Read Online Naked at Lunch by Mark Haskell Smith - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Mark Haskell Smith
Ads: Link
keep his pants on. They attempted to ban Die Nacktheit and, when that failed, took to regularly harassing its author, stopping him on the street and dropping by his house to try to catch him in the throes of some indecent high jinks so they could discredit him and lock him up. But as much as his message annoyed the authorities, there was something profound in his writings that resonated with the deep German desire—or perhaps deep human desire—for a romantic connection to nature and a spirituality unrelated to organized religion.
But while an artist like Ernst Kirchner was experimenting with “impulsive love-making and naked cavorting” in his Dresden studio, 18 Ungewitter was after something more pure. He was considered something of a killjoy by his critics, a vegetarian who eschewed alcohol, coffee, tea, milk, and sugar. He thought public dancing was immoral and railed against the publication of trashy literature. ******** To Ungewitter, nakedness was a panacea, a cure for almost every physical ailment, spiritual turmoil, and societal problem that afflicted humanity at the turn of the century. Even masturbation could be cured by nudism as “nakedness is calming on the sensual drive.” Which, in my limited experience, I don’t believe for a second. Everyone knows masturbation is cured by orgasm.
Revolutionary ideas are a response, a revolutionary needs something to revolt against—Thomas Jefferson had King George III, Karl Marx had capitalism, Charles Crawford had Victorian repression, and, nearly a century later, the Sex Pistols would have disco. For Ungewitter, it was the increasing industrialization and urbanization of Germany. Heavy industry and mass production were in full swing, and Germans had moved from a life spent frolicking in bucolic pastoralia to one toiling in toxic factories and overcrowded cities. A robust agrarian lifestyle was replaced by decadent urbanity, and the populace had become obsessed by materialism, debauchery, and fashion. Ungewitter saw this as a problem. In a later work, Kultur und Nacktheit: Eine Forderung ( Culture and Nudity: A Demand ), Ungewitter described his fellow countrymen with an acid dollop of health freak snark: “men walk about with reddened, fixed, glassy eyes, bald heads, breathing only in gasps, with a sagging gut and spongy, flabby muscles, behind whom women, first as corseted marionettes, later in the greatest corpulence, waddle.” 19 Ungewitter was reacting to a society that, in his eyes, had become morally rotten and physically weak. 20 American historian Chad Ross, in his excellent book Naked Germany: Health, Race and the Nation , distills Ungewitter’s rage succinctly: “Germany, bluntly put, had become too intellectual.” 21
After World War I something strange happened in Germany: nudism became hugely popular. As Ross puts it, “during the Weimar Republic nudism became a mass cultural phenomenon in which millions of Germans participated, whether as members of nudist leagues or more simply (and far more likely) as weekend beachgoers.” 22
Defeated in war, their economy wrecked and burdened with reparations, Germans needed some relief. Nudism let the German people have fun again. They hiked through the forests and swam in the lakes and rivers, embracing the healing rays of the sun, all the while naked. There are even photographs from that period of German men and women skiing naked in the snow. Amazingly, they are smiling.
And it wasn’t just an outdoorsy phenomenon. Ungewitter was joined by authors like Hans Surén, whose 1924 book Der Mensch und die Sonne ( People and the Sun ) was reprinted seventy-three times in its first year, and Heinrich Pudor ******** on the bestseller list, and magazines devoted to Nacktkultur began springing up across the country. These were lifestyle magazines that used nudism as a platform to promote a wide range of topics from Eastern religions to poetry and dance, sex reform and politics.
The 1920s saw dozens of new
But while an artist like Ernst Kirchner was experimenting with “impulsive love-making and naked cavorting” in his Dresden studio, 18 Ungewitter was after something more pure. He was considered something of a killjoy by his critics, a vegetarian who eschewed alcohol, coffee, tea, milk, and sugar. He thought public dancing was immoral and railed against the publication of trashy literature. ******** To Ungewitter, nakedness was a panacea, a cure for almost every physical ailment, spiritual turmoil, and societal problem that afflicted humanity at the turn of the century. Even masturbation could be cured by nudism as “nakedness is calming on the sensual drive.” Which, in my limited experience, I don’t believe for a second. Everyone knows masturbation is cured by orgasm.
Revolutionary ideas are a response, a revolutionary needs something to revolt against—Thomas Jefferson had King George III, Karl Marx had capitalism, Charles Crawford had Victorian repression, and, nearly a century later, the Sex Pistols would have disco. For Ungewitter, it was the increasing industrialization and urbanization of Germany. Heavy industry and mass production were in full swing, and Germans had moved from a life spent frolicking in bucolic pastoralia to one toiling in toxic factories and overcrowded cities. A robust agrarian lifestyle was replaced by decadent urbanity, and the populace had become obsessed by materialism, debauchery, and fashion. Ungewitter saw this as a problem. In a later work, Kultur und Nacktheit: Eine Forderung ( Culture and Nudity: A Demand ), Ungewitter described his fellow countrymen with an acid dollop of health freak snark: “men walk about with reddened, fixed, glassy eyes, bald heads, breathing only in gasps, with a sagging gut and spongy, flabby muscles, behind whom women, first as corseted marionettes, later in the greatest corpulence, waddle.” 19 Ungewitter was reacting to a society that, in his eyes, had become morally rotten and physically weak. 20 American historian Chad Ross, in his excellent book Naked Germany: Health, Race and the Nation , distills Ungewitter’s rage succinctly: “Germany, bluntly put, had become too intellectual.” 21
After World War I something strange happened in Germany: nudism became hugely popular. As Ross puts it, “during the Weimar Republic nudism became a mass cultural phenomenon in which millions of Germans participated, whether as members of nudist leagues or more simply (and far more likely) as weekend beachgoers.” 22
Defeated in war, their economy wrecked and burdened with reparations, Germans needed some relief. Nudism let the German people have fun again. They hiked through the forests and swam in the lakes and rivers, embracing the healing rays of the sun, all the while naked. There are even photographs from that period of German men and women skiing naked in the snow. Amazingly, they are smiling.
And it wasn’t just an outdoorsy phenomenon. Ungewitter was joined by authors like Hans Surén, whose 1924 book Der Mensch und die Sonne ( People and the Sun ) was reprinted seventy-three times in its first year, and Heinrich Pudor ******** on the bestseller list, and magazines devoted to Nacktkultur began springing up across the country. These were lifestyle magazines that used nudism as a platform to promote a wide range of topics from Eastern religions to poetry and dance, sex reform and politics.
The 1920s saw dozens of new
Similar Books
