O ihr wolkenschwärme wie neide ich euch um eure luftige drift

[O you swarms of clouds, how I envy you for your airy drift]

Selig seid ihr sturmvögel dass ihr ihnen auch nur nahen dürft

[Blessed are you storm birds that you may even approach them]

(Unattributed poem)

The district of Schönbach, in Kirchhain, Hesse, north of Frankfurt and the then Darmstadt Artist's Colony, a community of designers in the Jugendstil, is in the heartland of Germany near the Rhine and the Main rivers.

Hoppener, or 'Fidus' [Faithful] as he was known, was a free spirit, known then as a 'Wandervögel' [wandering bird]: he was the archetypical romantic German youth, into rambling, vegetarianism, anarchism, sunbathing, rambling and camping in the Rhineland, Theosophy and occultism, nudism, nationalism, together with socialism (he started a commune). He believed in free love, both hetero- and homosexual. He wore robes, lived the itinerant life of a nomadic prophet, and designed castles in the air. In 1925 he rejected the idea of racial purity and claimed that the 'sun-drenched clarity of the soul' was available to all humans. He stood out as an eccentric and individual man of creative genius; an exhibit of his photographic work was advertised as 'Art in the Service of Ascending Life,' and Fidus was acclaimed as 'the revered master,' the 'mysterious artist, and 'the believer in light.' In 1932, before Hitler came to power,  in common with many idealistic Germans he joined the Nazi party, but Fidus soon fell out with them and in 1937 the Nazis banned the sale of his images, condemning them as degenerate.