Published in 2003 by The University of Chicago Press.
Weimar nude culture. Leichtland 7, no.13 (1930).Introduction
page 01
Thee second half of the nineteenth century witnessed an increase in the living standards and the life expectancy of most Germans. At the same time, important breakthroughs in areas such as aseptic surgery and bacteriology endowed scientific medicine with symbols of diagnostic and therapeutic competence. Despite the growing prestige of the medical and life sciences, however, health and illness became important concerns for a growing number of Germans who scrutinized and disciplined their bodies in a utopian search for perfect health and beauty. During the Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic, many Germans organized themselves into voluntary associations concerned with natural therapy and lifestyle reform. Members of the "life reform movement" (Lebensreformbewegung), as it was termed, attacked the regular medical profession for its powerlessness in the face of illness and embarked on an unceasing quest for health on their own: they experimented with vegetarianism, therapeutic baths, and psychotherapies; they explored the therapeutic value of nudity and sunlight.
Supporters of the life reform movement were worried not only about the health of individuals but about the healing process (Gesundung) of society as a whole. They believed that modern civilization, urbanization, and industrialization had alienated human beings from their "natural" living conditions, leading them down a path of progressive degeneration that could only be reversed by living in accordance with man's and woman's nature (naturgemäße Lebensweise).
page 03
The goal of this study is to examine the various subjective social experiences that lay behind people's attempts to regain their health by reforming their lives. What was behind the constant self-scrutiny of individuals who tried to find the perfect lifestyle and therapy to help them overcome their perceived ill health? I argue that subjective experience of illness was mediated or constituted by the social experience of individuals. This is evident, for example, in the frequent complaints about nervousness among life reform supporters who were afraid that they could not keep up with their own career expectations. Indeed, as Germans increasingly medicalized their professional and personal problems, anxieties about success were often at the root of concerns about health and fitness.
[...]
Germans increasingly defined their personal problems in medical terms, described them in medical language, and understood them in a medical framework. At the same time, men and women turned to health advice literature for guidance concerning the management of their marriages and intimate relationships; they attempted to regain a sense of agency and assert control over their lives by means of bodily discipline and other health measures; and men in particular hoped that healthy living and natural therapies would increase their physical fitness and mental performance levels. The relation between a modern, industrializing society and the life reform movement was therefore not primarily one of modernization and protest against modernization, as some authors argue. Rather, the contemporary explosion in people's attention to their health was an expression of the contradictions and tensions characteristic of the period of classical modernity.
page 04
The concept of hygienic culture as I use it here includes more than the therapeutic practices and dietetic prescriptions intended to keep people clean and disease-free. It also refers to the social meanings that people attributed to such hygienic practices, regimes, and notions of health and beauty. My interpretation of popular hygienic culture is indebted to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, who has proposed a useful theoretical framework for this kind of analysis. According to Bakhtin, people fashion new meanings and values from a shared social discourse based on their various social experiences. By focusing on hygienic practices and values related to norms of physical beauty, I try to show how different social groups attributed different meanings to the same practices and ideals. Men and women from both the Bildungsbürgertum and the lower middle class shared similar ideals of physical beauty, but the social uses and values attributed to these norms varied according to their social experiences. In theory, physical beauty can have as many different social meanings as there are social experiences.
page 05
Chapter 1 shows life reform to be an integral part of turn-of-the-century bürgerlicher Kultur. In accordance with recent scholarship on the German Bürgertum, the term bürgerlich (roughly translatable as "bourgeois") does not denote social class in a Marxist sense. Instead, the term refers to value orientations and cultural norms shared by different sectors of the middle classes as well as sectors of the respectable working class. Central to these shared orientations and norms was a certain goal-directedness combined with the assumption that individuals could rationally manage their own futures, a belief that found expression, for example, in people's career expectations. I argue that the experience of personal failure—or, perhaps more important, simply the fear of it—underpinned the contemporary obsession with health. With its promise to increase people's Leistungsfähigkeit (in the dual sense of ability to perform and achieve), life reform gave its supporters a sense of agency in their own future.
