The Great Depression inspired more than just migration: it inspired rebellions against the civilization that had created the industrial and financial world. Karl May is still one of Germany's all-time best-selling authors. His "Winnetou" novels, set in the Wild West among "Indians", were immensely popular in the 1870s and spread the romantic myth of America as a virgin land. He never set foot in America but took inspiration from James Fenimore Cooper's novels of the 1820s.

When back-to-nature doctrines emerged at the turn of the 20th century, via multiple channels like "Lebensreform" guru Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, founder of the "Humanitas" commune near Vienna (1897), the nudist "Freikörperkultur" club of Essen (1898), the vegetable cooperative of Monte Verita` (1900), Karl Fischer's movement "Wandervogel" (1901), Hermann Hesse's novel "Peter Camenzind" (1904), Richard Ungewitter's pro-nudity treatise "Die Nacktheit" (1906) and Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophische Gesellschaft (1912), some individuals merged the two vogues and identified the Wild West as the ideal location to abandon the urban industrial society.

The pioneer was Bill Pester, who settled in southern California in 1916 living like a hermit in a palm hut. This German neo-paganism begat a number of eccentric naturalists who lived in the California wilderness, indulging in nudism and long hair and long beards. Among these proto-hippies, two Jewish kids stood out: the New York-born songwriter Eden Ahbez (born George Aberle), who arrived in 1941 in Los Angeles and lived under the "Hollywood" sign; and the San Francisco-born naturist Robert Bootzin (aka "Gypsy Boots"), who at about the same time settled in a canyon of southern California with a "tribe" of nomadic bohemians, living in caves, wearing nothing, practicing yoga and foraging for nuts and fruits.

In 1934 Hermann Sexauer and his wife Frieda Niedermuller, German immigrants who had arrived in California respectively in 1906 and 1904, opened a natural-foods store in Santa Barbara that became a gathering point for the town's more eccentric crowd.