Taking the author’s personal experiences with the German nudist movement as a starting point, this essay explores the discursive link between colonialism, its ideology of racial hierarchies and the Life Reform Movement (Lebensreformbewegung), which so profoundly shaped (German) ideas of community formation, bodily ideals and human-nature relations. Despite its overlap of timing, protagonists and ideas with German colonialism, as well as its noted influence on National Socialism, the coloniality of the Life Reform remains an academic blind spot. What would an examination of this past entail, in terms of political and ethical consequences for our engagement with the Life Reform’s legacy in our present?