THE CULT OF HEALTH AND BEAUTY IN GERMANY

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-31976-6
Writer: Michael Hau
Τitle: The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany
Subtitle: A Social History, 1890-1930
Language: English
Edition: First Edition
Place of Publication: Chicago and London
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Year of Publication: 2003
Format: 153x229mm (trimmed)
Pages: x+286 printed on alkaline paper; Notes, 207; Bibliography, 249; Index, 273
Illustrations: 48 black and white pictures and sketches
Binding: Paperback in duotone wrappers
Weight: 402gr.

BOOK DESCRIPTION

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 book at class formation in pre-Nazi Germany that will interest historians of Europe and medicine and scholars of culture and gender.

RECONSTRUCTING THE BODY

ISBN-13: 978-019-954645-6
Writer: Ana Cordon-Coyne
Title: Reconstructing the Body
Subtitle: Classicism, Modernism, and the First World War
Place of Publication: Oxford
Pub;isher: Oxford University Press
Year of Pulication: 2009
Format: 236x154mm
Pages: 330
Binding: Hardbound in colour dust jacket

BOOK DESCRIPTION

The First World War mangled faces, blew away limbs, and ruined nerves. Ten million dead, twenty million severe casualties, and eight million people with permanent disabilities - modern war inflicted pain and suffering with unsparing, mechanical efficiency. However, such horror was not the entire story. People also rebuilt their lives, their communities, and their bodies. From the ashes of war rose beauty, eroticism, and the promise of utopia. Ana Carden-Coyne investigates the cultures of resilience and the institutions of reconstruction in Britain, Australia, and the United States. Immersed in efforts to heal the consequences of violence and triumph over adversity, reconstruction inspired politicians, professionals, and individuals to transform themselves and their societies. Bodies were not to remain locked away as tortured memories. Instead, they became the subjects of outspoken debate, the objects of rehabilitation, and commodities of desire in global industries. Governments, physicians, beauty and body therapists, monument designers and visual artists looked to classicism and modernism as the tools for rebuilding civilization and its citizens. What better response to loss of life, limb, and mind than a body reconstructed?

WILHELMINISM AND ITS LEGACIES

ISBN-13: 978-1-57181-687-0
Editors: Geoff Eley and James Retallack
Τitle: Wilhelminism and its Legacies
Subtitle: German Modernities, Imperialism, and the Meanings of Reform, 1890-1930
Foreword: Volker R. Berghahn
Language: English
Edition: First Paperback Edition
Place of Publication: New York & Oxford
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Year of Publication: 2004
Format: 153x229mm (trimmed)
Pages:ix+269; Notes on Contributors, 253; List of Publications by Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, 257; Index, 261
Illustrations: 1 black and white picture; 6 figures and 4 tables
Front Cover Photograph: Arthur Kampf, 1. August 1914 in Berlin (1914)
Binding: Paperback in duotone printed wrappers
Weight: 382gr.
Entry No.: 2010036
Date of Entry: 23^rd December 2010

BOOK DESCRIPTION

What was distinctive –and distinctively “modern” –about German society and politics in the age of Kaiser Wilhelm II? In addressing this question, these essays assemble cutting-edge research by fourteen international scholars. Based on evidence of an explicit and self-confidently bourgeois formation in German public culture, the contributors suggest new ways of interpreting its reformist potential and advance alternative readings of German political history before 1914. While proposing a more measured understanding of Wilhelmine Germany’s extraordinarily dynamic society, they also grapple with the ambivalent, cross-cutting nature of German modernities and reassess their impact on long-term developments running through the Wilhelmine age.

DIE SCHÖNHEIT X. 12 (1913))

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