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Comment by superb-owl | Hacker News Reader

I had the pleasure of visiting the DDR Museum in Berlin [1] last month. I expected it to be about all the atrocities/hardship/etc but it was mainly a pleasant description of day-to-day life.

The thing I found the most amusing was the description of nude beaches. Apparently it was a point of tension between the Soviets and the Germans, but the Germans just kept getting naked and the Soviets gave up trying to police it. I can't find any great online descriptions of it, but this [2] seems to do a decent job.

[1] https://www.ddr-museum.de/en

[2] https://gdrobjectified.wordpress.com/2014/08/08/fkk/

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Nudism is definitely a big part of East German culture. Not in an eye poking way, it just is and it's not a big deal. I've lived here for over a decade now, and it's had a positive impact on me. It's just pleasant to do it, even if only from time to time, and not stick out like a sore thumb. Or even to go to a mixed sauna, and noticing how nobody really cares since they are there for themselves. I did it in a different country a couple years ago, and even though it was a designated area, some bushes were missing and a couple giggled looking in our direction. In a way, I felt sorry for them.

Is it different in West Germany? I had the feeling the casual nudism was more just German culture and not really different between East and West.

A lot of nudist camps were active in communist Yugoslavia, called FKK (Freikörperkultur), created and visited mostly by West Germans. So I guess there was not much difference between East and West Germany. For some reason, Germans in general are prone to nudism.

Considering it has its roots in the "Lebensreform" in the late 19th century, it's not that surprising that it's part of the culture. Still, American influence hasn't been good to it and it's also the reason why it's more prominent in Eastern Germany.

As someone pointed out in the other comment, it's not that it doesn't exist, but my impression is, it's more conservative. Still, Germany is a large country, so what is true in one part, does not have to be true in another. E.g. Munich is West as much as idk Hamburg, but I doubt the culture is very similar.

There was a movie on TV some time ago with this as a theme https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barfu%C3%9F_bis_zum_Hals .

I didn't know about it, sounds really interesting. A museum about the atrocities is the Stasi museum[0]. I found it very striking, it has a "look at what these criminals did" attitude.

[0] https://www.stasimuseum.de/en/enindex.htm

I've gone to a few nudist places in California. I find nudism to be liberating and I especially like how its a great equalizer of people.

The first time I disrobed at a nudist colony was literally an altered state of consciousness. I was conditioned unwaveringly from before my earliest memory to never, ever, ever, ever expose myself to anyone but doctors and lovers, on pain of shame, arrest, maybe ruin. For about 20 seconds I was overwhelmed by the cognitive and emotional dissonance of some sort of superposition of worlds. And then everything was fine.

> And then everything was fine

That was my experience. It's not a big deal once the shock of the new wears off

I was uncomfortably nervous at the local nude beach, where a very large owl was surveying the scene. I couldn’t help but figure that it’d be dead easy to mistake a flaccid penis for a mouse! I rolled over face-down out of a sense of self-preservation.

Second this, and also recommend visiting the Stasi museum at the old Stasi HQ in "East" Berlin. It's almost entirely in German, but the displays of everyday instruments used to suppress the East German people, all the shredded documents, and the SCENT JARS, are truly astounding to see. Absolutely worth it.

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