Naked Germans

Why naturism is still going strong

Sign from the Nazi era indicating the nudist beach. Img: Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Staatsarchiv Freiburg W 134 Nr. 016661 / Fotograf: Willy Pragher

Imagine you’re in a museum. You’re politely sauntering from one room to the next, occasionally mumbling a soft apology under your breath if you feel you’re in the way of another visitor. You find a fact on an information board that you want to remember, and reach for your phone to take a picture. But your phone isn’t there. You don’t even have pockets. You’re completely naked.

At this point, most of us wake up from what we’d consider a nightmare. Being naked in public places – at work, the supermarket, in the street – is a surprisingly common dream that many people have had in some iteration. Many psychologists consider it a classic stress dream, associated with feelings of anxiety, vulnerability or shame.

Many Germans, however, feel relaxed about public nudity. Naturism has been a social movement since the 19th century and is seen as both liberating and healthy by those who adhere to it. Having grown up with this culture, which was and is particularly prevalent on the Baltic Sea beaches of East Germany, I wasn’t surprised to learn this week that a German museum has decided to offer the experience I described at the beginning of this article.

To open a new exhibition, entitled “Frei Schwimmen – Gemeinsam?!” or “Free Swimming – Together?!” Stuttgart’s Haus der Geschichte or House of History museum is offering two types of guided tours: on some nights, you come fully clothed, on others, you visit entirely naked:

“Museum admission begins at 6:15 p.m. Please note that the exhibition can only be visited naked this evening. Please bring a towel to use the seating. The temperature in the exhibition space is approximately 23 degrees Celsius. Lockers and cloakrooms are available in the building near the special exhibition space.”

All naturist sessions were booked out shortly after the museum put them on its website. All of the fully clothed ones are still available. This suggests that punters are less interested in the exhibition, which focuses on the history and dynamics of public swimming in both indoor and outdoor settings, and more intrigued by the prospect of visiting a public space naked alongside strangers.

For this publicity stunt, which presumably works, given that I’ve heard about the exhibition despite living in a different country, Stuttgart’s House of History has teamed up with an organisation called GetNakedGermany. They call on people in Germany to, well, get naked because it allows humans to “feel their own surface, feel their own skin: he who knows this pleasure has lived.” They aim to desexualise nudity and introduce it as an element of public life.

I can practically feel non-German readers, particularly my British friends, blush and shudder at the thought. People in the UK regularly tell me that they were astonished to encounter public nudity on trips to Germany, be that by the seaside or in public parks in cities like Munich or Berlin. They often ask: “What is it with Germans and public nudity?”

That is a very good question. I wouldn’t say it's “Germans”, as in “all Germans”, who enjoy being naked. In a recent YouGov survey, only a quarter of West Germans and a third of East Germans said that they felt comfortable in settings of public nudity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, more men did than women. Yet only 41 per cent said that they’d never been naked in any of the settings offered by the survey, which ranged from “Sauna” And “Beach” to “Hiking Trail” and “Cruise Ship”. So, the majority of Germans have been naked in public at some point but generally don’t enjoy the experience. But that still leaves a sizeable proportion of people who do.

Public nudity has a long tradition in Germany, so much so that there is a specific name for it: Freikörperkultur (Free Body Culture) or FKK. It largely emerged as a backlash against industrialisation, urbanisation and modernity in the 19th century. Mass production disconnected workers from their labour, sprawling urban landscapes seemed to detach people from nature and modern life, away from extended family and with a more individualistic outlook, was felt to be a derooting experience.

The idea of spending time with friends and family, naked in nature, spoke to a yearning for simplicity, health and social cohesion. After all, a naked Catholic looks much the same as a naked Protestant, a naked worker may not be immediately distinguishable from a naked clerk. FKK existed alongside connected trends that focused on an embodied experience of the self and community. From gymnastics movements to hiking groups, young people, in particular, were drawn to activities that focused on the physical in the years of the German Empire.

Of course, the 20th century brought massive changes. The two World Wars, extreme ideologies and German division during the Cold War all impacted FKK as the aforementioned survey indicates with its clear differences between East and West Germans. Nonetheless, the root causes that made naturism attractive to many people haven’t dissipated. Today, too, many people feel detached. They want to eat “raw” food and embark on manifold quests for authenticity. The dissolution of communities has not been reversed but has rather accelerated, resulting in loneliness and apathy among many people. The effects of social media and the virtual world in general have exacerbated such emotions.

Germans in search of rootedness, meaning and community have a long tradition of finding joy in FKK. So I shouldn’t have been surprised to read that so many Stuttgarters jumped at the chance of visiting a history museum naked – irrespective of what’s … ahem … on show.