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Among the Nudists - Early Naturism: Home Farm Books
Among the Nudists - Early Naturism: Home Farm Books
Among the Nudists - Early Naturism: Home Farm Books
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Among the Nudists - Early Naturism: Home Farm Books

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Originally published in London 1931. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Home Farm Books are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork A study of early nudism or naturism in Europe and America. The first book providing firm evidence that the enjoyment of nakedness does not emanate from cranks, aesthetes or emotionally unstable people, but from athletic, out of door folk with plenty of energy and the wish for a healthier and happier life. Contains black and white vintage photographs of nudists. Contents Include: Nacktkultur Assails Us. Arrival at the land of the naked men. Initiation. The beach without bathing suits. Morning gymnastics. A dance at the inn. Hamburg-Nudity among the working classes. French Nudists and Naturists. A Chateau in Normandy. The spread of Nudism in Europe. The Philosophy of Nudism. America and Nudity. Keywords: Farm Books Europe And America Dating Nudism Emotionally Unstable Nudists Vintage Photographs Bathing Suits Nakedness Naturism Cranks Naked Men 1900s Naturists Normandy Gymnastics Initiation Nudity Black And White Artwork
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJan 9, 2013
ISBN9781447487388
Among the Nudists - Early Naturism: Home Farm Books

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    Among the Nudists - Early Naturism - Frances Merrill

    I

    NACKTKULTUR ASSAILS US

    THE LONG ANTICIPATED REST AND RELAXATION OF A SLOW North Atlantic crossing in early summer had distinctly not been realized. Instead, between an altogether unseasonable arctic atmosphere and days of storm and seasickness, we landed in Germany, the starting point of our long-planned visit to Europe, in anything but the proper physical condition for travelling. And this after we both had worked so hard through the first spring heat to get away! It was disheartening.

    But to Herr Koenig, the young German who had received our letters of introduction in Hamburg, our plight was easily remedied. All we needed was rest and—gymnastics.

    A vacation spent in doing setting-up exercises scarcely appealed to us, but the idea of rest seemed reasonable. We were thinking vaguely of postponing our tour by a few days, perhaps a week, when he startled us by proposing that we give ourselves two weeks, if not a month. He suggested a place up near the Baltic, a short way from Hamburg, the Freilichtpark of Klingberg, where he had just spent his own two weeks’ vacation; he could make all the necessary arrangements for us, and the cost would be reasonable.

    Certainly his own physical condition was a fine testimonial: clear blue eyes laughed out of a round German face that was burned to a russet brown; his whole being seemed to exude health and vitality. When we asked for a few details about this place so wunderbar, he hastened off—with a haste that at once gave us misgivings—for a big album of snapshots he had taken.

    Our hearts sank. While he arranged chairs so as to seat himself between us, we glanced hopelessly at one another with sickly smiles, prepared for at least a half hour’s boredom of looking at vacation pictures, in all likelihood so fuzzy and indistinct that they would have to be explained.

    He opened the album.

    Good God! The first page was taken up by a single photograph—one might well say a full-length portrait—at least 8 × 10, apparently an enlargement, of Herr Koenig himself, leaping high in the air to catch a ball, and—naked as a newborn sparrow!

    We, the guests, each heard the other gasp and, without seeing, felt the other blush.

    Schön, nicht war? murmured Herr Koenig rapturously, as usual forgetting his English in his emotion.

    Fortunately his comment, though in form an interrogation, called for no reply from us. We were deathly silent.

    The effect of that first picture was staggering, stunning. Had we been the least prepared for it, at all forewarned, we could have reacted in some fashion or other; but coming so unexpected, all-at-once and out of the black (of that album), it nearly paralysed us. Never would we have suspected Herr Koenig of exhibitionism.

    Happily our friend was too enthralled to notice our confusion. Completely engrossed in the picture, he was for a few moments quite unconscious of even our presence; he was captivated by the sheer beauty of the thing—a beauty quite lost on us, however. This gave us time to recover.

    And then, as the pages were turned, came other pictures—hundreds of them, it seemed—but smaller ones, several to the page. All were of nudes, unadorned by so much as a fig leaf, taken in the open air, singly or in groups, of both sexes, all ages, sizes, heights, beautiful and ugly, a whole galaxy of human forms in every conceivable posture and position, in action and repose.

