A Cultural and Political History of Dietary Reform in Germany since 1848

FAIN: FA-55644-11

Corinna Treitel
Washington University (St. Louis, MO 63130-4862)

I am applying for an NEH fellowship to complete my second book, Natural: A German History. This book presents a cultural and political history of the German quest to eat naturally from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth century. During these years, ever more Germans turned to vegetarianism, low-meat diets, macrobiotics, early forms of organic farming, and other such practices in an effort to put the nation, as one early advocate phrased it, on "the way to paradise" (Zimmermann 1843). Whereas previous scholars have cast such developments as apolitical and even marginal aspects of German history, my book examines them instead as integral to the biopolitics of German modernity. It does so by showing how advocates for a more natural diet shaped wide-ranging efforts to create a more stable, self sufficient, and powerful nation able to thrive in the modern world.

Associated Products

Eating Nature in Modern Germany: Food, Agriculture, and Environment, c.1870-2000 (Book)
Title: Eating Nature in Modern Germany: Food, Agriculture, and Environment, c.1870-2000
Author: Corinna Treitel
Abstract: Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian and the Dachau concentration camp had an organic herb garden. Vegetarianism, organic farming, and other such practices have enticed a wide variety of Germans, from socialists, liberals, and radical anti-Semites in the nineteenth century to fascists, communists, and Greens in the twentieth century. Corinna Treitel offers a fascinating new account of how Germans became world leaders in developing more 'natural' ways to eat and farm. Used to conserve nutritional resources with extreme efficiency at times of hunger and to optimize the nation's health at times of nutritional abundance, natural foods and farming belong to the biopolitics of German modernity. Eating Nature in Modern Germany brings together histories of science, medicine, agriculture, the environment, and popular culture to offer the most thorough and historically comprehensive treatment yet of this remarkable story.
Year: 2017
Publisher: Cambridge, UK: Cambrdge University Press
Type: Single author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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