The 17.7 km naked hiking trail opened last year in central Germany following a series of altercations between nudists and clothes-wearing hikers on regular trails.

The nudist trail, which stretches between the towns of Dankerode and Wippertalsperre in the picturesque Harz Mountains, is marked with warning notices ‘to ensure that clothes-wearing hikers won’t encounter any big surprises,’ German newspaper Bild reports.

The signs are emblazoned with photos of a male and female hiker wearing only boots and backpacks, and say, ‘Anyone who doesn’t want to see naked bodies may not proceed further!’

Germany has a long tradition of naturism, which is known by its German acronym of FKK, or ‘free body culture,’ according to Der Spiegel magazine. The tradition dates back to the late 19th century, and nude bathing is especially popular at designated beaches on the Baltic Sea coast in northern Germany.

There are 50,000 members of the German Society of Nudists, according to the Times of London.

The issue of naked hiking will soon be taken up by Switzerland’s Supreme Court, reports Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeiger, as translated by Worldcrunch.

One hiker, who carries a scarf when walking nude to wrap it around himself in case he encounters clothed hikers, told the Swiss paper that a sanctioned clothes-optional trail would give people the chance to experience the ‘bodily freedom’ of nude hiking, an experience that ‘fills you with happiness.’

“If you go in and experience how lovely it is to swim with a naked body, and come out without wet trunks on, you feel healthy. And if you can get over the fact that you are naked, it is great,” he said.

Freikoerperkultur (“Free body culture”), or “FKK” for short, was hugely popular in the otherwise highly restrictive German Democratic Republic (GDR).

And 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the habit is still going strong, and has even attracted a loyal band of followers from what was West Germany.

With life so tightly controlled in other ways FKK was a rare liberty that people made full use of in the GDR. Nowhere was this more evident than in Prerow, a picturesque seaside town 300km north of Berlin.

Here in GDR times, border guards, watch towers, searchlights, barbed wire, boats and radar all made sure no one escaped by sea to West Germany or to Denmark, Doris Pegel curator of the local museum, said.

Sailing and even surfing were off limits. But one thing people were allowed to do in the shadow of Prerow’s watchtowers was to indulge in FKK.

And indulge they did, in huge numbers, as people flocked to the seaside in summer and gave FKK a try.

When the GDR was still young, however, the Politburo saw FKK as a dangerous petty bourgeois degeneracy, Josie McLellan, a history lecturer at Britain’s University of Bristol who has researched the phenomenon, said.

Such suspicions were not helped by events in Prerow, where nudists gathered on the beach at night, daubing body parts with toothpaste and wearing African-style headgear for debauched “Cameroon Parties.”

With the ministry of the interior calling nudism a threat to the “natural and healthy feelings of our working people,” the authorities tried to stamp out FKK in the 1950s.

But many nudists were also party members, policeman and even judges, who protested that “doing FKK” and being a good communist were not mutually exclusive and that nudism was non-sexual.

“Here, the woman is not an object of desire, she is a comrade, there is no bikini to excite you,” McLellan cites one contributor to an illuminating 1966 survey of nudists as saying.

A widespread campaign of popular resistance soon made the authorities relent, and by the 1960s and 1970s onward FKK was almost a national pastime.

One of the many things to flood eastwards after German unification in 1990 was a certain prudishness towards nudism on the part of the curious new Wessi (“Westerner”) tourists.

The result was an effort to regulate the hobby more, and to demarcate beaches and lakes into FKK and clothed areas.

However, the old spirit of FKK has survived.

“Here it’s all very mixed because people don’t have a problem with it. It’s supposed to be separated but nobody really minds,” 66-year-old nudist Inge said on Prerow beach.

This meticulous investigation into the Weimer Republic’s naturist movements and its concurrent naked dance training/choreographic styles will surely stand as the definitive study of these complex issues for many years to come.

The dense chapters of this book serve up a most original interpretation of the ways in which “liberating divestiture” entered into the construction of the “identity of the avant-garde intelligentsia” through the visual presentation of the “modern body.”

Toepfer argues that both naturism and naked dance/gymnastics aimed to break through the rationalizations for mass culture in a search of “transcendent” possibilities. In doing so, he takes advantage of much unpublished archival material and rare photographs. Quite a few of both are reprinted here.

Click here for more information about this nudist book!