April- Cute Hippie Chick Of The Month: A Brief History Of Hippie Chicks

"Wandervogels Abschied" by Fidus, 1900

Ah-- yes fellow Dojo Rats, it's time again for our regular feature "Cute Hippie Chick Of The Month".
This time, we take a look at the origins of the "Hippie Movement", such as it is.
Let's begin with this really great article "Hippie Roots & The Perennial Subculture". This is a legenthy and somewhat inspirational historical perspective that takes us back to the Pagan ethos of the German Folk at the turn of the last century. Yes, you read that right. The Hippie Chick (and Dude) movement started in Germany. The article states:
"Thus the religiosity of the Indo-Germanic people, whenever their nature can unfold itself freely, emerges only in that form which religious science has described as "nature religion" or "earth religions". To remove the German soul from the natural landscape is to kill it. The Romans knew this so once Christianity had become the state religion of the Roman Empire their missionaries were eager to chop down the German forests and set their temples on fire.
Whenever the church encountered Pagan elements that it could not suppress, it gave them a Christian dimension and assimilated them. These ancestral traditions were reinterpreted and revised, but the church never succeeded in effacing the German Pagan heritage".

Celebrating The Sun, 1926
The Pagan spirit of the Germans became the "Wandervogel" movement of the 1920's, with youth roaming the countryside playing music, clad in wool, swimming nude and establishing "Nests" and "Anti-Homes". Popular literature from Goethe to Hesse was heavily influenced by the emerging movement. From the article:
"the "Wandervogel", was founded in 1895 by Hermann Hoffmann and Karl Fischer in Steglitz, a suburb of Berlin. They began to take some high school students on nature walks, then later on longer hikes. Soon a huge youth movement that was both anti-bourgeois and Teutonic Pagan in character, composed mostly of middle class German children, organized into autonomous bands".

In the 1950's and 60's, Germans who moved to the United States brought the Wandervogel spirit with them, and were called "Nature Boys". Many lived in warm climates where they could camp and forage food from the wild. Many abstained from alcohol and caffiene and ate only raw foods. This was the dawn of the natural health food movement of today. As far back as 1896, these were the goals of the original Wandervogel: Particularly:

1. vegetarianism
2. nudism
3. natural medicine
4. abstinence from alcohol
5. clothing reform
6. settlement movements
7. garden towns
8. soil reform
9. sexual reform
10. health food and economic reform
11. social reform
12. liberation for women, children and animals
13. communitarianism
14. cultural and religious reform: i.e. a religion or view of the world that gives weight to the feminine, maternal and natural traits of existence
(D.R.) Pretty foward thinking, Eh?
And finally, the so called "Hippie" movement saw fruition in the fertile 1960's:

Hippie Chick and Surfer Dude on the island of Kauai, 1971
So, we conclude our salute to the "Brief History Of The Hippie Chick" with another historical photo:

Germany, 1916

For more information, go to the article at this link.