Pre-World War I German Culture and Counterculture and the Movement Toward War:

About 51 B.C. Julius Caesar noted of the Germans: “The only beings they recognize as gods are things that they can see, and by which they are obviously benefited, such as sun, moon and fire; the other gods they have never even heard of.”  The word “God” was neuter in gender in the Teutonic languages.  They formed “nature religions” or “earth religions.”  (Hippyland)  The people of German Lands (The First Reich or Holy Roman Empire--a continuation of the Roman Empire--at its largest from the 9th century to the 19th century including  Germany, Austria, Slavenia, the Czech Republic, western Poland, Netherlands, eastern France, Switzerland, and northern Italy) always made a virtue of their late submission to Latin civilization and had glorified the natural man and woman with all of their virtues and vices.  German scholars, finding the Christian church to be a construction that had no special claim to truth, began considering non-Christian spirituality, including Asian religions and paganism.  Goethe (1749-1832) first described the growing availability of texts from other nations, including translations of Sanskrit, Islamic, and Serbian epic poetry, as “world literature.”  Though the revolutionary spirit of the German cultures has been central to the development of Europe, before 1870 Germany (not yet a unified nation-state) lagged behind Britain and France economically and politically.  But between Germany’s victory in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and 1900 the population of Germany underwent a radical shift away from its nature-orientation,  moving from being two-thirds rural to two-thirds urban.  The middle class had become “superficial, course, complacent, gluttonous, materialistic, industrialized, technocratic and pathetic.” (Hippyland)  Germany became increasingly imperialistic and militaristic, expanding its colonial powers to East Asia and conflicting with the United Kingdom, Russia, Japan, and the United States (The Second Reich). 

The counterculture was a response to the patriarchalism of Bismarck's Germany and a revival of Germany’s pagan, earth-based traditions.  The veneration of nature led to an affinity for the “blood and soil” (Blut und Boden) ideology adopted by the National Socialists and still at the root of white supremacist groups such as Stormfront.  Naturalism became tied to nationalism: “In every German breast the German forest quivers with its caverns and ravines, crags and boulders, waters and winds, legends and fairy tales, with its songs and its melodies, and a longing for home. . . it is the source of German inwardness, of the German soul, of German freedom.  Therefore protect and care for the German forest for the sake of the elders and the youth, and join the new German “League for the Protection and Consecration of the German Forest” (1923).  The swastika, defined as an Aryan symbol of the primitive gods of sunworship, expressed triumph and action as opposed to the defeat and suffering represented by the cross (Green 241). 

The völkish movement (which also ended in fascism) began in Romantic nationalism with its interest in German folklore, local history, and a back-to-the-land anti-urban populism.  The leftists popularized folk-culture such as folk music, black-letter calligraphy, runes, and medieval myths and legends while other groups (tending to emphasize Aryan bloodlines) celebrated native pagan traditions and customs such as the summer solstice.  Munich (particularly the artists’ quarter of Schwabing) was the German center of the counterculture.  The antithesis to Prussian Berlin, the people of Bavarian Munich were dark-eyed, Italianate, Catholic peasants with a preindustrial culture of festivity--community dancing and celebrations such as Fasching (pre-Lent carnival) and Oktoberfest.  This beer-making city was egalitarian and easy-going, the German art and cultural capital (and a center of male and female prostitution).  Unfortunately, “A good many spiritual threads connect [Hitler] with the bohemian crowd that by and by came to be known by the name of Schwabing.”  From about 1900-1920 Ascona, Switzerland, was also a focal point for European spiritual rebels (particularly those from Munich), a “protest colony set up on the frontier of civilization, where the forces of law and convention are weak and the sensitive and conscientious can live out a conscious defiance of bourgeois-majority rule” (Green 237).  A poor, highly traditional Italian Catholic fishing village on the shores of Lake Maggiore on the border with Italy, a slice of the Mediterranean set down in the Alps, a natural cure sanitarium, “The Mountain of Truth,” was developed there in 1902, drawing European urbanites to sunbathe in the nude, sleep outdoors, hike, swim, and fast. 

