Abstract
This chapter investigates the origins of organic agriculture in the German life reform movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Aiming to make lifestyles more natural, life reformers paid close attention to food and farming. In the 1870s–1880s, they argued that natural agriculture was a necessary step on the road to freedom and embraced the new artificial fertilizers of German chemistry. By the early twentieth century, in contrast, concern with racial degeneration and agricultural globalization led a new generation to reject artificial fertilizers as unnatural. Working from the proto-ecological view that “humans are only plants in the garden of nature,” life reformers adopted new ideas from German biology to invent an early form of organic agriculture that also served rightwing political goals. As such, the life reform movement became an important site for developing and politicizing the “biological perspective,” a characteristic expression of German thinking about nature.
Keywords
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- 1.
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Simons (1911, p. 11).
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Nyhart (2009, p. 2).
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Even today, indeed, “biologisch” remains the German word of choice for organics, yet carries its own distinctive meanings accumulated during the complex history sketched below.
- 5.
Assessing the politics of early organic agriculture has been a fraught enterprise, particularly in the German context. Anna Bramwell, for instance, argued that German ecologism expressed a political orientation beyond left and right. See Bramwell (1985, 1989). For important critiques, see Stephens (2001) and Olsen (1990). Other historians simply elide the political history of organic agriculture before the Nazi era. See especially Vogt (2000a). The rightward shift documented here, it is worth noting, was well in line with international developments. For the closely linked British case, see the book by Conford noted above as well as Conford (2005, 2008).
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Berry (1990, p. 145).
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Baltzer (1873, pp. 44–45 and 87–88).
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Baltzer (1903, p. 21). This was a favorite trope of vegetarians, who credited the idea to Alexander von Humboldt.
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Carey (1860, pp. 315–316). Carey was a major influence on Baltzer. See especially Baltzer, Reform, 7–35.
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Baltzer (1873, p. 37, 41–45, and 98–101).
- 11.
For an overview, see Zanden (1991).
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Zanden (1991, p. 232).
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Baltzer (1873, p. 44).
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Löbe (1856). This was an annotated translation of Samuel Smith’s Lois Weedon Husbandry (1856), which was in turn a modern adaptation of Jethro Tull’s New Horse-Houghing Husbandry (1731). The cultivation technique promoted by all three writers involved deep ploughing and no animal fertilizer.
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Baltzer, Reform, 27. Either Baltzer had not read the fine print or did not object to the fact that Roeder, following Liebig’s own recommendations, used factory-generated animal remains in his fertilizer mix.
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Uekötter (2011, p. 163).
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Liebig (1859, pp. 244–245).
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Carpenter and Kropotkin, for instance, drew on the book in their own utopian writings.
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For an excellent overview of mineral fertilizers in this period, see Smil (2001, Chaps. 1–3).
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Hensel (1890, p. iv).
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Hensel called poor blood composition Blutentmischung, a humoral term later popularized by Heinrich Lahmann, and Dyskrasia, a traditional Hippocratic term. As an antitode to poor blood, Hensel offered a recipe for “Hensel’s tonic,” a mixture with no nitrogen but plenty of iron, sulphur, and calcium. Hensel (1881, p. 86, 120–122, 129, and 180–181). Hensel’s relationship to the life reform movement was unclear. His use of such terms as “macrobiotics” and “poor blood” indicate that he may have belonged to naturopathic circles, but he also criticized vegetarians for being impractical. Hensel (1890, pp. 500–502).
- 27.
Hensel (1890, p. iii, 479, 483, 491, 504, and 509–510).
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Hensel (1894, pp. 94–95). From the life reform perspective, German chemists had an unhealthy obsession with nitrogen. While nutritional physiologists urged Germans to eat more protein (the only macronutrient containing nitrogen), especially from meat, and agricultural chemists urged Germans to fertilize more with nitrogenous substances, all in the pursuit of national health and fitness, life reformers stood out for vigorously advocating low-protein low-meat diets and low-nitrogen fertilizers, also in pursuit of national health and fitness.
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[1894] Mineraldünger.
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Uekötter (2011, pp. 146–159).
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Smil (2001, p. 48).
