Lebensreform
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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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.
Important Lebensreform proponents were Sebastian Kneipp, Louis Kuhne, Rudolf Steiner, Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, Fidus (Hugo Höppener), Gustav Gräser, 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. One group, called the "Nature Boys", settled in the California desert. One member of this group, eden ahbez, 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.
One noticeable legacy of Lebensreform in Germany today are the Reformhaus ("reform house") retail stores that sell naturopathic medicine and organic food.
Contemporary books that influenced Lebensreform
- Richard Ungewitter: Nakedness (1904), Template:ISBN
- Arnold Ehret: Mucusless Diet Healing System (1922), Template:ISBN — PDF
- Hermann Hesse: Siddhartha (1922)
See also