"The politics of those whose goal is beyond time are always pacific; it is the idolaters of past and future, of reactionary memory and Utopian dream, who do the persecuting and make the wars."  Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy
 
Some influences on German culture and the counterculture (to 1914):

• Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), the “Sybil of the Rhine,” produced major works of theology and visionary writings, wrote on natural history and medicinal uses of plants, animals, trees, and stones.
• Albertus Magnus (1200-1280) German philosopher, theologian, and scientist; in Frankenstein.
• Meister Eckhart (c1260-c1328) a German Neoplatonic philosopher, mystic, and celebrated preacher regarded as one of the forerunners of Protestantism.
• Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1398-1468) German goldsmith and printer.  His printing technology was a key factor in the European Renaissance.
• Martin Luther (1483-1546) German leader of the Protestant Reformation who posted his 95 theses on the door of the church at Wittenberg which began a rise of emphasis on the individual.
• Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486-1535) a German magician, occult writer, theologian, astrologer and alchemist; the most influential writer of western occultism; appears in various legends about Faustus including Goethe’s and in Frankenstein.
• Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (Paracelsus) (c.1490-1541) Swiss physician; author of works on chemistry, medicine, and alchemy; in Frankenstein.
• Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) German philosopher “worked out the most comprehensive and influential philosophical programme of the modern era”; known for Critique of Pure Reason; analyzed human will and its relation to god, freedom, and immortality.
• Goethe (1749-1832) German poet, dramatist, and novelist who with Herder, Schiller, and others evolved the classical German ideal of culture as a process of personal spiritual development (Sturm und Drung “storm and stress”). 
• Wolfgang Mozart (1756-1791) classical composer born in Salzburg, Austria (part of the Holy Roman Empire); vision of humanity “redeemed through art, forgiven, and reconciled with nature and the absolute.”
• Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) German poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright; with Goethe created the Sturm und Drung movement, a period known as Weimar Classicism.

• European Romanticism (late 1700s-early 1800s) developed from Rousseau in France and Sturm and Drung in Germany.  An attempt to escape the confines of population growth, urban sprawl, and industrialism, it embraced the exotic, unfamiliar, and distant.  Exalting the individual’s emotions, inner forces, values and aspirations above society, it looked to the Middle Ages and direct contact with nature for inspiration.  Later German Romanticism valued the seemingly irrational and supernatural projects of creative genius over the everyday world.
• Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) German composer and pianist; a crucial figure between the Classical and Romantic periods; one of the most acclaimed and influential composers of all time.
• Georg Hegel (1770-1831) German philosopher; one of the creators of German Idealism; with Kant one of the most influential philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment; influenced Marx as well as Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche; conceived the “Master/Slave” dialectic.
• Schopenhauer (1788-1860) German philosopher who stated in The World as Will and Ideas that the will is the key to reason.  He counted Buddhism and a world-denying mysticism as superior to current Christian theology.
• Karl Schlegel (1772-1829) German poet, critic, and scholar; with his brother August derived most of governing ideas as to the characteristics of the Middle Ages as expressed in the Romantic school.
• Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) German poet, translator, editor, novelist, and critic; one of the founding fathers of the Romantic movements; utilized fairy tales, psychology, and the supernatural.
• E. T. A. Hoffman (1776-1822) German Romantic author of fantasy and horror; his stories were tremendously influential in the 19th century; one of the key authors of the Romantic movement.
• Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859) Grimm: German academics who published folk tales and fairy tales from Europe; looking to the past and to folk culture were aspects of Romanticism.
• Carl von Weber (1786-1826) German composer, conductor, pianist, guitarist, and critic; one of the first significant composers of the Romantic school; greatly influenced German Romantic opera.
• 1796 Christopher Wilhelm Hufeland of Weimar published a book on macrobiotic diet and emphasized exercise, fresh air, sunbathing, cleanliness, regular scheduling, temperate diet, stimulating travel, and meditation. (Hippyland)
• Through the Romantics, the German middle-class became enamored of hiking in the 19th century.  Hiking became a way to commune with nature and to acquire a special and specific knowledge of one’s home through the details of its landscape.  (GHDI)  Hiking societies proliferated.  The “Friends of Nature” group used the slogan “Free Mountains, Free World, Free People.” (Hippyland)
• 1815 Ernst Moritz Arndt in On the Care and Conservation of Forests rails against exploitation of woodlands and soil, condemning deforestation and its economic causes with an unfortunate xenophobic nationalism.
• Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) German composer, pianist, organist, and conductor of the early Romantic period.
• Robert Schumann (1810-1856) German composer, aesthete, and influential music critic; one of the most famous and important 19th-century Romantic composers.
• Richard Wagner (1813-1883) German composer, conductor, theatre director, and essayist primarily known for his operas (some with pagan influence); wrote both music and libretto; transformed musical thought through his idea of Gesamtkunstwerk  (“total artwork”), the synthesis of all the poetic, visual, musical, and dramatic arts; a cultural hero for Hitler and the Nazis.

