One Hundred Years of Nakedness in German Performance - DocsLib

sign in sign up

<<

Home , Adamites, Nudity, Rudolf Koppitz

One Hundred Years of Nakedness in German Performance

Karl Toepfer

Nothing in theatre elevates the identity of actor over character more completely than nudity. Yet as a performance or spectacle, nudity remains a theatrical phenomenon, a form of masking, insofar as it amplifies desire to discover, to expose something hidden within the body that one cannot discover, as either performer or spectator, through any mediated image of the body. Nudity onstage usually signifies a heightened measure of freedom and trust exchanged between performers and spectators. But here I examine a hierarchy of conditions under which nudity, as a manifestation of “real” presence, undermines not only distinctions between actor and character but distinctions between theatre and “reality.” More precisely, I examine aesthetic strategies by which nudity, as a form of exposure, becomes less and less containable within conventional theatre spaces and urges performers to expose the theatricality of spaces that otherwise seem imperturbably “real.” This essay discusses this un- containability of nude performance from an evolutionary or historical perspective by analyzing nude performance aesthetic strategies in Germany over a 100-year period, from 1893 to 1992, with each strategy ascribing a different political or ideological significance to the power of the naked body to extend the realm of performance deeper into zones of reality considered too “authen- tic” to support (or tolerate) any confusion between nakedness and imperson- ation. The appeal of German Nacktkultur around 1900 rested upon the assumption that the act of displaying one’s nakedness and the act of observing the nakedness of others could form a group or communal activity representing a powerful set of political values. Nudism constituted a mode of performance insofar as it was a communal enterprise that followed a “script,” or at least a constel- lation of conventions or “rules” by which members of the enterprise sought to bring to life a large-scale story of social transformation for which they could claim a significant measure of authorship. Karl Rothschuh contended that German Nacktkultur, as an organized and self-defined phenomenon, existed as early as the 1870s, although he presented little evidence to support the as-

The Drama Review 47, 4 (T180), Winter 2003. Copyright ᭧ 2003 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

144

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 Nakedness 145 sertion (1983:113). But from the outset, supporters of Nacktkultur promoted it in relation to radical images of social reform, and with the performance of group nudity or “naked community” arose the perception even among non- nudists that nudism implied the modeling of a utopian social ideal. Nudism was more than the reform of hygiene; the shared display and observation of naked bodies entailed a reform of sexual morality, family intimacy, diet, education, social class, the legal system, ecological values, and economic priori- ties. Pioneers of the late-19th-century Nacktkultur were apparently offshoots of three intersecting constituencies: (1) The ecological “small garden” (Kleingar- ten) movement that fostered relief from urban degradations by promoting communal, municipal-supported suburban vegetable and flower gardens; (2) the gathering preoccupation with physical education in the schooling of young people; and (3) the rise of preventive medicine to produce a stronger, healthier assertion of national identity than Victorian morality permitted. With the ap- propriate ideological framework, nudism could emerge as the ideal power for achieving this intersection. In 1858, Daniel Moritz Schreber (1808–1861), Professor of Orthopedics at the University of Leipzig, published his Pangymnastikon, which proposed that the body could cure particular ailments, diseases, or deficiencies by performing exercises specific to its physiology and constitution. Schreber supplemented detailed medical explanations and descriptions of the exercises with drawings of the actions prescribed, many of which entailed the use of sus- pended rings. The book, translated into several languages, sold nearly a mil- lion copies in Europe and the United States by 1900 (Schreber 1899; Lewis 1862). The exercises themselves are still effective from a medical-physiological perspective. But the modeling of their performance in the drawings revealed a terminal, unhealthy flaw in mid-19th-century efforts to make bodies healthier and stronger. The models appear absurdly overdressed while exercising, with males wearing wainscots, ties, and boots, and females wearing layers of skirts and blouses (plate 1). The motive for this grotesque inclination to free the body and oppress it at the same time was to preserve the pervasive belief that one could protect and strengthen the body without really looking at it. Na- cktkultur was in large measure the creation of teachers who, charged with im- plementing physical education programs, understood how difficult it was for people to learn to perfect their bodies without looking at them, without treat- ing the body as the dominant aesthetic determinate of identity. But by linking nakedness to the performance of exercises, simple tasks, outdoor recreations, and even mere movement out of doors, nudism appeared as a stupendously radical critique and revision of what most people in Europe regarded as the most advanced or at least industrialized civilization in history. In a 1919 pamphlet, Hugo Peters went so far as to claim that nudism was a form of revolution: the creation of naked, self-governing communities was the most powerful and successful step in realizing the emancipatory transformation of a dysfunctional social reality. These ambitions appeared in the earliest writings of Nacktkultur theorists, beginning with Heinrich Pudor (1865–1943), whose Nackender Mensch (1893) laid an ideological groundwork for German nudism that colored, if not pervaded, subsequent discourse on the theme. Pudor linked the practice of nudism with achieving greater closeness to “nature,” which had the effect of persuading many people that nudism was an activity best performed outdoors, among trees, in meadows, beside lakes, on beaches, within groves, and glorified by sunlight. Nudism, as Pudor explained it, was a liberating response to repressive constraints imposed upon body and mind by pressures of moderni- zation and urbanization. As forces of modernity constantly destabilized the

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 146 Karl Toepfer

1. Heavily clothed performers of physical exercises in Daniel Moritz Schreber’s identity of things and people, nakedness became synonymous with optimum Pangymnastikon authenticity of being. Yet Nacktkultur did not propose that closeness to nature (1862:132). (Courtesy of entailed devising or recovering a simpler way of life. Pudor was a complicated Karl Toepfer) personality, and he saw Nacktkultur as a complicated form of social activism in which the display and observation of nakedness had hardly anything to do with improvised behavior. Nudism was part of a grand plan of social transformation that required its participants to follow a script, to perform their lives according to a new set of conventions. Getting closer to nature meant leading a more disciplined life, and getting naked meant becoming more productive. Pudor clearly associated nudity with improved labor conditions, greater labor efﬁciency, increased labor output, and greater satisfaction in performing labor, for he recognized that accommodating the conditions of naked labor involved a major transformation of workplace thinking and environmental conditions. He therefore advocated the coordination of nudity with a rigorous scheduling of group tasks like hiking, exercising, eating, reading, wood chop- ping, carpentry, music playing, shoveling and raking, swimming, and gardening. His early pamphlets attempted to diminish the tendency to associate nakedness with sickness or unhealthy vulnerability, a tendency reinforced by medical literature that promoted nude sunbathing as a therapy for tuberculosis and other ailments. But nudity for Pudor was never an end in itself; it was always a fundamental component within a larger effort to revise the conditions of modern civilization. He integrated his discourses on nudism into a monumental intellectual framework that unfolded mainly through his incredibly proliﬁc publications on a bewildering range of themes: music, education, aesthetics, Teutonicmy-

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 Nakedness 147 thology, applied arts, modernist art, folklore, nationalism, economics, agri- culture, and German geography.1 His pamphlet on Bisexualitat (1906c), for example, argued that bisexuality was a physiological rather than psychological condition defining the entire human species, and this condition became evident when one looked often enough at bodies in regard to particular details shared by men and women. Awareness of these peculiarities considerably diminished the conventional inclination to see bodies as homosexual, heterosexual, or asexual. And because of Pudor’s ambition to link nudism with powerful patriotic motives and amplified national self-esteem, it was easy, if somewhat misleading, to identify nudism with the politics of racial hygiene and the vir- ulent anti-Semitism that Pudor espoused in numerous publications into the 1930s. Nevertheless, Pudor articulated an ideal that predisposed the demographic organization of Nacktkultur. Jews do not seem to have participated in the nudist lifestyles practiced by the Nacktkultur groups (although I am aware that in some German and Austrian dance schools of the 1920s, young Jewish women engaged in nude activities; I have no evidence indicating that Jewish men did so). But it is not altogether clear if the absence of Jews from the nudist landscape was due to nationalist-eugenic thinking that did not welcome the presence of “un-German” bodies or to an inherent Jewish disinclination to regard either bodies as expressions of powerful metaphysical concepts like nation, state, and race, or nudity as an advantage to achieving superior health. From Pudor’s perspective, the Jews exerted a decadent or corrupt influence on European culture because of biological properties (or impurities) that nudity revealed. These properties included, beyond physiognomic peculiarities associated with the ethnographic typologies of human bodies that bolstered the racial ideologies of the early 20th century, a supposed inability or unwilling- ness of Jewish bodies either to feel “comfortable” (with nakedness as the truest measure of comfort) within the wildness, openness, and power of nature or to treat nudity as a basis for education, self-discipline, labor, and communal political force (Gemeinschaft). The conflation of nudism with nationalist sentiment was even more intense in the ideas of Richard Ungewitter (1868–1958), who was partly responsible for creating the first nudist park near Berlin in 1903. In books such as Nacktheit und Kultur (1907) and Nacktheit und Moral (1906), Ungewitter used photography to document the authority of Nacktkultur to restore German bodies to a bucolic paradise, far removed from the decadent landscapes of modernity. He suggested that if the state failed to set aside land for the practice of nudism, then nudists should organize themselves into a disciplined front that would ap- propriate land on which to form a nudist society insulated from the contami- nating influences of both capitalism and Marxism. But Ungewitter went even further: when police arrested him for appearing nude in public spaces, he asserted in court his right to be seen naked and the right of the public to see him naked, and the Wilhelmine courts agreed with him, stating that in prosecuting him for public nudity, the state had to demonstrate the actual damages to citizens by such behavior. Germany’s defeat in World War I compelled Ungewitter to strengthen the perception that nudism was central to maintaining German warrior virtues. The nudist parks he established near his home town of Stuttgart were hardly recreational resorts; they resembled military barracks in which the inhabitants rose before 6:00 a.m., engaged in prolonged nude physical exercises, observed the most severe vegetarianism, formed nude communal work groups, and participated in naked seminars that prepared people for the “resurrection” of Germany as a world power. But Ungewitter did not see Nacktkultur as the

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 148 Karl Toepfer glorification of a primitive lifestyle. Nudity in the industrial workplace, he spec- ulated, would do much to diminish the alienation of labor from technology and to dispel the darkness cast over the German economy by Anglo-American capitalism, Jewish financial conspiracies, and the Bolshevik revolution. Initially he expected that nudism would restore faith in marriage and the heterosexual couple as the primary defense against the corrupting influences of modernism and technology. But he showed no patience with feminism, which he believed was responsible for “softening” German civilization, and in his vision of a new social order, women were important only to the extent that they fulfilled the tradi- tional homemaking duties assigned to them by archaic notions of sexual difference—except that now they could perform these duties in the nude. Indeed, by 1919, he had linked his political vision to the reactionary fantasies of a purified 2. Image from Die Scho¨n- German society advocated by Ostara, an Austrian neopagan nudist cult whose heit (1913) showing “play- membership consisted exclusively of blond males who represented a revived ful” intimacy between “Aryan aristocracy” capable of excavating from repressed collective memory the naked bodies, three females heroic, salvational image of Teutonic physiognomy. Ungewitter treated the and one male. The image strong homoerotic aura that pervaded the writings and activities of Ostara as the suggests the natural environ- inevitable response of Aryan manhood to the decadent “feminization” of Ger- ment “permits” relations manic culture. In his mind, then, nudity in itself was the supreme revelation not between the sexes that are only of racial identity, but of the more mysterious idea of national identity.2 more naked, more playful, Despite its grandiosity, Ungewitter’s Nacktkultur social vision was pro- more aesthetic, more erotic, foundly provincial, imbued with insulating fantasies of purified identity, and and more difficult to “deter- obsessed with recovering a folkloric idea of social unity. But nudism also in- mine” than in an “unnatu- spired cosmopolitan apostles, such as Karl Vanselow (1877–1959), a poet, ral” society in which clothes economist, art historian, and promoter of the artificial “world” language Es- determine sexual as well as peranto, who founded in Berlin the opulent journal Die Scho¨nheit (1903– social relationships. (An- 1929). For Vanselow, nudity and nudism were above all aesthetic phenomena dritzky and Rautenberg and subject to analysis and evaluation primarily through their relation to a se- 1989:47; courtesy of Karl rious appreciation of art. The presentation of nakedness was not a critique or Toepfer) evasion of modernism, but a manifestation of it, for the modern spirit entailed more than a hunger for new technologies; it implied a powerful desire to look at the body with detached curiosity and pleasure. Nevertheless, to amplify the capacity of his audience to look at bodies, Vanselow relied extensively on photo technology to reinforce the point that nudity, far from designating a condition of authenticity, glorified the authority of the image and illusion. Die Scho¨nheit, with editorial headquarters in Dres- den, was a luxurious monthly embellished, at first, with intricate art nouveau ornamentation and layout. Vanselow juxtaposed photo studies of nude persons with artworks featuring nudes, and he continually sit- uated nudity within a wide array of historical frames, so that photo scenes often reenacted old paintings or contained within them references to remote historical eras. Some photos staged images from the ancient world by posing nude bodies on archaic divans or against classical pillars or before Viking bonfires, while other photos enacted idealized poses of solitary individuals, pairs, or groups against a background of ver- dant summer woodland. After World War I, the editors abandoned analogies to painting and historical dramas and allowed photography to adopt modernist

