[2] Strongly influenced by the swirling social currents of the time, Schmelzkopf became involved with the Wandervogel youth movement which combined a love of hiking and of nature with hostility to industrialisation and a form of nationalism based on a romanticised vision of the past.
For Anna Klara Schmelzkopf, leading a healthy life in harmony with nature and opposed to militarism blended seamlessly with the social and wider goals of the emerging (largely at this time middle-class) women's movement.
The marriage led to a breakdown in Anna Klara's relationship with her own family, and the young couple settled in Bremen, a rapidly expanding industrial port city roughly 160 km / 100 miles to the north-west of Braunschweig.
[1] When Ottilie Hoffmann died at the end of 1925, a few months after her ninetieth birthday, it was clear that in terms of combatting alcohol abuse, she had found a reassuringly committed and energetic successor in Anna Klara Fischer.
A deeply committed pacifist, openly horrified by the role played by government paramilitaries in enforcing the will of the party, she was able to prevent, the incorporation of the "Deutsche Frauenbund für alkoholfreie Kultur" into the "Nationalsozialistische Frauenschaft" ("National Socialist Women's League"), until 1943, despite coming under intense political pressure to do so earlier.
It was possible to hope that the need for "healthy living" and the accompanying struggle against the drug alcohol, with all its destructive consequences for families, women, children and young people, would be reflected in government policy.
[1] In her capacity as national chair of the "Deutsche Frauenbund für alkoholfreie Kultur", Anna Klara Fischer looked after more than 400 female athletes at the 1936 Berlin Olympiade.
[1][6] She continued her work after 1945, overseeing the rebuilding the alcohol-free bars and restaurant destroyed by British and American bombing during the early 1940s, and then |further extending the network.