• Johann Jacob Bachofen (1815-1887) a Swiss jurist, a contemporary of Hegel, Marx, Engels, and Nietzsche.  From his interest in Roman law he passed to an examination of ancient symbol and myth and developed his matriarchal theory in Myth, Religion, and Mother Right (1861) which influenced many.  The work suggests that “mother right” must have preceded patriarchy during a period when orgiastic pagan rites were presided over by women.  The authority of motherhood along with female maturity and sexual experience became fundamental to the matriarchal values of the counterculture.
• Karl Marx (1818-83) German economist and social philosopher published the Communist Manifesto 1848.  With the decline of Christianity, Marxism filled a void.
• Tolstoy (1828-1910)  Russian novelist and moral philosopher.  From a rich and noble family, toward the end of his life he rejected the institutions of society, including personal property and the state itself, together with corrupted art, in a kind of saintly anarchism. 

• Nietzsche (1844-1900) German philosopher, philologist, and poet.  Enthusiastic love of life was the ground of his philosophy.  Announcing that “the last Christian died on the cross” and “God is dead,” he advocated returning to the pagan virtues of the Greeks (influenced by Bachofen). With his perception of the cultural flattening of the industrial era and his ideas on the breeding of a new aristocracy, he was one of the major influences on 20th-century thought.  His ideal overman is secure, independent, and highly individualistic; feels deeply but his passions are rationally controlled; is a creator of a “master morality” liberated from all values except those he deems valid.
• 1866 Ernst Haeckel of Jena University first used the term “ecology” (Hippyland)
• 1860’s an ex-Protestant minister published a book on the naturalich lebensweise or “natural lifestyle” then organized some vegetarians into a Free Religious Community claiming Pythagorus as the ancestor of his movement.
• Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach (1851-1913), influenced by naturalich lebensweise, an artist and leading figure in the Lebensreform  movement, preached living in harmony with nature and formed communities and workshops on religion, art, and science.