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 Nakedness 149 abstract design principles that aggressively differen- tiated it from painting and pictorialism (plates 2 and 3). Nacktkultur ideology found better articulation through photomontage: designers simultaneously juxtaposed nude bodies with images of machines and pastoral beauty. In the same image, the nude body appeared comfortably aligned with both gleaming city- scapes and primal landscapes. Nude bodies seemed just as inviting sprawled beside a shiny automobile as wading in a forest pond. The journal seemed less preoccupied with the idealized posing of nude bodies and more focused on revealing the nude body as a source of action and movement. Imagery and text concen- trated on themes of athletics, body beautification, outdoor adventure, hygiene technology, physical education, body culture in movies, body culture in Amer- ica, modern art trends in the depiction of bodies, the nude body’s adaptability to different ecologies, and modern dance (Vanselow’s wife, the dancer Olga Des- mond, had introduced, with her partner Adolf Salge, completely nude dances to subscription audiences in Berlin from 1910 to 1912). The journal published poems and stories that brooded obsessively on the theme of “longing” and often cast a melancholy mood. Even Pudor’s somber meditations on wind and clouds decorated the pages of one issue. Die Scho¨nheit never abandoned the photo studio as the site for 3. Nude dance in a garden, producing the optimum idealized image of the nude body, and even in the from Die Scho¨nheit multitude of pictures taken outdoors at parks, woods, beaches, meadows, gar- (1914:plate following page dens, and farms, the photographers and their subjects shared a fondness for 240). Here nudity represents carefully rehearsed effects, a pleasure in forming a dramatic “composition.” To a domesticating power; it is appear nude was a self-consciously artistic gesture, motivated by a desire to not always to be associated make the world more beautiful. Unlike Ungewitter, Vanselow did not link this with the “wildness” of na- beautification to the theme of racial hygiene, for Die Scho¨nheit published im- ture. (Courtesy of Karl ages of idealized nude bodies from cultures all over the world. Body type, Toepfer) rather than racial type, controlled the hierarchy of identities within this beau- tified world. This implied bodies that were young, slender, athletic, and ra- tionally nourished in relation to scientific information about the body’s capacity to give and experience pleasure and to strengthen personal identity. And unlike Ungewitter and Pudor, Vanselow showed little interest in con- necting nudity to labor, the industrial workplace, or a more austere, “disciplined” lifestyle; for him, nudism was a manifestation of luxury, wealth, aesthetic surplus, and the expansion and enrichment of free time. Nudism became a sign of increased social and economic productivity insofar as it was a consequence of a growing freedom from the necessity of labor. In its imagery, Die Scho¨nheit tended to avoid the idealized Adam and Eve couple promoted by Ungewitter; indeed, many pictures, especially of nude groups, still have the effect of undermining conventional distinctions between homosexual and heterosexual identities, between social classes, between strangers and friends, and between friends and erotic partners, because of the obvious pleasure the participants take in getting close to each other and even touching each other, without transmitting much sense of belonging to each other or of being “attached” to another in a hallowed, exclusive manner. Such ensemble pictures, and even some couple pictures, did not seem over deter-

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 150 Karl Toepfer mined, like Adam and Eve poses, in compelling the viewer to read them in a specific manner; with their dramatic calculation and aesthetic self-consciousness, they invited the viewer to imagine possible relations between bodies without in- structing the viewer to interpret the image with reference to a specific narrative or erotic significance. Thus, some ensemble pictures allowed the viewer to construct fantasies or motives for the “scene” in which naked bodies may assume homosexual and heterosexual affinities at the same time. In plate 4, for example, the nude males supporting the shield project a vaguely homosexual aura, and yet their “closeness” to each other appears as an element of their “idolization” of the heroic, nude female figure. It was the power of the images in Die Scho¨nheit to stimulate erotic fantasy, rather than simply document an ethnographic phenomenon, that persuaded such a large readership to see nakedness as a “poetic” activity.3 Vanselow saw the nude body as the decisive source of power in reconciling “nature” with modern civilization; nothing undermined archaic distinctions between nature and civilization more effec- tively than the act of displaying one’s nudity and observing the nudity of others. That idea was as modern as any technology concurrent with it.4 The success of Die Scho¨nheit was such that it inspired throughout Germany an enormous proliferation of journals and books devoted to nudism, nudity, and nude photography. The magazine provided the theoretical framework for the emergence of the Freiko¨rperkultur (FKK) movement, a network of nudist 4. The Glow by Sascha clubs whose total membership may have exceeded 500,000 by 1927, and this Schneider, from Die magnitude was due in part to the enthusiasm for nudism shared by large sectors Scho¨nheit (1905:171). The of the labor movement and Social Democratic Party.5 But Nacktkultur was not dramatic image combines altogether synonymous with Freiko¨rperkultur. FKK adherents sought to resi- homosexual and heterosex- tuate the body within nature and to dissolve the separation of public and pri- ual erotic fantasies capable vate space that nudity otherwise preserved. They hoped to create a new, of appealing to both male hybrid set of social services institutions that superceded outmoded civic and and female viewers. (Cour- domestic organizations of life. However, other Nacktkultur enthusiasts be- tesy of Karl Toepfer) lieved that nudism was primarily an educational, not a socioecological, experience, and so they pursued the idea that the most powerful site for nude performance was not in nature, but in schools. The leaders of this approach were largely women, beginning with the American physician Bess Mensendieck (1864– 1959), who, with her headquarters in Vienna, had established by 1905 a network of schools throughout Germany that instructed young women in the “Mensendieck System” for achieving healthy physiques, bodily poise, and confidence in their appear- ances. In 1896, Mensendieck began to combine photography and nudity to explain her pedagogical method, which she first published in 1906, in Ko¨rperkultur des Weibes, a book so popular that it enjoyed seven revised editions within 20 years. In a series of photographs, a nude young woman performed numerous simple exercises that brought the body closer to a classical ideal of beauty and released it from the damage inflicted upon it by pathological cultural constraints on female physical assertiveness. Mensen- dieck aligned her nude photographs with classical pictures and statues of female bodies. She saw the display and exercising of the naked, solitary female body as a manifestation of the Nietzschean will to power,

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 Nakedness 151 wherein history was understood above all as an aesthetic experience, the result of a driving “struggle for beauty” that had its dark origin inside a body filled with a mysterious potential to produce a “great,” sin- gular identity or “destiny.” But in subsequent publications, she modified her method somewhat so that the photo sequences showed the nude model performing simple actions (rather than exercises) first in a pathological but commonplace manner, and then in the correct, “healthy” manner advocated by Men- sendieck, whose text commented on the dangers to the spine, shoulders, pelvis, or muscles when performing an action in the pathological manner, while emphasizing that for every action the healthy manner also prevailed from an aesthetic perspective (plate 5). Mensendieck saw no special connection between nudity and nature. Her nude models always performed alone and always only within domestic interiors, and the actions they performed consisted entirely of functional tasks: reading, talking on the phone, folding clothes, lifting a basket, reaching for a jar on a shelf, ironing, picking up a child’s ball, bending, sweeping, placing objects in closets, washing the face, pushing a heavy table, and so forth (plate 6). But Mensendieck did not believe women would learn the correct way to perform these actions simply by looking at pictures; to achieve the self-consciousness necessary to correct the innumerable bad habits of posture infect- ing the most banal actions performed by women, the student had to perform these actions without wearing any clothes and she had to watch other students perform the same actions in the nude. One cannot 5. Bess Mensendieck per- underestimate the power of this teaching technique in persuading German forming an exercise for women that nudity substantially enhanced the capacity of students to learn achieving beautiful posture, that which would give them an unprecedented sense of control over their iden- from Ko¨rperkultur der tities and capabilities (Mensendieck 1919; 1923; 1924 [1906]; 1927a; 1927b; Frau ([1906] 1924:figure 1931). 31). The picture was taken Disciples of Mensendieck spread across Germany and established schools in in 1896 and appeared in the practically every city, but soon they began to move beyond Mensendieck’s first edition of her book, utilitarian goals. Nudity became an element in the cultivation of bodily ex- Ko¨rperkultur des pressivity, particularly when integrated with the “rhythmic gymnastic” theo- Weibes, in 1906. (Cour- ries of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865–1950), who aligned a condition of tesy of Karl Toepfer) emancipated being to knowledge of the body’s capacity to synchronize its “in- ternal” rhythms (governed by the heartbeat) with the multitude of “external” rhythms in life itself (Feudel 1949; Bachmann 1984). Dalcroze himself had no interest in complete nudity, for he assumed that the performance of a movement, when properly synchronized with even the most complex musical rhythms, would lead to a much higher body consciousness than seeing more of the body and bodies or even than watching the performance of movement. Through the almost infinite variety of rhythmic exercises he devised, Dalcroze revealed the astonishing, automatic, and mathematically determined power of the body, either individually or in groups, to move with unimagined freedom and elegance to a huge range of rhythms, abrupt rhythmic changes, and contradictory rhythms animating different parts of the body at the same time. But the

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 152 Karl Toepfer

6. Model demonstrates the “correct” pose for working at an ironing board, from Bess Mensendieck’s It’s Up to You (1931:145). Ameri- can censors required Men- sendieck to have a bikini painted on the naked body. (Courtesy of Karl Toepfer)

mechanistic basis for Dalcroze’s “excessive rationality” soon became evident. As early as 1910, Hede Kallmeyer in Berlin began combining Mensendieck nudity with Dalcrozian rhythmic exercises to produce a new kind of “har- monic gymnastics” that opened up more obviously erotic possibilities for bodily expressivity than nudity, rhythmic movement, or gymnastic exercise could achieve as separate activities. That is to say, the linking of nudity and gymnastic movement had the effect of sanctifying the idea that nakedness was movement toward a condition of ecstatic emancipation, even if this meant nothing more than that teachers no longer cared if their exercises entailed an aesthetic as well as hygienic devotion to the body that encouraged a narcissism capable of nurturing masturbation, which nineteenth-century gymnastics teachers constantly dreaded.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 Nakedness 153

7. Women from the Hedwig Hagemann School in Ham- burg perform a group exercise indoors. Hagemann was a disciple of Mensendieck, but Mensendieck became anxious when Hagemann moved toward nude group exercises that could be con- strued as homoerotic. (Hagemann 1927:plate 62; courtesy of Karl Toepfer)

After World War I, when the ideas of Mensendieck and Dalcroze seemed insufficient to redefine German identity and release previously occluded powers within it, schools set up by their disciples introduced teaching methods in 8. Dancers from the Ida which nudity became instrumental first in the study of gymnastics and dance, Herion School in Stuttgart and then in more and more subjects. At Hedwig Hagemann’s Hamburg perform a dance designed for school, for example, nude movement education indoors and outdoors entailed the camera, as a photo- the complete absence of music: instead, bodies in groups responded to impro- graphic sequence (Isenfels vised dramatic scenarios delivered vocally by the instructor (plate 7). Her pro- 1927;n.p.). (Photo by Paul gram moved beyond the development of healthy, graceful bodies functioning Isenfels; courtesy of Karl efficiently within the domestic sphere; she sought to Toepfer) produce a heroic and even brazen image of female muscularity and assertiveness that also projected a glamorous homosexual aura (Hagemann 1927). So alarmed was Mensendieck by this “distortion” of her “system,” this preoccupation with sleek muscularity, that in 1926 she initiated futile legal actions against Hagemann, which actually further diminished her influence in Germany (Hilker 1926). Meanwhile, in Stuttgart during the 1920s, the school of Ida Herion operated in a majestic garden villa, in which naked students, male and female, learned to perform blatantly erotic fantasies wherein the dancers moved from spacious neoclassical interiors to sumptuous terraces and balconies and then into luxuriant courtyards, shadowy garden pathways, and sun-dappled groves. Music did not accompany them; rather, these were dances constructed for pho- tographic documentation, so that what accompanied movement and pose was the discussion between the dancers, the photographer, and the instructor about the image they wished to create (plate 8). One could even say that students in this school learned the sig-

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 154 Karl Toepfer

9. Dancer performing an expressionist dance in Ernst nifying practices of voluptuousness, the kinetics of ecstatic gesture (Isenfels Schertel’s Dream Theatre, 1926; Adelphi and Kettermann 1927). Some of Herion’s students performed 1926, supposedly in a trance nude in Ernst Schertel’s “Dream Theatre,” which toured Europe from 1925 to stimulated by music, scenog- 1927, in concert halls as well as nightclubs, with weird, expressionistic dance raphy, and nudity. (Schidlof dramas that purportedly relied on hypnotism and occult evocations to make 1931:301; courtesy of Karl “naked” the kinetic energies of the repressed unconscious (plate 9). Herion Toepfer) and Schertel explored a twilight cultural zone that was neither pornography nor a studio-controlled high art idealization of the nude body. Indeed, one might even say that their project was to show how the desires to photograph nude dancing and to be photographed dancing nude were the pivotal pressures for undermining the conventional opposition between pornography and “serious” art, for consumers of the photo books and the “Dream Theatre” performances included middle-class schoolgirls and worldly collectors of erotica. But another Stuttgart teacher, Alice Bloch, an orthopedic physician and Mensendieck student, eliminated dance altogether from the curriculum in her school and focused on developing a new kind of gymnastic practice in which naked women strengthened their bodies through interactive exercises that continually urged the student to measure or compare the vulnerability, pliancy, and muscularity of other women to her own. In this school, students constantly “positioned” each other during the performance of exercises, and this implied that physical intimacy was essential in perfecting physical strength. Whereas the Herion school associated nudity with an aristocratic movement from villa interior to garden playground, Bloch saw nudity as the basis for con- necting the clinic or classroom to the freedom of natural open space, a vaguely uncontaminated rural landscape of meadows, fields, and ponds. She was perhaps the first instructor to integrate nudity with the teaching of intellectually intense theoretical courses (mostly about anatomy, physiology, and nutrition). But her classrooms were most unusual: no desks, no chairs, no blackboards (plate 10). Naked students gathered in large, very spare gymnastic exercise rooms containing wall bars, benches, hardwood floors, and sometimes mats. No one expected students to have fixed or assigned places within the space. They could move about during lectures and demonstrations or lie on the floor or exercise on the benches or wall bars. Sometimes they grouped around a table to examine pictures, diagrams, or models of bodily organs. Ideas introduced in demonstrations received immediate application through interactive exercises that required students to guide and even touch each other. It is not difficult to discern a refined homosexual subtext or aesthetic in the photo docu-

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 Nakedness 155 mentation, which, however, Bloch entrusted only to men, primarily Willy Balloff (Bloch 1927). Bloch may have secured a measure of public approval for her homosexual aesthetic by relying on male photographers of her pedagogy. It is doubtful that any country was as tolerant of homosexuality before 1933 as Germany. Even before 1914, when Magnus Hirschfeld published his gigantic treatise on The Homosexuality of Men and Women, the country loomed above all others in research on homosexuality and in its capacity to nourish what seemed to for- eign eyes a vast homosexual subculture, described in some detail by Hans Ostwald in Ma¨nnliche Prostitution (1905). So many major physicians and jurists, such as Rudolf Virchow and Erich Wulffen, argued for a tolerant attitude toward homosexuality that by 1919 Hirschfeld could establish his world famous (and opulent) Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin as a pervasively respected center for research into the manifold forms of sexuality and as a rather ﬂamboyant agency for promoting homosexual culture. Berlin during the Weimar Republic was probably the world capital of homosexuality, at least in relation to the commercial- ization and institutionalization of homosexual pleasure (Fro¨hlich und Kaufmann 1984; Moreck 1929:213– 337). Even some political conservatives, like Hans Blu¨her, in the widely read, 10. Students at Alice Bloch’s two-volume Die Rolle der Erotik in der ma¨nnlichen Gesellschaft (1919), con- school in Stuttgart practice tended that male homosexuality was the foundation for the resurrection of pair exercises with wall Germany as a world power. At the same time, however, the literature and im- bars. (Photo by Willy Bal- agery about the Berlin homosexual culture, tending toward the sensationalis- luff in Bloch 1927:plate 65; tic, often portrayed an unbridled world of sleazy entertainments and courtesy of Karl Toepfer) “unwholesome” sexual practices, but not naked living. Nudity in homosexual imagery, especially painting and drawing, overwhelmingly favored lesbian scenes, and nudity in nightclub performances, when they were not conventional revue numbers, also focused on lesbian themes with sadomasochistic scenarios. Even so, heterosexual male Nacktkultur enthusiasts seemed reluc- tant to permit photographs of themselves with only other men, an inhibition that apparently did not apply to Nacktkultur women. Hans Suren, the author of the immensely popular Der Mensch und die Sonne (1924) and Deutsche Gymnastik (1925), proposed that men would develop stronger and healthier bodies if they performed his gymnastic exercises in the nude and participated in solely male group athletic Nacktkultur activities. But he hesitated to show pictures of men exercising nude together, especially in publications after Der Mensch und die Sonne, and so he demonstrated his exercises with photographs of himself nude and alone. Suren’s discretion had the effect of reinforcing the perception that men who allowed themselves to be photographed nude with only other nude men were experiencing some sort of homosexual pleasure, a point that seems further strengthened if one imag- ines the action performed by the girls in the Bloch photograph performed instead by men. By having men photograph her female students, Bloch may have believed that the homoerotic aura projected by the image achieved a measure of approval that was more difﬁcult to assume when women were the photographers or when naked men performed the same action. Yet the Bloch image served the aim of detaching homosexual culture from its “decadent” associa-

