The Germans

 Post-war misery

1918 - 1923

TURBULANCE & UNREST. The German ‘revolutionary’ period = Nov 1918 until founding of Weimar republic August 1919. This period of liberal democracy lasted until 1930, when President Hindenburg introduced emergency powers leading to Hitler becoming Chancellor in 1933.

The Spartacists Revolt, Jan 1919

The right wing Kapp Putsch, March 1920

Red Rising in the Ruhr March 1920

1923: France & Belgium occupy the Ruhr area hoping to force Germany to make reparations for WWI.

Jan 1923. Hyperinflation.

Right-wing Freikorps unit 1919

The Freikorps march on Berlin - March 13th, 1920.

Members of the Ruhr Red Army. Ruhr, Dortmund, 1920

Troops of the right-wing Kapp-putschists on Potsdamer Platz, Berlin

Freikorps (right wing paramilitaries arrest suspected Communist, 1919

1923: Weimar Reichswehr (state army) arrest Communist - Saxony

A German revolutionary faces a Freikorps firing squad after the failed uprising

Left wing insurgents, Berlin 1919

The Leftist “Volksmarine” Division which terrorized Berlin in late 1918 and early 1919

Leftist soldiers during Christmas fights in the Pfeilersaal (Berlin City Palace)

Revolutionary spartacists marching in(to) the Berlin-Castle (November 1918)

Freikorps unit arrests Spartacist

Anita Berber, ‘high priestess of depravity: actress, night club performer, dancer, drug addict – dead at 29

Sebastian Droste, poet actor and dancer of 1920s gay Berlin subculture.

Berber on stage

Evil does not know itself there. That town [Berlin] is doomed more than Sodom ever was.  —Christopher Isherwood

Gottfried Brockmann, 1924

Otto Dix & Martha Dix 1928

The Cologne based ‘progressive artists group’

Heinrich Hoerle

Franz W. Seiwert. Linocut. 1922

‘Proletarian Intellectuals’

Cologne based Group of Progressive Artists: Else Schuler, Tristan Rèmy, Franz Seiwert, Gerd Arntz, ca. 1925

Painter Marta Hegemann 1925

Cologne artists & bohemians at Karnival ball late ’20s

URBAN COUNTERCULTURE WEIMAR

Johann Scheff, rent boy. 1932 (note checked shirt)

1928: 50,000 homeless teenagers, 14,000 aged 14 – 18 living rough in Berlin alone. Their groups = called the Ring’ or Wild-Frei (Wild & Free) Gangs

Edelweiss Pirates

17 year-old August Müller (centre) and other teenage friends of the Edelweiss Pirates. Cologne May 1945.

By the early 30s, urban gangs defied compulsory Hitler youth membership & were known as the ‘Edelweiss Pirates’ due to their badges. Had names like: Shambeko Band (Düsseldorf); Navajos (Cologne). Often industrial workers,Wore an exaggerated Stenzen (‘wide boy’) shape & loud checked shirts, battered hats with edelweiss badges or coloured pins, & proto-goth skull-&-crossbones rings..

Gang members like the Hamburg ‘Swings’ grew their hair & in an act of cultural resistance wore Anglo-American clothes: plaid jackets (a popular British trend at the time). Bright scarves, diplomat’s hat & umbrellas. Listened to Lindy Hop music (forbidden). Formed in the wealthier part of Hamburg in 1938 

Café Heinz (Hamburg) hot spot for swing youth.

The HJ set up its own police squads to supervise young people. These Streifendienst patrols were made up of Hitler Youth members scarcely older than those they were meant to be policing.

12 Edelweis pirates being executed in Cologne 1944 after assassinating local Gestapo chief.

16 year old Barton Schink, Edelweiss Pirate & leader of the Navajos who was executed with 12 others in Cologne 1944

Sophie Scholl of the White Rose group, executed 1943 for treason at 22.

1803: Friedrich Sertuerner of Germany first synthesizes morphine.

1853: Dr. Alexander Wood of Edinburgh invents hypodermic syringe (allows intravenous injection).

1859: Cocaine isolated by German Albert Niemann. Used for depression and impotence by 1880s.

