The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History, 1890-1930 (review)

That health and beauty are supposedly linked was already a commonplace in ancient Greece, but rarely has this association been as powerful in its reach and central in its implications for structuring the study of human beings as it was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The secularization of religious attitudes toward health and beauty and the biologization of science, coupled with the innovations and reach of medicine, framed a new reading of the relationship of health and beauty in the period from 1890 to 1930. Michael Hau has now provided us with a brilliant case study examining this relationship in Imperial and Weimar Germany. He discusses "life reform," hygiene, race, constitutionalism, and nudism—with strong observations about the function of questions of gender and race in all of his categories. Well-written and brilliantly illustrated, Hau's study shows how notions of the normal and of the deviant play themselves out in terms of the meanings attached to beauty.

Covering areas already examined by German-language histories (such as the hygiene exhibitions in Imperial and Weimar Germany), Hau adds to their findings a sophistication that is rarely found in these earlier studies. His awareness of the interrelationship and contestation of race, hygienic, and constitutional models illustrates how truly specific the German case is—and yet the very idea of "beauty" is Western, with all of its implications. What is striking about the German case is that even though Germany was never a major colonial power, the notions of types of beauty and racial beauty dominated the German scene just as they did the colonial worlds of France and the United Kingdom at the same time. If it is true that German culture served as a substitute for German national identity in the pre-1871 period, then it is equally true that German science served as a substitute for German colonial aspirations before Bismarck and after the mandates of the League of Nations.

When these debates evolve, the focus, as Hau admirably illustrates, is defining beauty within Germany. Even the "racial" question, as illustrated by his discussion of representations of Africana in the literature, is postulated to define the German norm. This is very much in line with Karl Rosenkranz's mid-nineteenth-century idea that ugliness is simply the counterpoint to beauty: define one, and you have already defined the other. Rosenkranz, Hegel's most important student, used racial typologies as examples throughout his argument in the 1850s much as did Hans Günther, the anthropologist whose racial typologies so dominated the discussion in the Weimar Republic.

What is most striking about Hau's work is that he knows that what he is describing is a case study—perhaps a central one because of the Holocaust, but a case study nevertheless. An analysis of how such ideas would have been played out in the United States or Australia at the time would show both how typical and also how unusual the "German case" really is. Hau's work is the first step in a true historicization of human beauty in the long turn of the century that marked the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.

This book is a must for anyone interested in the intellectual backgrounds to the history of medicine in Germany. Beauty—that odd topic that once again has become the subject of study in many fields—is shown to be a central concept in structuring biological and clinical systems. Hau's work is original and brilliant. It will be widely used.