More than a century ago, an alternative utopian commune in Germany’s Harz Mountains drew prominent thinkers and artists like a magnet. Yet, for some, this radical attempt to "return to nature" ultimately led to a dramatic escape into the South Seas.

The traces have faded, and the gravestone in a tiny cemetery in Klein Oschersleben, a quiet village in eastern Germany, is barely legible. Yet this very spot marks where a grand German colonial dream shattered. In this grave lies Stefan von Kotze, the scion of an ancient aristocratic family who, around the turn of the twentieth century, traveled the world in search of the exotic.

Kotze sent back dispatches from Australia, Africa, the Middle East, and the South Pacific. At the time, the South Seas were the ultimate paradise of longing for a colorful counterculture of German dropouts—an era famously chronicled by Swiss author Christian Kracht in his acclaimed novel *Imperium*.

What Kracht omitted, however, was that the roots of these sun-seeking idealists lay in the modern-day German state of Saxony-Anhalt, right in the heart of the country.

Europe’s First Eco-Village

Stefan von Kotze was not the only one to set out from this region for German New Guinea, a tropical archipelago in the Western Pacific that the German Empire had annexed as a colony in the late nineteenth century. Just sixty kilometers further west, near the village of Stapelburg in the Harz Mountains, the brothers Adolf and Rudolf Just were busy building a radical vision of their own: an alternative, nature-based society hidden deep in the forest.

They named their sanctuary "Jungborn"—a poetic, old German term that translates to "Fountain of Youth" or "Source of Rejuvenation." Founded in 1895, it quickly evolved into Germany’s very first ecologically oriented commune, promising that anyone who stripped away urban life and returned to the "source" of nature would be physically and mentally reborn.

The founder, Adolf Just, a former bookseller, had grown deeply weary of modern civilization after contracting a severe nervous illness in his youth. Determined to heal, he began experimenting with natural therapies on his own body, utilizing mineral-rich mud, light therapy, fresh air, and strict fasting. At the age of twenty-six, he finally moved to the idyllic Ecker Valley in the Harz Mountains.

There, Just lived by his personal manifesto, "Return to Nature," which also served as the title for his published green doctrine. He renounced all technological progress, did hard physical labor, lived in a windowless "light-and-air hut" in the middle of the woods, slept on the bare floor, and ate a strictly vegetarian diet consisting mostly of raw fruit and vegetables.

Today, nothing remains of this historic site but a sparse birch forest. The village, which around 1900 had become a beacon for early hippies and practitioners of the *Lebensreform* (Life Reform) movement—a social phenomenon across German-speaking Europe that rejected industrialization in favor of organic living—eventually fell victim to twentieth-century geopolitics.

Because the land sat directly on the inner-German border after World War II, the East German communist regime completely demolished the remains of the commune to clear a line of sight for its heavily fortified border security installations.

Yet, in its heyday, Jungborn was nothing less than Europe's first eco-village. The cabins deliberately lacked window glass, featuring only open cutouts to let in natural sunlight. Meals were eaten collectively in large dining halls.

Guests walked around entirely naked to soak in the elements, though the sexes were strictly segregated into a "Ladies' Park" and a "Gentlemen's Park."

Kafka and the Naked Vacationers

The commune became a hotspot for the era's celebrities. Famous German actors of the early twentieth century, including Marika Rökk, Victor de Kowa, and Hans Albers, came here to unwind.

Like any ordinary guest, these stars subjected themselves to a customized regimen of air and sun baths, massages, gymnastics, and raw food. The Just brothers firmly believed that health sprang directly from the four primal elements: light, air, mud, and water. If a person was willing to expose themselves to these elements, disease would vanish.

In the summer of 1912, the world-famous author Franz Kafka arrived in Stapelburg, suffering from a severe case of writer's block. He moved into a cabin named "Ruth"—a wooden hut completely open on three sides—and stared at his surroundings in utter bewilderment.

"Naked people are lying quietly outside my door," a visibly unnerved Kafka noted in his private diary, adding, "everyone except me is without swim trunks." The sight of these entirely naked bodies moving slowly between the trees even caused the anxious writer, by his own admission, "occasional light bouts of nausea."

Fleeing to the Pacific: The Cult of the Coconut

For another guest, however, Jungborn provided the ultimate inspiration: August Engelhardt. A trained pharmacy assistant, Engelhardt joined the commune but soon found the German Empire far too restrictive and local authorities far too prudish. Because public nudity was legally prosecuted as a breach of public decency, police regularly raided the Just brothers' property.

Having grown impatient with Jungborn's rules, Engelhardt developed an even more radical philosophy known as "Cocovarism." This extreme worldview combined sun worship with a diet consisting exclusively of coconuts and tropical fruits. To Engelhardt, the coconut was the most divine, perfect food on Earth, capable of granting immortality.

Aided by a substantial inheritance, Engelhardt emigrated to German New Guinea. He purchased the tiny tropical island of Kabakon with the goal of establishing a utopian, nudist plantation commune.

Other German eccentrics soon followed him into the Pacific, including August Bethmann from the central German town of Alsleben. By the age of thirty, Bethmann had stopped eating anything but fruit.

As a "frugivore"—a strict branch of veganism focused only on consuming fruits that can be harvested without harming the plant—he proudly claimed he no longer even needed to drink water, relying entirely on the moisture of the fruit.

The goal of these island emigrants was as absurd as it was monumental: they intended to found an "international tropical colonial empire of fruitarianism." Their rallying cry was: "Long live the Equator! Down with the Poles!"

The Bitter End of a Utopia

The Pacific paradise quickly descended into tragedy. The roughly thirty followers Engelhardt had gathered around him died in accidents, succumbed to tropical diseases, or simply lost faith in their guru. Bethmann died during a desperate attempt to return to Germany. Engelhardt himself grew emaciated, fell gravely ill, and, in his profound isolation, occasionally resorted to eating meat again.

When Australian troops captured the German colony at the outbreak of World War I, which lasted from 1914 to 1918, they detained the skeletal eccentric. However, the soldiers of the British Queen quickly released him, dismissing him as nothing more than a "harmless lunatic." Engelhardt died in May 1919, completely abandoned and alone on his island of Kabakon.

Back in Germany, the Jungborn eco-village fared little better. The Just brothers were forced to defend themselves in court against charges of quackery and medical charlatanism.

Adolf Just eventually stepped down from managing the commune, but successfully reinvented himself. He began marketing the region's local loess clay as a medicinal powder. The company he founded, *Luvos*, still produces this "heilerde" (healing earth) for stomach and skin ailments today, remaining a household name in Germany.

Adolf Just died in 1936. His pioneering eco-village was used as a refugee camp in the chaotic years following World War II, before being completely erased from the map by East German authorities after 1964. The deadly, heavily guarded border that split East and West Germany during the Cold War ran directly through the middle of the former nature paradise

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