One Hundred Years of Nakedness in German Performance

One Hundred Years of Nakedness in German Performance Karl Toepfer Nothing in theatre elevates the identity of actor over character more com- pletely than nudity. Yet as a performance or spectacle, nudity remains a theat- rical phenomenon, a form of masking, insofar as it amplifies desire to discover, to expose something hidden within the body that one cannot discover, as ei- ther 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 supple- mented 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 revolu- tion: 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 per- vaded, 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 glori- fied 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 in- volved 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 garden- ing. 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 evi- dent when one looked often enough at bodies in regard to particular details shared by men and women. Awareness of these peculiarities considerably di- minished the conventional inclination to see bodies as homosexual, heterosex- ual, 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

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