Naked at Lunch (8 page)

Local authorities were caught between keeping enlightened workers from turning Germany into a worker’s paradise and trying to get freethinkers like Ungewitter to keep his pants on. They attempted to ban
Die Nacktheit
and, when that failed, took to regularly harassing its author, stopping him on the street and dropping by his house to try to catch him in the throes of some indecent high jinks so they could discredit him and lock him up. But as much as his message annoyed the authorities, there was something profound in his writings that resonated with the deep German desire—or perhaps deep
human
desire—for a romantic connection to nature and a spirituality unrelated to organized religion.

But while an artist like Ernst Kirchner was experimenting with “impulsive love-making and naked cavorting” in his Dresden studio,
¹⁸
Ungewitter was after something more pure. He was considered something of a killjoy by his critics, a vegetarian who eschewed alcohol, coffee, tea, milk, and sugar. He thought public dancing was immoral and railed against the publication of trashy literature.
********
To Ungewitter, nakedness was a panacea, a cure for almost every physical ailment, spiritual turmoil, and societal problem that afflicted humanity at the turn of the century. Even masturbation could be cured by nudism as “nakedness is calming on the sensual drive.” Which, in my limited experience, I don’t believe for a second. Everyone knows masturbation is cured by orgasm.

Revolutionary ideas are a response, a revolutionary needs something to revolt against—Thomas Jefferson had King George III, Karl Marx had capitalism, Charles Crawford had Victorian repression, and, nearly a century later, the Sex Pistols would have disco. For Ungewitter, it was the increasing industrialization and urbanization of Germany. Heavy industry and mass production were in full swing, and Germans had moved from a life spent frolicking in bucolic pastoralia to one toiling in toxic factories and overcrowded cities. A robust agrarian lifestyle was replaced by decadent urbanity, and the populace had become obsessed by materialism, debauchery, and fashion. Ungewitter saw this as a problem. In a later work,
Kultur und Nacktheit: Eine Forderung
(
Culture and Nudity: A Demand
), Ungewitter described his fellow countrymen with an acid dollop of health freak snark: “men walk about with reddened, fixed, glassy eyes, bald heads, breathing only in gasps, with a sagging gut and spongy, flabby muscles, behind whom women, first as corseted marionettes, later in the greatest corpulence, waddle.”
¹⁹
Ungewitter was reacting to a society that, in his eyes, had become morally rotten and physically weak.
²⁰
American historian Chad Ross, in his excellent book
Naked Germany: Health, Race and the Nation
, distills Ungewitter’s rage succinctly: “Germany, bluntly put, had become too intellectual.”
²¹

After World War I something strange happened in Germany: nudism became hugely popular. As Ross puts it,
“during the Weimar Republic nudism became a mass cultural phenomenon in which millions of Germans participated, whether as members of nudist leagues or more simply (and far more likely) as weekend beachgoers.”
²²

Defeated in war, their economy wrecked and burdened with reparations, Germans needed some relief. Nudism let the German people have fun again. They hiked through the forests and swam in the lakes and rivers, embracing the healing rays of the sun, all the while naked. There are even photographs from that period of German men and women skiing naked in the snow. Amazingly, they are smiling.

And it wasn’t just an outdoorsy phenomenon. Ungewitter was joined by authors like Hans Surén, whose 1924 book
Der Mensch und die Sonne
(
People and the Sun
) was reprinted seventy-three times in its first year, and Heinrich Pudor
********
on the bestseller list, and magazines devoted to
Nacktkultur
began springing up across the country. These were lifestyle magazines that used nudism as a platform to promote a wide range of topics from Eastern religions to poetry and dance, sex reform and politics.

The 1920s saw dozens of new organized nudist clubs with cultish names like German Friends of the Light and Leipzig League of Friends of the Sun, as well as Orplid in Danzig and Ungewitter’s own club, the Lodge of Rising Life, a group with a stringent anti-Semitic admission policy that, according to Ross, “would remain an important presence in the nudist world for years.”
²³

All that chatter about the German ideal of physical fitness and finding optimum health in the fresh air and sunshine had a dark underbelly. As Ungewitter wrote in
Kultur und Nacktheit
,
he saw nudism as key to “bettering of the German race by promoting marriages between blonde-haired, blue-eyed types.”

Failed watercolorist Adolf Hitler was torn on the issue of nudism. Many of the nudist clubs that had sprung up, notably around Berlin, were popular with Marxists and artists and political agitators, while others were hotbeds of German nationalism and anti-Semitism. In case you’re just tuning in: Hitler preferred the latter. As Ross writes, “Given the constant, unavoidable viewing of participants at the nudist park and the racial anti-Semitism that permeated
Nacktkultur
, one is tempted to conclude that nudism was also a means of identifying otherwise well-assimilated Jews.”
²⁴
You get the subtext, right? There is no better place to spot dudes with circumcised penises than a nudist camp.

Hitler’s advisers were equally ambivalent. Some believed that organized nudism would lead to moral decay. Hermann Göring declared that nudism “destroys women’s natural feeling of shame, and causes men to lose respect for women, thereby destroying the basis for any real culture.” Is he saying that real culture comes from women living in shame? What does that even mean? Others were less prudish, but feared that nudist camps were havens of communism and homosexual activity.