• Freud (1856-1939) Austrian psychiatrist, founder of psychoanalysis. Lawrence was introduced to the work of Freud by Frieda and her family and friends.  “I never did read Freud,” Lawrence wrote in October 1913, “but I have heard about him since I was in Germany.” 
• Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) Russian-German novelist, essayist, psychoanalyst, and a muse, colleague, and companion for such authors and thinkers as Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud.  With her indifference to moral conventions and insatiable intellectual curiosity, Andreas-Salomé challenged the gender roles of her day.
• Fidus (1868-1948), painter influenced by Diefenbach.  A follower of Theosophy, he incorporated images of nudity, nature, and mysticism.  His Art Nouveau style directly inspired the psychedelic art work of the 1960s.  He became a Nazi party member in 1932 and was rejected by them in 1937.
• Jung (1875-1961) Swiss psychologist early influenced by Nietzsche and Bachofen.  Engaged in a mutual analysis with Otto Gross, calling Gross his “twin brother,” later falsely diagnosing Gross as schizophrenic.  In 1912 Jung founded the school of analytical psychology.
• 1883 Louis Kuhne of Leipsic, Germany, laid the foundation for Naturopathy in a book highly praised by Gandhi. (Hippyland)
• 1884 The first German Theosophical Society was established.  The roots of Theosophy are in the Vedas which “made their way from India to inform the East, then the West, through the derivatively evolving disciplines of Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Platonism, Zen Christian Mysticism, German Transcendentalism, British Romanticism, American Transcendentalism” then Theosophy.  Theosophy is based on the belief in unity of existence, the oneness of matter, energy, and the divine ground.
• 1896 Adolf Just opened his Jungborn retreat in the Hartz Mountains near Isenburg, Germany, to promote the natural life and intimate communion with nature.  He wrote against air and water pollution, meat, vivisection, vaccination, coffee, alcohol, smoking, and the education provided by public schools.  He also influenced Gandhi. (Hippyland)
• 1896 The expression Lebensreform Bewegung (life reform movement) was first used.  It comprised various German social trends of the 19th and early 20th century. (Hippyland)  Critical of industrialization and urbanization, it had the motto “Back to Nature.”  There was no overall central organization.
• 1901 The Wandervogel (“wandering free spirits”) youth hiking group was founded in a suburb of Berlin which soon spread to all parts of Germany with 50,000 members.  Composed mostly of middle-class German children, it was anti-bourgeois and Teutonic Pagan in characters, embracing communion with nature and peasant culture.  They hiked, camped, sang songs, and swam nude.  Establishing permanent camps in the wild, they were one of the precedents to the youth-hostel movement began in 1906 in Altena, Germany. (Hippyland) Unfortunately, the emphasis on youth, nature, community, and German roots was absorbed by the anti-Jewish Nazi movement.
• 1904 German author Richard Ungewitter published a best-selling book advocating nudism and abstention from meat, tobacco, and alcohol. (Hippyland)
• 1907 Prussian Law against the Deformation of Villages and Regions with Exceptional Landscapes.

Some characteristics of the Lebensform movement:
• naturopathic medicine (massage, hydrotherapy, herbal remedies, air and light baths, plant-based diets, Ayurveda, Yoga) defiance of scientific medicine
 • vegetarianism, veganism, raw foods, abstinence from alcohol, caffeine, and tobacco
• clothing and grooming reform--long hair, beards, sandals, loose clothing, natural fabrics
• nudism as a way to improve health and morality
• sexual reform
• liberation for women, children, and animals
• cultural and religious reform--world view that gives weight to the feminine, maternal, and natural traits of existence--feminism, pacifism, paganism, sun worship, mysticism
• settlement movements (intentional communities)
• garden towns
• ecological agriculture--Marx: “All progress in capitalist agriculture is progress in the art, not only of robbing the laborer but of robbing the soil.”
• economic reform

Some other characteristics of the counterculture:
• psychology: in a world that sees the unconventional as crazy, it drew those with various psychological problems ordinary medicine could not cure, both developing and distrusting psychoanalysis and psychiatry
• life philosophy: endorsed social adventure and vagabondage as well as traditional earth-rooted cultures; fear of industrialization, science, and big-city sophistication; support for environment, the little people, and regional traditions which were later absorbed by the Nazis.
• feminism: both oriented to political change and to lifestyle change, marriage as bondage, marriage as refuge from the state
• politics: socialism (in 1912 Germany became socialist and had Europe’s largest socialist party) and anarchism (both peaceful and violent) 
• spirituality: embraced various earth-related traditions such as Dionysus, Magna Mater, Pan, and the Norse  Eddas (myths and hero tales).  The Knights Templar,  Rosicrucianism, and Freemasonry influenced the German occult revival of 1880-1910.  Interest in Eastern spirituality and translations of Eastern spiritual works: the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, Tao, Theosophy.  In 1889 a Theosophical lay-monastery was founded in Ascona.  Their periodical Lotusblüten (Lotus Blossoms) (1892-1900) was the first German publication to use the theosophical swastika on its cover.   
• art forms: Art Nouveau (1893 in Europe), German Expressionism (includes Die Brucke 1905-13 and Der Blaue Reiter 1909-14 ) surrealism, Dada; experimental forms and extremist moods; interest in art of primitives, children, non-European cultures, and the insane; against established culture and genteel taste
• Modern Dance: culture of body movement, dance rites, festivals, and pageantry also co-opted by the Nazis