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 156 Karl Toepfer

11. A nude game-fantasy enactment by students of the Jenny Gertz School in Halle. (Die Scho¨nheit 1926:55–56; courtesy of Karl Toepfer)

tion with the sensational pleasures of nocturnal and subterranean Berlin. For Bloch, homosexual desire, as revealed through homosexual nudity, moved women toward health, light, and open space. In Halle, throughout the 1920s, Jenny Gertz (1891–1966), a disciple of Dal- croze and Rudolf Laban, cultivated a successful nude pedagogy for children and youth. As with Bloch, her classes moved from interior to exterior spaces of modest, almost austere “nakedness,” but the children, six to seventeen years old, performed interactive rhythmic exercises that more resembled complex games than dances or gymnastic stunts. Physical coordination interested her more than pliancy or muscularity, and, unlike Herion and Bloch, her imagination blossomed most powerfully in the teaching of large group movement. She was a devout Marxist who believed that nude group movement was the foundation for preparing students to participate in momentous social transformation. She loved complicated conﬁgurations of bodies wherein a group sus- tained its identity in spite of the multiple and even contradictory pressures and rhythms within it—a group, indeed, that signiﬁed a superior condition of freedom by the mutability of its form. A spiral formation would metamor- phose into a propeller-like movement, and then into a phalanx surge, while each child might move to a unique rhythm (plates 11 and 12). Nudity was for Gertz essential to understanding the dynamics of social organization and change, because she did not believe that momentous social transformation was even possible without the profound trust in others guiding the group coordination of nude bodies. Was it possible to pursue such a nude pedagogy without engaging in open discussion of sexual identity, sexual desire, and modes of sexual pleasure? Probably not, although in Gertz’s case, sex education was not a part of the formal curriculum, as Marxist doctrine was; rather, Gertz assumed that within a Marxist ideological framework, sex education would occur in- formally, in a congenial, improvised manner that was simultaneously “natural,” healthy, and liberating. The radical beauty of her pedagogical mind is manifested in the photo documentation of her class activities, which provided some of the most enchanting and exquisite images of nudity released by an era and culture that seemed to look at bodies with an unsurpassed seriousness of purpose (Gertz 1926; Loesch 1990:81–87).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 Nakedness 157 In any case, all the Nacktkultur publications implied that nudism and naked living intensiﬁed interest in eroticism, theories of sexuality, and “new” forms of sexual pleasure. This is evident from the editorial organization of the journals: advertisements for books about sex; articles dealing with the power of nudism to enhance sexual experience; personal ads from nudists seeking mates; photographs of nude bodies in calculated, voluptuous poses; poems and short stories on romantic themes; and a constant determination to embed aesthetic values within hygienic values. Nude performance of large groups appeared mostly in schools established by Rudolf Laban (1879–1958) and his disciples, such as Hertha Feist in Berlin, Margarethe Schmidts in Essen, and the Estonian Helmi Nurk in Bremen. Large group performances required unusual performance spaces that urged the spectator to view bodies from shifting, multiple angles, as the group (especially with Laban) moved from one space to another or positioned bodies across a space much larger than any conventional stage. Spectators became mobile, in motion. Laban encouraged his students to think of group movement as an increasingly, almost tortuously convoluted circulation of bodies through spaces never designed for performance. He disliked intensely the idea that a powerful group identity depended on unison movement and synchronicity; rather, a body should maintain its individuality while contributing to the strength of the group. But the choreographic imagination needed to build large groups of such monumental complexity exceeded the talent of all but a very few artists, and Laban was not one of them. His choreography never inspired the acclaim that his teaching did, nor did he even use his own, widely adopted notation system to record any of his dances; he seems to have recognized that his group projects, as pedagogical instruments, were of much greater beneﬁt to the student participants than to a completely detached spectator. In any case, within the Laban domain (or elsewhere for that matter), photo documentation of completely nude group performances involving both men and women was extremely rare, except for the Gertz and Koch schools (plate 13). Within the dance culture, apparently, it was easier to get many persons of the

12. Male and female children of the Jenny Gertz School in Halle (ca. 1928) watch a pair of small girls execute movement relations of exceptional complexity for their age. The children here are not entirely naked, but in other images of similar movement games they are naked. Gertz never provided a clear statement of when nudity was appropri- ate. (Loesch 1990:218; courtesy of Karl Toepfer)

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 158 Karl Toepfer same sex to have their picture taken moving together nude than to photograph both sexes dancing nude together. It is doubtful that people of the 1920s as- cribed a homosexual motive to this preference, partly because of the mysterious inspirational rhetoric Laban used to describe dance as a metaphysical condition of cosmic dynamism that was beyond representation in any conventional sense of performance. He would refer to the “dance of the stars” or the “dance of the wind” (Laban 1920). Dance, he claimed, was movement toward a transcendent, redemptive identity, for which nudity was simply an emblem. And by his own example he showed how the study of dance and choreography could produce an astonishingly seductive personality, a captivating leader preoccupied with choreographing, one might say, the destinies of others. He conducted sexual relations with many of his female students, who remained passionately devoted to him and his prodigious outpouring of ideas even after he moved on to new adventures; his lack of follow-through commitment to any one person or to his ideas actually worked to his benefit, insofar as his followers quickly discovered opportunities to “complete” something greater than themselves. Laban’s success in linking bodily movement to an ecstatic erotic mystique and to a nebulous, enshrouded cos- mological language served to consolidate the belief that the more naked the body became for others and 13. Male group movement the more intimate one’s knowledge of it became, the more entangled one be- at the Laban School in came in the shadows of metaphysics and in convoluted emotional attachments Hamburg. Laban favored to other bodies. Yet this notion of nudity as the intimation of a turbulent but group movements that did “hidden” emotional cosmos allowed Laban, through the system of Laban not depend on uniform, schools that spread throughout Germany and then elsewhere in Europe, to unison movement, but al- create a transcendent manifestation of “community,” of people bound to- though he promoted nude gether by abstractions which perhaps proved greater than the effort to realize, images of his female disci- with the FKK movement, Pudor’s and Ungewitter’s idea of nudity as a “de- ples, he hesitated to show cisive” revelation of national or racial affiliation.6 the genitals of his male stu- At the Adolf Koch school in Berlin, however, nudity was such a pervasive dents, probably because he component of instruction that it was difficult to consider it a performance at feared public association of all. Members of Koch’s organization tried to be naked as much as possible as his methods with homosex- long as possible, and at least within the school they were naked when doing uality. But images of his practically everything: eating, sleeping, exercising, listening to music, playing male group exercises such as music, giving lectures, engaging in sports, building and gardening, reading and this one nevertheless ap- writing, conversing, drawing, digging, fixing food, and convening commit- peared in publications ori- tees. Koch (1894–1970) was a public school teacher, who, in 1924, ran into ented toward homosexuals. trouble with his supervisors when he sought to have children in his class take Laban himself never made off all their clothes when performing exercises and group dances. He then re- any overt reference to homo- solved to form his own school which would offer a healthy alternative to the sexuality in his published dysfunctionality he saw in the public school system, and, from today’s per- work. (Laban 1926:96; spective, he was astoundingly successful in finding supporters, especially courtesy of Karl Toepfer) among the labor movement and members of the health professions. For Koch, “body education” was more than the study of bodies and their capabilities; it referred to optimum conditions for learning and openness to new knowledge, which occurred, he contended, when the body was most

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 Nakedness 159 vulnerable to external evaluation and influence. Tothe extent that all were naked within a group or society, nudity leveled off divisive differences between people and social classes. In his school, therefore, people from different age groups, professions, and backgrounds mingled together to incarnate the political principle that the true equality of a society depended upon the magnitude of nakedness within it. Nudism, he argued, amplified healthy sexuality and diminished inclinations toward morbid perversions; it revised people’s relations to work and the workplace and thus encouraged the introduction of new technologies and practices to accommodate the need for greater nakedness in the world (Koch 1929; 1932; 1933).7 It challenged the authority of an economy based on consumerism, and it challenged the false images of beauty and satisfaction of desires perpetrated by the entertainment media. It implied a monumental reform of educational thinking, so that the learning of everything—mathematics, geography, history, auto repair, sewing, or singing— required an entirely new relation to space, the “classroom,” language, and instruments of learning. Nevertheless, all this equality tended to produce a uniformity of its own, which is evident in the photo documentation of nude group exercises wherein men and women perform all movements in unison, striving for a perfect, shared synchronicity. Koch’s obsession with linking nudity to health and equality required him to exclude nakedness almost altogether as a point of access to dark zones of human experience, and as a result, his was not a school in which one could learn much about the nature of ecstatic power (plate 14). In the theatre of the Weimar Republic, nude bodies, overwhelmingly female, appeared before audiences with a frequency and sensationalistic effect unprecedented in the history of Western civilization. But such nudity occurred almost exclusively in nightclubs and cabarets in Berlin and Hamburg. Right-wing critics of the Republic pointed often to these performances as symptomatic of Germany’s “decline,” and indeed, even the Freiko¨rperkultur movement tended to regard nightclub nudity as the product of pathological attitudes toward the body and sexuality. Theatre in itself objectified the naked body in an unhealthy manner by its ancient veneration of the distinction between performance and audience, offering and evaluation, whereas the Nackt-

14. Male and female students of the Adolf Koch School exercise nude together. Koch associated unity or equality between the sexes with synchronized movement. (Gay 1932:66; courtesy of Karl Toepfer)

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 160 Karl Toepfer kultur schools and camps proposed to dissolve entirely the difference between performer and spectator, observer and observed. To preserve their reputation for elevated moral seriousness of purpose, the theatres of the Weimar Repub- lic, otherwise responsible for one of the most exciting eras in the history of the theatre, avoided opportunities for the performance of nude bodies. Only a few dramatists, such as Curt Corrinth, Hans Henny Jahnn, and Hermann Essig, actually inscribed nude scenes, but no one produced these plays to include the nudity, and the mere suggestion that a state theatre might offer such scenes encouraged the police to intervene.8 In Vatermord (1915/22; premiere, Berlin, 1922), Arnolt Bronnen (1895–1959) achieved considerable success with a powerful, marvelously detailed drama of oppressive family life that concluded with a completely naked woman offering herself to her tormented son after he has killed his brutal father (Bronnen 1985). In his brilliant, perverse, and ex- traordinarily innovative comedy, Die Exzesse (1923), Bronnen included a scene in which a woman invites a ram to copulate with her and another scene in which another woman, frustrated by a man’s inattention to her, suddenly bares her breasts to him and discharges upon him language that is a fascinating mixture of rage, accusation, lust, and masochistic self-degradation (Bronnen 1990 1:273–349; Mayer 1977:55–115). Many critics considered the 1925 productions (in Berlin, Gera, and Munich) pornographic, even though the director, Moritz Seeler, omitted all nudity. Bronnen’s preoccupation with nudity and expressionist voice reached its most ambitious articulation in a much earlier work, Die Geburt der Jugend, written in 1914 and published in 1922, in which a large group of adolescents, male and female, oppressed by family, school, and civic ﬁgures, transform a rampage into a revolution when they ﬂee into a great forest and establish a new society dedicated to “trampling down” older generations and living in a state of primeval freedom. In the forest, all the young people are completely naked. They have lost their names, and the text only refers to them by their positions in space: “those on the edge,” “one in the middle,” “three of the undulators,” “all those who crawl,” and so forth. Voices resonate with antiphonal effects, as speech becomes hymnic, choral, orgiastic, unpunctuated, often rhymed, ne- ologistic, hypnotically repetitive, and controlled by a severely restricted vo- cabulary:

A peculiar body Me! Me Raging, insane desire I sink into ﬁre Scorching ﬂames Throw me together With wanton earth Voluptuization I sink and sink Enraged exhilarated I sink I thrust I hunt O-o-ooh. (Bronnen 1922:66–67)

Dialogue, so vibrantly stichomythic earlier in the play, virtually disappears as individual and choral utterances function entirely as components, variant tonalities, of a kind of mass voice that exists for no greater purpose than to proclaim the cosmic totality of the anonymous, naked tribal horde. For Bron- nen, the emergence of a naked society implied not only an amorphous expansion of space “conquered” by anonymity and nudity, not only the collapse of