page 08
During the entire period discussed in this book, Germans invested the human body with multiple, and at times contradictory, meanings based on their social experiences. During the Kaiserreich and during the Weimar Republic, hygienic practices and aesthetic ideals for the body were important in the formation of class, gender, and racial identities. The meanings of physical beauty were always publicly contested and rarely stable. After 1933, this would change. To be sure, leading Nazis shared the aesthetic ideals of earlier propagators of popular hygiene, but these ideals took on a much more sinister significance under the conditions of the terrorist regime that the Nazis established. During the Nazi era physical beauty represented a racial Volksgemeinschaft from which the disabled as well as religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities such as Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals were purged. The Volksgemeinschaft that was forged by the Nazis, first by means of legal, social, and cultural stigmatization of minorities and finally by mass murder, was therefore quite different from the utopian communitarian visions of many life reformers before 1933.
Chapter 01: Life Reform as Bürgerliche Kultur
page 15
Since life reformers as well as orthodox physicians claimed that beauty was an expression of perfect health, people had to face the additional pressures of living up to the lofty aesthetic ideals of an increasingly body-conscious society. Indeed, one of the ironies of the health-consciousness of the period was that it perpetuated the feelings of personal inadequacy that gave rise to it.
page 17
Whether a person sees in illness an opportunity for agency or whether she sees her fate as inevitable, for instance, will make a difference in her subjective experience of the illness. It can be argued that one of the reasons why the life reform movement was so attractive was that it allowed for agency-no matter whether the experienced states of illness were life-threatening diseases or simply feelings of personal inadequacy. People could recapture a sense of autonomy by accepting the life reform premise that they would become healthy sooner or later if they followed nature's path and adopted an improved lifestyle.
Chapter 02: Popular Hygiene Culture, Class, and Aesthetic Norms
page 33
Turn-of-the-century popular hygienic literature presented an aesthetisized version of the ideal human body, as regular physicians and life reformers alike espoused the bodily norms of Greek and Roman antiquity. Regarding beauty as the expression of healthy and normal organic functioning and ugliness as a sign of disease, they offered gender-specific representations of the ideal: statues of Hercules and Apollo embodied the masculine ideals of beauty and strength, and statues of Venus gave form to the feminine ideal. These forms were believed to come closest to the formal laws determining absolute beauty that the bodies of really healthy human beings were supposed to express.
page 46
It was typical of many life reformers to assert bildungsbürgerliche aesthetic norms while rejecting intellectualism and luxuries and to prefer an ascetic health regimen that emphasized physical development instead. This combination held a special appeal for the lower middle-class members of life reform organizations, people who had neither cultivation in the form of higher formal education (Bildung) nor significant amounts of property (Besitz), the social markers of the Gebildeten. No wonder they tried to achieve true cultivation by transforming their bodies in order to approach the aesthetic ideals that had first been formulated in Greek antiquity. As [Richard] Ungewitter put it: "the culture of the nude [body culture] . .. is the necessary precondition for the true culture of all of mankind"
Chapter 8: Weimar Leisure Culture: Freikörperkultur and the Quest for Authenticity and Volksgemeinschaft
page 176
The most successful life reform authors, such as Hans Surén, appealed to the anti-academic and anti-intellectual sentiment of a mass audience. Many physical culturists hoped that Freikörperkultur (nudism; literally, "free physical culture") as a leisure activity allowed people to transcend the "artificial" distinctions of status and wealth by creating a "people's community" of equals. Stripped of their clothes, people would present their authentic selves devoid of deceptive self-presentations. This chapter first situates physical culture and nudism in the cultural context of the Weimer period and then looks at nudists' hopes for the creation of a utopian people's community (Volksgemeinschaft) that might transcend the social classes.