Some influential people within the counterculture and people influenced by the counterculture:
• Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) German philosopher and social thinker, born in Austria, broke away from Theosophy and founded Anthroposophy, a system of thought which attempted to deduce the nature of the world from the nature of humanity.  Attempted to find a synthesis between science and mysticism.  Influenced by Goethe and Nietzsche.  Worked collaboratively in drama, movement, and architecture.  Established center for creation of “soul art” in dance in Munich 1909.
• Raphael Friedeberg (1863-1940) anarchist expelled from German Social Democratic Party 1906 for his criticism of Marx and defense of anarchism, atheism, internationalism, antimilitarism, and supporting direct action; joined Lebensreform movement and moved to Ascona 1906.
• Max Weber (1864-1920) German sociologist and economist advanced the theory of the connection between Protestantism, especially Calvinism, and the development of capitalism.  Had ties to Munich and Ascona through Frieda’s sister Else von Richthofen.
• Stefan George (1868-1933) Now-forgotten once influential German poet; a bridge between the 19th century and German modernism; openly homosexual but conservative, a part of the Cosmic Circle, his ideas played a part in the rise of proto-facism. 
• Franziska zu Reventlow (1871-1918)  An emancipated German countess, a writer, artist, and translator (also a prostitute and dominatrix), who defined herself as an “hetaera” wanting women to have control of their bodies, to talk about sex, to free oneself from shame and guilt; argued for the abolition of marriage.  The “Queen of Schwabing,” lived in Munich and Ascona.  In her 1915 autobiography she described her circle in Schwabing as “a spiritual movement, a niveau (a standard), a direction, a protest, a new cult, or rather an attempt to use old cults to achieve new religions.”  Lovers with Rilke, Klages, and probably Gross.
• Ludwig Klages (1872-1956 ) A virulent anti-Semite and Aryan elitist, a precursor to German Fascism and Nazism, he was part of the “Cosmic Circle” in Munich influenced by Bachofen--using mythology, anthropology, and cultural history they idealized an older and better civilization based on women’s rights, women’s religion, women-centered families.  They stood for life values, for eroticism, for the value of myth and primitive cultures, for the superiority of instinct and intuition over the values of science, for the primacy of the “female mode of being.” Conversely, he also believed in the erotic (but not homosexual) power of love between men and blood brotherhood.  Published treatise on psychology announcing his (not Freud’s) discovery of the “Id” (1910). Profoundly influence the youth movement and their ecological consciousness, authoring “Man and Earth” (1913). 
• Rainier Maria Rilke (1875-1926) Germany lyric poet preoccupied with the encroaching mechanistic utilitarianism symbolized by the U. S. A. on European culture.
• Thomas Mann (1875-1955)  Influenced by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as well as the composer Wagner, wrote about the conflict between the artist life and that of the bourgeoisie in his novel Tonio Kruger (1903), partially set in Munich.
• Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) German novelist influenced by Nietzsche, the counterculture figure Gusto Gräser in Ascona, his visit to India, the Bhagavad Gita.
• Otto Gross (1877-1920) Radical colleague of Freud and Jung (who later ostracized him).  Influenced by Nietzsche and Bachofen, he fought “the Goliath of German patriarchy”; promoted sexual liberation and the sacredness of sex; saw mental illness as an expression of a legitimate protest against a repressive society; and saw psychoanalysis as a path to inner freedom in preparation for the revolution.  Through his wife, he became lovers with Frieda’s sister Else then Frieda, naming Frieda “Woman of the Future.” because of her free-spirited passion for life.
• Erich Mühsam (1878-1934) German-Jewish anarchist.
• Martin Buber (1878-1965) Austrian-born Jewish philosopher of “I-Thou” theory.
