics:
The workers' movement was a mass movement interested in power politics and only secondarily in sociocultural issues.
After 1968, Germany (and other countries) saw the growth of the so-called New Social Movements such as the students' movement, the peace movement, and the movement of the modern environmentalists. Those movements lacked a unified ideology, had no tight organization, and were very diverse. Their members (not only the leaders) were highly educated, which was a result of the expansion of the German educational system in the 1960s. Typical for these movements was a certain enmity towards "leaders" and a preference for direct action, although these movements often changed the way they expressed themselves.
The Lebensreform movements were much smaller groups that consisted often of academics. They had experienced an estrangement in modern society and tried to realign mankind and nature. They usually organized themselves in a traditional way, with lectures, clubs, and magazines.[5]
One outstanding prophet of the Lebensreform movement was the painter Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach (1861–1913), a pacifist and Tolstoyananarchist who lived with his students in a hermitage in Höllriegelskreuth near Munich and later founded the community Himmelhof[de] near Vienna. Among his disciples were three painters: Hugo Höppener (Fidus), František Kupka and Gustav Gräser.[3] In 1900 Gräser became the cofounder and inspiring pioneer of the community Monte Verità near Ascona, Switzerland. Monte Verità attracted many artists from all of Europe, during World War I conscientious objectors from Germany and France. Gustav Gräser, a thinker and poet, greatly influenced the German Youth Movement and such writers as Hermann Hesse and Gerhart Hauptmann. He was the model for the master figures in the books of Hermann Hesse. Richard Ungewitter and Heinrich Pudor were also well-known advocates of a strain of Lebensreform that emphasized nude culture (Nacktkultur) and was explicit Völkisch in tradition, which eventually became the Freikörperkultur movement.[3][4] The Freikörperkultur movement eventually broadened and came to include socialists with no strains of ethnic nationalism like the educationalist and gymnastics teacher Adolf Koch.[3][4]
Effect in the United States
Some of the less well-known protagonists of the movement in Germany, such as Bill Pester, Benedict Lust, and Arnold Ehret, emigrated to California at the end of the 19th and until the mid-20th century, where they strongly influenced the later hippie movement.[6][7] One group, called themselves the "Nature Boys", settled as a commune in the California desert. One member of this group, eden ahbez, wrote the song Nature Boy, (recorded in 1947 by Nat King Cole), popularizing the "back-to-nature" movement in mainstream America. Eventually, a few of these Nature Boys, including Gypsy Boots, made their way to Northern California in 1967, just in time for the Summer of Love in San Francisco.[6]
Today
Many contemporary environmental and other movements (the organic food movement, many fad diets and "back to nature" movements, as well as "folk movements"), have their roots in the Lebensreform movement's emphasis on the goodness of nature, the harms to society, people, and to nature caused by industrialization, the importance of the whole person, body and mind, and the goodness of "the old ways".[3]:40[8][9]:32–33[10]
Right-wing radicalism
A specific stream based on völkischRomanticism gradually became part of Nazi ideology by the 1930s, known as blood and soil. As early as 1907, Richard Ungewitter published a pamphlet called Wieder nacktgewordene Menschen (People have become naked again) which sold 100,000 copies, arguing that the practices he recommended would be "the means by which the German race would regenerate itself and ultimately prevail over its neighbours and the diabolical Jews, who were intent on injecting putrefying agents into the nation's blood and soil".[11]
The extremists promoting right-wing ideology eventually became popular among Nazi Party officials and their supporters, including Heinrich Himmler and Rudolph Höss, who belonged to the right-wing farming organization the Artaman League. When other groups were being banned or disbanded due to political conflict during the 1930s, the extreme nationalist ideology became connected with National Socialism. The German Life Reform League broke apart into political factions during this time. The Nationalist physician Artur Fedor Fuchs began the League for Free Body Culture (FKK), giving public lectures on the healing powers of the sun in the "Nordic sky", which "alone strengthened and healed the warrior nation".[12] Ancient forest living, and habits presumed to have been followed by the ancient tribes of Germany were beneficial to regenerating the Aryan people, according to Fuchs' philosophy. Hans Sùren, a prominent former military officer, published Man and the Sun (1924), which sold 240,000 copies; by 1941 it was reissued in 68 editions. Sùren promoted the Aryan master race concept of physically strong, militarized men who would be the "salvation" of the German people.[13]
↑ Joachim Raschke: Soziale Bewegungen: ein historisch-systematischer Grundriss. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / New York, 1987 (1985), pp. 44-46, 408-411, 415, 435.
↑ Hakl, Hans Thomas; McIntosh, Christopher (2014). Eranos: An Alternative Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century. Routledge. p.272. ISBN9781317548133. How can we explain the convergence of conservative-volkisch currents with the Lebensreform faction, the ecology movement,(103) early women's liberation and the opening to alternative forms of religion—a convergence that seems so surprising from today's perspective? A deep emotional chord is struck by the themes of one's own Volk, of peace-giving religion, of the local soil that demands such careful nurturing, of one's own mother, indeed of the "feminine" in general. This chord vibrates again and again in the same register, which can best be characterized by the German word Geborgenheit, implying a reassuring sense of security against that which is new and strange. Footnote 103: The ecology movement, which today tends to be seen as belonging to the left, had its origins in the Lebensreforrn groups of around the turn of the twentieth century, which were often marked by "Volkisch" (ethnic) thinking and were influenced by the Wandervogel (wandering birds) movement. What they had in common was their opposition to the industrialization and urbanization of modern life.