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 Nakedness 161

15. A sadomasochistic nightclub act in which women slide orgasmically down the edge of a giant ra- zor. The women actually performed this scene nude, but the publisher of the photo decided to paint un- derclothes on the performers. (Moreck 1929:112; courtesy of Karl Toepfer)

difference between audience and performance, but the transformation of language itself from the individualized and dramatic to the choral and lyrical. And this emergence was violent, one of the dark zones that Koch sought to exclude from his vision of nudist revolution, although it was Bronnen who later sym- pathized with the Nazis, not Koch. But none of this nudity appeared in Moritz Seeler’s 1925 production of Die Geburt der Jugend in Berlin; indeed, he eliminated altogether the ﬁnal “Inkar- nation” scene in the forest. It was therefore only a few female dancers who dared to appear nude with any “seriousness” of purpose on the conventional stage. Only the Traumbu¨hne Schertel, based in Stuttgart (1925–1927), offered a dance with a nude male, accompanied by female dancers from the Herion school, in bizarre expressionist choreography devised by the producer-owner of the group, Dr. Ernst Schertel, the controlling power at Parthenon, a Leipzig publishing house that specialized in books and magazines related to eroticism, sexology, and nudism (Schertel 1926; Toepfer 1997:62–67). The entirely female, nude “ballets” of Celly de Reydt, in Berlin (1919–1921), were always nightclub acts, but they attracted the attention of the police because of de Reydt’s obvious pleasure in combining nudity with religious themes— women engaged in homosexual or masturbatory choreography in churches or before crosses and altars (Toepfer 1997:75–77; Gordon 2000:58–60). Numer- ous Berlin and Hamburg nightclubs presented shows featuring many nude female bodies for audiences that included many female spectators. But these shows were entertaining insofar as they were “about” the power of female nudity to privilege a commercialized atmosphere of libidinous excess and glamorous degradation. Scenarios dwelled obsessively on themes of sado- masochism, lesbianism, and prostitution. These performances linked entertainment to extravagant gestures of desecration; the magnitudes of female nakedness, vulnerability, and availability were proportional to what spectators would pay for them; nude entertainment was ultimately about the pleasure audiences could feel in the destruction of innocence (plates 15 and 16). The public could associate dancers with nudity because of the willingness of so many dancers to perform nude for cameras, but it is perhaps impossible to ﬁnd

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 162 Karl Toepfer any evidence that these women ever performed nude before audiences in theatres. Dancers like Claire Bauroff and Mila Cirul became famous because of the beautiful nude images of them made by Viennese studio photographers, such as Madame d’Ora, Ru- dolf Koppitz, and Trude Fleischmann (plate 17) (Fa- ber 1983, 1995; Schreiber 1991). Photo technology allowed dancers to control perception of their bodies and dissemination of their performances much more efficiently than unmediated presentations in theatres. Modern dance, like gymnastics, apparently strengthened its emancipatory authority by aligning itself to a a condition of nakedness. The great choreographer Mary Wigman (1886–1973), based in Dresden, dis- trusted nudity in performance and in the classroom, because she felt that the expressive value of choreography depended on seeing movement rather than the body. Her dancers wrapped themselves in quasi- medieval robes and veils and seldom bared much more than their arms. Yet plenty of her students enjoyed posing nude for amateur and professional photographers (plate 18).9 Nevertheless, only two women achieved fame (or notoriety) for actually dancing naked in “serious” theatres: Adoree Villany and Anita Berber. Adoree Villany, whose birth and death dates are unknown, 16. Sadomasochistic night- was probably a French Jew, who, between 1908 and 1910, rented theatres in club scene photographed in major cities throughout Europe to present her historical dances. In these she his studio by Heinz von conjured up images and movements associated with particular cultural eras, Perckhammer, 1928. In the from biblical times through Greco-Roman civilization, the Byzantines, the 1930s, Perckhammer pro- Persians, the Pre-Rapahelites, and so on. Her many dances, all solos, com- duced appealing photographs bined this historization with narrow, abstract, and often tragic themes, such as of nude “Aryan” women “Seduction,” “Dance of the Lilies,” “Dance with Hair,” “Pain.” She loved posed heroically in beautiful presenting herself in a large array of glamorous, exotic costumes, which she farm lands and wheat fields. supplemented with an (undancerish) enthusiasm for props and complex scen- (Andritzky and Rautenberg ery. In several of her dances, however, she appeared partially or completely na- 1989:122; courtesy of Karl ked, and in Munich in 1910, the police decided that her performance, for a Toepfer) subscription audience at the Residenz Theater, contributed intolerably to public indecency. After a lengthy trial, she was found guilty of the charge and forbidden to perform any of her dances in Germany. She then retreated to Paris, where she eventually published a huge and truly wonderful book, Tanz- Reform und Pseudo-Moral (1912), in which she explained her dance aesthetic, justified herself as a “serious artist,” and inserted, in addition to many press clippings praising her work, some quite witty satirical sketches of her oppo- nents—an exquisitely cheerful spirit pervades her writing. She also made abundant use of photography to document and analyze her dances, including those with nudity. The pictures reinforce her point that nudity, when com- bined with lighting effects, historicized scenery, and different movements or poses, alters perception of the same body as much as the most exotic costume (plates 19 and 20). Unlike the nudists, Villany saw nudity as an inherently theatrical condition, a contrived state of being, an artificial construction of identity. As such, nudity was essential in gaining access not to nature, but to history and to the multiplicity of historical identities that are hidden within the body and which form its ever-evolving “identity” (Villany 1912).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 Nakedness 163 The bisexual Anita Berber (1899–1928) pursued a much more violent and “decadent” dance aesthetic. Like Villany, she was preoccupied with mytho- historical images of female identity, and also like Vil- lany, she viewed nudity as a theatrical gesture, an opportunity for manipulating the artifices that shaped perception of her being. In some of her nude dances, she powdered her body or oiled it, and she always painted her face very carefully. Her Salome dance (1921) apparently began when she emerged naked from a large urn filled with blood. But Berber’s spirit was much darker than Villany’s. She concen- trated on themes of drug addiction, sadomasochistic sexual relations, lust, murder, betrayal and abandon- ment, desolating loneliness, self-destructive cravings for ecstasy, degradation, the ephemerality of beauty, and the violence provoked by beautiful bodies and the struggle to possess them. These were “dances of vice and horror,” the title of a very strange book she produced in Vienna in 1922, in collaboration with her partner at the time, Sebastian Droste; Berber and Droste also made a film of the same title, long since vanished. But the book, with its many phantasmal poems, its numerous beautiful photographs of her taken by the Viennese photographer Madame d’Ora, 17. Dramatic studio portrait and its weird artworks, was obviously an effort to bestow seriousness on Ber- of a dancer by Rudolf Kop- ber’s aesthetic and allow her to transcend the dreck of nightclub depravities pitz, 1929. Many such im- and criminality that had already stained her reputation. ages circulated as postcards Yet Berber’s success as a dancer rested upon her use of nudity to signify her and appeared in numerous sexual availability to the world, her hunger for orgiastic ecstasy, her promis- magazines. But “artistic” cuous appetite for new men and women in her bed, her craving for sexual rap- dancers almost never per- tures with strangers, and her eagerness to collapse the difference between formed in this manner be- sexual fantasy and actual sex (plate 21). She, like Villany, treated nudity as a fore public audiences. (Faber proud assertion of narcissism, for which neither woman could be expected to 1995:44; courtesy of Karl apologize. Indeed, both women, despite their major differences in tempera- Toepfer) ment, seem to have treated their performances as refined forms of masturbation that were preferable, as sources of erotic-emotional satisfaction, to “private” or “secret” expressions of sexual intimacy (Berber and Droste 1922; Jencik 1930; Jencik 1931; Fischer 1984; Lania 1929; Toepfer 1997:83–96). For Berber, nude dancing was like public masturbation insofar as her movements and especially her facial gestures, imbued with lascivious undulations, orgas- mic voluptuousness, and delirious breathing, were revelations of an extravagant will to experience orgiastic ecstasies. She treated the audience as if she could consume and exhaust it with her appetite for pleasures too great for any one person to satisfy. Yet it was precisely this monumental magnitude of her appetite that established the distance between herself and her audience, that made the spectator, male or female, feel overwhelmed and perhaps even eclipsed by a woman who saw ecstasy as the consequence of an outrageously “excessive” expectation of humanity. Alone, naked, and excited before an audience, she showed how orgiastic ecstasy was, above all, a masturbatory fantasy—and this insight was not altogether consoling, not altogether free of a pathos experienced more by the spectator than by the performer. With the advent of the Nazi era, all experimentation in nude performance virtually came to an end, for the Nazis did not see in nudity or nudism the

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 164 Karl Toepfer manifestations of power needed to solve the problems afflicting Germany. The body exuded aesthetic power only when it was wrapped in seductive uni- forms and marked with state-authorized insignia. In itself, the body preoccupied the Nazis only to the extent that it revealed racial identity, the dominant source of value for all bodies, as exemplified in plate 22 which idealizes the athletic, “Aryan” female body “type.” But the Nazis determined the racial markers of the body almost entirely by measuring the physiognomy of the head, which meant that one didn’t have to look carefully at the rest of the body to understand its expressive potential. From this perspective, nudity could not offer any advantage as a performance; instead, nakedness pervasively signified conditions of weakness, ultimate exposure, defor- mation, stigmatization, marginalization, humiliation, and contamination (plate 23). Yet these anxieties about the body’s powerlessness and vulnerability be- 18. Students at the Mary fore catastrophic forces of destruction and national distress survived the defeat Wigman School in Dresden of the Nazis and pervaded the early decades of the Cold War. The FKK re- pose nude for the Greek vived during the 1950s, with the approval of the Occupation Government, but photographer Nelly. Nudity its ambitions now seemed very modest compared with the energy released by was never a part of Wig- nudist programs of the 1920s. Nudism re-emerged as a recreational, semi- man’s instructional method, therapeutic activity that helped integrate its participants into a mainstream but some of her students culture dominated above all by respect for familial, economic, social, and in- nevertheless wished to be stitutional stability. Gone altogether was any sense that nudity was a founda- seen naked. (Harder tion for social change, and also gone was any sense that nudity provided 2001:plate 10; courtesy of superior opportunities to assess the aesthetic significance of the body. Recre- Benaki Museum, Athens) ational nudism made very few demands on its participants, and that accounted for its appeal, for it allowed its participants to escape all pressures for performance elsewhere in their lives: to be naked before others simply signified one’s ability to achieve complete acceptance. The need to provide conditions of acceptance, however, completely detached nudity and nudism from any discourse on the desires and desirability of bodies, for desire always designates capacities for change. It was probably inevitable, then, that Viennese Actionism arose in the 1960s to move nude performance in a new direction. Strongly influenced by psy- choanalytic theory and Artaudian theatre aesthetics, the Viennese Actionists (chiefly Otto Muehl, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Gu¨nther Brus, and Hermann Nitsch) viewed the body as the site of hidden “complexes” and anxieties that were the major agents of personal and social unhappiness. The task of nude performance was to confront performer and spectator with the sources of these anxieties located within the body. People were naked to the extent that they revealed what was hidden inside them on a material level: blood, urine, excrement, saliva, sweat, semen, tears, odors. Revelation of the material level connected the performance to a deeper, more mysterious level of nakedness. The Actionists did not associate nudity with the conventional idea of nature as that ecological system which would somehow exist independently of human endeavor—trees and grass and sun and water. Rather, nature asserted its connection to the body through the unconscious. Only an intensely visceral mode of performance could release repressed, salvational energies and transfigure the body. Perhaps the most successful of the Viennese Actionists (though hardly the most extreme) is Hermann Nitsch (b. 1938). His Orgies Mysteries Theatre

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 Nakedness 165

19. Adoree Villany performing Pain (1908). Vil- lany linked nudity to a wider range of emotions and historical “scenes” than per- performed its first “Action” in 1961, and since then he has staged 107 Actions, haps any other dancer in which he continues to perform at a large castle he owns near Salzburg, with history, with the possible the most recent occurring in 2001. The format for the Actions has changed exception of Anita Berber. little since the 1960s, except that the scale has become increasingly grandiose, (Villany 1912:103E; cour- with performances lasting several days and covering an enormous perfor- tesy of Karl Toepfer) mance space. Nitsch has sought to restore significance to the concept of ritual, which otherwise has lost all efficacy or redemptive power in modern civil- 20. Villany displaying a ization. His Actions turn every space into a temple, in which performance mood of anxiety that prob- focuses on the themes of nakedness, sacrifice, imploration, defilement, puri- ably could not achieve such fication, and resurrection. Nude men and women submit to simulated cruci- dramatic intensity if she fixion; Nitsch and his adepts pour animal blood and entrails on the nude were not naked. (Pastori bodies; blood spills and splatters everywhere, over a huge space; Nitsch in 1983:8; courtesy of Karl Catholic vestments performs libations and intones huge lists of “blood words,” Toepfer) poetic phrases, and portentous cosmic statements; as everything gets messier and messier, bodies become more and more naked, and distinctions between performer and spectator cease to exist (plate 24). All Actions move the participants to create an orgiastic community, but many Actions are monumental repetitions, for Nitsch assumes that ecstatic transformation of life is possible only by performing Actions to exhausting excess. The Wagnerian scale of his ambition is evident from his detailed scenarios for the Actions, which actually leave little room for improvisation: he inscribes the scenarios as if they were scores for gigantic orchestral compositions. For each Action, he designates thousands of activities performed by a multitude of

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 166 Karl Toepfer participants. He describes: the movements of choirs in different places and the appearance of musical groups; the making of ritual materials; the movement of participants into different animal stalls; the intonation of immense eruptions of words, shrieks, screams, cries; the amplification and distortion of these voices; the touching of bodies and of particular body parts; the defiling of bodies, and the materials and methods of defilement; the washing of bodies; the staining of white cloths with different animal fluids; the release of odors, the display and “mixing” of many different flowers; the staining of innumerable objects with blood; the endless speaking of what has been stained and defiled and trans- formed; the movement of animals; the temperature of liquids; the accumulation and sharing of entrails; the formation and movement of processions; the choreography of smoke and fumes; the preparation of many foods; the break- ing apart of animal carcasses; the blood-drenched feasts; the cues for the dis- charge of urine, semen, menstruation, and excrement; the duration of all actions; the diagrams for the spatial relations between actions; the organization of spectacular lighting effects; the lighting of innumerable candles; the tolling of bells, the blasts of trombone choirs, and the tinkling of multiple glocken- spiels; the gradual transformation of the vast “mess” into a “sacral sphere”; the revelation of a new “tabernacle”; the metamorphosis of the participants into “seraphs” and purified beings; the monumental transformation of the “slaugh- terhouse of theatre” into the cathedral of orgy; and on and on and on, for days and nights. Each script is an enormous catalogue of lists of actions. And Nitsch composes his own interminable soundtracks, broadcast through a complex network of speakers and mixing many different kinds of music, from old folk songs to electronic drones to sounds of nature to quotations from Mozart to distorted voices. Blood and nakedness are everywhere, but probably no other sort of performance conveys so forcefully the idea of the body struggling to defeat—to expose and exorcise—a huge impurity within itself, some great stain upon being, some mighty “inner” obstacle to ecstasy. It all sounds crazy, and surely is, yet it is doubtful that anyone coming out of one of these performances has quite the same worldview as one had going in; this is the scale of performance actually needed to “change” anyone in a world in which people, saturated (or “polluted”) with mediated perceptions, have become profoundly estranged from their bodies and afraid of them. Nitsch has documented all his Actions in immense detail, which he pack- ages in such abundance that the Orgies Mysteries Theatre has been for many years almost a major industrial complex, producing many huge books, CDs, videos, CD-ROMs, gallery exhibits all over Europe of the blood-stained cloths and other artifacts, as well as prodigious commentaries. In the 1960s and ’70s, Nitsch staged Actions in many European cities, and rather than performing them in theatres, he performed them in auditoriums, plazas, stadiums, fields, and basement studios. The violence of his productions brought him many legal difficulties: civic authorities sought to regulate the performances and to delete elements they considered dangerous to public health and safety. In 1973, Nitsch settled into the castle, and there he was able to preside over an insulated cult domain that allowed him to realize his increasingly grandiose orgiastic fantasies without having to worry about the attitudes of people who regarded him as a maniac. But with this decision, he aligned his aesthetic with the assumption that nakedness was the most acute revelation of a profound and irreparable alienation from both nature and modern civilization. Nakedness was the foundation for a new refuge or sanctuary, but not for a new society nor even for a new capacity to become integrated into the world beyond the sacred site of ritual defilement and purification.10

