The introduction to John Alexander Williams's Turning to Nature in Germany offers a spirited summary of an increasingly important interpretive shift in the recent literature on modern Germany, and on German modernity. We might call this shift the “turn to complexity”—the argument that we should spurn all teleologies in favor of models that can accommodate ambivalence, contingency, and conflict as important, indeed constitutive parts of the “story” of Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, Williams rejects the older view that German interest in nature was evidence of a “peculiarly Teutonic, protofascist agrarian romanticism.” This view was, he suggests, constructed on “a very narrow source base indeed,” limited to texts “written primarily by intellectual, artistic, and political elites”; it was based on a “myopic and teleological view of pre-Nazi German culture” that focused narrowly on the “influence of the small, far-right-wing, ‘folkish’ fringe” and ignored the views and role of “moderate bourgeois reformers and liberal Social Democrats”; and it assumed that “any critique of industrial capitalism and the … metropolis was irrational” (p. 5). In contrast, Williams aligns himself with a more recent historiography that sees Germany not as fatally anti-modern, but as “a prime example of Western modernity,” and western modernity as “complex and multifaceted, with both emancipatory and oppressive potentials” (p. 7). This “new paradigm of a heterogeneous modernity,” Williams believes, “has liberated the field of German history from deterministic narratives of linear continuity from the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich” (p. 8). Williams's book is an attempt to further this interpretive shift by examining, in one study, three distinct histories or case studies, in each case stretching from the imperial through to the Nazi periods: that of socialist nudism and socialist hiking clubs (chapters one and two); that of youth hiking as practiced both by autonomous youth groups and by adult-organized “youth cultivation” groups (chapters three through five); and that of nature conservation (chapter six). His aim is to offer the reader a complex and nuanced picture of what he calls “naturism”—the common set of ideas and assumptions both about the body and about the relationship between people and the landscape that underlay all three movements.

This is a bold conceptual program and a massive research agenda; and that presents Williams with some difficult challenges. Each case study is firmly rooted in solid research in archival and published sources, and Williams has a sharp eye for the telling detail and the revealing quotation. The book is a pleasure to read both for its nearness to the sources and for the pungency with which Williams is able to formulate his insights. Nevertheless, no individual chapter offers startling new findings; readers versed in the literature on each topic will be on familiar ground here. The book is also somewhat lopsided—there are four chapters here on hiking, one on nudism, and one on conservation; for all Williams's desire to escape from a focus on middle-class intellectuals, only the first two chapters really do so; and the focus here is, also, quite heavily on the Weimar period. More important, Williams's interpretive agenda makes it imperative that he examine organizational histories in some depth—both so as to get beyond that narrow source base of texts by intellectuals and politicians, and so as to be able to offer a complex narrative, sensitive to the importance of conflict and compromise. He does both with admirable economy and verve; but that does somewhat compromise his ability to offer a coherent and focused account of “naturism” as a set of ideas. We see “naturism” in action here in three different contexts; but the precise contours, structure, and potentials of this discursive field (or complex of ideas, assumptions, attitudes, tropes, metaphors, and so on) across all three contexts are not quite brought into focus here.

Nevertheless, by the end of this book Williams has constructed a clear and very interesting interpretation, one that draws convincingly on all three case studies. There were, Williams argues, fundamentally two varieties of “naturism.” One, central to the thinking and practice of Social Democrats and autonomous youth groups, was essentially romantic, individualist, and emancipatory; it viewed nature as a “realm … outside of society that promised freedom … liberation from the institutions of social and political authority, an intimate sense of community” (p. 259); it was characterized by reverence for the beauty of nature and by a desire for “greater equality, democracy, and justice” (p. 260). The other, present above all in the thinking of adult organizers of youth groups and of middle-class conservationists, was more “rationalist” (p. 262); it was increasingly attracted to “racist pseudoscience” (p. 237) and racial nationalism; it was more likely to resort to the “panic-stricken rhetoric of moral panic and demonization” (p. 261); and it was interested less in appreciating and exploring nature as a realm of freedom and beauty than in using the encounter with nature as a means of pursuing ideological indoctrination and an authoritarian model of community. It was, as Williams puts it, “instrumentalist, purely anthropocentric” and “anything but reverent” toward nature (p. 255). The difference may be summed up in the distinction between “hiking” (Wandern) as practiced by Social Democrats and autonomous youth groups, and “marching” as practiced by the Hitler Youth.

Williams has, therefore, reversed the charges: the problem in modern German thinking about nature was not nature-centered, anti-modern irrational romanticism, but anthropocentric modernist rational instrumentalism. I am, of course, simplifying here; Williams does a good job of recounting the complex and historically contingent relationships between these two tendencies in “naturism” (including the tension between them within particular groupings, such as the adult “youth cultivators”). Nevertheless, those familiar with the recent literature on German reform movements will recognize the basic pattern of the argument.

In the end, this book succeeds impressively, making a valuable contribution to the ongoing and very lively discussion of reform and modernity in Germany. Williams offers a synthetic interpretive argument that is greater than the sum of its parts, and that opens up an exciting and challenging set of questions. This study will be read with pleasure and profit by anyone interested in the history of conservation, nudism, hiking, popular culture, reform, and the complex problem of German modernity more broadly.