    Later we recalled how, when there appeared a picture of an especially beautiful young girl and Herr Koenig would demand, Herrlich, nicht war? we wondered at his brazen depravity.

    So this was the place and the way he would have us go to rest and recuperate! The idea of such a thing was just a bit too fantastic. We felt as we might were someone to say to us, Come, step into my rocket-ship and we’ll go to Mars for tea. It seemed totally unreal to us.

    In spite of his arguments and urging, we finally broke away, pleading the need of time in which to make a decision.

    Decision! As if that required any time on our part! The whole business was too preposterous to be even considered. We left with mingled emotions of anger and pity, uncertain whether his proposal was an insult or merely a sign of his aberration.

    We were barely out of Herr Koenig’s house and again on the streets of Hamburg when we were confronted with magazines which, judged from the pictures ornamenting the covers, were devoted to the nude. A few such we had noticed the day before, as soon as we had got off the boat train; but we had then taken them to be a special product for sale to the tourist. With our limited knowledge of the native tongue we had surmised the pornographic appeals subtly implied by the voice of the vendors who, thrusting their wares before our eyes, repeated again and again their Schön, nicht war? Sehr schön! Now we saw these things as something else, a native product for native consumption, for they seemed to be on sale everywhere.

    We had heard not a few people in the past condemn the Germans for being addicted to this sort of thing, for blatant obscenity, views we had always tended to discount as being based more on national prejudice than a knowledge of facts. These magazines, however, seemed a substantiation, for they were not only offered in abundance and in a diversified choice, but openly, without the least fear or even pretended surreptition.

    What a paradise this for an Anthony Comstock, for the John Sumners, and all of the Society for the Suppression of Vice!

    And yet, these cover pages, now that we came to notice them, did have a singular beauty. They seemed to lack the insinuating naughtiness of implication and coquetry that characterize our own pornographic art. In fact, these pictures left nothing whatever to suggestion. They were brutally frank in their display of everything æsthetic and otherwise pertaining to the human animal.

    But theirs was a naïve sort of frankness. They were pictures generally of beautiful young men and women at play in woods and fields, of usually less beautiful fathers and mothers with children of various ages, engaged in games or bathing in sunny waters and in the open air. There was something honest and clean about them that attracted us in spite of ourselves; we were inclined to buy one and examine it. Perhaps it would explain our friend’s perversion. But we hesitated, half ashamed and afraid that after all it was nothing but obscenity.

    Our interest grew as more and more of these publications were proffered us, not only by the news vendors of every street and park but at the news-stand in our own hotel. It was not until we stopped before the window of a large and obviously reputable bookstore in the business centre of the city, and there found a whole collection prominently displayed—at least twelve or fifteen different titles—that our curiosity overcame our scepticism. Furtively we entered and, with simulated casualness, thumbed one or two of them; then, selecting a couple of the least pretentious, we nervously paid the price asked of us, hurriedly rolled them—covers innermost—and fled with them and our guilty consciences.

    Back in the seclusion of our hotel, door securely locked, we proceeded to examine our purchases. What we found was not the pornographic feast that we had suspected, but rather a collection of almost amusingly ingenuous pictures of unclothed German children and adults, dancing and in repose, in the most pastoral surroundings, adolescents gambolling in idyllic settings, and whole shoals of human fish stranded and lying scattered on the hot sands of summer shores.

    With much thumbing of dictionaries, we proceeded to investigate the generous accompaniment of printed text. Here again we found the same innocent freedom from any sort of innuendo. In fact it had a distinctly moral tone. It was downright and sincere propaganda for nudity, advocated for the healthy as for the ill, as a preventive as well as a cure, and on moral and psychological no less than purely physical grounds. Nacktkultur (literally culture of nakedness), the whole German nudist movement and philosophy, was spread before us.

    Of course we had heard of nudism abroad, heard tales and read newspaper accounts, but they had been generally the products of exaggerated rumour or the strained imagination of raconteur or of reporters pressed to fill allotted columns of space, stories obviously sprung from either a gossipy taste for the scandalous or a flair for the sensational. Invariably they had dealt with the subject in the most distant and vaguest manner possible. They had depicted some single group, some isolated camp or centre, and treated it as something either unique or a radical instance—an awful example—of the goings-on in some far-off land and of a foreign people, the victims of a warped psychology. Never had we heard of nudism as a movement, or of nudity as a practice based on a rounded philosophy of life.

