The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany

by Hau, Michael

• ISBN13: 9780226319766
• ISBN10: 0226319768
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-04-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

From the 1890s to the 1930s, a growing number of Germans began to scrutinize and discipline their bodies in a utopian search for perfect health and beauty. Some became vegetarians, nudists, or bodybuilders, while others turned to alternative medicine or eugenics. In The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany, Michael Hau demonstrates why so many men and women were drawn to these life reform movements and examines their tremendous impact on German society and medicine. Hau argues that the obsession with personal health and fitness was often rooted in anxieties over professional and economic success, as well as fears that modern industrialized civilization was causing Germany and its people to degenerate. He also examines how different social groups gave different meanings to the same hygienic practices and aesthetic ideals. What results is a penetrating look at class formation in pre-Nazi Germany that will interest historians of Europe and medicine and scholars of culture and gender.

Author Biography

Michael Hau is a lecturer in modern European history at Monash University in Australia.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	vii
Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(8)
Life Reform as Burgerliche Kultur	9	(23)
Popular Hygienic Culture, Class, and Aesthetic Norms	32	(23)
Gender and Aesthetic Norms in Popular Hygienic Culture	55	(27)
Racial Aesthetics	82	(19)
Models of Holistic Constitutionalism in Regular Medicine and Natural Therapy	101	(24)
The Constitutional Convergence: Life Reform, the ``Crisis of Medicine,'' and Weimar Hygiene Exhibitions	125	(25)
Constitutional Typologies: Weimar Racial Science and Medicine	150	(26)
Weimar Leisure Culture: Freikorperkultur and the Quest for Authenticity and Volksgemeinschaft	176	(23)
Conclusion	199	(8)
Notes	207	(42)
Bibliography	249	(24)
Index	273