Mel Gordon - Voluptuous Panic - The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin

Koch had many adversaries in the Nacktkultur world of Berlin. His tendentious Socialist teachings, skill for generating publicity, acceptance of all body types, and astonishing prosperity disturbed his opponents, who promoted nudism as an aesthetic as well as a health regimen. Mostly it was the reactionary Nacktkultur organizations that defined their programs in counter-distinction from the “Free Men.”

In 1920, the Nationalist physician Artur Fedor Fuchs attempted to draw members for his “League for Free Body Culture” (FKK) from the same family and Lumpenprol pool that Koch had already reached. Staking out the first Nacktkultur Territory on the Lake Motzen army and offering a full calendar of sporting activities in the nude, Fuchs did find a lower- and middle-class audience. But it was limited.

Over the next few years, the FKK attracted a considerably more upscale and fashion-conscious crowd, Berlin’s Girl-Culture denizens. At Fuchs’ “Free Sunland” encampment, professional athletes, balding aristocrats, and glam film starlets—wearing just gold bracelets or sexy flat footwear—mixed on the volleyball and tennis courts. While the portly and bespectacled Fuchs himself had the reputation as a morose ideologue, the FKKers were basically apolitical and sexually hip. Unlike Territory Adolf Koch, Free Sunland provided ample opportunities for gawking at the eye candy during daylight hours and swinging in the nudist “fuck huts” at night. The food, although vegetarian and still Germanic, was several notches above the mucky Socialist fare.

For his can’t-get-away-from-the-city members, Fuchs rented the multi-storied Luna Bad in Berlin East. There every Sunday and Wednesday, naked FKKers exercised, swam, received electrical tanning and massage treatments, and ate. The sight of moneyed aristocrats dining in the semi-nude (most retained one small indication of class, like a monocle or silver hair brooch) amused foreign journalists, looking for those Only-in-Berlin social mores. Former military officers, sans uniform, bowed to kiss ladies’ hands and then dashingly clicked their bare heels together. Society types maintained their elegant manners although their protruding flesh sometimes got in the way.

A cynic writing for the American newsweekly The Outlook spotted a fat society matron at the Luna Bad one morning who became so engrossed in her companion’s repartee that she failed to notice the soft-boiled egg matter falling from the spoon she held in front of her mouth. The errant yolk drops rolled down her breast, hung from her nipple for an instant, and then splattered over the folds of her stomach.

As the FKK expanded, its softcore Aryan message became more stringent and pronounced. Nacktkultur , lecturers illustrated in pulldown charts, was a natural reversion to pre-Christian folkways. Once the solar rays of the Nordic sky alone strengthened and healed the warrior nation. German tribes spent most of their summer daylight hours naked and carefree until evil missionaries from the south forcibly covered their bodies in shame. The awakening of Aryan might required a restoration of ancient forest practices.

Another German Nationalist, Hans Surén, pulled the reactionary Nacktkulturists even farther to the right. In his Berlin studio and influential publications, Surén proposed a cult of the sun and the naked male body. A celebrated officer from the German colony of the Cameroon, Surén instilled his followers with strict military discipline and designed a vigorous system of gymnastic drills. For Surén, Nacktkultur living was not a therapy for the weak and undernourished but a means of soldierly conditioning and sun worship. The salvation of the German people did not depend upon weekend armies of nature-lovers and naked sunbathers; it demanded a race of toned and greased-up supermen. Surén’s first book Man and the Sun (1924) sold over 235,000 copies and was reissued in 68 editions by 1941. Despite its unmistakable homoerotic imagery—floppy-dicked muscle-men wrestling bright-eyed boys on the grassy plain— Man and the Sun was a favorite Aryan read for the Hitler faithful and Nazi culture-mavens.

Between Naked Marxism and Naked Fascism stood the bulk of the Berlin Nacktkultur supporters. They came from solid middle-class backgrounds and equated nudity with recreation and pleasure. The first Territory established for Berlin’s nude hedonists was Fritz Gerlach’s “New Sunland.” Unlike the FKK Free Sunland, from which it seceded, the New Sunland had few rules or political slogans tacked to birch trees. Hanging over its admission table in front was a poster declaiming: “HAPPINESS—the Imposed Order of the Day.” Instead of shaming boys out of their erections or stealing away in “fuck huts,” New Sunlanders were encouraged to display their affections quite openly. All in all, the atmosphere in the New Sunland was unpretentious and pleasant, like the nudists themselves.

Less respectable was Hans Heinz Rassow’s “Naked Club,” which limited its membership to only the most beautiful and socially-connected youths. Meeting in Rassow’s spacious Berlin West quarters, the Naked Club clique traveled en masse to Wandervogel sites, where they swam, hiked, sang folk songs, and generally partied nude in the woods.

Charly Straesser, a sometime participant in New Sunland League and the Rassow group, decided to create his own nude Territory on Lake Motzen in 1924. He called it “Birkenheide.” Here Nacktkulturists could do anything they pleased. There were no official-looking identity cards, annual fees, psychological questionnaires, lessons in hygiene, group diets, campfire anthems, or political-ethnic profiles. Birkenheide’s nudists weren’t even required to have fun.

Photographers and gawkers who refused to disrobe were not admitted to Birkenheide. Anyone else was welcome. Patrons merely had to pay at the gate and agree to perform a short work assignment during their stay. Consequently, Birkenheide had the most varied and unconventional nudists. Straight perverts and gay men conducted their consensual activities unimpeded. Gigolos from the Resi and Femina nightclubs found Birkenheide most congenial to their daytime occupation. And Berliners out for a nonurban, fresh-air Bummel swore by the place. Charly Straesser’s invention was a bit of libertarian paradise. It prospered until Berlin’s Nacktkultur societies and Territories were reorganized as National Socialist institutions.■