| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Michael Hau. The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History 1890–1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2003. Pp. x, 286. $22.00.
Michael Hau's study examines the proponents of the so-called "life reform movement" from Wilhelmine through Weimar Germany. The movement was composed of individuals and groups convinced that modern civilization was alienating people from their true natures and that the downward spiral toward human degeneration could only be stopped by embracing a comprehensive and hygienic change in lifestyle. While many of those involved were sympathetic to alternative medicine, the movement was by no means the preserve of lay people and free thinkers. Mainstream physicians and academic researchers, too, played an active part in spreading the ideas of life reform at this time.	1
As Hau explains, despite a great deal of heterogeneity, life reformers tended to share a vision of the human being that linked health with certain aesthetic norms. Individuals, they thought, had particular kinds of constitutions that were mimetically expressed through the body and body parts. In short, body morphology was believed to reveal everything from psychiatric disorders to intellectual aptitudes to moral pedigrees. But life reform was about more than self-evaluation. It was also about life management, and the movement tended toward holism, seeing physical beauty as "the organic expression of the harmonious and purposeful interaction of the body, spirit, and mind" (p. 101).	. . .

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