The Lebensreform movement in Germany was a politically diverse movement. There were hundreds of groups across Germany dedicated to some or all of the concepts associated with Lebensreform: ecology and organic farming, vegetarianism, naturism, and abstinence from alcohol and tobacco. Dozens of magazines, books, and pamphlets were published on these topics. Some groups were made of socialists, some were apolitical, and some were rightwing and nationalist in outlook. Joachim Raschke compared the Lebensreform to other movements and found some specifics:
The workers' movement was a mass movement interested in power politics and only secondarily in sociocultural issues.
After 1968, Germany saw the growth of the so called New Social Movements such as the students' movement, the peace movement and the movement of the modern environmentalists. Those movements lacked a unified ideology, had no tight organization and were very diverse. Their members were highly educated, which was a result of the expansion of the German educational system in the 1960s. Typical for these movements was a certain enmity towards "leaders" and a preference for the direct action, although these movements often changed they way how they expressed themselves.
The Lebensreform movements were much smaller groups which consisted often of academics. They had experienced an estrangement in modern society and tried to realign mankind and nature. They usually organized themselves in a traditional way, with lectures, clubs and magazines.
One outstanding prophet of Lebensreform was the painter Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, a pacifist and tolstoyan anarchist who founded the community Himmelhof near Vienna. Among his disciples were three painters: Hugo Höppener, František Kupka and Gusto Graeser. In 1900 Graeser became the cofounder and inspiring pioneer of the community Monte Verità near Ascona, Switzerland. Monte Verità attracted many artists from all of Europe, during World War I conscientious objectors from Germany and France. Gusto Graeser, thinker and poet, greatly influenced the German Youth Movement and such writers as Hermann Hesse and Gerhart Hauptmann. He was the model for the master figures in the books of Hermann Hesse. Richard Ungewitter and Heinrich Pudor were also well known advocates of a strain of Lebensreform that emphasized nudism and was explicitly anti-Semitic, which eventually became Freikörperkultur movement. The Freikörperkultur movement eventually broadened and came to include socialists with no strains of racism like Adolf Koch, who for example organized factory workers to go on nudist hikes.
Today
Many contemporary environmental and other movements, have their roots in the Lebensreform movement's emphasis on the goodness of nature, the harms to society, people, and to nature caused by industrialization, the importance of the whole person, body and mind, and the goodness of "the old ways".
A specific stream based on völkisch Romanticism gradually became part of Nazi ideology by the 1930s, known as blood and soil. As early as 1907, Richard Ungewitter published a pamphlet called Nudity and Culture, arguing that the practices he recommended would be "the means by which the German race would regenerate itself and ultimately prevail over its neighbours and the diabolical Jews, who were intent on injecting putrefying agents into the nation's blood and soil". The extremists promoting rightwing ideology eventually became popular among Nazi Party officials and their supporters, including Heinrich Himmler and Rudolph Höss, who belonged to the right-wing farming organization the Artaman League. When other groups were being banned or disbanded due to political conflict during the 1930s, the extreme nationalist ideology became connected with Naziism. The German Life Reform League broke apart into political factions during this time. The Nationalist physician Artur Fedor Fuchs began the League for Free Body Culture, giving public lectures on the healing powers of the sun in the "Nordic sky", which "alone strengthened and healed the warrior nation". Ancient forest living, and habits presumed to have been followed by the ancient tribes of Germany, were beneficial to regenerating the Aryan people, according to Fuchs' philosophy. Hans Sùren, a prominent former military officer, published Man and the Sun, which sold 240,000 copies; by 1941 it was reissued in 68 editions. Sùren promoted the Aryan master race concept of physically strong, militarized men who would be the "salvation" of the German people. Recently, Germany has been experiencing a growth of rightwing extremist organizations with ecological connections, including organic farming. Since the 1990s, a number of rightwing farmers have set up organic farming operations in Mecklenburg. The politically far-right environmental-interest magazine Umwelt und Aktiv is believed to receive support from the far-right nationalist National Democratic Party of Germany. German publications Der Spiegel and Süddeutsche Zeitung have also covered the link between far-right extremists and certain organic farming projects in Germany, and it has received government and academic attention as well. Speculation is that such rightwing projects may be attempts to revive the Nazi-era Artaman League, to soften the image of the NPD, or to pull supporters away from the leftwing Alliance '90/The Greens of Germany, which is Europe's most successful environmentalist political party.
Contemporary books that influenced ''Lebensreform''
