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Reviewed by:
  • Naked Germany: Health, Race and the Nation
  • Sander L. Gilman
Chad Ross . Naked Germany: Health, Race and the Nation. Oxford: Berg, 2005. xi + 239 pp. Ill. $79.95 (cloth, 1-85973-861-3), $26.95 (paperbound, 1-85973-866-4).

The publisher graces the cover of Naked Germany with a double image of a naked young woman running across a meadow in an ecstatic pose. This would be enough to lead one to pick up this volume for its purely prurient interest—but nakedness is not nudity, as Kenneth Clarke taught us decades ago, and one reader's prurience is another's scholarly interest.

Chad Ross has provided what is clearly a first take on the "FKK" (nudism) movement, from its late nineteenth-century antecedents in imperial Germany to its contemporary significance. The details of the origin of nudism in Germany remain legend, and Ross's work has not been able to convert them into any type of factual time line. Clearly part of the Youth Movement of the 1890s, nudism was a response both to the sexual conformity of the age and to the age's claim about "natural" health, something that we seem to accept today without much thought. Ross chronicles this view through its high point in the 1920s and the implication of nudism in Weimar Germany as a "liberal" or even "left-wing" activity.

Yet nudism was clearly also the stuff of the conservative middle classes. Thus in July 1912 Franz Kafka went to Rudolph Just's naturopathic sanatorium "Jungborn," in the Harz Mountains, to cure his aching "heart" and his "pathological nervous condition" (see my biography Franz Kafka [London: Reaktion, 2005]). Just, the son of the author of the best-selling Return to Nature! and mail-order purveyor of health foods, subscribed to virtually all of the diet and exercise fads of the moment, and he was also an advocate of nudism. Here Kafka drew the line and became known according to his own account as "the man in the swim trunks." This was not just prudishness, but a sense that he did not want to reveal his circumcised body in a place that had a New Testament in every room. Given the reactionary nature of the place, he was probably right to keep on his trunks—and eat the vegetarian diet!

Nudism became a problem for the Nazis, who in general, following Hitler's own proclivities, were in favor of a "healthy" life style—no meat, no tobacco, no Jews. (Kafka was right!) Ross is able to more fully account for the Nazi ambivalence and track the meanings associated with nudism until the end of the war. His monograph gives much shorter shrift to the postwar reappearance of nudism and its explosion as a healthy, moral activity, in opposition to the barely controlled public nakedness of the 1960s. Its relationship, from the 1920s, to sexual hygiene movements meant that it was a counter to alternative lifestyles, while setting the model for them.

Ross's book is a good analysis of a complex of issues that continue to haunt not only contemporary Germany but also much of the new Europe. How is individual health to be assured so as to foster a healthy nation? Nudism was one answer; slow food has become another alternative today. But is either understandable without comprehending their function in constructing images of the competent national state, even in the twenty-first century? Ross provides a good model by which we [End Page 485] can examine other alternative lifestyle movements with notions of a "healthy" national (or even continental) state.

Sander L. Gilman
Emory University
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