• Isadora Duncan (1878-1927) American expressionist dancer began her first dance school in Grunewald, Germany, 1904.
• Gusto Gräser (1879-1958) Poet, Naturmensch, Taoist, rebel, his naive but self-conscious simplicity was a model for a life free of compulsion and responsibility.
• Rudolf von Laban (1879-1958)  One of the founders of modern dance, formulated Ausdruckstanz, dance movement independent of music and storytelling celebrating body wisdom, at Ascona, 1911.
• Frieda von Richthofen (1879-1956) Born in Metz, France, a German-occupied garrison town.  Her father, Baron Friedrich von Richthofen, had been injured as an officer in the Prussian army and was a garrison administrative officer.  Married in 1899 to Ernest Weekley, British philologist and professor of modern languages at University College Nottingham, she soon had a son and two daughters.  She was lovers with her daughter’s godfather, Will Dowdson.  In 1907 she was lovers with Otto Gross in Munich and by 1910 with Ernest Frick.  In 1912 she met Lawrence and traveled to Germany with him then to Italy having brief sexual encounters with two other men before marrying Lawrence in England in 1914.  Lawrence says of the character in Mr. Noon based on her, she “took her sex as a religion.” 
• Robert Musil (1880-1942) An Austrian of partly Czech decent, one of the great figures in German literature and the modern novel; known for The Man Without Qualities (begun early 1920s).
• Ernest Frick (1881-1956) Pro-violence Swiss anarchist and artist, self-educated from a working-class background, lived in Munich and Ascona where he was a disciple of Otto Gross and lovers with  Frieda Gross and Frieda Weekley.
• Franz Kafka (1883-1924) Czech writer, living in Prague, writing in German of man’s anguish, isolation, perplexity, and frustration in the mechanized, bureaucratized modern world.
• Max Brod (1884-1968) Czech-Jewish Expressionist author, composer, and journalist most known for his friendship with Kafka.
• David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930)  Born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, to Arthur John Lawrence, a barely literate miner, and Lydia (née Beardsall), a former schoolmistress, he received a teaching certificate from University College Nottingham in 1908, resigning from teaching in 1912 and dedicating himself to writing.  He visited Munich and Ascona between 1912-14 and met Otto Gross.  One of the most influential novelists of the 20th century, his collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialization.  In them, he confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, human sexuality, and instinct.  Much of Lawrence’s outlook is reminiscent of Jung and Nietzsche but, although he was acquainted with the works of both, his philosophy developed independently.  For Lawrence capitalism destroyed the soul and the mystery of life, as did democracy and equality.  He devoted most of his life to find a new-yet-old religion that will return the mystery to life and reconnect humanity to the cosmos.  His religion was animistic and pantheistic.  In 1912, the year he met Frieda Weekley, he wrote, “What the blood feels, and believes, and says, is always true.”  In Mr. Noon the character based on Lawrence “believed people must do what they want to do.” 
• Mary Wigman (1886-1973) German dancer, choreographer, and teacher--one of the founders of Modern Dance who expressed herself through nature, the great god Pan, and the demonic.
• Franz Jung (1888-1963) German writer associated with the Dada movement in Berlin.
• Franz Werfel (1890-1945) Austrian-Bohemian novelist, playwright, and poet.
• 1912-17 Mabel Dodge’s Wednesday evening salons in Greenwich Village.

Some sources:
German History in Documents and Images.  http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org
“Hippy Roots & The Perennial Subculture.”  Hippyland. http://www.hippy.com/article-243html
“Lebensreform.”  Intentional Communities.  http://wiki.ic.org/wiki/Lebensreform
International Otto Gross Society website: www.ottogross.org/
Mountain of Truth: The Counterculture Begins, Ascona, 1900-1920.  Martin Green.
A Genius for Living: The Life of Frieda Lawrence.  Janet Byrne.
Mr. Noon by D. H. Lawrence (the annotated Cambridge edition).