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 Nakedness 167 Nitsch saw nudity as essential to the creation of a new, isolated, purified cult, and as such he was part of a pervasive effort in the 1960s to emancipate social reality from oppressive constraints on feeling and desire; he contributed an obvious, even self-consciously extreme component of a global challenge to censor- ship, the consequence of which was a vast proliferation of nude performance in all media, including the theatre. By the mid-1970s, nudity occurred so fre- quently on German stages, even when authors had not prescribed it, that it actually became a conven- tion, lasting up to this day, for designating the “seriousness” expected of the theatre. But seriousness meant that nudity became associated with representing conditions of suffering, disillusionment, and the failure of sexual desire to resolve conflict. However one responds to his aesthetic, Nitsch does connect nudity to ecstatic experience. But theatrical seriousness after the War, dominated by Brechtian theory of performance, depended on cultivating audience “distance” (Verfremdung) from the thing represented, and that resulted in equating nudity with unecstatic or failed ecstatic action. The dance theatre of Pina Bausch (b. 1940) typi- fied this sobering deployment of nudity. In a work such as Carnations (1983), beautiful nude bodies, male and female, appeared as victims of social pressures (group aggression) that motivated sadomasochistic relations between men and women and preserved pathological definitions and distributions of power within society. The beauty of the bodies did not protect them from becoming objects or causes of suffering; nakedness merely amplified vulnerability, remoteness from power (plate 25). Naked physical beauty appeared as a burden, an opportunity to expose the joyless toil involved in upholding a corrupt belief in an idealized image of desirability, as when a naked female dancer carries on her shoulders another woman or even a man, not for a moment, but for awhile that was deliberately “excessive” insofar as it was painful. Bausch used nudity to cast suspicion on the body as the focus of 21. Anita Berber luxuriated desires that release people from socially imposed constraints on their power to in the display of her nudity. move and love. But this “sobering” approach to nudity in performance was a But her aesthetic was per- brilliant application of the Brechtian ambition to heighten the rationality of haps more complex than the audience and treat performance entirely as a detached object of critique, sensation-seeking audiences so that the freedom or elevated identity of the spectator depended on his or of the time cared to ac- her capacity to overcome irrational “identification” with the thing repre- knowledge. Here, the way sented. From this perspective, nudity in the ecstatic mode collapsed the dis- she tucks her face (with eyes tance between audience and performance, leading to an irrational and veiled) against the shadow destructive society. of her upraised arm indicates But the desire to maintain critical distance collided with the impulse to “in- a coy abashedness that is in tegrate” bodies into a larger, more inclusive understanding of “the world,” tension with the “brazen” and this conflict guided the nude performance of an artist whose aesthetic was revelation of her torso and perhaps as radical as anything proposed by Viennese Actionism. Vera von genitals. (Fischer 1984:67; courtesy of Karl Toepfer)

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 168 Karl Toepfer Lehndorff (b. 1939) was born into an aristocratic East Prussian family. The Nazis executed her father for participating in a plot to kill Hitler, and the loss of the huge family estate compelled her to wander for many years throughout Europe with her mother, who was uncertain of how or where she and her daughter could “fit” into the postwar society. While studying art in Italy in 1962, Lehndorff ’s statuesque, Amazo- nian body brought her an invitation to do modeling in Paris. But when success eluded her there and then in New York,she returned to Italy in 1964 and began to turn her life into a performance. She was a tall woman, at least 6'1" and perhaps much taller. Calling herself “Veruschka,” she responded to all questions about her past with inscrutable, cryptic answers. Sud- denly she was interesting to Italian fashion designers looking for a new image of female self-confidence and audacity. Michelangelo Antonioni cast her as herself in Blow Up (1966), in which she played a nearly nude, writhing model who completely collapses the distance between artist and model by driving her photographer to orgasm on the studio floor. This brief scene made her famous; indeed, she sub- sequently appeared on the covers of more major fashion magazines than any other model of the 1960s— 13 covers for American Vogue alone. But she had no desire to become a mainstream movie star, preferring 22. Nacktkultur image instead to appear nude in bizarre, Eurotrash experiments like Carmelo Bene’s promoting racial hygiene Salome (1972). In 1983, she appeared in male drag as a voluptuously handsome and Teutonic beauty. The Dorian Gray in Ulrike Ottinger’s hothouse lesbian cult film Dorian Gray im photographer, Gerhard Rie- Spiegel der Boulevardpresse. Lehndorff ’s enthusiasm for experimental perfor- bicke (1878–1957), was al- mance lay in the artistic authority of the model “Veruschka.” Unlike other ready famous in the 1920s models, she assumed a decisive role in selecting the poses, settings, layout, for his outdoor photos of fashions, makeup, lighting, camera placement, and themes of her shoots. At nude athletes, dancers, and the same time, she became a mysterious figure in the international high- gymnasts. This photo, from fashion social world. Her voluptuous height and her detached, aloof aristo- Skulpturen aus Fleisch cratic manner easily allowed her to capture attention and even great popularity und Blut (1940, in Syma- without having to please anyone but herself or compromise her taste for som- nek 1996:41), was very ber moods. Veruschka made it possible to discuss a model as a powerful artist similar to work he did in rather than as a generic commercial entertainer. She cast a genuinely “mag- the 1920s and did not repre- netic” aura. But despite her flamboyantly public love affairs with celebrities sent a new direction for him like Peter Fonda, she showed little interest in exploring the excitement of ro- under the Third Reich. But mance or the limits of commitment (Fonda 1998:199–206; Gross 1995:184– in the Nazi context, view- 92). ers associated the image with In the early 1970s in Hamburg, Lehndorff began her decade-long collabo- a different set of values, pri- ration with the sculptor and painter Holger Tru¨lzsch, who became her pho- marily the expression of ra- tographer and took all pictures of her in color. This monumental project cial purity and strength. culminated in the publication of a book, “Veruschka”: Trans-figurations (1986), (Courtesy of Karl Toepfer) which displayed the power of her naked body to “blend” into a multitude of identities. Between 1971 and 1973, Tru¨lzsch photographed her with different styles of clothes, male and female, that they had meticulously painted onto her body. No matter how garish the fashion style, the viewer saw the clothes and the body at the same time. The sequence of images exposed fundamental con- flicts between the body and clothes, between male and female definitions of

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 Nakedness 169 the body, and between one “Veruschka” and another. In these pictures, shot entirely in a studio, Lehndorff assumed extravagantly theatrical poses and perfected the impression of a restless woman excited and ani- mated by a body eager to claim its authority over any fashion imposed upon it. Every fashion exactly “fit” her body, and in doing so, she “fit” into a society comprised of many styles. From 1974 to 1978, the “trans-figurations” moved in a new direction. Tru¨lzsch and Lehndorff painted her body not with clothes but with the more abstract patterns of material elements: swirls of liquids, ex- plosions of light, animal scales, bark. Her poses were contortions rather than theatrical gestures, and, outdoors, her body now began to “blend” into natural landscapes—snow-dusted dead trees in a German forest or dead trees in a parched Mozambique wil- derness—where, as Lehndorff explains, “a white woman tries not to fade away into the tremendously strong African landscape” (Lehndorff and Tru¨lzsch 1986:146). In subsequent images, Lehndorff ’s body began to “mutate” into ferns and moss, sand and stone. And then, by 1977, pose and painting achieved their most austere expression. Nude, Lehndorff simply stood against stark man-made walls, with her eyes closed, facing the camera. “My only interest is in fus- ing into the background. The place is often one which is in a state of decay and is related to our culture” (146). With an incredibly refined technique, 23. Nudity as a condition she and Tru¨lzsch now painted onto her somnambulistically posed body the of stigmatization and degra- materials of the ruined walls: rusted iron, rotted brick, corroded steel, stained dation. A Jewish woman tiles, dilapidated wood. Her body blended into pipes, cables, bolts, beams, stripped of her clothes by girders, doors, panes, rivets, and faded paint itself (plate 26). No matter how participants in a pogrom, in carefully an environment or external identity is imposed upon it, her body al- Lemburg, Poland, 1942. ways triumphs over the techniques of its effacement, always appears greater (Wykes 1973:146; courtesy than the world it inhabits. All kinds of materials and objects seem embedded of Imperial War Museum) into her identity, and yet one always sees her body. Nudity permits her to “fit” into every environment, to assume any disguise, to adapt to all settings, to re- fuse commitment to any external pressure or place, and yet she stands out, alone, aloof, remote, utterly still, in a trance, transfigured. Perhaps this aesthetic, this monumentally solitary nudity, designates an aristocratic narcissism, discloses the absolute exclusivity of a body in relation to all nature and all the decayed, “dehumanizing” artifacts of the industrialized world. “The nakedness of human skin always disturbed me,” she remarked in the book (Lehn- dorff and Tru¨lzsch 1986:145), and in an interview with Playboy, she acknowledged that “The body does not arouse me sexually” (Rubartelli 1971:96). But these observations did not mean that the viewer saw her body as unerotic, unbeautiful, or “corrupted” by the sense of impurity that Nitsch assumes is responsible for constraining a body’s attractiveness. Rather, she sought to objectify her body with perfect artistic detachment, to present her body as nothing more than “a form—the shape of a human female body” (Lehndorff and Tru¨lzsch 1986:146), which her own detached artistic intelli- gence could manipulate as an object attached to other, equally observed objects.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 170 Karl Toepfer

24. Image from the 50th Action staged by Hermann Nitsch, Castle Prinzendorf, 1975. (Klo¨ckner 1989:79; courtesy of Karl Toepfer)

Transﬁguration, then, referred to Lehndorff ’s power to see her own body with the same detachment as other bodies and objects, a detachment that pre- cluded any preoccupation with questions of arousal, attraction, or impurity. She did not even suppose transﬁguration had anything to do with producing images that reveal the conditions of the body’s greatest “authenticity.” For this reason, she and Tru¨lzsch did not regard their book as an album of discretely captured images, but as the photo documentation of a performance that occurred in many places over a long period of time and encompassed an evolu-

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 Nakedness 171

25. Nudity as disclosure of weakness, diminished power, or authority, and the failure of erotic feeling to produce satisfying “connec- tions” between people. This is a common function of nudity in state-sponsored theatrical productions from the late 1960s onward. Here a scene from Pina Bausch’s dance theatre production Viktor, Wuppertal, 1986. (Schmidt 1992:75; photo by Gert Weigelt)

tion in aesthetic consciousness. “Our work is like a silent performance in which two persons are involved. Holger and myself. There are no spectators” (Lehndorff and Tru¨lzsch 1986:146). Embedded within any study of the images is an awareness of the laborious and time-consuming action of painting Lehn- dorff ’s body, an action which, amazingly, she herself helped perform after the clothes pictures. This enormously protracted closeness of the photographer- viewer to the object of his gaze indicates a knowledge of the model’s body that is as far beyond the knowledge gained from intense erotic intimacy as it is beyond the capacity of the image to do anything more than merely imply the closeness. It is a performance that no mode of mediation can contain, nor can it have any sort of spectator who only watches it in its entirety. As a performance, then, this process of transﬁguring the body contradicts Lehndorff ’s

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 172 Karl Toepfer

26. Nudity establishes the limits of self-effacement and implication in the image itself that transfiguration is a condition of supreme “integration” into the envi- detachment from one’s own body and the bodies of others. Nudity, in this ronment. Vera Lehndorff, case, collapses the distance between not only viewer and creator, but also be- with Holger Tru¨lzsch, Ox- tween artist and model, painting and photography, nakedness and fashion, im- ydation, Hamburg-Altona, age and performance, body and nature, flesh and industrial materials, and 1978. (Lehndorff and “Veruschka” and Vera Lehndorff; it “abolish[es],” as Tru¨lzsch suggests, “the Tru¨lzsch 1986:136; courtesy distinction between reality and painting—and reality becomes painting” (148). of Vera Lehndorff) And yet, from this aristocratic perspective, nudity offers no basis for a new society, for a new idea of community, for an intensified trust between bodies. Nudity here is always a magnification of a transcendent aloneness, of a superior freedom to look at oneself as an object apart from the rest of the world. Even so, Lehndorff ’s project was an effort to “integrate” her naked body

