Volkish Life Reform
originally posted here, by Peter Crawford
In 1867 the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel coined the term ‘ecology’ and began to establish it as a scientific discipline dedicated to studying the interactions between organism and environment.
Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (February 16, 1834 – August 9, 1919), was a German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, including anthropogeny, ecology, phylum, phylogeny, stem cell, and the kingdom Protista. Haeckel promoted and popularized Charles Darwin’s work in Germany and developed the controversial recapitulation theory (“ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny“) claiming that an individual organism’s biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarizes its species’ evolutionary development, or phylogeny.
The published artwork of Haeckel includes over 100 detailed, multi-colour illustrations of animals and sea creatures (Kunstformen der Natur, “Art Forms of Nature”). As a philosopher, Ernst Haeckel wrote ‘Die Welträtsel’ (1895–1899, in English, The Riddle of the Universe, 1901), the genesis for the term “world riddle” (Welträtsel); and ‘Freedom in Science and Teaching’ to support teaching evolution.
Haeckel developed a philosophy he called ‘monism.’ The ‘German Monist League’ he founded combined scientifically based ecological holism with völkisch social views. Haeckel believed in nordic racial superiority, strenuously opposed race mixing and enthusiastically supported racial eugenics. His nationalism became more fervent with the onset of World War I, and he fulminated in anti-semitic tones against the post-war Jewish/Soviet Republic in Bavaria. In this way Haeckel contributed to that special variety of German thought which served as the seed bed for National Socialism.
The pioneer of scientific ecology, along with his disciples Willibald Hentschel, Wilhelm Bölsche and Bruno Wille, profoundly shaped the thinking of subsequent generations of environmentalists by embedding concern for the natural world in a tightly woven web of Völkisch social themes. Thus, for the Monists, perhaps the most pernicious feature of European bourgeois civilization was the inflated importance which it attached to the idea of man in general, to his existence and to his talents.
The biologist Raoul Francé, founding member of the ‘Monist League’, elaborated so-called ‘Lebensgesetze’, ‘laws of life’ through which the natural order determines the social order. He opposed racial mixing, for example, as “unnatural.” The chief vehicle for carrying this ideological constellation to prominence was the German youth.
The world’s first self-conscious “youth” movement sprang up in response to, and as a rejection of, urban life and the cold, impersonal mechanics of modernity. It’s members wanted to reunite themselves with nature. They went vegetarian, sometimes favoured nudism, hiked and even camped out in the wilderness, creating alternative societies to the mainstream. It was a romantic, spiritual movement. Many saw themselves as pagans, worshipping the sun, conceived of as an ancient Teutonic deity. The young men sang songs and played guitars around campfires in a movement that was closely involved with Lebensreform (“life reform”).
Lebensreform (“life reform”) was a social movement in late 19th-century and early 20th-century Germany, Austria 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), Gusto Graeser, and Adolf Just. Hugo Höppener (1868-1948), who used the pseudonym Fidus was one of the most significant artists of the movement. Depicting nude figures among the natural landscape, not sexualized, but in harmony with nature, and working in cooperation with each other, Fidus gained wide recognition.
Several of his works show a male-female couple embracing, not out of lust, but in a kind of Tantric reaching for Deity. His most famous work (of which he made several versions), ‘Gebet zum Licht’ (Prayer to the Light), shows a man standing on a rock mound, with his arms outstretched to the sky. In 1932, Fidus joined the NSDAP.. Fidus was probably impressed by the National Socialist’s environmentalism and romantic portrayals of the German people.
The Lebensreform movement in Germany originally was a politically diverse movement. There were hundreds of groups across Germany dedicated to some of all of the concepts associated with Lebensreform: ecology and organic farming, vegetarianism, naturalism (Nacktkultur), and abstinence from alcohol and tobacco. Dozens of magazines, books, and pamphlets were published on these topics. Some groups were made of socialists, some were apolitical, and some were right-wing and nationalist in outlook.
Other groups which emerged from völkisch Romanticism gradually became part of National Socialist ideology by the 1930s, known as ‘Blut und Boden’ (blood and soil). As early as 1907, Richard Ungewitter published a pamphlet called ‘Nudity and Culture’ (which sold 100,000 copies), arguing that the practices he recommended would be: “the means by which the German race would regenerate itself and ultimately prevail over its neighbours and the diabolical Jews, who were intent on injecting putrefying agents into the nation’s blood and soil“.