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Utermöhlen(1895, p. 3, 13–14, 23, and 33).
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Lahmann’s model of pathogenesis also followed Hensel’s in its stress on how diet caused good or poor blood composition.
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Lahmann’s estate was Gut Friedrichsthal. Lienert (2002, p. 45). Lahmann had little hope that agricultural reform would help poor Germans right away, so his books also included detailed recommendations for self-provisioning and civic action. He urged city dwellers to go out on weekends and holidays to gather wild greens in meadows and open fields. Chicory, dandelion, sorrel, borage, mustard, and even the young leaves of stinging nettles, he noted, were high in minerals and free to all. Since fresh fruits were harder to acquire, he called for social pressure to encourage civic authorities to plant public orchards. Lahmann (1892, pp. 154–155 and 158–159).
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Bebel (1900, pp. 355–356, 390–392).
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Vogt names both Bauernfeind and Gustav Simons as pioneers of ecological agriculture, but does not explore their political valence. Vogt (2000a, pp. 64–65).
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Hunt (1974, p. 316).
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Chile nitrate delivered nitrogen at 30 times the concentration of animal manure. Smil (2001, p. 46 and 48).
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Simons, Die deutsche Volksernährung, 96.
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Scholarly attention has focused on the biodynamic methods associated with Rudolf Steiner and a small group of anthroposophical farmers. The best overview is Vogt (2000a, Chap. 4). For opposing views on the relation of this group to the Nazi regime, see Vogt (2000b); Treitel (2009); and Staudenmaier (2010, pp. 226–252). Perhaps the more interesting question concerns the politics of these groups before 1933. Less studied but no less revealing were other pioneers of organic agriculture, including Wilhelm Büsselberg , Leberecht Migge , Walter Rudolph, and Friedrich Schöll . With the exception of Rudolph, whose politics are unclear, all of these figures were political radicals. Migge was an anarchist, while Büsselberg and Schöll were Könemann’s fellow travelers in völkisch circles.
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[1959] Ewald Könemann 60 Jahre.
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Könemann (1939, pp. 1–2).
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Francé (1913, p. 5).
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Roth (2000, pp. 59–60).
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Francé (1922, p. 27, 39, 67, and 70).
- 55.
Könemann (1939, p. 98).
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Könemann (1939, pp. 235–236 and plate 14).
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Könemann (1939, pp. 186–188, 235–236, 264–265, and 285–286). For his extended discussion of fertilizers, see 171–251. For his model self-composting toilet, see plate 14 between pp. 216 and 217. Note that Könemann's ideal was farming without animals and animal manure, but in practice biological agriculture did use animal manure and prescribed treating farm animals with “comraderly attention” (p. 165).
- 58.
Francé (1920, p. 276).
- 59.
Könemann (1939, p. 59 and 87).
- 60.
Francé (1922, pp. 47–48).
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Francé (1920, p. 269, 276–280).
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For example, he substituted the supposedly more Germanic “f” for the “v” of conventional German usage. Viehloser Ackerbau ( agriculture without animals) thus became fiehloser Ackerbau. Könemann (1925). The Nazi regime also considered adopting this orthography a few years later. See Birken-Bertsch and Markner (2000).
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Könemann (1933, p. 9 and 32).
- 64.
Bodenständig was popularized by Alwin Seifert , a landscape architect and cultural conservative closely tied to the Nazi regime. For Seifert and his use of the term, see Rollins (1995, p. 503). As for Lebensraum, this concept has a long and checkered history. In the Nazi context, it connoted creating living space for Germans through the conquest and racial reconstruction of Eastern Europe. It is important to note, however, that the term carried other meanings before and after the Third Reich. For its coinage by the geographer Friedrich Ratzel, see Smith (1980). For Darré’s use of the term, see Gerhard (2005). For the repurposing of this term by West German nature conservationists in the 1950s, see Chaney (2008, p. 117).
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Treitel, C. (2015). Artificial or Biological? Nature, Fertilizer, and the German Origins of Organic Agriculture. In: Phillips, D., Kingsland, S. (eds) New Perspectives on the History of Life Sciences and Agriculture. Archimedes, vol 40. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12185-7_10
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