10 Facts About Lebensreform

Lebensreform is the German generic term for various social reform movements, that started since the mid-19th century and originated especially in the German Empire and later in Switzerland.

Whether the reform movements of the Lebensreform should be classified as modern or as anti-modern and reactionary is controversial.

Lebensreform movement in Germany was a politically diverse social reform movement.

Representatives of the Lebensreform propagated a natural way of life with ecology and organic farming, a vegetarian diet without alcoholic beverages and tobacco smoking, German dress reform and naturopathy.

Spiritually, the Lebensreform turned to new religious and spiritual views, including theosophy, Mazdaznan and yoga.

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Architectural form of the Lebensreform first came from settlement experiments such as Monte Verita, later in the garden city movement such as the Hellerau settlement and many others, the best-known representative of which was the reform architect Heinrich Tessenow, and the Bauhaus.

Lebensreform was a mainly bourgeois-dominated movement in which many women participated.

Part of the Lebensreform movement included the freikorperkultur, the physical culture, gymnastics and expressionist dance.

One outstanding prophet of the Lebensreform movement was the painter Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, a pacifist and Tolstoyan anarchist who lived with his students in a hermitage in Hollriegelskreuth near Munich and later founded the community Himmelhof near Vienna.

Richard Ungewitter and Heinrich Pudor were well-known advocates of a strain of Lebensreform that emphasized nude culture and was explicitly Volkisch in tradition, which eventually became the Freikorperkultur movement.