“It has nothing to do with sex,” said Udo Schumacher, 64, as he stood, stark naked, on a bracing beach in Prerow in what was once communist East Germany.
“If you go in and experience how lovely it is to swim with a naked body, and come out without wet trunks on, you feel healthy. And if you can get over the fact that you are naked, it is great,” he said.
Freikoerperkultur (“Free body culture”), or “FKK” for short, was hugely popular in the otherwise highly restrictive German Democratic Republic (GDR).
And 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the habit is still going strong, and has even attracted a loyal band of followers from what was West Germany.
With life so tightly controlled in other ways FKK was a rare liberty that people made full use of in the GDR. Nowhere was this more evident than in Prerow, a picturesque seaside town 300km north of Berlin.
Here in GDR times, border guards, watch towers, searchlights, barbed wire, boats and radar all made sure no one escaped by sea to West Germany or to Denmark, Doris Pegel curator of the local museum, said.
Sailing and even surfing were off limits. But one thing people were allowed to do in the shadow of Prerow’s watchtowers was to indulge in FKK.
And indulge they did, in huge numbers, as people flocked to the seaside in summer and gave FKK a try.
When the GDR was still young, however, the Politburo saw FKK as a dangerous petty bourgeois degeneracy, Josie McLellan, a history lecturer at Britain’s University of Bristol who has researched the phenomenon, said.
Such suspicions were not helped by events in Prerow, where nudists gathered on the beach at night, daubing body parts with toothpaste and wearing African-style headgear for debauched “Cameroon Parties.”
With the ministry of the interior calling nudism a threat to the “natural and healthy feelings of our working people,” the authorities tried to stamp out FKK in the 1950s.
But many nudists were also party members, policeman and even judges, who protested that “doing FKK” and being a good communist were not mutually exclusive and that nudism was non-sexual.
“Here, the woman is not an object of desire, she is a comrade, there is no bikini to excite you,” McLellan cites one contributor to an illuminating 1966 survey of nudists as saying.
A widespread campaign of popular resistance soon made the authorities relent, and by the 1960s and 1970s onward FKK was almost a national pastime.
One of the many things to flood eastwards after German unification in 1990 was a certain prudishness towards nudism on the part of the curious new Wessi (“Westerner”) tourists.
The result was an effort to regulate the hobby more, and to demarcate beaches and lakes into FKK and clothed areas.
However, the old spirit of FKK has survived.
“Here it’s all very mixed because people don’t have a problem with it. It’s supposed to be separated but nobody really minds,” 66-year-old nudist Inge said on Prerow beach.
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