“The presentation is . . . buttressed by an extensive apparatus of annotation and bibliography that assists in making this book a first-rate addition to the literature on the social and cultural, as well as medical, history of modern Germany.”

Michael Bississ | History

“Hau’s is an intelligent and persuasive book. . . . Its combination of nuanced social historical analysis with cultural historical methods and approaches represents exemplary historical scholarship; his fascinating material and his synthesis of aesthetic and medical approaches to the body adds much needed complexity to the history of life reform, hygiene, and responses to modernity in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany.”

H-Net review | H-Net review

“This informed, nuanced, and richly detailed study of the life reform movement and alternative medicine in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany makes important contributions to broader debates about modernity, class, gender, and race in German society and culture.”

German History

“Much of Hau’s narrative will resonate with a generation today driven by the cult of fitness as exhibited in postmodern gyms, TV ads, and health advice books. Are we to look to the late nineteenth century in order to grasp the underlying meaning of this diosposition?”  

Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, | Journal of Social History

“Hau’s approach is sophisticated and original; it offers important insights; and like most really exciting books, this one raises more questions than it answers. It will be appreciated as a particularly important and fruitful beginning by students of the history of medicine, the body, eugenics and racial thought, “life reform,” and popular culture.”

Edward Ross Dickinson | Central European History

“Hau applies a sophisticated interpretive lens to a particularly illuminating region of German social and cultural history.”

Kevin Repp | Journal of Modern History