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For Germans living in the communist GDR, where travel, personal liberties and sales of consumer goods were curtailed, FKK functioned in part as a “safety valve,” according to Bauerkämper a way to let off tension in a deeply restrictive state by providing a bit of “free movement”. The birthplace of modern nature healingīut it wasn’t until the decades after Germany’s post-war division into East and West that FKK really blossomed, particularly in the East – though embracing getting naked was no longer restricted to the bourgeois class.And while Nazi ideology initially prohibited FKK, viewing it as a spring of immorality, by 1942 the Third Reich had softened its public nudity restrictions – though, of course, that tolerance wasn’t extended to groups the Nazis persecuted, like Jews and communists. In 1926, Alfred Koch founded the Berlin School of Nudism to encourage mixed-gender nudist exercise, continuing the belief that outdoor nudity promoted harmony with nature and wellness benefits. According to Bauerkämper, there was a “sense of new freedom after the authoritarian society and suffocating conservative values of Imperial Germany (1871 to 1918).” During the Weimar Era (1918-1933), FKK beaches populated by “a very, very small minority” of sunbathing members of the bourgeois sprang up. “Nudism is part of this broader movement, which was directed against industrial modernity, against the new society that emerged in the late 19th Century,” Bauerkämper said.Īccording to Hanno Hochmuth, a historian at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam, this reform movement took particular hold in larger cities, including Berlin, despite its romanticising of country living. At the turn of the 20th Century, Lebensreform (“life reform”) was in the air, a philosophy that advocated for organic food, sexual liberation, alternative medicine and simpler living closer to nature.
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“Nudism has had a long tradition in Germany,” said Arnd Bauerkämper, associate professor of modern history at Freie University in Berlin. And unlike, say, taking off your top at a beach in Spain, FKK encompasses a broader German movement with a distinct spirit, where stripping down to your essence in the natural world has historically been an act of both resistance and relief. FKK, as it’s usually shortened to, is associated closely with life in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany or “GDR”), but nudism in Germany as a public practice stretches back to the late 19th Century. What I’d seen wasn’t part of Berlin’s hedonistic side, however, but an example of Freikörperkultur, or “free-body culture”.