Occulture

by Carl Abrahamsson

  2

  Splendor Solis

  Lebensreform and Sexual Vitalism in Germany

  Originally published in the Polish magazine Trans/Wizje (no. 6, 2015).

  THE INTERESTING AND INFLUENTIAL TRAIL of alternative lifestyles and philosophies that manifested in Germany around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries has been well documented.*2 Nature-loving youth defied their heavy bourgeois programming and channeled/conceptualized a whole movement, including vegetarianism, sun worship, nudism, fasting, and an assortment of creative health cures. Some of these early protagonists moved on to America, specifically to the West Coast, and created a loose egregore that eventually gave birth to the hippies, and more.

  There has always existed a long tradition of alternative thinking, as well as nature worship, in Germany. Why is that? One could of course look to the pagan past of the region as such, where Germanic tribes were defiant in the onslaught of Christian violence and propaganda. The tribal life rooted in nature wasn’t unique for the Germanic sphere of course, but the strength of their resistance to change undoubtedly shows that they weren’t willing to trade their way of life for new, strange, and arbitrary philosophies stemming from Rome and beyond.

  One could easily say that one line of influence is simply tradition that eventually became mythic. The pagan past lived on, primarily in rural regions, both in stories and in the celebrations of the natural, seasonal cycles. Christians tried to revamp these cycles to fit their own ends (Christmas vis-à-vis the winter solstice would be the most obvious example), but they didn’t fully succeed.

  Similar challenges arose again during the Reformation. Where the hegemony of the Catholic Church had been almost total for approximately one thousand years (Sweden was the last country in Europe to be officially “christened” in 1124), Martin Luther suddenly challenged the Roman Catholic Church, and successfully so. This brought a democratization of the Christian faith and also a general sense of independence, as biblical (and other) translations into German could at this time also be distributed thanks to Gutenberg’s magical printing press. Ideas and concepts were now no longer imposed from above by an authority that demanded blind faith and strict obedience. The specifically German interpretation was what mattered.

  The Reformation divided the German sphere into a northeastern Protestant part and a Catholic southwestern part. Although central Europe was divided into smaller principalities, the German language and shared history brought together a form of cultural identity that in itself was strongly authoritarian—meaning you either gave orders or obeyed orders. The conservative rigidity eventually took on symbolic (as well as concrete) shape in the Prussian army and society, which was orderly and hierarchical to the extreme. When Germany was eventually turned into a single empire in 1871, the Prussian model served as an example for all these principalities.

  Within this highly structured and orderly society, the exterior developments of industrialism and progress within the natural sciences brought not only material wealth but also increased pollution and waste, without forgetting increased ill health in the wake of this pollution and stress.

  These parameters of progress constituted the basis for a diametrical movement—a revolt stemming from the children of the new German Reich (1871–1918). That the focus now lay on health, nature, spirituality, and so forth is hardly remarkable. That the contemporary focus on a profitable present and an almost superstitious belief in a science for the future should bring about a romantic longing for distant pagan pasts is also almost a given. A similar phenomenon can be seen in the British Pre-Raphaelite movement (ca. 1848–1870). In Germany, a yearning for an idealized state of mind and way of life became a pro-individualistic safety valve in a culture immersed in collective progress and imperialism.

  Germany has always maintained an extreme psyche, in which societal and cultural developments swing from one extreme to another. Usually, one form that contains rebellion in itself can be quickly integrated within its own opposite. An example of this would be the Wandervögel movement (groups of free-spirited and tradition-affirming hiking boys and girls), which was quickly turned into the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) movement after the National Socialist takeover. The Nazis had thoroughly studied how the Catholic Church had gone about their business throughout the centuries, and tried to integrate similar “adaptations.” Their inclusion of runic symbolism, a longing for past glories (German ones only, of course), solar worship, and so on all stemmed from late-nineteenth-century Lebensreform movement(s). With these attractive elements heavily flaunted in their demonstration of power, plus the integration of the blind faith of Catholicism, the Prussian model of organization, a great demagogue in Hitler, and assorted scapegoating patterns to boot, the Nazi success was swift and efficient.

  The generation born in Germany in the late nineteenth century was fed up with what was being offered. What better way to protest than to just head out into nature in a highly romanticized state of mind? They also soon found out that there had already been precursors in older generations who had explored exciting phenomena like nudism and vegetarianism.

  Gusto Gräser (1879–1958), a young freethinker and nomad from Austria, had been in touch with Lebensreform protagonists Richard Ungewitter (1869–1958) and Karl Wilhem Diefenbach (1851–1913). These meetings contributed to Gräser’s formulating ideas about a colony in nature, where free love and healthy vegetarian diets could rule supreme. The Monte Verita community, established by Henri Oedenkoven and Ida Hofmann in 1900 at Ascona in Switzerland, soon became a melting pot for alternative lifestyles and attracted creative people from all of Europe (Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung, Isadora Duncan, and D. H. Lawrence, to mention but a few). Gusto Gräser became a sort of wanderer-poet in residence and attracted a lot of starry-eyed visitors. Monte Verita became like a magnet for the curious and open-minded, and also a generator for many spin-off ideas.

