Giving nature a higher purpose: Back-to-nature movements in Weimar Germany, 1918-1933.

Abstract

This study analyzes the complex and changing historical meanings of returning to nature during the Weimar years through a set of case studies of back-to-nature organizations. The most popular of these organized endeavors were the life-reform (Lebensreform) movement, devoted to vegetarianism, homeopathy, and nudism; the conservationist movement; and an array of independent and adult-sponsored youth movements determined to improve the minds and bodies of adolescents through organized hiking. Naturist rhetoric and practice addressed issues of general contemporary concern: the ambiguous relations of class, gender, and generation; the burdens of the lost war; and the uncertain fate of the German people. Each organization claimed to have embarked on a more natural path toward a brighter future. Two common tendencies can be seen in the processes by which the naturists gave nature its higher purpose. First, each organization established official rules and practices intended to guide their constituents in the most correct way of returning to nature. Second, the concept of nature itself underwent change due to the multivalence of contemporary nature visions. Naturist rhetoric was shaped and contested around three contradictory incarnations of nature: (1) an awestruck, neo-Romantic concept of nature as a realm of individuality, emotion, and mystery; (2) human nature, usually perceived as dangerously irrational and sexual; and (3) nature as a source of immutable laws. As the Weimar years wore on, this latter rationalistic vision became increasingly dominant in back-to-nature organizations. By the early 1930s, nature had been rhetorically honed into a more orderly and cultured nature--a clean nature. In basing their worldviews and plans of improvement on natural law, the naturists transformed nature into the utopian model for a more stable Germany. The study sheds light on cultural responses to the trends that constituted the modernity specific to the Weimar years, ranging from the rise of new mass cultural forms, to changing relations between the sexes, to the social, economic, and political legacies of war and revolution. Moreover, the study of nature concepts brings us closer to an understanding of the cultural continuities between Weimar and the Third Reich. For the Nazis appropriated the dominant rationalistic concept of nature as clean, ultimately using it to legitimate their murderous purification of the national community.