page 177
During the Weimar Republic, life reformers continued to assert that exercise and nude culture improved peoples' overall health and that life reform would save both individuals and the nation from the degeneracy brought on by the unhygienic practices and lifestyles of modern civilization. Körperkultur's goal, the holistic development of body and mind, distinguished it from other contemporary forms of exercise, such as sports. In contrast to traditional gymnastics as well as the gymnastics advocated by life reformers, the goal of the various sports disciplines was to increase the performance level of individuals in specialized, competitive contests of physical exercise. Sports fragmented the human body by exercising only the skills that were necessary for high performance in a specific discipline. Physical culturists criticized this tendency; their goal was the harmonious and healthy development of the body-one that was beautiful because its physical faculties were evenly developed. (Although traditional gymnastics came closer to this holistic ideal, it was still criticized by Weimar physical culturists for its military-like drill and unnatural formalism.)
page 178
In contrast to nude culture during the Wilhelmine era, when Richard Ungewitter and others early on combined rabid racism with ardent agitation for the eugenic necessity of nude culture, the nudism of the Weimar years increasingly stressed the hedonistic side of the practice. This was expressed in the titles of most nude culture journals: Joy (Die Freude), Laughing Life (Lachendes Leben) and Land of Light (Lichtland) were at no loss to celebrate the pure pleasure that could be experienced in the nature parks owned by nudist organizations. This hedonism can be understood as a rejection of old conventions and mores that seemed meaningless after the senseless slaughter of the war. As the historian Modris Eksteins has pointed out, hedonism and narcissism reached epidemic proportions in the war-weary European nations. The more meaningless the war appeared, the more people insisted that the "meaning [of life] lay in life itself, in the act of living, in the vitality of the moment.”
page 193/195/196
[...] Freikörperkultur supported the free mingling of the sexes and defended the joint bathing of men and women in the socially controlled setting of the nature parks established by nude culture associations. In this respect, nudism reflected conflicts in Weimar society about the appropriate relations between the sexes. Weimar nudists were in favor of abandoning the tradition of separate homo social spheres of social intercourse in favor of a mingling of the sexes. Pre-war Herrenpartien (all-male gatherings) for the purpose of drinking and amusement were condemned as "petit bourgeois" (spießig) and contrasted with men and women jointly spending wholesome quality time together in the open. Conservative attacks on mixed-sex but nonnudist family beaches were also energetically repudiated. The free mingling of the sexes, the nudist Therese Mülhouse-Vogeler claimed, was a precondition for the development of "true companionship based on trust" between future marriage partners because along with their clothes men and women would also rid themselves of deceptive masks that hid their true character. so In addition, some propagators of nude culture refused to condemn sexual relationships between unmarried men and women because sexuality was a necessity for personal fulfillment.
The free mingling of the sexes was, however, not the only significant attraction of nude culture. Historians now debate whether the social and moral milieus that formed the backbone of the political parties in the imperial era, the working-class subculture and the Catholic milieu, found their high point during the Weimar Republic or whether these milieus were only finally destroyed when the Nazi regime created the illusion of an egalitarian people's community (Volksgemeinschaft). A frequently recurring theme in the journals of the Freikörperkultur movement was the claim that nudism helped people transcendthe boundaries between social classes. Nudity, its defenders claimed, woulderase titles and other forms of social distinctions. Nudists could therefore doaway with social prejudices and select their spouses based on the quality of theircharacter and not on their social position. Nudity was seen as a certificate of authenticity. Freikörperkultur would mean that people were stripped not only of clothes but of social conventions.
Nudism held out the promise of the creation of a community in which, one author argued, class hatred would be suspended, because both manual and white-collar workers would realize that material possessions were unimportant. The experience of nude bathing on Sundays would make humans free, and they would achieve true equality. They would not be reminded anymore of their own poverty and would forget the sorrows of everyday life. Envy based on social distinctions would vanish, and the German people would be welded into a "brotherly whole." Hypocritical democracy would be replaced with a noble sense of community that was in stark contrast to the class hatred that was fostered by irresponsible elements agitating among the working classes. At the time, many sports and leisure associations were still organized along confessional and politicallines. Many socialist workers' and bürgerliche sports associations did not yet participate in common competitions. Therefore the creation of a Volksgemeinschaft held considerable promise for people who viewed the cultural and social separatism of the Social Democratic and Communist labor movement with suspicion.