  The concepts permeating Monte Verita were a condensed mix that were part of the greater movement called Lebensreform: a reformation of how life should be led, away from the big cities and the waste of aggressive capitalism. One could say that the ideas were old (perhaps even mythic) and had been filtered for some time through a general German health consciousness up until this critical era when a young generation of Germans simply started acting out rather than just talking about change. It’s interesting to see how even basic concepts like hiking in nature became politicized in the Germanic sphere. The original Naturmenschen, like those at Ascona, simply wanted to be free and to experiment, roaming the forests and hills. The Nazis immediately wanted to wipe off any kind of romanticism involved and strengthening how young boys’ and girls’ sense of collective belonging (the perfect platform for propaganda). The also-present Socialist stress on hiking focused on the health of the new class of industrial workers. So, no matter which perspective, German nature was the stage of political agendas as well as of necessary reflection and soul searching for the entire nation.

  The artist most frequently associated with the Lebensreform movement, “Fidus” (Hugo Höppener, 1868–1948), painted rituals and idyllic frolicking in the sunshine, with nude men, women, and children. The images were often adorned with runic or pseudo-runic letters, to tie in the fantasies to a glorious past of pastoral pagan bliss. Solar worship is almost always prominent in his images. The idealized iconography of Fidus’s paintings often borders on cartoonish kitsch that brings to mind the later Nazi propaganda of Körperkultur (body culture). But seen in its own temporal context, Fidus’s art comes across as romantically idealistic.

  On a more structured level, interesting things were going on parallel to this in German para-Masonry. The Ordo Templi Orientis, founded and run by Austrian paper industrialist Carl Kellner (1851–1905) and Theodor Reuss (1855–1923), integrated mysteries from the East, including sexual rituals for the highest degrees. The influx came from Indian tantrism and was then developed further as British occultist Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) got involved. The mergin
g of Crowley’s own religious text Liber AL vel Legis (The Book of the Law) with the structure of the OTO created a perfect vehicle for what he defined as a “solar-phallic” initiatory system. Reuss incidentally (or not) established an OTO presence at Monte Verita by, among other things, reviving the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light (a mystical order working with sex magic) and arranging a conference there in 1917, which contained a reading of Crowley’s Gnostic Mass: his dramatic public celebration of solar-phallicism and the creativity of Eros.

  Where most of the individuals involved were regarded as freaks or morally degenerate, some people managed to break the general ice. Pioneers like Louis Kuhne (1835–1901), Benedict Lust (1872–1945), and Adolf Just (1859–1936) wrote books about their health-reform ideas that became bestsellers, with worldwide translations to follow. This in itself contributed to a similar wave of radical health thinking in America. Rudolf Steiner created his Anthroposophic movement out of his own disappointment with Theosophy. He managed to convince thousands of people—including quite a few wealthy ones—that a new and occult way of looking at the world was totally possible to integrate in an otherwise normal lifestyle and outlook. Soon there was an impressive study center outside of Basel (the Goetheanum), newly formed Waldorf schools, teachings on how to farm more consciously and grow organic vegetables (the origins of biodynamic farming), and so on. Steiner was an enthusiastic and creative pioneer who inspired others by synthesizing and rephrasing previously too-radical concepts and making them understandable for common people. Where Monte Verita was an inspiration for curious outcasts and artists, Anthroposophy became more of an integrated movement with a potential for substantial change.

  Not surprisingly, Steiner’s cosmology contained many insights into the relationship between Sun and Earth, between the human spirit and body:

  We must transform ourselves, through the light, into beings who no longer experience their connection with the Earth, but feel connected to the cosmic spaces. Gradually, the contemplation of the stars, the Sun, the Moon, and cosmic space must become as familiar to us as plants growing in the meadow. If we are merely children of the Earth, we look down upon the plants covering the meadow. We enjoy them, but we don’t understand them, for we remain earthly beings weighed down by gravity. As earthly beings bound by gravity, we have learned to stand on the Earth. But if we could transform ourselves, we could connect ourselves with the widths of cosmic space—those meadows of the heavens, seeded with stars.1

  Steiner had been researching Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) at university, and there’s really no way of escaping this master when looking at anything German. Goethe’s anti-Catholicism and pro-sexual attitudes, and not forgetting his reverence for nature as such, made him the ideal symbol for the more intellectually inclined Lebensreform people. Steiner wrote that “Goethe was filled with this yearning when he wrote his essay on the Metamorphosis of Plants. Many of his statements were those a person would make who felt oriented to the Sun rather than the Earth—a person who felt that the Sun pulls the force of the plant’s growth out of the Earth while it is still hidden underground.”2

  A typical phenomenon at the time was also a reformation of the view of the body in art and creative expression. Although there was nude revelry and dancing at Monte Verita, the most striking photographs are those from dance performances arranged by Rudolf von Laban. Photographs of elegant human bodies clothed in free-flowing and strongly colored light robes still make an impression. They remind one of Rudolf Steiner’s system of physical expression: eurythmics. The spiritual and semantic gestures and poses made by colorful robe-clad dancers move the communication from the intellect to the human body as such.

