The social meanings of the beautiful body: Popular hygienic culture in Germany, 1890-1930

The dissertation looks at popular health reform movements in Germany from 1890 to 1930. It argues that these health reform movements were the expression of a growing middle class reflexivity centering on the healthy body as a precondition of performance and success in bourgeois life. This work argues that it is not enough to interpret these movements as a rejection of scientific medicine and its professional authority as other historians have done. Instead of focusing on the programmatic differences between health reformers and regular physicians, this dissertation looks at what these groups had in common. It describes popular hygienic culture as a discursive field consisting of hygienic practices, attitudes and body images that were shaped by the medical profession, propagators of alternative health practices and their clients alike. Both regular physicians and health reformers pathologized the anxieties of the middle classes as far as rapidly changing gender anxieties and fears of personal failure were concerned. The dissertation contends that medicalization was not a process that was simply imposed by the definitional power of the medical profession, medicalization was a process that emerged out of the concerns and anxieties of the middle classes.;By examining physical ideals for the human body in regular and alternative medical literature the dissertation demonstrates that contemporary attitudes towards the body were aspects of an important discursive arena for the formation of class identities. The ideal of "cultivation" (Bildung) that served as a status marker for members of the educated middle classes was appropriated by lower middle class people who claimed that a well trained body was a better sign of cultivation. The cultivated body became a form of symbolic capital for the uneducated in their symbolic aggression against the educated middle classes. Hygienic practices and discourse concerning body ideals constituted a contested arena for the competing claims of feminists and anti-feminists as well. This was also true for the discourse concerning racial beauty types. During the Weimar Republic racial theories essentialized class differences and class based aesthetic preferences.