Pair in an Expressionist Dance by Gerhard Riebicke, 1930.Riebicke chronicled the Lebensreform moveme

Pair in an Expressionist Dance by Gerhard Riebicke, 1930.

Riebicke chronicled the Lebensreform movement in Wiemar Germany. Created as a reaction against industrialization, proponents of Lebensreform (life reform) advocated a return to a more natural existence, encompassing vegetarianism, organic farming and nudism while refraining from substances such as alcohol and tobacco.

Those ideals may seem to belong to the left side of the political spectrum, aligned with the Green Party, for example. After Hitler was ceded power in 1933, many of the architects of Lebensreform instead embraced Nazism, finding echoes of their ideas in the rhetoric connecting blood and land and in policies to improve the purity and fitness of the German race. Lebensreform can still be found in the ideals of far-right groups in contemporary Europe and the United States, for example in the rejection of science and medicine which conflict with traditional beliefs.

Paradoxically, Lebensreform also inspired the hippies and free love advocates of the 1960s, some of whom “returned to the earth” to establish communes and break away from prevailing sexual norms.

Perhaps if the politics could be put aside to focus on the part about being naked in nature, Lebensreform might inform people about what they have in common instead of what makes them different.