"Whether one is young or old, man or woman, manual worker or thinker" was unimportant. According to many nudists, political convictions and religious beliefs did not matter as long as one was committed to the aesthetic and moral ideals of nudism. They hoped to erase status barriers in order to create a community that transcended the traditional "sociability" (Geselligkeit) of people of the same background. Nudists experienced the disintegration of the milieus that had structured leisure activities and given meaning to class identities during the Kaiserreich as a liberation. They celebrated nudism as the path to a social harmony that was to be realized as a leisure-time "people's community." The foundation of this community was a depoliticized illusion of social equality.
Conclusion
page 199
This work has been concerned with the various ways in which Germans invested aesthetic ideals of the human body with multiple and often contradictory meanings. Although regular physicians and life reformers, educated and lower-middle-class people, and feminists and antifeminists often used the same neoclassical icons in order to represent ideals of human health and beauty, they conveyed different messages through the various ways in which they propagated physical culture and a healthy lifestyle.
page 201/202
During the Nazi era older meanings of the beautiful body were still invested with the intentions they had acquired in the previous years. Such meanings are rarely unambiguous, as the historian Thomas Alkemeyer has stressed in his book on the Nazi Olympics. Nevertheless, with the rise of the Nazi movement to power, the meanings of physical beauty changed significantly It was not merely that the Nazis dissolved or purged some life reform and nude culture associations because they considered them politically and morally suspect. Life reform associations were forced into line and nazified (gleichgeschaltet). Marxists, socialists, and especially Jews were expelled.
Images of the beautiful body were no longer openly employed in symbolic contests about class and gender identities, as they had been during the Kaiserreich and the Weimar period. They did not have the same degree of semantic polyvalency that they had acquired in the social conflicts of these earlier, more pluralistic, periods. Physical beauty now became the emblem of a utopian racial community purged of stigmatized undesirables. Nazi race discourse did not racialize perceptions of social class. After 1933, Nazi propaganda in schoolbooks de-emphasized what the Nordic racists had claimed was the heterogeneous racial makeup of the non-Jewish German population. Emphasizing such differences would have conflicted with their propagation of a seemingly classless people's community from which "racially undesirables," in particular Jews, were excluded by means of social, legal, and cultural stigmatization?
The heroic representation of physical beauty in Nazi culture did not only serve the purpose of intimidation. The representation of the beautiful—be it in Nazi sculpture, illustrated magazines, postcards, or Leni Riefenstahl's film Olympia—promised Germans who were willing or able to become "worthy" members of the people's community the imaginary fulfillment of the desire of physical, spiritual, and national perfection. At the same time, however, the idealization of beauty and health set the stage for the devaluation and stigmatization of people who were sick, handicapped, or non-Aryan. The Nazis considered worthless the lives of humans who, in their view, did not have the racial potential of healthy Aryans and therefore could not aspire to their lofty ideals of beauty. The annihilation of the sick and ugly in the name of health and beauty was thus an important driving force of Nazism.9 Nowhere is the contrast between the pathological and the aesthetic more obvious than in the Nazi art exhibitions of 1937. In Munich the "pathological" art of the avant-garde shown in the exhibition "Degenerate Art" was presented in contrast to the "healthy" art shown in the "Great German Art" exhibition. Drawing on the techniques developed by Schultze-Naumburg, the former presented modern art as the product of the sick and twisted minds of "racial inferiors," whereas the latter presented works of timeless beauty as the expression of the racial essence of the German Volk.
page 202
The propagation of a "New German Healing Science" (Neue Deutsche Heilkunde) was in part an attempt to bring the natural therapy movement into line and reorient German medicine toward preventive medicine. This shift entailed an exclusive emphasis on the health of the "people's body" instead of on the health of individuals. Germans were expected to contribute to the health of the nation by being fit and avoiding poisons such as alcohol and tobacco that would weaken the race.
