‘The Hiker Stands…Before Reality Itself’

In the early twentieth century, German Catholic youth in the Quickborn movement adopted hiking as a defining and formative activity. Following the trail blazed by Free German Youth such as the Wandervogel two decades earlier, through hiking these young Catholics turned to the natural world as a sacred space in which they could come to know themselves. While Quickborners upheld a traditional Catholic anthropocentrism, their hikes opened up novel ways of engaging and appraising nature that altered traditional Catholic practices. They no longer regarded the natural world as a realm of toil and suffering. Rather, in an industrializing world, nature becomes a site of revelation. Nor did this youth search for ways to harness nature’s powers of claim ownership. Their engagement was ephemeral, transient, and an eminently bodily experience that led to spiritual insights. Through the actual practice of hiking, these youth also combined secular and religious practices, staving off a privatization of religion and a separation of secular and religious spheres.