Light Friends

Swedes practice nudism with erotic grace, the French with gay abandon; British nudists even manage to shed the stiff upper lip. Among West Germans, unzipping has become a solemn Teutonic cult whose practitioners rarely even wear a smile. Banned by the Nazis as "one of the greatest dangers to German morality and culture.'' nudism has enjoyed a spectacular boom since the end of World War II. As prosperous Germans have been able to afford more and better clothes, they yearned all the more to take them off--except, of course, in austerely Communist East Germany, where even collective nudism is verboten.

In 1949 there were only 1000 members of the German Association for Free Body Culture; today there are some 50,000, as well as several hundred thousand freelance cultists who loll in the buff on the 80 officially sanctioned nudist beaches specially set aside for them by the West German government. Of the organized German nudists, most are laborers, tradesmen and white-collar workers. But not all. Clad only in signet ring and cigar, some of Germany's richest and most famed industrialists also frolic in the buff at exclusive North Sea beaches. What they all have in common, explains an earnest West German sociologist, is a need to escape from the tedium of the affluent society--"the craving to have something that everyone else doesn't have--or vice versa in this case." Nudism in Germany centers on the family. A husband can rarely become a card-carrying nudist unless his wife also joins the Free Body Culture Association.

Single sun worshippers are put through a long probation period before becoming fully unfledged members, thus ensuring that they do not join merely to play hide and peek. Despite the obstacles, recruiting is easy. Several years ago, a U.S. Air Force pilot crash-landed near a nudist beach, took one look around as he climbed out of his plane, and immediately started peeling.

German nudists address each other as Lichtfreund (friend of light), scorn normal bathing areas where clothes are worn as "textile" beaches. Broad-beamed male and female nudists delight in taking group setting-up exercises, sail, water-ski and throw cocktail parties in the buff. The nudists' chief foe is the Roman Catholic Church, which says that nude bathing beaches "are places where immorality is furthered.'' Light friends vehemently deny this charge, say that the reason for the rise in nudism is that "we feel less observed when we're naked." Elsewhere in Europe this summer, Teutonic tourists in the raw have been all too well observed; on the Riviera, police in helicopters and afoot have been hard pressed to keep them in clothes. However, they have settled one question that has long tickled European imaginations: most Germans look better with their clothes off than with their Lederhosen on.

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