Le végétarisme dans l’Allemagne contemporaine et l’héritage de la Lebensreform

Abstract

According to Norbert Elias, the study of a society’s relationship to the consumption of food, especially of meat, gives an important indication of the evolution of civilization. In contemporary Germany, a strong school of thought, apparently imported from the USA, praises veganism. It expresses itself through an enthusiasm for books like Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating animals or Karen Duve’s Anständig essen, which will be analyzed in this essay. Newspapers as well as the political party Die Grünen widely reflect this trend. In order to better define this way of thinking, we will go back to the roots of German vegetarianism, recall the ascetic demand for moral purity that has always accompanied them, and compare the collective vegetarian experiences at the time of Lebensreform with their current commercial dissemination, without neglecting their anarchistic component.