  As we all know, things quickly changed when the National Socialists came to power. The healthy outdoors Sun gave way for the mystical Black Sun; the Wandervögel became Hitlerjugend; fertility cults became baby factories, complete with Mutterkreuz (mother’s cross) medals (after eight German babies had been produced by the same mother); pagan sites of worship became centers for political demagogy; and so forth. Using the Christian-Catholic method of appropriation, Goebbels, Himmler, and company scouted the lay of the land and used what they found applicable to the chaotic German mind frame. The individual was sacrificed for the collective, and yet many healthy elements remained. The problem was that everything needed to be prefixed with German, National Socialist, or Hitler—which of course excluded everyone and everything else.

  One should note too that many of the protagonists that inspired the Monte Verita activities were as steeped in Ariosophy and racial theories as many of their purely political contemporaries. Richard Ungewitter, although radical in his nudism and vegetarianism, was a devout anti-Semite and associated with one of the publications favored by Adolf Hitler early on: Ostara. However, when the Nazis came to power, vegetarianism could be condoned (the most famous vegetarian being of course Hitler himself) but not nudism. Ungewitter remained respected in some ways but was not allowed to be outspoken about his interests. Heinrich Pudor’s nudism was even more adamantly tied in to racial theories, but his criticism of the decadent laxness(!) of the Nazis naturally created a problematic situation for him.

  The clearest example of how Lebensreform permeated even the most conservative environments in Germany is probably the physical educator Hans Surén. As a commander at the army’s School for Physical Exercise, he introduced things like mud baths and nude cross-country running for the cadets. Although politically aligned with the National Socialists, his ideas were simply deemed too extreme, and the cadets eventually had to get dressed in new and swastika-adorned uniforms.3

  In socialist circles too, nudism was integrated in a political scheme, as has been pointed out by scholar John Alexander Williams: “Like social hygiene, sex reform was a normative ideology that called on workers to transform themselves into more rational and disciplined human beings. Together, social hygiene, sex reform, and anticapitalism were all founts of socialist nudist ideology—a set of intertwined influences that distinguished this branch of nudism from the nonsocialist branch.”4 Permeating most of these characters and groups, loose or tight, was the explicit core need to return to nature and embrace the sun, symbolically in temples and concretely in exterior nature. The question then emerges: Why all of this solar and alternative force in the Germanic sphere?

  It is interesting to note how the sun is a feminine noun in German: die Sonne. With the moon being masculine (der Mond), we see a distinct and early difference from the Latin and its later variants (French, Spanish, Italian, etc.), in which the sexual connotations are reversed. In a cultural sphere where the sun is suddenly a feminine, maternal energy and the nocturnal moon a paternal energy, one could draw some speculative conclusions: giving life and survival is associated with fire, light, and heat, whereas paternal protection and strength come from a sphere of darkness and cold, reflected in a pale, poetic moon. Where the Hindu solar symbol, the swastika, gives the visual impression of spinning deasil (with the sun, or clockwise), the National Socialist–Ariosophic variant spins widdershins (against the sun). This was carefully constructed to make an impression in the outer world and perhaps even on magical levels. The uniforms and insignia of the SS, black and with shiny metal death’s-heads, connote a shadow world rather than the otherwise so heavily promoted healthy living of solar “children” playing in nature without apparent order.

  Another interesting psychological trait is that Germans call their country Der Vaterland (the Fatherland), whereas most other nations tend to regard their nation as a mother or as feminine (as in Mother Russia, for instance, or la France).

  Many ancient fertility rites in the old German regions contained fire and solar symbols. Midsummer and other seasonal peaks were celebrated with bonfires, and many objects (as well as living beings) related to sowing or harvesting were concretely sacrificed in holy oak-fueled fire.

  J. G. Frazer recounts several fascinating and sexualized old customs in medieval Germany in his classic st
udy The Golden Bough:

  At nightfall the whole male population, men and boys, mustered on the top of the hill; the women and girls were not allowed to join them, but had to take up their position at a certain spring half-way down the slope. On the summit stood a huge wheel completely encased in some of the straw which had been jointly contributed by the villagers; the rest of the straw was made into torches. From each side of the wheel the axle-tree projected about three feet, thus furnishing handles to the lads who were to guide it in its desecent. The mayor of the neighbouring town of Sierck, who always received a basket of cherries for his services, gave the signal; a lighted torch was applied to the wheel, and as it burst into flame, two young fellows, strong-limbed and swift of foot, seized the handles and began running with it down the slope. A great shout went up. Every man and boy waved a blazing torch in the air, and took care to keep it alight so long as the wheel was trundling down the hill. The great object of the young men who guided the wheel was to plunge it blazing into the water of the Moselle. . . . As it rolled past the women and girls at the spring, they raised cries of joy which were answered by the men on the top of the mountain; and the shouts were echoed by the inhabitants on the opposite bank of the Moselle.5