1870s, Doctors inject women with morphine to dull period pains & to manage the ‘obstinate hysteric’. Upper class women choose narcotics over alcohol (considered a lower class vice) to relieve emotional stress as narcotics were more socially acceptable. By the 1890s, 2/3 of addicts in the USA were women.

1874: Heroin (diacetylmorphine) 1st synthesized by English researcher, C.Wright but developed commercially in 1895 by The Bayer Company of Germany,

1896: Mescaline was isolated from peyote. Synthesized 1914. Merck = major supplier of mescaline sulphate during Weimar period and it = used as a stimulant & intoxicant in nightclubs throughout France & Germany at the time.

1890s: Widespread fashion for ether inhalation for recreational purposes.

1912: MDMA (‘Ecstasy’) synthesized by German ‘Merck’ chemist Anton Koellisch.

 

In 1938, German company Temmler Werke began working on Pervitin, a new drug that was structurally different then previous “pep” pills on the market. Pervitin was the early version of what we know today as crystal meth. Referred to as “pilot’s salt” or “tank chocolate” by members of the Wehrmacht (German armed forces),

‘Koks Emil’ Berlin Coke dealer, 1929Concealing cocaine wrap in a garter – Berlin 1920s.

People were hospitalized after watching the film & one woman, after seeing it, woke up one night, went out on the street in her nightshirt and screamed ‘Now I am going to die! Now I am going to die!’

1919: ‘Nerven’ film

Dir. Robert Reinert. [1919]

‘tormented souls living their lives in a tormented country’

The Wandervogel (‘wandering birds’)

A popular movement of German youth groups from 1896. The ethos was to reject restrictions of society & get back to nature & freedom. The groups split into more independent organisations, all still called Wandervogel and related in spirit.

Gustav Nagel

1901

Bad Arendsee, Altmark, Germany where Nagel had his commune

Gustav in 1931 (above)

Revival Sermon

Friedrich Muck-Lamberty - the “Messiah of Thüringen”. & the Neue Schar (‘New Mob’)

1920

“Collapse of the old/youth is appalled”

Friedrich Muck-Lamberty & the Neue Schar (‘New Mob’)

Eisenach (Karlsplatz) 1929

The new ‘flock/mob’ enteringGoslar

Two keywords of this revival were “spirit”and “swing”. A Schar flyer said“The revolution of the soul”“Fellow, let it flap and wave,Don‘t pretend to be sedated!It should be a little bit stormyIf something pleasant shall happen.Do what horrifies the people!Don‘t be so iced!Glow is spirit!“

Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach (1851 - 1913)

Diefenbach @ Starnberger lake nr. Munich (1886)Satire on Life reformers Diefenbach [left] &

Wurzensepp

& promoted life in harmony with nature rejection of monogamy, a vegetarian diet & rejecting orthodox religion

1885: Founded the ‘Humanitas’ workshop for Religion, Art and Science

1872-1879 born into extreme poverty, he studied fine art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.

1881 Diefenbach’s first contact with the ‚German Band of Free Thinkers‘ (vegetarian free thinkers) & correspondence with Eduard Baltzer und Arnold Rikli (early proponents of Nature cure, consisting of hydrotherapy, air and light baths, a vegetarian diet, and herbal remedies).

1895 Diefenbach left Vienna with his family and travelled in the Alps

Diefenbach with members of the group at the Himmelhof. Far left = Gusto Graser, middle (lying in front of Diefenbach) the animal rights activist & pacifist Magnus Schwantje

He created the commune ‘Himmelhof’, in Ober Sankt Veit near Vienna (1897–1899) which was one of the models for the 1900 reform settlement Monte Verità in Ascona.

Diefenbach was mocked as the ‘Kohlrabi Apostle’ & reservations grew at his autocratic style and public promotion of nudity. He was driven underground and eventually into exile in Capri where he lived with a group of women followers. He had 2 broken marriages behind him, his children had rejected him and he was ridiculed.

Deathbed, Dec 15 1913

Diefenbach artwork

The Nature Preacher Johannes Guttzeit

A Prussian army officer who resigned due to ill health in 1879. In 1898, a group of young people under his leadership joined Diefenbach’s ‘Himmelhof’ community & took over from Diefenbach. Guttzeit’s group had ideals that were semi pagan. In 1884 he founded the ‘Pythagorus group’, later re-named the ‘Brotherhood group’. He consequently wandered across Italy, eventually settling in Zurich (1888) as a preacher. He was against the Establishment in all its forms (army, church, government). He also published until 1903 a newspaper called ‘The new Human’.