    Here, on the other hand, we found arguments favouring it, presented seriously and documented by citations from seemingly impeccable authorities in the fields of both science and philosophy. Innumerable were the benefits that these articles attributed to nakedness. They stressed the need of the human organism, particularly of the glandular and nervous systems, for sun- and airbaths, and the superiority of exercises taken unclad to sports or gymnastics practised with even the scantiest athletic costumes.

    Clothes through the ages, the unhygienic and unæsthetic garments prescribed by fashions, were discussed, with excursions into anthropology and history, to trace the origins of the sense of modesty and shame. From the varying standards of different cultures, the writers demonstrated that nudity was not shameful in some of the greatest periods of mankind—for instance, in the highly civilized era of Greece, or in the deeply religious Middle Ages; in short, that modesty has no connexion with morality.

    Total nudity is chaste, they repeated; it is the suggestion of semi-undress that is indecent and harmful. Hence nudity in common, without distinction of age or sex, is innocuous; nay more, they argued, it is morally profitable. Destroying the secrecy and mystery of sex, it does away with unhealthy desires and perversions, and makes easy the task of giving the young a rational attitude towards sexual matters. The race will profit æsthetically as well, for when people must show their bodies in public they cannot remain complacent about defects and deformities that clothes can mask.

    The improvement of the race—that was the goal of Nacktkultur. It was not a return to barbarism and a state of nature, but the freeing of man from what is baneful in modern life. The ideal was nothing more startling than the old mens sana in corpore sano. The means alone were radical. The whole philosophy might be summed up in the phrase of one writer: Health, beauty, and purity through nudity and light.

    We suddenly realized the significance of the name of Herr Koenig’s proposed Freilichtpark. It did not mean a park of free light in the sense of having gratuitous lighting, free gas or electricity; it meant a park in which the open light of day, the sunlight—and incidentally the open air—was free to play upon the human organism. Likewise, the term Lichtfreunde, so often repeated in all the articles we read, distinguished the friends of this movement for open, or free, light and air.

    Herr Koenig’s suggestion no longer seemed so monstrous. Impressed with at least the apparent sincerity and high purpose of the apostles of the new creed, if with nothing else in their doctrines, we were half inclined to learn more of their practice, to judge for ourselves the miraculous blessings they promised, and to decide whether they themselves were true prophets or—what seemed more likely—the fanatical followers of false gods. At any rate we were ashamed of what we had thought when Koenig first revealed the new life to us, and we blushed at the memory of our blushes.

    Humbly and apologetically we went back to him—not as converted sinners, however, but as open-minded agnostics. We would not commit ourselves to stay at this nudist colony—this Freilichtpark in the obscure place, Klingberg bei Lübeck—but we offered to go have a look at it.

    Good! Herr Koenig pronounced emphatically. "You will like it and be very grateful to me for sending you. It is much better than going to a Kur place, like Baden Baden, and not nearly so expensive."

    Yes, we agreed doubtfully, "but we’re not sure we shall like Nacktkultur. It’s entirely new to us, you know."

    Of course you will, he insisted. "Everybody does—once he tries it. If all the opponents of Nacktkultur could be got into a Freilichtpark, undressed, just for a day, by evening there wouldn’t be any opponents."

    He followed up this extravagant assertion by repeating that we ought to stay there for several weeks.

    Well, we conceded, we’ll agree to stay a week or ten days—that is, provided we can stand it after the first look.

    Herr Koenig laughed heartily at the idea of anyone fleeing from such an innocent thing as a nudist park.

    KLINGBERG FREILICHTPARK

    II

    ARRIVAL AT THE LAND OF NAKED MEN

    A FEW MINUTES OUT OF HAMBURG AND WE WERE AWARE of being in old Holstein. Gentle low hills of sandy soil covered with surging fields of golden grain, pastures of the most vivid green sprinkled with flowers of brilliant yellow and white and blue, and tiny hamlets, mere huddles at crossroads, of a few old red-brick houses trimmed in gleaming white and crowned with high pointed roofs of thatch. A pastoral countryside, a beautiful land indeed, in a quiet peaceful way, that should prove a balm to shattered city nerves, American city nerves.

