The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany
A Social History, 1890-1930
- Contents
- Review Quotes

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Life Reform as Bürgerliche Kultur
2 Popular Hygienic Culture, Class, and Aesthetic Norms
3 Gender and Aesthetic Norms in Popular Hygienic Culture
4 Racial Aesthetics
5 Models of Holistic Constitutionalism in Regular Medicine and Natural Therapy
6 The Constitutional Convergence: Life Reform, the "Crisis of Medicine," and Weimar Hygiene Exhibitions
7 Constitutional Typologies: Weimar Racial Science and Medicine
8 Weimar Leisure Culture: Freikörperkultur and the Quest for Authenticity and Volksgemeinschaft
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
“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.”
“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?”
“Hau applies a sophisticated interpretive lens to a particularly illuminating region of German social and cultural history.”
Biological Sciences: Anatomy
Sociology: Social Change, Social Movements, Political Sociology
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