The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History, 1890-1930 - Hardcover

Hau, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226319741 ISBN 13: 9780226319742

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2003

Synopsis

From the 1890s to the 1930s, a growing number of Germans began to scrutinize and discipline their bodies in a utopian search for perfect health and beauty. Some became vegetarians, nudists, or bodybuilders, while others turned to alternative medicine or eugenics. In The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany, Michael Hau demonstrates why so many men and women were drawn to these life reform movements and examines their tremendous impact on German society and medicine.

Hau argues that the obsession with personal health and fitness was often rooted in anxieties over professional and economic success, as well as fears that modern industrialized civilization was causing Germany and its people to degenerate. He also examines how different social groups gave different meanings to the same hygienic practices and aesthetic ideals. What results is a penetrating look at class formation in pre-Nazi Germany that will interest historians of Europe and medicine and scholars of culture and gender.

About this title

About the Author:

Michael Hau is a lecturer in modern European history at Monash University in Australia.

Review:

“The presentation is . . . buttressed by an extensive apparatus of annotation and bibliography that assists in making this book a first-rate addition to the literature on the social and cultural, as well as medical, history of modern Germany.” (Michael Bississ History)

“Hau’s is an intelligent and persuasive book. . . . Its combination of nuanced social historical analysis with cultural historical methods and approaches represents exemplary historical scholarship; his fascinating material and his synthesis of aesthetic and medical approaches to the body adds much needed complexity to the history of life reform, hygiene, and responses to modernity in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany.” (H-Net review H-Net review)

“This informed, nuanced, and richly detailed study of the life reform movement and alternative medicine in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany makes important contributions to broader debates about modernity, class, gender, and race in German society and culture.”

(German History)

“Much of Hau’s narrative will resonate with a generation today driven by the cult of fitness as exhibited in postmodern gyms, TV ads, and health advice books. Are we to look to the late nineteenth century in order to grasp the underlying meaning of this diosposition?”  

(Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, Journal of Social History)

“Hau’s approach is sophisticated and original; it offers important insights; and like most really exciting books, this one raises more questions than it answers. It will be appreciated as a particularly important and fruitful beginning by students of the history of medicine, the body, eugenics and racial thought, “life reform,” and popular culture.” (Edward Ross Dickinson Central European History)

“Hau applies a sophisticated interpretive lens to a particularly illuminating region of German social and cultural history.”

(Kevin Repp Journal of Modern History)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0226319741
• ISBN 13: 9780226319742
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272