There Goes This Art of Manliness: Naturism and Racial Hygiene in ...

Journal of Sport History, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring, 1991)
cure against the population decline and important for the benefit of racial
hygiene, the opposition was mainly restricted to the Catholic church. 137 On the
whole it was a protestant northern city movement reaching in one way or
another half of the German population, although the amount of organized
nudists was limited.
In terms of the sex/gender system it can be safely assumed that social nudity
did make quite a difference at the beginning. To look at and feel the body of a
comrade of the opposite sex, be it male or female, had an emancipatory effect
particularly for young men and women. But the dialectic of the matter should
not be overlooked: under the guise of racial hygiene an otherwise indecent
activity became sanctioned-but racial hygiene in itself looks at women and
men only in their sexual functions, it thus reduced women all the more to their
reproductive biological function. When the various branches of social nudity
were coordinated into the Nazi state that was openly spoken out:
German women are not urged to be mere breeding machines. The full exercise of
the reproductive function is regarded not as breeding only, but breeding for
quality. A woman’s life is held to be full and socially useful only when her
children are strong, healthy, intelligent and racially pure. 138
For men social nudity also made a difference: Sexual pretense, symbols, and
imagination became less important than the reality of the sexes. It had to be
understood that women would no longer accept anybody and anything without a
chance to compare. Physical make-believe as part of the art of manliness lost its
importance in the social nudist groups. Men, women, and children alike had the
feeling of being on more equal terms than before when being in the nude
together.
137. Gesetz und Freiheit. (Früher “Deutsche Freikörperkultur”) (May 1936), 123.
138. Clifford Kirkpatrick, Nazi Germany. Its Women and Family Life (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1930),
174.
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