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 Nakedness 173 into a variety of environments comprising a dis- tinctly modern world, without forming or belonging to any society at all. Her ambivalent attitude toward the power of nudity as an instrument of social integration appears all the more remarkable when compared with Leni Riefenstahl’s The Last of the Nuba (1973), a glamorous photo album consisting of 172 images, mostly in color, of the Nuba tribal society, which inhabited a remote and practically unknown region of Sudan. Riefenstahl (b. 1902) took these pictures between 1962 and 1969, but it is clear that what fascinated her about the Nuba was their naked bodies, not any unique social order, culture, or political ideal developed by the tribe. Her interest in the tribe was purely aesthetic, not anthropological, insofar as the Nuba provided her with images of a society wherein nudity was constant, pervasive, and yet mysterious (plate 27). By focusing almost entirely on bodies and group- ings of bodies, Riefenstahl bestowed a heroic aura upon Nuba nudity, for she detached the documentation of their daily life from any ideological framework articulated by the tribe; indeed, the photos managed to detach the bodies from any serious sense of environment. The Nuba appeared to live in a hot, arid, rugged landscape, but Riefenstahl treated it as a generic scenic backdrop for presenting “primitive” 27. Nuba warriors appear naked bodies. Naked male Nuba were heroic to the degree that she viewed engaged in a pensive sharing them as warriors, even though her book offered no evidence to show that the of confidences. The picture Nuba were exceptionally successful as warriors or even hunters. The imagery is “mysterious” partly be- of the book conformed to a distinctive narrative logic: nudity created a unified cause Riefenstahl never pro- society when it offered a heroic image of the body, but in creating a heroic vides even any captions that image, nudity leveled off differences between individuals within the society, explain the context for the so that no matter how Riefenstahl looked at Nuba bodies, nudity did practi- image, let alone analysis of cally nothing to individualize any of them or to strengthen the idea, perva- specific images in her book. sively promoted by European nude photography, that revelation of the body In this picture, does the was fundamental in constructing a unique human identity. Her images of “primitive” status of the Nuba society treated human nakedness with the same aesthetic detachment men, established by their one would apply to photographing a herd of naked horses or naked lions. But conjunction of their black- it is exactly this aesthetic detachment that accounts for the book’s great appeal. ness and their nudity, be- Here nudity has enormous power to unify society only when that society is stow an “innocence” upon completely detached from any serious idea of “civilization,” from modernity, them that absolves the from technology, from scientific curiosity about the natural world, from his- viewer from seeing a homo- tory, from anything contaminated by fashion or temporal specificity. When sexual communication be- you see human society the way you see a herd of horses or lions, you see the tween the men? (Riefenstahl bodies of humans the way the Nuba see the bodies of horses or lions: as em- 1973:42; courtesy of Karl blems of mythic or superstitious powers. Toepfer) But Riefenstahls’s mode of thinking is not “fascinating fascism,” as Susan Sontag argued when she reviewed the book back in 1975 (Sontag 1980 [1975]);11 it is Victorian-Colonial era Christianity. It is a view of nudity as a socializing force that was already conventional within Western civilization by 1910, when Riefenstahl was eight years old. German Nacktkultur before the Nazi era sought to show how nudity, even if it could not unify German society, could nevertheless exert a transformative, emancipatory influence upon the nation. The

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 174 Karl Toepfer nudists saw the naked body as a historical and historicizing power. Postwar disillusionment with such grandiose idealism provided a favorable environment for Riefenstahl’s ahistorical aestheticism, in which communal nudity was proof of a society’s freedom from history. Lehndorff ’s aesthetic thus appears as a repudiation not only of the Riefenstahl view of nudity but of the pre-Nazi Nacktkultur view as well, for on the one hand her images always revealed her naked body as a historical artifact, as subject to fashion as any effort to cover it up, while on the other hand, this very creation of historical consciousness through nakedness amplified her aloneness and “transfigured” her aristocratic detachment from society. Her nakedness could “blend” into different, histori- cally peculiar environments, without, however, having any power to integrate her into a society, a group, a tribe, even a partnering of any sort. But despite all this postwar skepticism toward social nudity, belief in the power of nakedness to produce social unity had not by any means disappeared from German consciousness. Perhaps I can develop this point most persua- sively by describing my own experience of German group nudity in 1992. In January of that year I visited Leipzig to do research for my book Empire of Ec- stasy (1997), which explores German Nacktkultur and dance culture of the 1920s. The Leipzig Bu¨cherei, adjacent to the University of Leipzig, was the official repository for all German-language publications between 1913 and 1945, and the Leipzig Tanz Archiv also contained important documents. In the Bu¨cherei, I encountered many Weimar-era publications related to nudity that were otherwise very difficult to find anywhere in the world. My work in the library captured the attention of a couple of male library clerks, students at the University, who were eager to show me publications about Nacktkultur that had so far not appeared on my bibliographic lists. These young men knew that section of the library very well, and it seemed to please them greatly that an American had traveled such a great distance just to read and copy the old books and study the pictures within them. A heavy snow covered the city, and the sky was gray and bleak day after day. I invited the library clerks to lunch at a cafe´ near the University. They told me that no one had requested the Nackt- kultur books for decades, because the Communist regime discouraged any curiosity about sexual subcultures; indeed, the secret police were likely to investigate anyone who filled out request slips for such publications. But in a bookstore I had purchased an excellent anthology of nude photographs taken in East Germany, and this book indicated the presence in the country of a sophisticated enthusiasm for displaying and seeing nudity in unusual ways and places (Petsch 1987). The clerks also introduced me to another University student, Manfred, who was an athlete and knew “about the ideas of the body culture of that time,” because his mother had been a librarian for the University and he himself had participated in the state-sponsored swimming competitions. He was now studying economics and marketing. Manfred and I got along very well, but we did not talk much about Nacktkultur; we talked mostly about how things had changed since the collapse of the Wall and what would happen as a result of reunification. He invited me to have dinner with him and his girlfriend, Ilka, in her apartment, and again we hardly talked about Nacktkultur, except to re- fine the obvious point that the Communists regarded social nudity as a distrac- tion from, rather than an instrument for, the development of a socialist state. We talked until nearly two in the morning; but later in the day I left for Berlin. Manfred and I corresponded when I eventually returned to California, and he sent me a copy of Hans W. Fischer’s Ko¨rperschonheit und Ko¨rperkultur (1928) that he had discovered in a used bookstore. In the meantime, some new grant money allowed me to return to Leipzig in the spring, so that I could read and

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 Nakedness 175 copy numerous publications, mostly magazines, which I had not been able to study on my previous trip. A heat wave had spread across Europe in late May of 1992. When I got off the train in Leipzig, I had only to take about 30 steps before my body felt soaked with sweat. In a large fountain-pool, two little girls, sisters obviously, aged about five and eight, leaped and splashed about completely naked, while their mother, in shorts and sleeveless blouse, took pictures of the children and chatted with a couple of other women in their thirties. The people lounging in the plaza viewed the naked children with a placid satisfaction that I could easily confuse with approval. I stayed in the apartment of an old woman who lived in an enormous block of high-rise tenements overlooking the parkway that led to the Bu¨cherei. For several hours I sat naked and sweating on a chair facing the balcony window. In mid-afternoon, the sky suddenly turned gray and heavy and then black with storm clouds. The breeze rushing onto my body drew me out onto the balcony, and I stood naked there as a torrential rain fell upon me. The old woman knocked on my door and asked if I needed anything. I said, no, I was perfectly content, and moved toward the bureau mirror to admire my rain-drenched nakedness, without thinking for one second that my nakedness on the balcony might cause the old woman some embarrass- ment. The ensuing days remained oppressively warm. But in the Bu¨cherei, the atmosphere was always cool and stirred by gentle breezes I never felt anywhere else, and day after day I spent many serene, happy hours reading in forgotten journals forgotten articles on body culture by such stirring thinkers as Hans Prinzhorn, Ernst Schertel, Elfriede Feudel, Heide Woog, Dorothee Gunther, Paul Leppin, and Curt Corrinth. In the long golden evenings, I took marathon walks through the city, through the vast parks, returning to my room around midnight, and quite often it occurred to me that walking naked throughout the city was a perfectly sensible idea, not at all eccentric, even though all the old Nacktkultur books in the library showed nude bodies only in nature, in fields, woods, and meadows. Manfred finally called me early in the morning. He had been in Jena most of the week, at some sort of student conference. He and Ilka were very eager to invite me to his apartment for dinner. But before we went to his place, Manfred wanted me to meet some people who, he said, “practice the Nacktkultur you are studying.” He told me to take a tram all the way to the end of the line, where he would meet me about 7:30 in the evening. I spent the day in the Dance Archive, reading correspondence and memos about the dancer Olga Desmond and examining numerous movement drawings by Rudolf Laban. The weather was now even hotter than when I first ar- rived in the city. In the early evening, as I walked to the tram station, the city seemed deserted—it was so quiet and still and empty of people. I enjoyed the long walk from the library to my room and then to the tram partly because of the pleasure I felt in the sweat streaming from my body and I wanted more sweat to stream and enhance the sensation that my body was shedding something excessive and becoming ever leaner and sleeker. When I reached the tram plaza, I saw several policemen engaged in an argument with a group of five gypsy women. I could not determine what the point of contention was, but the police made clear they didn’t want the women to board a tram. Many Germans, including Manfred and Ilka, dislike gypsies and regard them as social pests, not least because they believe the gypsies have made stealing the economic foundation of their secretive, pagan culture. These women, in their mid-teens to mid-thirties, wore brightly colored, flowing dresses that made them look Near Eastern, somehow veiled and be- jeweled. I thought they looked simultaneously quite pretty and rather dirty,

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 176 Karl Toepfer besmirched. The police shooed them away from the tram-waiting platform, and the women, backpedaling, shouted insults at the officers. But they seemed to realize that they had lost their struggle with the police and now the best they could do was stage a kind of defiant retreat. This defiance culminated in a star- tling gesture. As they backpedaled and jeered at their “persecutors,” three of the women lifted their skirts and exposed their naked genitals. They kept their genitals exposed for at least a minute, while the entire group shouted insults. Many bystanders witnessed this scene. But the police appeared bored and merely sneered at the women; they walked away from the women, confident that they had protected the trams from whatever plot the gypsies had hatched against the well-behaved citizenry. I thought it was grotesque that women would think they were insulting anybody by flashing their genitals. The tram ride was quite long, about 45 minutes, but I was still in the city when I stepped off in a sort of mall surrounded by high-rise apartment towers. Manfred and I embraced—he was full of apologies for being out of town, for the long tram ride, for the drabness of the environment, but I told him that so far I was happy with every day of my stay in Leipzig. As we walked through the neighborhood, he commented on the identity and history of buildings, then he abruptly asked how my research was going. “Excellent,” I said, “I really should spend the whole summer here; the library holds so many things I haven’t even requested yet.” The road meandered away from the high rises and into a rather ugly field further deformed by heaps of rubble, clumps of ornery weeds, piles of sand, rusting sheet metal, and heavy excavation equip- ment. “New apartments will be built here,” Manfred explained. The road, however, came to an end at an embankment overlooking a fairly large lake. In the dusky light, it was an astonishingly beautiful scene, the water shimmering with golden reflections and dark, ancient, enormous trees casting long shadows across the water. Maybe thirty naked people were on the beach below us; clustered in groups of four, five, or six, they lounged on blankets, reading, pic- nicking, conversing, strumming a guitar, sketching, or taking pictures. Man- fred led me toward a group that included Ilka, another woman, Kristina, and two men, Reinhard and Ernst, all University students and all naked. I was probably the oldest person on the beach. Manfred’s friends greeted me effu- sively, confiding an exuberant enthusiasm for my research project on “the body culture of the Weimar days,” for this was “a story that should no longer be kept secret.” Manfred was already taking off his clothes while introducing me to his friends, and he was completely naked before I realized that they all expected me to become naked too without anyone actually inviting me to do so. But I hardly minded, for I could never recall feeling embarrassed when anyone had seen me naked, and indeed it was easy enough to construct the impression that I enjoyed being seen naked without seriously supposing I was an exhibitionist. Manfred and his friends were good-looking, with trim, athletic physiques; some people on the beach were perhaps not quite so “attractive,” but I certainly could not say they were ugly. I was happy with my own body, even if I could never understand satisfactorily what made it desirable to men and women. Manfred kissed Ilka lightly on the cheek, then suggested that he and I “soothe our bodies” by taking a swim. Ilka and Kristina and Ernst and Reinhard seemed content to sit on the blanket and read and smoke and con- verse and sketch and display their nakedness and observe the slow, twilight transformation of the scene. The water was cold and clear, and despite the sweltering weather, it took several minutes of vigorous swimming before my body felt comfortable merely treading in place. With Manfred leading, we swam maybe two hundred yards from the shore; the people on the beach, the trees, the buildings all seemed far

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 Nakedness 177 away, and so did the construction cranes looming on the eastern horizon behind them, against the pink sky. In the heart of the lake it was intensely quiet and still. The swim out made us pant, and the dense, cold water made treading only slightly less strenuous than swimming. But we did not shiver anymore. Manfred began asking me questions that obviously had preoccupied him for some time. He asked if I had a girlfriend. Had I ever been married? Had I known many women from “an erotic perspective”? Had I ever loved a woman “passionately,” that is to say, had I ever known a woman who had the power to push me “in the direction of great irrationality”? What was she like and how did I “manage to deal with her power”? Did I know any American women who were nudists? Answering these and related questions required me to speak at length and give protracted explanations, convoluted autobiographical stories. It was not altogether relaxing to plunge into these matters while trying to keep aﬂoat in the deepest part of the lake. But soon I realized that Manfred was not particularly concerned with my answers; rather, he used the questions as a way to determine how far he could trust me. What he really wanted to talk about was his own relation to Ilka and women in general, and he wasn’t sure how far he should go in conﬁding his ambivalence toward a woman he had “loved for so long.” In spite of her athleticism and beauty, Ilka was physically and emotionally fragile; she seemed exceptionally vulnerable to sickness, in- jury, pain, and thus it was “somewhat tiring to love her.” “Her love of nudism has not made her as strong as you may think,” he remarked. Everyone seemed to assume that he and Ilka would eventually marry. But since meeting me in January and looking more seriously into the history of Nacktkultur, he had begun to think that his understanding and experience of women was much too limited and that perhaps he ought to “get closer to other women,” if he was to know the “power” of a woman to move his life in a different and even “irrational” direction. He wondered if maybe he didn’t love Ilka as passionately as he might because he was afraid to love any woman stronger than himself. I said any woman who makes a man feel he is not in control of himself always seems stronger than him. But that is an illusion, I proposed, for a man becomes irrational in proportion to the degree that his passion is unrequited, and a woman’s power isn’t great if she doesn’t love the man she makes irrational. Anyway, it seemed to me that the strength of a passion depended on one’s capacity to tolerate and even enjoy the perversities staining the object of one’s passion. Perversities and perversions, however, are not always evidence of irrationality; they sometimes follow a logic that an irrational society cannot understand. Manfred apparently wanted to ponder these ideas before continuing the dialogue. After treading speechlessly for a moment, he plunged downward and re-emerged perhaps 15 yards away, swimming a backstroke in a circling movement around me. I swam toward him. I guess my reference to “irrational society” spurred him to move our discussion to a more abstract and political level. He wanted to talk about the future of Germany “without the Wall.” He wondered if East Germany was “too sick” ever to catch up with “the Western world,” and then I began to sense that he believed the West felt as ambivalently about Eastern Germany as he felt toward Ilka. What was beautiful and desirable about the Eastern sector, other than its sorrowful failure to live up to an impossible ideal, its tragic languishing? But I remarked that desire targeted places the way it targeted people—one desired a place not because it could transform oneself, but because one enjoyed the pleasure of being able to transform (or “liberate”) the place or at least change it in some way no one there could foresee. Manfred then asked: “And how can we in the East feel this plea-