‘FIDUS’ (Hugo Höppener)1868 - 1948) ~ “the artist of the illuminable”.

He met Diefenbach whilst studying Art in Munich. Diefenbach had been condemned to eight days imprisonment for public nudity and Höppener served this sentence for the older master, earning the name Fidus - the “faithful” – from Diefenbach.

Fidus [right] with his mentor Karl Diefenbach

Paintings by Fidus

Satana (detail)

‚The First Human Beings‘ poster 1908

‘Lichtgebet’ (Salute to the sun) by Fidus. 1913. The iconic image of the Lebensreform movement

….as seen in 1919 film ‘Nerves’

Fidus designs for  Pantheistic Temples

The Nature Apostle‚Gusto‘ (Gustav) Arthur Gräser 1879 - 1958

With Diefenbach (sitting right). He joined the Himmelhof commune in 1897

Ca. 1900 – the year he went to Ascona

Gusto Graeser (1900) whilst on his trek through Italy before settling and founding the Ascona commune with his brother. Many thought he was Jesus resurrected.

Hermann Hesse (who worked both the personality and teachings of his guru through several of his books)& Gerhart Hauptmann regarded Graser as the personification of the ‘New Man’ as extolled by Nietzsche and Walt Whitman

Gusto travelling from Munich to Berlin

1911

Gusto was regarded as a prophet to the Wandervogel and his poetry appeared in their publications. He was ejected from Saxony for photographing his 2 year old daughter naked which led to a huge surge in support for him. This is when he set off for Berlin in his pony and carriage

Gusto in Munich around 1915  Gusto in ruins of Munich 1945

He was imprisoned during this period for conscientious objection & sentenced to death by firing squad, instead sent to an asylum for the insane. He left & went back to Ascona which he had left in 1909  

‘I am in search of roots, the roots of plants, roots to eat, the roots of words, the roots of civilisations and mountains…..’

Gusto

In 1900 Graeser & his brother Karl help found the utopia community at Monte Verità . They built this house which was the heart of the community & from which it grew. Its aim was the establishment of a society promoting a ‘reform of life’, based on freedom, simplicity, new religious & spiritual values, They practised heliotherapy, naturism and advocated a symbiosis with nature. Their dwellings were to be liberated houses of light and air and their diet natural foods. They rejected authoritarianism, capitalism and sexual taboos.

Gusto would sit in this house and the one next door talking to Herman Hesse who reproduced many of the discussions in his books ‚Demian’ and  ‚Zarathustras Wiederkehr’ .

Karl Graeser

Gusto

The Monte Verita: Ascona commune1900 ~ 1920

Ur hippies at Monte Verità , Ascona on the shore of Lake Maggiore (Switzerland) .

Ascona commune 1909. D.H Lawrence & Frieda came there, Carl Jung, Max Weber, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka and Isadora Duncan. Psychoanalyst Otto Gross, protégé of Freud whose father, a criminologist, had him locked up for lewdness and drugs. This inspired Kafka to write ‘The Trial.

The ‘light/air’ huts at Ascona

Ascona

How the Ascona commune developed contemporary

dance: Mary Wigman

Wigman dancing at Ascona

‘Witch Dance’ (1914)Mary Wigman, who expressed herself through nature, the great god Pan and the demonic. She was a friend of the Graeser brothers.

German choreographer Rudolf Laban & his dancers @ the Monte Verità commune at Ascona, 1914. Isadora Duncan & her dancer brother also visited. Gusto Graeser’s ecstatic ‘Expressionist Dance’ was interpreted into a more professional, structured form by Laban who later performed it publically as the ‘German Dance’ or ‘Expression Dance’.

Laban the 'magician' of 'salvation-through-dance' @ the Monte Verità commune at Ascona. Laban ‘led his chain of naked maenads celebrating sunrise by the lake, in the meadows’. 1914

the ‘father of Naturopathy’ (1866 – 1922) arrived in Los Angeles in 1914 after running the sanatorium @ Monte Verità.

