Depending on an outsider’s personal convictions, FKK adherents can illustrate either that Germans are complete cranks, or that the country is a prudery-free paradise. But it would be a mistake to assume that Germany’s tolerance of public nudity is uncontested. In the past month, a ban on public nudity has been confirmed for a popular bathing lake in the country’s south, and anglers are campaigning to ban naked sunbathing at another lake nearby—a ban that now holds more or less across the region. Last summer saw bathers of both sexes at a clothing-optional lake in western Germany jeered by disapproving men who had apparently come to the area with harassment in mind. The head of the agency that runs Berlin’s swimming pools and numerous bathing lakes has noted that the popularity of naked swimming has plummeted in recent years, and he cites friction with the city’s less naturism-friendly tourists as a possible cause.
That doesn’t mean FKK is dying out. Instead, social and technological change is reshaping habits, and locations for public nudity are being regulated by law. Cameraphones and social media are chipping away at naturists’ sense of their own anonymity, while tourism and Germany’s growing multiculturalism are affecting popular attitudes in complex ways. But before we look at how things are changing, we need to look at how a practice that would seem relatively taboo in contemporary North America became so widely accepted in the first place. [...]
The official beginning of naturism’s modern German revival, however, dates to 1898, when the first naturist association was founded in the city of Essen. Intertwined with 20th-century movements aspiring to promote public health, the idea in an age of heavy clothing and smoky urban air was primarily to help people escape from unhealthy, polluted cities. Their nakedness was a departure from everyday convention, just as their actual bodies broke with routine by leaving built-up areas to discover and bond with nature. [...]
Legally, public nudity is not an offense in Germany, but people can be sanctioned for “harassment of the general public” over complaints or provocations, such as walking down the street naked outside of a special naturist event. This is left up to local authorities’ discretion, but beyond Bavaria, where rules about where nudity is and isn’t permissible were largely thrashed out in 2013, people tend to play it by ear. Germany’s fondness for bylaws clarifying what public spaces should be used for helps avoid conflicts. German parks often have clearly demarcated spaces for different activities. Nudity in an area set aside for sports would be unacceptable, but would be far more tolerated in a designated Liegewiese—a “lying down meadow” that parks often signpost as places for sunbathing.
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