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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.
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.
In the turbulent decades after World War I, both France and Germany sought to return to an idealized, prewar past. Many people believed they could recapture a sense of order and stability by reinstituting traditional gender roles, which the war had thrown off balance. While French and German women necessarily filled men's roles in factories and other jobs during the war, those who continued to lead active working lives after World War I risked being called "modern women." Far from a compliment, this derogatory label encompassed everything society found threatening about women's new place in public life: smoking, working women who preferred independence and sexual freedom to a traditional role in the home. Society felt threatened by the image of the "modern woman," yet also realized that conceptions of femininity needed to accommodate the cultural changes brought about by the Great War. In Modernizing Tradition, Adam C. Stanley explores how interwar French and German popular culture used commercial images to redefine femininity in a way that granted women some access to modern life without encouraging the assertion of female independence. Examining advertisements, articles, and cartoons, as well as department store publicity materials from the popular press of each nation, Stanley reveals how the media attempted to convince women that--with the help of newly available consumer goods such as washing machines, refrigerators, and vacuum cleaners--being a mother or a housewife could be empowering, even liberating. A life devoted to the home, these images promised, need not be an unmitigated return to old-fashioned tradition but could offer a rewarding lifestyle based on the wonders and benefits of modern technology. Stanley shows that the media carefully limited women's association with modernity to those activities that reinforced women's traditional roles or highlighted their continued dependence on masculine guidance, expertise, and authority. In this cross-national study, Stanley brings into sharp relief issues of gender and consumerism and reveals that, despite the larger political differences between France and Germany, gender ideals in the two countries remained virtually identical between the world wars. That these concepts of gender stayed static over the course of two decades--years when nearly every other aspect of society and culture seemed to be in constant flux--attests to their extraordinary power as a force in French and German society.
This introduction to the history of Weimar Germany challenges readers to rethink preconceived ideas of the republic and throws new light on important areas such as constitutional and social reform, Jewish life, gender and cultural developments.
"In the popular imagination, turn-of-the-century Vienna is a cerebral place, marked by Freud, the discovery of the unconscious, and the advent of high modernist culture. But as historian Alys George argues, this stereotype of Viennese Modernism as essentially "heady" overlooks a rich cultural history of the body in the period. Spanning 1870 to 1930, The Naked Truth is an interdisciplinary tour de force that recasts the visual, literary, and performative cultures of the era and offers an alternative genealogy of this fascinating moment in the history of the West. Starting with the Second Vienna Medical School and its innovations in anatomy and pathology, George traces an emerging culture of bodily knowledge by analyzing a variety of written and visual media, including theater and dance, and by drawing connections between scientific and artistic discourses. Paying equal attention to both low and high culture, bringing gender and class issues back to the fore, and highlighting the role of female thinkers and writers, George's book makes a signal contribution to our understanding of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Viennese and European culture. The Naked Truth shows us that the "inward turn" cannot be understood until it is set against the backdrop of a culture obsessed with exploring and displaying humanity in its embodied, carnal form"--
The first book to explore and analyse the experience of illness in German society under National Socialism
Investigates the role of sex and sexuality in early 20th-century German culture, and how this past continues to shape the present
The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany presents a new interpretation of National Socialism, arguing that art in the Third Reich was not simply an instrument of the regime, but actually became a source of the racist politics upon which its ideology was founded. Through the myth of the "Aryan race," a race pronounced superior because it alone creates culture, Nazism asserted art as the sole raison d'être of a regime defined by Hitler as the "dictatorship of genius." Michaud shows the important link between the religious nature of Nazi art and the political movement, revealing that in Nazi Germany art was considered to be less a witness of history than a force capable of producing future, the actor capable of accelerating the coming of a reality immanent to art itself.
During the era of the French revolution, patriots across Europe tried to introduce a national uniform. This book, the first comparative study of national uniform schemes, discusses case studies from Austria, Bulgaria, England, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Turkey the United States, and Wales.
Rosemarie K. Bank and Michal Kobialka, eds., Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter / Reviewed by Danny Devlin