Lebensreform
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Lebensreform ("life-reform") is the German generic term for various social
Other important Lebensreform proponents were Sebastian Kneipp, Louis Kuhne, Rudolf Steiner, Hugo Höppener (Fidus), Gustav Gräser, and Adolf Just. One noticeable legacy of the Lebensreform movement in Germany today is the Reformhaus ("reform house"); retail stores that sell organic food and naturopathic medicine.[2]
History
The Lebensreform movement in Germany was a politically diverse social
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 ).
Lebensreform was a mainly
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 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
Effect in the United States
Some of the less well-known protagonists of the movement in Germany, such as
Today
Many contemporary environmental and other movements (the
Right-wing radicalism
A specific stream based on
The extremists promoting right-wing ideology eventually became popular among Nazi Party officials and their supporters, including
Contemporary books that influenced Lebensreform
- Just, Adolf (1903) [1896]. Return to Nature: Paradise Regained. Translated by Lust, Benedict. New York: Benedict Lust. ISBN 9780787304850. Also available as a PDF from the Soil and Health Library
- ISBN 0-9652085-1-6
- Arnold Ehret: Mucusless Diet Healing System (1922), ISBN 0-87904-004-1 — PDF
- Hermann Hesse: Siddhartha (1922)
See also
- Agrarianism
- Anarcho-naturism
- Anarcho-primitivism
- Back-to-the-land movement
- Bioregionalism
- Commune (intentional community)
- Communitarianism
- Deindustrialization
- Down to the Countryside Movement
- Ecovillage
- Green anarchism
- History of the hippie movement
- Localism
- Neo-Tribalism
- Physiocracy
- Permaculture
- Plain people
- Renewable energy
- Rural flight
- Self-sufficiency
- Simple living
- Subsistence agriculture
- Survivalism
- Sustainability
- Sustainable development
- Sustainable living
- Tolstoyan movement
- Wandervogel movement
- Lebensphilosophie
Footnotes
- ^ Eichberg, Henning. Nacktkultur, Lebensreform, Körperkultur - Neue Forschungsliteratur und Methodenfragen - PDF [Nude culture, life reform, body culture - new research literature and methodological questions] (in German). Gerlev, Denmark.
- doi:10.1002/germ.201090000. — PDF
- ^ ISBN 9780804700153.
- ^ a b c Krell, Maria (2021-04-21). "Geschichte der Freikörperkultur: Die nackte Wahrheit" [History of the Free Body Culture: The Naked Truth] (in German). Heidelberg: Spektrum der Wissenschaft Verlagsgesellschaft mbH. Retrieved 2023-05-08.
- ^ Joachim Raschke: Soziale Bewegungen: ein historisch-systematischer Grundriss. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / New York, 1987 (1985), pp. 44-46, 408-411, 415, 435.
- ^ a b "Hippie Roots & The Perennial Subculture" Archived 2010-09-24 at the Wayback Machine — also contains excerpts from Kennedy (1998)
- ^ Frieze magazine, issue 122 (April 2009): Tune in, Drop out Archived 2010-01-03 at the Wayback Machine
- ISBN 9781317548133." (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.
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
- ISBN 978-1-60598-560-2.
- PMID 10885127.
- ^ Gordon 2006, pp. 138–9
- ^ Gordon 2006, p. 144
- ^ Gordon 2006, p. 146
Bibliography
- Thorsten Carstensen & Marcel Schmid: Die Literatur der Lebensreform. Kulturkritik und Aufbruchstimmung um 1900. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2016, 352 pp., ISBN 978-3-8376-3334-4
- Gordon Kennedy: Children of the Sun: A Pictorial Anthology From Germany To California 1883–1949. Nivaria Press (1998), 192 pp., ISBN 0-9668898-0-0
- Gordon, Mel (2006). Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin. Feral House. ISBN 1-932595-11-2.
- John Williams: Turning to Nature in Germany: Hiking, Nudism, and Conservation, 1900–1940. Stanford University Press (2007), 368 pp., ISBN 0-8047-0015-X
- Martin Green: Mountain of Truth. The Counterculture begins, Ascona, 1900-1920. University Press of New England, Hanover and London, 1986, 287 pp., ISBN 0-87451-365-0
- Friedhelm Kirchfeld & Wade Boyle: Nature Doctors. Pioneers in Naturopathic Medicine. Portland, Oregon,1994, 351 pp., ISBN 0-9623518-5-7