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Reviewed by:
  • Naked Germany: Health, Race and the Nation
  • Heikki Lempa
Naked Germany: Health, Race and the Nation. By Chad Ross. Oxford: Berg, 2005. Pp. 288. $34.95 (paper).

Chad Ross has written an interesting book on German nude culture. As with most interesting books, the causes for this interest are also causes for some major challenges. Since the beginning of the twentieth century nude culture has been such a palpable presence in German society that the scarcity of scholarly attention to it is a major surprise. And now that it has [End Page 532] been discovered it eludes clear categorization: it does not follow the flow of political or economic changes, and it does not sit neatly in an established scholarly discourse. There is a very solid scholarship on the history of German sports (Svenja Goltermann, Christiane Eisenberg, Michael Krüger) and medicine (Ute Frevert); there is a growing literature on the history of alternative medicine (Michael Hau) and dancing (Karl Toepfer); and there is an increasing interest in the history of sexuality (George Mosse, Atina Grossmann). But none of these fields seems to cover what Chad Ross tries to capture. In the center of his attention is the body—the naked body—and its history in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. But besides Henning Eichberg’s early efforts at moving bodies, there is hardly any systematic scholarship on the history of the German body.1 Yet, arguably, Germany is the cultural realm that has been fascinated by the body, its practices, and its education perhaps more than any other realm in the Western world over the past 250 years. It is this void and novelty that explains some of the undeniable strengths as well as unavoidable weaknesses of Ross’s book.

Ross’s thesis takes its departure from modernization. “Nudism,” according to Ross, “was not an anti-modern reaction to Wilhelmine industrialization and urbanization or even the expansion of democracy in the Weimar Republic. Rather, nudism was a way to reconcile and harmonize the deep divisions in the German nation, often exacerbated by industry, politics and religion.” Moreover, “nudist ideology was . . . the means to . . . achieve the larger goal of creating a classless, nudist racial utopia” (11). Although Ross’s take is quite legitimate and supported by the rich evidence of his book, we are still left with questions that should be explored. What does Ross mean by modernization? Is it embedded in the classic triad of industrialization, urbanization, and democratization, or could it include alternative [End Page 533] paths that might even use elements that we normally consider antimodern or premodern? For instance, Ross’s findings of how the ideologues of the nude movement started with a strong rejection of modern medicine but began to embrace it at the end of the 1920s indicate that the question of modernization is not only valid but also important and complicated (76).

The book is divided into seven thematically structured chapters that do not follow a chronological scheme. The first chapter is an attempt at a basic narrative of the German nude movement between 1900 and 1950. The second chapter tackles the politics of the movement and its relationship to political and religious authorities. The third and fourth chapters analyze the medical ideologies of German nude culture. The last three chapters probe a host of themes, including aesthetics, gender, sexuality, and race. As always, a choice between a structural and a chronological approach is a trade-off; either one sacrifices analytical precision, as in the chronological approach, or one misses the opportunities to probe the dynamics of change, as in the structural one. In Ross’s book the understanding of social, political, and cultural change of the nude culture becomes a problem. There is an effort at an overall chronological framework, but since the dynamics of change come from the interplay of politics, class, gender, medicine, and racial thinking (topics that are discussed in thematic chapters), we are, in fact, left with the question, What actually happened to German nude culture between 1900 and 1950, that is, how did it change? This structural problem could have been alleviated by a good editor who weeded out unnecessary repetition...

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