Josie McLellan

State Socialist Bodies: East German Nudism from Ban to Boom*

In 1987, a lavish parade wound through the streets of East Berlin. The procession, to celebrate the 750th anniversary of the city’s foundation, took five hours to pass the podium seating the great and the good of the East German regime. The best views went to First Secretary Erich Honecker and his wife, Margot, the Minister for Education. There was little to distinguish this scene from a thousand other cold war pageants until the arrival of a float bearing topless mermaids. The moment when TV cameras panned from these barely clad participants to show the Honeckers’ reaction (Erich beaming, Margot slightly strained) went down in East German legend. The contrast with East Germany’s previous leader, Walter Ulbricht, could hardly have been greater. Ulbricht’s “Ten Commandments of Socialist Ethics and Morals,” handed down in 1958, included the exhortation: “you should live cleanly and decently and respect your family.” In keeping with this moral hard line, the Communist regime had attempted to outlaw nudism altogether in the 1950s. Policemen had patrolled the Baltic beaches, fining and arresting bathers without swimsuits. Nudist organizations had been dissolved or driven underground, and those wishing to continue their hobby had been forced into either subterfuge or outright defiance of the regime. By the 1980s, however, public nudity was widely practiced in East Germany. Indeed, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, nudity has been seized upon as one of the most visible markers of East German difference. While nudism was well established in certain West German beaches and parks (the English Garden in Munich is the best known), its acceptance was by no means a matter of course. In West Germany, and in Western Europe and America

‘I Wanted to be a Little Lenin’: Ideology and the German International Brigade Volunteers

Around 2800 Germans joined the International Brigades and fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Many had suffered political persecution in Germany, and the majority were already in exile when war broke out in Spain. This article asks what role ideology played in their decision to volunteer, and traces their changing motivation as they arrived in Spain, experienced combat for the first time, and eventually waited for the war to play itself out. Even amongst such politically committed soldiers, motivation was neither homogeneous nor stable. The wish to defeat fascism and return to Germany was one shared by almost all volunteers, but boredom, desire for adventure and ties to their fellow soldiers all played an important part in motivating men to fight and keeping them in the field.

Did Communists Have Better Sex? Sex and the Body in German Unification

‘Sex at last!’ gasped German weekly newspaper Die Zeit in June 1990, reporting the opening of the first sex shop to the east of the German– German border. This, according to the newspaper, was a significant event in the dying days of the GDR, a country whose citizens ‘were not allowed to show themselves naked or see the naked bodies of others, except at the nudist beach’. ‘The workers and peasants’, the article went on, ‘could only practise voyeurism under the covers of the marriage bed’. Now, at last, currency reform and the impending unification were giving them the opportunity to make up for lost time (Stock, 1990, pp. 1–2). Around the time of unification, accounts such as this one were common, presenting sex as one of many areas in which East Germans had to ‘catch up’ with their Western neighbours. East Germans, it seemed, had led lives which were sexually as well as politically repressed. The brave new world of the market economy now offered new erotic opportunities.

Book Review: Germany since 1945

ingly clear that Figgis was on target with his second claim – that conciliarism had a profound effect on resistance theories in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And, what must be especially satisfying to Oakley is that this conclusion about what he has called the road from Constance to 1688 (and beyond), although not without its challengers, is becoming ‘mainstreamed’ in modern political history texts. While it would be naive to think that the issues related to ecclesial affairs in this book constitute anything more than a ‘minority report’ in an era where no Vatican III appears on the immediate horizon, and Rome is as determined as ever to lead and direct the church, Oakley has served all early modern historians well in this vivid account, which admirably combines synthesis with his own creative contributions to constitutional history.