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 178 Karl Toepfer sure in transforming you, the West?” I said: “I don’t know.” But I should have said that this nudist culture inherited and practiced by the university students probably had greater power to change the West than any of the satisfactions associated with the pursuit of socialist ideals under the Communist regime. By now, the twilight was fading rapidly; the high rises on the horizon, their dark, looming forms spotted with evening lights, displayed a phantasmal aura. Even Manfred, bobbing so close to me that I felt a vaguely homoerotic tension gathering in the darkness and heating the water, seemed somehow unmasked and spectral at the same time. “We should return to the group,” he said. So we swam toward the shore, with me following way behind him, the champion swimmer. It was an exhilarating sensation to emerge naked from the cool water into the hot, humid air, and indeed I regretted the onset of this darkness that pre- vented the most refulgent display of my nakedness. Ilka handed me a towel; she asked me “how it went” with me and Manfred in the lake, but Manfred immediately answered her question by saying “we talked about how desiring a person is like desiring a place.” When Ilka suggested that this language was excessively enigmatic, he said “we discussed the power of women and places to make men move in an irrational direction.” Now that I had the chance to look at her, Ilka was much more attractive to me naked than dressed—I mean that I felt more warmly toward her than at any time since meeting her in the winter. Ernst and Reinhard were set to light a bonfire made of scrap wood from the rubble heaps. Two other little groups on the beach had already lit fires. Manfred informed me that the police frowned on these fires, which blackened the beach and sometimes encouraged drunken revelers to leave their trash. But the beauty of the small fire was irresistible. It existed only to bestow a shimmering glow upon our nakedness. We all sat on the blanket. We passed around bottles of fruit juice and orange slices and star-shaped cookies. Manfred, Ernst, Ilka, and I smoked cigarettes, and this detail was in itself interesting because it reinforced awareness that the value of nudism did not depend entirely upon a narrow or puritanical idea of healthiness. Kristina wanted to know more about my scholarly project, about the thesis I wished to ad- vance, while Reinhard and Ernst wanted me to explain American perceptions of the “new German situation.” They confided that they were unsure to what extent I represented or deviated from conventional American attitudes. The talk settled on the theme of German politics and the huge obstacles to a successful reunification of the nation, but none of the students felt as much opti- mism about the future as myself. Ilka made a mysterious remark to me: “You have no idea how consoling it is to live as if you are not responsible for your own happiness or sorrow, only for the happiness and sorrows of others, with whom you are supposed to share a dream of a better world.” I was curious to know how the students became involved with nudism. Was it part of their education before they entered the University? But none of them came from families that practiced nudism or even discussed it. The Nacktkul- tur of the 1920s was scarcely visible in the historical consciousness they ac- quired as children; what little they knew of it came from sequestered books or magazines belonging to older relatives who had themselves obtained the now- faded publications in secret when they were young. Yet all of the students had started to practice nudism together as teenagers when they participated in the outdoor activities of Communist youth groups. The Party never encouraged nudism nor even any discussion of its historical significance. But, as Ernst observed, “Young people sometimes imagine ways of living without waiting for some kind of approval from the past. And sometimes even the Party group leaders would let the students teach them, by pretending to look the other

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 Nakedness 179 way.” Kristina thought it was odd to use the phrase “pretending to look the other way” to describe the undeclared willingness or even desire of some Party authorities to let the young people look directly at naked bodies. The group then wanted me to explain my own connection to nudism “beyond discover- ing its history.” I said I had no affiliation with any nudist organizations in the United States and I had never met any Americans who belonged to a nudist club. Nevertheless, since childhood I believed I had occasionally behaved like a nudist insofar as I enjoyed performing, while alone and naked, certain hum- ble actions, such as raking leaves or plucking cherries in a nearby orchard or driving on the highway. And although I often contemplated the possibility of living in a community where everyone was naked, I had to admit that I actually preferred to imagine a society in which I alone was always naked and that nakedness was even assumed by the public to be a punishment, a humiliation, inflicted upon me for an improper aspect of my sexuality so obscure that no one seemed able to name it. My parents had no interest in nudism, and I hardly ever saw them naked. However, they were fond of paintings and sculptures that depicted idealized nude bodies; several times they confessed their disap- pointment at not being able to afford artworks of nude bodies that could be displayed in the house. This affection for classical images of the nude probably depressed their curiosity about nudism: they doubted too heavily that they looked good enough to display their nakedness for others, even though they looked pretty attractive to me, and I told them so—but perhaps not often enough to prevent them from divorcing. Neither my father nor my mother ever expressed annoyance or impatience or displeasure in seeing me naked, and I grew up feeling that they not only liked seeing me naked; they liked that I wanted them to see me naked. But I soon wearied of talking about myself. I wanted to hear more about the lives of students. But they preferred to dwell on the theme of what nakedness and nudism signified in a society where the secret police were pervasive and nearly everyone was spying on someone else. This theme inevitably raised the question of how well their parents had survived in the police state by acting as informants, surveillance agents, or curators of secrets. “At that time,” Manfred said, “nothing within the entire concept of nakedness had any reality. I mean, no matter how naked you were, you always felt you were hiding something, even from yourself.” The students then drifted into a more theoretical discussion about metaphorical applications of the word “nakedness” and the conditions under which metaphor was an assertion or subversion of political doctrine. I wasn’t sure I followed their debate, so I watched for the most part in silence, and said only, as I recall, in response to a question, something like “what is naked is the exposure of a form that has a strong reason to be hidden.” Kristina picked up her guitar and began strumming timidly. The students wanted to sing some songs, but it took them awhile to decide on a song they all knew. They sang some sort of archaic but spirited East German pop tune from the 1960s, and it was quite thrilling to hear such confident, glossily blended voices emanating from this cluster of glowing naked bodies kneeling before the little fire. This whole scene at the lake brought to apotheosis a German attitude toward nudity in performance or nudity as performance that could reveal itself only through my protracted experience of Leipzig itself. Nudity here at the lake was not, as it was for Lehndorff, a manifestation of aristocratic apartness from “everybody else.” But neither could this nudity provide a foundation for national or class or communal or even (as Nitsch proposed) “subversive” cultic unity, as the Nacktkultur idealists had imagined; nor did it signify, as Riefen- stahl implied, a heroic transcendence of history. Rather, in this nudity, I could

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 180 Karl Toepfer

28. Arrest of Adamites in Amsterdam before the city hall, 1535; a 17th- see the great, controlling idea for a hundred years of German nudity in perfor- century image published in mance or nudity as performance: nothing collapses the distinction between Die Scho¨nheit (1926). life and performance as completely as the display of the naked body. That is The Adamites were a radi- the true unifying power of nudity. Yetthis power is historical rather than “nat- cal force within the Baptist ural,” insofar as nakedness discloses a will to power. A Hegelian aura suffuses movement, which spread the evolution of German nude performance: History is the struggle to make from the Netherlands and the world and the phenomenon of Being more naked. Heidegger was perhaps 12 Northern Germany into even more emphatic: Truth is unveiling. Poland and Bohemia- But to evoke Heidegger is merely to assert that nudity is the intimation of a Moravia in the early 16th grand metaphysical reality. Nudity is more than the “materialization” of the century. The Adamite idea self in the body; it is the materialization of a mysterious cosmic energy other- of a naked society or naked- wise known as “the will.” The Germans could integrate nudity into a pro- ness within society arose found philosophical idea, not because their purpose was to make the body from a powerful hunger to dominate perception, even if that was a consequence of their ambition, but to reinterpret the meaning of establish the supreme value and authority of nakedness itself. They assumed baptism, the circumstances that a deeper and greater reality is always hidden, covered up, and the greatest under which the body re- power lies in “the will” to reveal what is hidden. They wanted people to see ceived God’s blessing and the nakedness of things everywhere, to see the whole world made naked. To protection. (Courtesy of make things naked was perhaps the purpose of philosophy, insofar as philoso- Karl Toepfer) phy constituted a theory of will. And because it was not simply the expression of desire or intention or hope or aspiration, but the articulation of an impera- tive accumulation and release of power that is, paradoxically, the measure of human freedom, the will manifests itself as compulsion or obsession or recur- rence. The nakedness of the body “everywhere” afﬁrmed the authority (or philosophical majesty) of nakedness itself.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 Nakedness 181

29. German communal But philosophy this serious seeks consequences that are more than cultural: bath, as painted by Han they are economic, legal, and political. The Nacktkultur enthusiasts of the Bock (1597). Such baths 1920s saw nudism as a basis for “building” a new society, but the very term were the theme of numerous “building” carries with it economic implications or insinuations. In Der German prints and paint- Mensch und die Sonne, Hans Suren imagined a world in which most forms of ings from the 14th century labor and employment would be performed naked. But the extension of the to the early 17th century. nudist camp or garden into the daily workplace also entailed a vast transfor- (Schidlof 1931:133; courtesy mation of national resources. New technologies, new ofﬁces, new schools, of Karl Toepfer) new factories would have to emerge to accommodate the nakedness of labor- ing bodies; even places on streetcars and the surfaces of sidewalks would have to inspire new designs that protected naked bodies from distressing external forces and created huge greenhouse or arcade-like cities. Such a huge social transformation would require a new state legal apparatus that redeﬁned such concepts as “person” and “property,” for a society governed by the superior value of nakedness has overturned conventional assumptions about relations between identity and ownership of property; the “naked state” implies a re- distribution of national resources insofar as the idealization of nakedness cre- ates a new materialism that urges citizens to detach themselves from the possession of property as the measure of their identities. The whole idea of covering up the body, with clothes and attired emblems of status, upholds the belief that the body achieves identity and value through the material objects attached to it or owned by it. The theory and practice of a “naked state” was already a serious project for

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 182 Karl Toepfer the heretical 16th-century radical Protestant Dutch and German Adamites, to whom Die Scho¨nheit devoted an issue in 1926 (plate 28), and with the up- heavals of the Reformation, Germans seemed to have experimented with the idea of naked societies to a larger degree than elsewhere in Europe (plate 29). Of course, the ambitions of Weimar Nacktkultur did not survive the disaster of the Third Reich. And yet I felt something of that spirit of “building” a new society in my naked encounter with the Leipzig students. The fall of Communism provided an opportunity for a “new” society to emerge, as long as people were willing to see each other “nakedly.” But nakedness as practiced by our little community in Leipzig was the microcosm of a “new” society that collapsed the difference between performance and spectator. I am not sure why Germany is unique in claiming such a serious historical and social value for nakedness. Probably many intersecting variables attached to Germany’s history, geography, and language are responsible for catalyzing “the will toward nakedness,” with the value of nakedness emanating from the enduring German Romantic hunger to draw cosmic power from “the 30. Carefully staged studio absolute” and “the infinite,” the intimation of which photograph laden with sym- is possible only through elaborate and mighty metaphysical discourse. bolic gestures that appeared But I will say that what was unique to Germany even before the Adamites in the nudist journal Die was a pervasive, state-sponsored theatre culture. The fragmentation of the Freude (1928). The picture German-speaking lands into so many small states before 1870 made it possible in its magazine context ob- for German speakers to believe that the German language allowed its speakers viously links nudism with to inhabit a multitude of identities or “masks,” and this instability or uncer- healthy bodies, with ex- tainty of identity encouraged the development and proliferation of a theatre alted, redemptive (or “pas- culture that was pervasive and “serious” throughout the German-speaking sionately” romantic) erotic lands. It was not really centralized; every little state established its claim to se- feeling, and with the habi- riousness through an “official” theatre that was the most accurate index, so to tation of a “dark” (deep) speak, of freedom in public discourse. But the unification of Germany did not interior (psychic) space. mean the end of a pervasively sophisticated theatre culture. On the contrary, Nudism here is not a matter one might even say that unification vindicated the authority of theatre to ar- of getting closer to any con- ticulate the mutability or multiplicity of German identity, its power to assume ventional sense of “nature.” an “infinite” magnitude of manifestations. But theatre as such always postu- (Moreck 1929:61; courtesy lates that one cannot “see” anything very well without a profound difference of Karl Toepfer) between performance and observer, and German theatre has been a great and monumental achievement precisely because of the extraordinary seriousness with which the culture as a whole expected performers and spectators to respect the difference between themselves. Perhaps only a theatre culture of such determined seriousness could nourish the grandiose ambition to collapse the difference between theatre and reality, the dominant consequence of which is the emergence of a “new” society. This collapse of difference between theatre and “life” implies the collapse of difference between the “subjective” and “ob- jective” domains of reality that was the declared aim of German Romanticism in its ambition to breathe the absolute power of the “infinite.” Nothing achieves this collapse more successfully and more ecstatically than the nakedness of human bodies.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 Nakedness 183

Notes 1. Pudor’s books related to nudism include: Nackender Mensch (1893), Der Einfluss des Lich- tes auf den menschlichen Ornismus (1905a), Die Frauenreformkleidung (1905b), Hygiene der Bewegung (1906a), Katechism der Nacktkultur (1906b), Nackt Kultur (1907). Pudor also published many works on other aspects of contemporary German culture. 2. See Ungewitter (1906; 1907; 1920a; 1920b [all published in Stuttgart by Ungewitter himself ]). Also important is his grandiose and continuously engaging anthology of es- says by right-wing thinkers, including himself, is Die Zusammenbruch: Deutschlands Wiedergeburt durch Blut und Eisen (1919). 3. It may seem that Nacktkultur, with its belief in getting closer to “nature,” was primarily an outdoor activity, which, in a country with long winters like Germany, could take place only in the summer. But the Nacktkultur journals, led by Die Scho¨nheit, wanted to promote nudity as a year-round lifestyle. Nakedness could occur anywhere at any time. Nakedness belonged in the home as well as in the meadow, the woods, or seaside sand dunes. To communicate this idea, the journals published numerous studio photographs of nude models in carefully directed and lighted poses. These pictures were self- consciously dramatic, avoided documentary informality, and linked to nudity to a heightened aesthetic consciousness. 4. A complete edition of Die Scho¨nheit is available at the Freiko¨rperkultur library in Kassel, Germany. Some European booksellers have complete editions for sale on the Internet, and the appeal of these old magazines for buyers today is remarkably intense. 5. On the history of Freiko¨rperkultur, see Andritzky and Rauthenberg (1989); Grisko (1999). Also, see Gay (1932), one of the best books ever published on German nudism; Parmelee ([1927] 1941); and Merrill (1931). The activities of nudists seem not to have bothered the state guardians of public morality, but the publications by nudists and firms claiming to promote nudism inspired numerous charges of “indecency,” with courts tending to favor the accused rather than prosecutors. A fascinating (and often quite hu- morous) compilation of documents related to absurd state prosecutions in the Hannover region for “indecency” by nudist publishers in Dresden and elsewhere appears in Brauns (1927). Also of exceptional theoretical interest is an issue of a scholarly psychoanalytical journal devoted entirely to the theme of “nakedness and education” (Mengs 1928). 6. For information about the attitude toward nudity by Laban and his disciples, see Laban (1926); Die Scho¨nheit 22/1 (1926), a special issue devoted to Laban. See also Wolfens- berger (1990:111–16). The most complete biography of Laban is by Evelyn Do¨rr (1999; 2003). 7. Koch’s school and statements by his daughter about nudism and the school appear in the documentary film This Nude World, directed by Michael Mindlin, with script by Jan Gay (1932). 8. Curt Corrinth’s play Der Leichenscha¨ndler (1918) includes a scene in which a prostitute walks nude among the corpses of slain German soldiers in the trenches of World War I. Hans Henny Jahnn’s Die Kronung Richards III (1922) features male homosexual nudity. Hermann Essig’s U¨ berteufel (1918) contains incestuous nudity between brother and sister. 9. Several photos by Elli Souyoultzoglou-Serandaris (Nelly) of nude Wigman students, from 1920 to 1924, appear in Harder (2001:plates 8–11, 13). A Wigman student in the late 1920s, Letty Thom, kept a scrapbook-diary, which contains nude photos of herself. This album is in the possession of the dance historian Wilfried van Poppel, in Amster- dam. 10. The bibliography on Nitsch is enormous, much of it generated by himself. A complete list of his publications, exhibitions, recordings, and videos is difficult to compile. On his website, Nitsch sells a large number of products documenting his Actions and exhibits: Ͻhttp://www.nitsch.org/ien/Ͼ. The Zentrales Verzeichnis Antiquarischer Bu¨cher, a website that centralizes the inventories of hundreds of European used bookstores, lists 320 titles by and about Nitsch, the great majority of which sell for at least $50.00. A huge number of sites on the Internet make reference to Nitsch; some of the more interesting include: Ͻhttp://sammlung-essl.at/deutsch/kultur/archiv/nitsch.htmlϾ; Ͻhttp:// galeria.origo.hu/nitsch/nitbeng.htmlϾ; Ͻhttp://www.xs4all.nl/ϳjeroenvu/gwv/nitsch. htmϾ.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 184 Karl Toepfer