    If one could but forget the ordeal ahead!

    Three Germans shared our compartment, a woman and two men, of peasant types with the air of burghers. All were healthy, rosy-skinned animals, and strong. Were they nudists?

    The buxom Fräulein with the wealth of straw-coloured hair wound around her head, who got on at the next station: was she too bound for the Klingberg Freilichtpark? She vaguely resembled the nude feminine rope-jumper gracing the front cover of Lachendes Leben which we had seen on display at all the news-stands of Hamburg the day before.

    Did we dare appear before such strangers, clad only in light and air? Could we walk bravely, if not calmly, without a weakening of the knees or a burning blush, before these people? Or would all our Anglo-Saxon heritages rise up to overwhelm us and send us slinking away, terrified by guilt and shame? Should we be able to stand erect, as humans built in the image of God, with these people in their modern Garden of Eden? And if we could, would it be only to find their paradise a sham, a pretext for debauchery that would sicken us?

    Such thoughts filled our minds as the country-side sped by our window; every perception came to us associated with this one idea.

    An hour and twenty minutes brought us to Lübeck, The City of Golden Towers and the chief old Hanseatic port on the Baltic, where we changed trains for another thirty minutes’ ride to Dorf Gleschendorf, further up the coast.

    The country took on a still more rustic, a primitive appearance, was somewhat rougher and more heavily wooded, with dense forests of beech and pine whose branches brushed the windows of the little train. Paved roads gave way to sandy lanes set deep between hedges of hawthorn, that were occasionally bank full of droves of sheep driven by dogs and slow plodding peasants in caps and corduroys. All was idyllic, a perfect setting for the scenes we had found portrayed in the nudist magazines.

    But meanwhile dull grey clouds had covered again the sunny morning sky under which he had left Hamburg, and the breeze was cold with the damp of the sea just beyond the low row of hills. We felt still less inclined to lay aside our clothes and gambol on the grassy slopes. We closed the window of our compartment and turned up the collars of our coats.

    As the little train came to a stop at the station of Dorf Gleschendorf, we nervously grabbed our bags and left the compartment, glancing furtively along the platform to see if our golden-haired Fräulein was likewise getting off—and, to see how many people took notice of our descent and smiled in full knowledge of our destination. We felt self-conscious, guilty, not a little ashamed.

    Ist dis Mister Merrill?

    We turned to shake the hand of Herr Paul Zimmermann, the owner of the Freilichtpark, an alert little man with a shaven face and bald head as brown as a hazelnut, and as clean and smooth.

    Strangely enough, he was in knickers and jacket; we had half expected—or feared—to find him nude.

    Taking our bags and leading the way to his wagonette, he chatted, in a combination of German, French, and an occasional English phrase or word, and immediately much of our fears and nervousness began to vanish. He was friendly and genuinely human, this little nudist, and we felt drawn to him as to a kind soul in an ugly world.

    It was a cold twenty minutes’ ride from Dorf Gleschendorf station to Klingberg on the high back seat of the wagonette, along winding roads felly deep in sand that showed no track of an auto. The sky now was a leaden hue; the wind across the fields and heath was sharp. Meanwhile we were regaled with animated talk by Herr Zimmermann, who from the seat ahead pointed out and named the woods and hills and old landmarks along the way.

    We learned that he had been twenty-five years building his Freilichtpark, and that it still was but the rough beginning of what he planned. He happily told us that we should find English spoken at his place—by a Chinese gentleman, Mr. T. M. Wang, of Shanghai, formerly in consular service in America. In fact, we were going to find the Landhaus Zimmermann, he assured us, truly an international institution, being patronized by men and women from not only all parts of Germany but Belgium, England, France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Australia, and the United States.

    After a sharp turn the road dipped and bordered a little lake, perhaps two or two and a half miles wide, surrounded by wooded hills. This, the Grosser Pönitzer See, our host informed us, was where his guests swam, and he proudly pointed out on the opposite shore the clump of trees and a pier which were

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