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Book Reviews
| Michael Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany. A Social History, 1890–1930 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003). ISBN 0-2226-31976-8. 286 pp.
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| Michael Hau, an historian of modern German history at Monash University, has produced a stimulating and intriguing study of the 'utopian search for perfect health and beauty' during the period of classical modernity stretching from the late Kaiserreich through the Weimar Republic. Faced with the pressures and anxieties generated by modern industrial society, Germans 'increasingly defined their personal problems in medical terms, described them in medical language, and understood them in a medical framework.' One dimension of this medicalisation of problems and anxieties was the emergence of a socially heterogeneous and highly disparate 'life reform movement' which argued that modern society needed to adopt a new way of living if it were to avoid the dangers of decay and degeneration. Hau's study challenges the conventional view that has emphasized the struggle between alternative life reformers and regular medicine by insisting that both life reformers and regular physicians shared similar expectations and values and 'participated in a common discourse'. He convincingly exposes the fluidity of the boundaries between these two competing forces in the medical mass market of Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany and demonstrates that both groups could also embrace similar positions, such as antifeminism. A fascinating examination of hygiene exhibitions in the 1920s provides a cardinal example of the appropriation of life reform discourse by 'scientific' medicine. One of Hau's chief findings, then, is that the accepted view of the strictly antagonistic relationship between life reformers and the orthodox medical establishment needs to be jettisoned in favour of a more complex view of rivalry mixed with co-optation and exchange. |
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Hau's book is divided into eight chapters, with the first five focusing on themes and developments prior to World War I and the last three devoted to the postwar Weimar Republic. He uses hygienic advice literature and the publications of life reformers and regular physicians in order to explore a wide range of themes: the aesthetic norms for the human body (derived from the classical Greek ideal), the use of notions of ideal physical beauty in order to stabilise traditional gender relations, the social functions of racial discourse, holistic models of 'constitutionalism,' and the emergence of physical culture and nudism. Some key individual life reformers—Friedrich Bilz, Klara Ebert, Reinhold Gerling, Louis Kuhne, and Richard Ungewitter—come in for extended treatment and make appearances in several of the chapters in connection with a variety of themes. |
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One of Hau's main contentions is that class position is the key to understanding the use of aesthetic ideals. The concepts of health and beauty were invested with multiple and often contradictory meanings and at times served as vehicles for the expression of class resentments. In his second chapter, for instance, he persuasively argues that while life reformers in general shared a common belief in the value of the beautiful body, those from the educated middle class saw physical education as a complement to cultivation of the mind (Bildung), while less educated lower-middle-class life reformers regarded the cultivated body (Körperbildung) as a substitute mark of distinction which compensated for their lack of academic training. |
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Overall the book is distinguished by Hau's impressive ability to deploy the analytical concepts of class, gender, and race in order to provide sophisticated readings of his source material. He understands the importance of probing individual cases and categories in detail and placing the material carefully in its immediate context. The result is a richly nuanced study that presents a complex and persuasive account of the life reformers and their place in German society. Hau invokes Mikhail Bakhtin and Pierre Bourdieu as his theoretical and methodological guides, but eschews any lengthy theoretical excursus. This is a highly confident and self-assured effort that demonstrates an admirable control of a large amount of material, both textual and visual. |
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One final strength of the book deserves to be mentioned. Hau's approach is, in a sense, resolutely 'historicist.' He resists the temptation to position his analysis as simply a prehistory to Nazism, insisting that 'it is necessary to understand periods before Nazism on their own terms in order to better understand what followed.' When dealing with the case of Hans Surén, a prominent advocate of nudism and physical culture in the Weimar years who after 1933 accommodated himself with the Hitler regime, he correctly points to the dangers of (mis)reading Surén's texts backwards from the later Nazi period. Hau's careful, contextualised reading of his sources helps him steer clear of such dangers. The result is a book that makes a significant contribution both to our understanding of the life reform movement itself and to the broader discontents of Germany in the period of classical modernity. |
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| STEVEN R. WELCH
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| UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE |
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