Lebensreform
Lebensreform ("life reform") was a social movement in late 19th-century and early 20th-century Germany and Switzerland that propagated a back-to-nature lifestyle, emphasizing among others health food/raw food/organic food, nudism, sexual liberation, alternative medicine, and religious reform and at the same time abstention from alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and vaccines.[1][2]
Important Lebensreform proponents were Sebastian Kneipp, Louis Kuhne, Rudolf Steiner, Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, Fidus (Hugo Höppener), and Adolf Just. Some practitioners of Lebensreform such as Bill Pester, Benedict Lust, and Arnold Ehret emigrated to California in the late 19th (Lust) or first half of the 20th century and directly influenced the later hippie movement.[1][2] One group, called the "Nature Boys", settled in the California desert. eden ahbez, a member of this group, wrote a hit song called Nature Boy (recorded in 1947 by Nat King Cole), popularizing the homegrown back-to-nature movement to 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.[1]
One noticeable legacy of Lebensreform in Germany today are the Reformhaus ("reform house") retail stores that sell naturopathic medicine and organic food.[3]
Contemporary books that influenced Lebensreform
- Adolf Just: Return to Nature: Paradise Regained (1896), ISBN 0787304859 — PDF
- Richard Ungewitter: Nakedness (1904), ISBN 0965208516
- Arnold Ehret: Mucusless Diet Healing System (1922), ISBN 0879040041 — PDF
- Hermann Hesse: Siddhartha (1922)
See also
References
- ^ a b c http://hippy.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=243 — also contains excerpts from Kennedy (1998)
- ^ a b Frieze magazine, issue 122 (April 2009): Tune in, Drop out
- ^ Attention: This template ({{cite doi}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by doi:10.1002/germ.201090000, please use {{cite journal}} (if it was published in a bona fide academic journal, otherwise {{cite report}} with
|doi=10.1002/germ.201090000instead. — PDF
- Gordon Kennedy: Children of the Sun: A Pictorial Anthology From Germany To California 1883–1949. Nivaria Press (1998), 192 pp., ISBN 0966889800
- John Williams: Turning to Nature in Germany: Hiking, Nudism, and Conservation, 1900–1940. Stanford University Press (2007), 368 pp., ISBN 080470015X
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