In 1999, Kadmon Records released a four-CD recording of Nitsch’s interminable Iceland: A Symphony in Ten Movements (1998). The same year, Nitsch released an eight- CD recording of the soundtrack for the Fifth Day of the Six Day Action (1998); the recording is distributed by the Cortical Foundation in Malibu, California, which has distributed several other recordings of Nitsch’s gigantic soundscapes. See also Von der Aktionsmalerei (1988); Klo¨ckner (1989); Nitsch (1985); Stark (1987). On Nitsch’s con- ﬂicts with the law and police, see Leiss (1971:460–83). 11. For Sontag, the chief evidence for the fascist identity of Riefenstahl’s Nuba images is Riefenstahl’s collaboration with the Nazis through her ﬁlms of the 1930s, especially Tri- umph of the Will (1935). But it is not at all clear from her argument that Riefenstahl’s images of the tribe differ from glossy ethnographic photos that appear in such journals as National Geographic, the work of photographers with no ties to fascism, because Son- tag never examines any ethnographic photography other than Riefenstahl’s. Sontag de- pends entirely on biographical details of Riefenstahl’s life to connect the work of the artist to a fascist aesthetic. The evidence she provides from the images themselves is hardly enough to convict them of fascist sentiment; actually, it’s quite unlikely that the cultural curators of the Third Reich would have found anything in the Nuba culture or The Last of the Nuba helpful in promoting the Nazi ideology. 12. Heidegger: “ ‘Being-true’ (‘truth’) means Being-uncovering” ([1927] 1962:262; H220); “Being-true as Being uncovering, is a way of Being for Dasein” (263; H221). Heidegger uses the terms unveiling, uncoveredness, and unhiddenness mostly interchangeably, although he does make subtle distinctions between them in theorizing how Dasein “ex- presses itself as a Being-towards entities—a Being-towards which uncovers.”

References

Adelphi, Max, and Arno Kettermann 1927 Tanzkunst und Kunsttanz. Stuttgart: Graphische Kunst-un Verlagsanstalt. Andritzky, Michael, and Thomas Rauthenberg, eds. 1989 Wir sind nackt und nennen uns Du. Giessen: Anabas. Bachmann, Marie-Laure 1984 La rythmique Jaques-Dalcroze: une e´ducation par la musique et pour la musique. Neuchaˆtel: A` la Baconnie`re. Bene, Carmelo, director 1972 Salome. Film. Videotape cassette released in 1994 by Istituto Luce (Rome) and Deltavideo (Milan). Berber, Anita, and Sebastian Droste 1922 Die Ta¨nze des Lasters, des Grauens und der Ekstase. Vienna: Gloriette. Bloch, Alice 1927 Harmonische Schulung der Frauen. Stuttgart: Dieck. Blu¨her, Hans 1919 Die Rolle der Erotik in der ma¨nnlichen Gesellschaft. 2 vols. Jena: Diedrichs. Brauns, Walther, ed. 1927 Nacktheit als Verbrechen. Egesdorf: Laurer. Bronnen, Arnolt 1922 Die Geburt der Jugend. Berlin: Rowohlt. 1923 Die Exzesse. Berlin: Rowohlt. 1985 Vatermord. Schauspiel in den Fassungen von 1915 und 1922. Munich: edition text und kritik. 1990 Werke. 5 vols. Klagenfurt: Ritter. Do¨rr, Evelyn 1999 Rudolf von Laban. Leben und Werk des Ku¨nstlers (1879–1936) (2 vols: 1. Biogra- ﬁe and 2. Ku¨nstlerisches Werk). PhD Diss., Humboldt University, Berlin.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 Nakedness 185

2003 “Rudolf von Laban: The ‘Founding Father’ of Expressionist Dance.” Dance Chronicle 26/1:1–29. Faber, Monika 1983 Madame D’Ora: Wien-Paris. Vienna: Brandsta¨tter. 1995 Rudolf Koppitz, 1884–1936. Vienna: Brandsta¨tter. Feudel, Elfriede 1949 Rhythmisch-musicalische Erziehung. Wolfenbu¨ttel: K.H. Mo¨seler. Fischer, Lothar 1984 Anita Berber, Tanz zwischen Rausch und Tod 1918–1928 in Berlin. Berlin: Haude und Spener. Fonda, Peter 1998 Don’t Tell Dad. New York: Hyperion. Fro¨hlich und Kaufmann 1984 Eldorado, Homosexuelle Frauen und Ma¨nner in Berlin 1850–1950. Berlin: Fro¨h- lich und Kaufmann. Gay, Jan 1932 On Going Naked. Garden City: Garden City Publishing. Gertz, Jenny 1926 “Tanz und Kind.” Die Scho¨nheit 22, 2:49–61. Gordon, Mel 2000 Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin. Los Angeles: Feral Press. Grisko, Michael, ed. 1999 Freiko¨rperkultur und Lebenswelt. Kassel: Kassel University Press. Gross, Michael 1995 Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women. New York: Morrow. Hagemann, Hedwig 1927 U¨ ber Ko¨rper und Seele der Frau. Leipzig: Grethlein. Harder, Matthias 2001 Nelly: Dresden, Athens, New York. Munich, London, and New York: Prestel. Heidegger, Martin 1962 [1927] Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row. Hilker, Franz W. 1926 “Aus der Geschichte der gymnastischen Bewegung.” Gymnastik 1, 4 (April): 48–54. Hirschfeld, Magnus 1914 Die Homosexualita¨t des Mannes und des Weibes. Berlin: Marcus. Isenfels, Paul 1927 Getanzte Harmonien. Stuttgart: Dieck. Jencik, Joe 1930 Anita Berberova. Prague: Terpsichore. 1931 “Kokain: Versuch einer Analyse des Tanzes Anita Berber.” Schrifttanz 4, 1:10. Klo¨ckner, Hubert 1989 Wiener Aktionismus 1966–1971. Klagenfurt: Ritter. Koch, Adolf 1929 Nacktheit: Ko¨rperkultur und Erziehung. Leipzig: Oldenburg. 1932 Ko¨rperbildung/Nacktkultur. Leipzig: Oldenburg. 1933 Das Nacktparadies von Berlin. Leipzig: Oldenburg. Laban, Rudolf 1920 Die Welt des Ta¨nzers. Stuttgart: Seifert.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 186 Karl Toepfer

1926 Gymnastik und Tanz. Oldenburg: Stalling. Lania, Leo 1929 Der Tanz im Dunkel: Anita Berber. Berlin: Schulz. Lehndorff, Vera, and Holger Tru¨lzsch 1986 “Veruschka”: Trans-figurations. Boston: Little Brown. Leiss, Ludwig 1971 Kunst im Konflikt. Berlin: de Gruyter. Lewis, Dio 1862 New Gymnastics. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. Loesch, Ilse 1990 Mit Leib und Seele. Berlin: Henschel. Mayer, Hans, ed. 1977 Arnolt Bronnen, Stu¨cke. Kronberg: Athenaum. Meng, Heinrich, ed. 1928 Zeitschrift fu¨r psychoanalytische Pa¨dagogik, 3, 2–3 (November/December):41– 104. Special issue devoted to “nakedness and education.” Mensendieck, Bess 1919 Standards of Female Beauty. New York: Schob and Wisser. 1923 Funktionelles Frauenturnen. Munich: Bruckmann. 1924 [1906] Ko¨rperkultur der Frau. Munich: Bruckmann. 1927a Anmut der Bewegung im ta¨glichen Leben. Munich: Bruckmann. 1927b Bewegungsprobleme, die Gestaltung scho¨ner Arme. Munich: Bruckmann. Merrill, Frances, and Mason Merrill 1931 Among the Nudists. Garden City: Garden City Publishing. Mindlin, Michael, director 1932 This Nude World. Script by Jan Gay. New York: Vision Pictures. Moreck, Curt [Konrad Haemmerling] 1929 Kultur—und Sittengeschichte der neuesten Zeit. 3 vols. Volume 3: Das Genuss- leben des modernen Menschen. Dresden: Aretz. Nitsch, Hermann 1985 O.M. Theater Lesebuch. Vienna: Freibord. Ostwald, Hans 1905 Ma¨nnliche Prostitution: Das Berliner Dirnentum, vol. 5. Leipzig: Fiedler. Parmelee, Maurice 1941 [1927] Nudism in Modern Life. Mays Landing, NJ: Sunshine. Pastori, Jean-Pierre 1983 A corps perdu: La danse nu au XXe siecle. Laussane: Favre. Peters, Hugo 1919 Revolution und Nacktkultur. Dresden: Die Scho¨nheit. Petsch, Ursula, ed. 1987 Aktfotografie. Leipzig: VEB Fotokinoverlag. Pudor, Heinrich 1893 Nackender Mensch. Berlin: Pudor. 1905a Der Einfluss des Lichtes auf den menschlichen Organismus. Langensalza: Gesundes Leben. 1905b Die Frauenreformkleidung. Leipzig: Seeman. 1906a Hygiene der Bewegung. Langensalza: Beyer. 1906b Katechism der Nacktkultur. Berlin-Steglitz: Pudor. 1906c Das Geschlecht: Bisexualitat. Berlin: Pudor. 1907 Nackt-Kultur. 3 vols. Leipzig: Pudor.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 Nakedness 187

Riefenstahl, Leni 1973 The Last of the Nuba. Reprinted 1977, 1986, 1995. New York: Harper and Row. Rothschuh, Karl 1983 Naturheilbewegung Reformbewegung Alternativbewegung. Stuttgart: Hippocrates. Rubartelli, Franco 1971 “Countess Vera Gottlieb von Lehndorff (a.k.a. Veruschka) photographed by Franco Rubartelli.” Playboy, January:96. Schertel, Ernst 1926 “Tanz und U¨ berschwang.” Soma 4:272–75. Schidlof, Berthold 1931 Prostitution und Ma¨dchenhandel. Leipzig: Lykeion. Schmidt, Jochen 1992 Tanztheater in Deutschland. Berlin: Propylaën. Die Scho¨nheit 1905 Luxus Ausgabe. Dresden: Verlag Die Scho¨nheit. 1914 Luxus Ausgabe. Dresden: Verlag Die Scho¨nheit. 1926 Special issue devoted to Laban. Die Scho¨nheit 22, 1. Schreber, Daniel Moritz 1862 [1858] Pangymnastikon. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 1899 Medical Indoor Gymnastics. London: Williams and Norgate. Schreiber, Hans 1991 Trude Fleischmann: Fotografin in Wien 1918–1938. Vienna: Wirtschafts-Trend Zeitschriften. Sontag, Susan 1980 [1975] “Fascinating Fascism.” In Under the Sign of Saturn, 73–105. New York:Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Also available in New York Review of Books, 6 February 1975 Ͻhttp://www.anti-rev.org/textes/Sontag74a/Ͼ. Stark, Ekkehard 1987 Hermann Nitsch’s Orgien Mysterien Theater und die “Hysterie der Griechen,” Mu- nich: Fink. Suren, Hans 1924 Der Mensch und die Sonne. Suttgart: Dieck. 1925 Deutsche Gymnastik. Berlin: Oldenburg. Symanek, Werner 1996 Aktfotografie der 30er und 40er Jahre. Duisburg: VAWS. Toepfer, Karl 1997 Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ungewitter, Richard 1906 Nacktheit und Moral. Stuttgart: Ungewitter. 1907 Nacktheit und Kultur. Stuttgart: Ungewitter. 1920a Nackt. Stuttgart: Ungewitter. 1920b Nacktheit und Aufstueg. Stuttgart: Ungewitter. Ungewitter, Richard, ed. 1919 Der Zusammenbruch: Deutschlands Wiedergeburt durch Blut und Eisen. Suttgart: Ungewitter. Villany, Adoree 1912 Tanz-Reform und Pseudo-Moral. Paris: Privately printed. Von der Aktionsmalerei zum Aktionismus 1988 Von der Aktionsmalerei zum Aktionismus. Wien 1960–1965. Klagenfurt: Ritter.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021 188 Karl Toepfer

Wolfensberger, Giorgio, ed. 1990 Suzanne Perrottet. Ein bewegtes Leben. Bern: Benteli.

Karl Toepfer is Associate Dean in the College of Humanities and the Arts, San Jose State University. He is the author of Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935 (University of California Press, 1997); Thea- tre, Aristocracy, and Pornocracy (PAJ Publications, 1991); and The Voice of Rapture (Peter Lang Publisher, 1991), as well as a novel, Ursumari (Orella, 2001), and numerous scholarly articles on theatre, dance, dramatic literature, and ﬁlm. A cur- rent project is a book about ancient Roman dance drama.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764089 by guest on 02 October 2021

Web Analytics