Bodies in Nature: Swimming and Nudism in Weimar Germany

In the aftermath of World War I, outdoor swimming and sunbathing reached unprecedented levels of popularity in Germany. While a range of cultural commentators perceived recreational forms of bathing as useful outlets for the war-weary nation to experience the physical benefits of nature, the growing preponderance of mixed-sex or “communal” bathing spaces for men and women, along with Germany’s burgeoning nudist movement, generated competing notions of the body, gender, and nature among three broad socio-political milieux during the 1920s. Socialists and Communists, including the predominant socialist-proletarian wing of organized nudism, greeted the widespread acceptance of communal bathing and yearning for nature as a welcome shift away from the bourgeois morality of Imperial Germany, towards more equal gender relations and improved health for the working class. On the other hand, moral conservatives—particularly Catholic bishops and lay morality leagues—viewed both communal and nude bathing as reflections of a “neo-pagan Zeitgeist,” which dangerously overemphasized nature and the body while denying the truth of original sin. Members of the völkisch and radical Right, drawing from turn-of-the-century arguments and Germany’s recent colonial experience, disagreed on whether nudism represented an “un-German” return to primitiveness or a chance for racial renewal through nature, but shared the sense that the future of the German “race” was at stake. After 1929, escalating political turmoil spilled over into these spaces of contestation, making public pools and bathing areas staging grounds for what contemporaries in the early 1930s perceived as a broader “culture war” over the future of the nation.