West Germany: 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...