Thorsten Carstensen & Marcel Schmid: Die Literatur der Lebensreform. Kulturkritik und Aufbruchstimmung um 1900. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2016, 352 pp., ISBN978-3-8376-3334-4
Gordon Kennedy: Children of the Sun: A Pictorial Anthology From Germany To California 1883–1949. Nivaria Press (1998), 192 pp., ISBN0-9668898-0-0
Gordon, Mel (2006). Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin. Feral House. ISBN1-932595-11-2.
John Williams: Turning to Nature in Germany: Hiking, Nudism, and Conservation, 1900–1940. Stanford University Press (2007), 368 pp., ISBN0-8047-0015-X
Martin Green: Mountain of Truth. The Counterculture begins, Ascona, 1900-1920. University Press of New England, Hanover and London, 1986, 287 pp., ISBN0-87451-365-0
A back-to-the-land movement is any of various agrarian movements across different historical periods. The common thread is a call for people to take up smallholding and to grow food from the land with an emphasis on a greater degree of self-sufficiency, autonomy, and local community than found in a prevailing industrial or postindustrial way of life. There have been a variety of motives behind such movements, such as social reform, land reform, and civilian war efforts. Groups involved have included political reformers, counterculture hippies, and religious separatists.
The Völkisch movement was a German ethnic nationalist movement active from the late 19th century through to the dissolution of the German Reich in 1945, with remnants in the Federal Republic of Germany afterwards. Erected on the idea of "blood and soil", inspired by the one-body-metaphor, and by the idea of naturally grown communities in unity, it was characterized by organicism, racialism, populism, agrarianism, romantic nationalism and – as a consequence of a growing exclusive and ethnic connotation – by antisemitism from the 1900s onward. Völkisch nationalists generally considered the Jews to be an "alien people" who belonged to a different Volk from the Germans.
A lacto-vegetarian diet is a diet that abstains from the consumption of meat as well as eggs, while still consuming dairy products such as milk, cheese, yogurt, butter, ghee, cream, and kefir.
Benedict Lust was a German-born American who was one of the founders of naturopathic medicine in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Freikörperkultur (FKK) is a social and health culture that originated in the German Empire; its beginnings were historically part of the Lebensreform social movement in the late 19th century. Freikörperkultur, which translates as free body culture, includes both the health aspects of being naked in light, air and sun and an intention to reform life and society. It is partly identified with the culture of nudity, naturism and nudism in the sense of communal nudity of people and families in leisure time, sport and everyday life.
Monte Verità is a 321 metres above sea level high hill and a cultural-historical ensemble in the Swiss canton of Ticino. The site is in the municipality of Ascona, about half a kilometre north-west of the old town. Monte Verità, located on Lake Maggiore, was a well-known meeting place for the life-reformers (Lebensreform), pacifists, artists, writers and supporters of various alternative movements in the first decades of the 20th century. After 1940 the place lost its importance. An attempt at a revival in the late 1970s met with very limited success.
Adolf Karl Hubert Koch was a German educationalist and sports teacher. He was the founder of a gymnastics movement named after him and a pioneer of the Freikörperkultur movement in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, which in turn was part of the larger Lebensreform movement.
Lotte Herrlich (1883–1956) was a German photographer. She is regarded as the most important female photographer of the German naturism. This mainly was during the 1920s, in which the Freikörperkultur was popular within Germany, before the Nazi Party assumed power (1930s), promptly prohibiting it.
Ways to Strength and Beauty is a 1925 German cultural film directed by Wilhelm Prager. The 125 minute full-length silent film was produced by Ufa-Kulturabteilung of Weimar Germany. The film was first screened on 16 March 1925 and in a revised version on 11 June 1926 in the Ufa-Palast am Zoo in Berlin.
Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach was a German painter and social reformer.
The Artaman League was a German agrarian and völkisch movement committed to a Back-to-the-land–inspired ruralism, founded in 1923. Active during the inter-war period, the League became closely linked to, and eventually absorbed by, the Nazi Party.
Heinrich Pudor was a German Völkisch-nationalist pundit and a pioneer of the Freikörperkultur in Germany. He took the pseudonyms Heinrich Scham and Ernst Deutsch.
Adolf Just (born 8 August 1859, Lüthorst near Dassel, Kingdom of Hanover; died 20 January 1936, Blankenburg was a German naturopath. He was the founder of the sanatorium Jungborn in Eckertal.
Richard Ungewitter was a German naturist and pioneer of the Freikörperkultur movement and one of its first organizers. There was a völkisch element in Ungewitter's ideas.
Naturism is a cultural and social movement practicing, advocating and defending social nudity in private and in public. It is particularly strong in Germany where it goes under the name Freikörperkultur (FKK). It refers to a lifestyle based on personal, family and/or social nudism in the "great outdoors" environment. Naturism grew out of the German Lebensreform movement and the Wandervogel youth movement of 1896, and has been adopted in many neighbouring European countries and was taken by the German diaspora to North America and other continents.
Gustav "Gusto" Arthur Gräser was a German alternative lifestyle advocate, artist, and poet. He is considered one of the founders of communal lifestyle in Germany. Together with his brother and fellow artist Karl Gräser, he co-founded one of the earliest social reform settlements, which was located along Monte Verità in Ascona. His penned and painted works included many of that were not published until a revival of interest during the counterculture of the 1960s emerged.
Back to nature or return to nature is a philosophy or style of living which emphasises closeness to nature, rather than artifice and civilisation. In this, the rustic customs and pastoralism of country life are preferred to urban fashion and sophistication.
Light Prayer is a painting associated with the German Youth Movement and Lebensreform concept of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It portrays a young, naked man who stands on a rock and stretches his arms toward the sky. It was created by the German painter Fidus, who from 1890 to 1938 made eleven versions in various media. In 1913, he created a postcard based on the painting that became widely spread in Germany.
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