But what self-respecting Nazi wouldn’t be attracted to nudism as espoused by racist ideologues like Ungewitter? The more Hitler and his cronies looked at ideas like eugenics, clean living, and the romantic notion of pure-bred German
volk
frolicking in the Schwarzvald, the more appealing nudism became. Besides, it was popular. People enjoyed naked outings in the Black Forest and skinny-dipping in the Rhine. Hitler, being a political animal, decided to split the difference. In March 1933 he ordered all nudist clubs closed—especially ones with ties to Marxist and communist organizations—and in January 1934, he reopened Nazi-approved nudist clubs under the sponsorship of the National Socialist Party and the newly created Kampfring für Völkische Körperkultur, which was later renamed the Bund für Leibeszucht, which Google Translate regurgitates as “Confederation for Physical Breeding.”

…

But Germany wasn’t the only place where people were thinking of ways to congregate in the nude. In England, a man named Harold Clare Booth began promoting the nudist ideal, beginning pseudonymously with an article titled “The Nude Culture Movement” published in the health journal
Physical Culture
in 1913. Fads and fashion travel, so it’s no surprise that the idea of enjoying sunshine and fresh air unencumbered by clothing had drifted across the English Channel. Nudism was suddenly being discussed in magazines including the
New Statesman
and
Health & Efficiency
,
a publication promoting healthy living, diet, and exercise. Booth continued to publish articles on the subject, and in 1923, perhaps influenced by the writings of Swiss physician Auguste Rollier on heliotherapy, he and a group of like-minded people founded the English Gymnosophist Society (EGS). Other groups began to spring up shortly after that, notably the Sunshine League and New Health Society organized by London physician and heliotherapy advocate Dr. Caleb Saleeby.

At the time in England, it was against the law to “conspire to outrage public decency,” so nudist groups tried to keep their activities as quiet as possible. But as the EGS began to grow, and fear of infiltration by Scotland Yard became a real concern, Booth spun off a splinter faction of core members that called itself the Moonella Group. It was an exclusive club—there were only about a dozen members—but they were committed to nonsexual social nudism and began to hold weekly meetings at the Essex estate of one of their female members.

Early nudists loved to write manifestos, create rules and regulations, and otherwise codify their intentions in written documents, and the Moonella Group was no different. Fueled by what I can only call paranoia, the members drafted the “Resolution of the Moonella Group for the Due Ordering of Its Affairs,” which swore participants to secrecy. Not only were they not allowed to tell anyone about the existence of the group, but they weren’t allowed to divulge who the other members were, going so far as to give themselves “gymnic names” when they joined. I guess the first rule of a nudist club is no one talks about the nudist club.

Naturally they had a secret handshake.

It’s easy to mock the paranoid behavior of early nudist groups, but it helps to keep in mind that in 1925 there were public decency laws on the books and a nudist could easily have been sentenced to prison for cavorting in the buff outdoors, especially if men and women were naked together. Not only was the idea of naked men and women enjoying sunshine together illegal and scandalous, but there were fears that nudists were either communists or, as revealed in Nesta H. Webster’s ludicrous shit-stirrer
The Socialist Network
, part of the German-Russian-Jewish-led international conspiracy against Christianity.

Eventually Booth and the others looked to set up a more permanent camp for their philosophizing and purchased some land near Bricket Wood outside of London. The “camp,” as it was known, was established in 1927 and formally named the Fouracres Club. Over time it evolved into the Fiveacres Club.
********
It was the first nudist camp established in England and is still, eighty-seven years later, a functioning nudist retreat center. I wonder what Booth and the other early gymnosophists would’ve said when Pink Floyd played there on Guy Fawkes Night in 1966.

…

The French have long loved fashion, and they weren’t about to be left out of this new clothing-optional fad. So in 1927, a couple of brothers, the naturopaths and physicians Gaston and André Durville, founded the Société Naturiste,
and shortly thereafter published
Fais Ton Corps
(
Make Your Body
), a book that looked at the curative effects of sunshine, fresh air, and a healthy vegetarian diet. Like Ungewitter and other naturists at the time, they believed urban living was the cause of many of the diseases that were afflicting people and, like Ungewitter’s, the brothers’ books were bestsellers. As their popularity increased, they began publishing a biweekly magazine called
Naturisme
, and leased an island in the Seine at Villennes-sur-Seine that they called Physiopolis.

Although the brothers would’ve preferred a fully nude retreat, there was pressure from the local police and the French minister of public health to keep breasts and genitals covered. Men wore shorts and women wore bras and panties. Jan Gay, author of
On Going Naked
,
visited Villennes in 1931 and said, “Without being too harsh, one can call this island a pseudo-naked French Coney Island.”
²⁵
Which is actually kind of harsh.

Another group sprung up about the same time as a counterpoint to the Durville brothers. The Amis de Vivre
(Friends of Living) didn’t go in for vegetarianism or abstaining from alcohol; they ate pâté, drank wine, and smoked cigarettes—in other words, they were French—but they did it in the nude. A collection of doctors, writers, and professors, they weren’t especially dogmatic about their pursuits; they just thought being naked was the most important part of nudism.

As you would guess from the name, the Amis de Vivre
was an easygoing bunch. Nudity wasn’t required unless members were in the “nudarium” area. Louis-Charles Royer, a writer and member of the Amis, wrote a serialized fiction about the group called
Au Pays des Hommes Nus
(In the Land of Nude Men), which became a bestseller and led to other branches of the club springing up in Lyon, Perpignan, Marseilles, and other French cities.

Meanwhile the Durville brothers had become frustrated with the restrictions imposed on them at Villennes and set out to find a place where they could build a true naturist paradise. In 1931 they settled on the small island of Levant off the French coast in the Mediterranean where they built a rustic retreat they called Heliopolis. It was undeveloped, close to nature, and bursting with fresh air and abundant sunlight. Better still, it was a private island where everyone could be totally naked all the time. A nudist utopia, if you will.