Influential German Lebensreform emigres in the U.S: ‘Professor Arnold Ehret

Author of ‘Rational Fasting (1914) & "Mucus-less Diet"(1922) which were literary standbys within hippie circles in San Francisco and Los Angeles in the 1960s. President Reagan’s daughters & Steve Jobs were amongst his many later adherents. It is said that Kafka based his short story the Hunger Artist on him.

1946

Influential German Lebensreform emigres in the U.S: Maximillian SikingerMax was one of the feral children living rough after WW1. Explored natural healing & nutrition in Germany & Came to USA in 1935. Spread the Lebensreform philosophy to the California Nature Boys in the 1940s & mentored ‘original hippy’ Robert Bootzin.

Pioneered women working out with weights including singer Linda Ronstadt in the 70s. 1st fitness advocate at Muscle Beach (Santa Monica) & trained Mr Universe contestants. Regular fixture at 60s festivals & a lifestyle guru to 1960s West Coast hippies.

1926

German Lebensreform emigres in the U.S: Dr. Benedict Lust "The Father Of Naturopathy”

Lust opened the first health food store in the USA in 1896 called the ‘Kneipp Store’ and brought the Kneipp‘water cure’ to America.Founded the American School of Naturopathy in New York City, the first naturopathic medical school in the world.

1911

Lust Health Store, Lexington Ave, NY.

Adolf Just 1859-1956

The Simpler Life is the demand of the hour. The confusions of a complex civilization, the disintegration of the old-fashioned home, the distractions of international discord, the perplexity of the individual mind wavering between the evolution of Science and the revolution of Theology—all these disturbing elements have settled moodily into a sense of universal unrest, that pervades the mingled atmosphere of nations - Be at peace with yourself’ [Just,1896]

Just’s clay bath therapy

William Pester California, 1917

Guru to the U.S. Nature Boys: Wilhelm ‘Bill’ Pester from Saxony. He left Germany (to avoid military service) in 1906 and settled in California.

Bill in 1917

“There was a boy / A very strange enchanted boy / They say he wandered very far, very far / Over land and sea / A little shy / And sad of eye / but very wise was he”. (Nature Boy by eden ahbez)

THE NATURE BOYS 1948The boys grew their hair and beards, were vegetarians, practiced Eastern mysticism & slept outside; roamed nearly naked and foraged for food. Kerouac mentions the Nature Boys in ‘On the road’

Back row: Gypsy Boots, Bob Wallace, Emile Zimmerman. Front row: Fred Bushnoff, eden ahbez, Buddy Rose)

1948

Wrote the No.1 song ‘Nature Boy’ for Nat King Cole about Bill Pester ‘The original Hippie’. The song later became the  soundtrack for the 1948 pacifist film (dir.Joseph Losey) The Boy with Green Hair

(aka. George Mcgrew

"I am a being of Heaven and Earth, of thunder and lightning, of rain and wind, of the galaxies, of the suns and the stars and the void through which they travel. The essence of nature, eternal, divine that all men seek to know to hear, known as the great illusion time, and the all-prevailing atmosphere". eden ahbez

Ahbez and Sinatra …& Nat King Cole

Nature Boy was first sung by Cole but covered by by Frank Sinatra, Dinah Shore, George Benson and dozen of others & was in the charts for 15 weeks.

Eden with Brian Wilson (Beach Boys). He sat in on the ‘Pet Sounds’ recording sessions in 1966

“I look crazy but I’m not. And the funny thing is that other people don’t look crazy but they are.” – eden abhez   

He travelled in sandals, wore shoulder-length hair, beard, & white robes. Camping out below the first L in the Hollywood sign above L.A., he studied Oriental mysticism. He slept outdoors with his family & ate vegetables, fruits & nuts claiming live on three dollars per week.

‘That’s my reason for living – to help the youth of this planet’. 85 year old ahbez shortly before his death (1908-1995)

Nature Boy Robert Bootzin (Gypsy Boots) mentoree of Max Sikinger

Late 1940s

Gypsy Boots early 1950s on Groucho Marx’s TV show ‘Bet your Life’

Bootzin: the ‘clown prince of health at 90 years old…

THE END