Eating Nature in Modern Germany Food, Agriculture and Environment, C.1870 to 2000

About this book

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.

Contents

Introduction. Natural, a German history

1. Hunger, citizenship, and the gospel of nature
2. Being natural
3. Nature and the nutrition question in Imperial and Weimar Germany
4. Humans are only plants in nature's garden: remaking German agriculture, 1870–1939
5. Nature and the Nazi diet
6. Mainstreaming nature, pursuing health: food and the environmental turn in West Germany
7. Masking nature, prescribing health: the East German experience

Conclusion. The natural temptation

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Biography

Corinna Treitel is a historian at Washington University, St Louis. She is the author of A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (2004), and has published articles in Central European History, Food and Foodways, Modern Intellectual History, and various edited volumes. She has received several major grants, including a year-long fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Massachusetts, a faculty research award from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a mid-career fellowship from the Center for Humanities, Washington University.