I arrived in Germany for the first time in the dog days of summer, and it didn’t take too many trips to local parks and lakes to confirm that people here are quite comfortable in their own skins. FKK (Freikörper Kultur, or “free body culture”) is alive and well in Germany.
It’s quite noticeable after several years on the more prudish side of the Atlantic. The city parks here have a designated section for nude bathing in summer. (Nude senior citizens playing volleyball – I promise it’s a sight you won’t easily forget.) Watching the screens at the gym one morning, I saw a news story featuring uncensored footage of topless Ukrainian women leading a protest march (don’t ask me, I had no audio). And in a recent nationwide poll of attitudes to the new full body scanners being deployed at airports around the world, most Germans are fine with having a stranger seeing the outline of their naked body.
In a nutshell: nudity is not such a big deal here.
It makes sense when you think about it. We all have arms and legs and body hair and private parts – so what’s to hide? In a secure, modern, civilised society, what are we trying to protect ourselves from, exactly? When you consider the gratuitous violence that’s par for the course in Hollywood, it seems almost laughable that Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction could cause such an uproar.
Of course, there’s a difference between being able to accept that logic intellectually, and actually putting it into practice. Old hang-ups die hard.
During my first three weeks in Germany, I was somewhat mortified not to be able to find a gym where you could shower in the privacy of a cubicle. In America and Australia, you’ll see one or two people walking around the locker room in the buff, but they’re the exception rather than the rule. And there’s always a private shower. I was brought up the Indian way – I don’t walk around naked in front of other people, even if they are all women. I just don’t.
So when I finally found a gym with shower cubicles, I joined, even though it cost almost twice as much as the cheapest gym in my area. All was well again in the land of Urmi’s maidenly modesty.
That is, until the day I came back sweaty and exhausted from my workout, grabbed my gym bag, and headed to the showers, only to find that – *gasp* – the entire cubicled section was closed for repairs. The only bathing facility available was the tiled 4x4m prison-style shower room, with shower heads spaced three feet apart along each wall.
Oh, how my heart quailed.
I was already running behind schedule, so there was no time to decamp to the privacy of my apartment. And I’d hit the gym hard, so there was no way I could skip the shower and be sure that my colleagues would leave the office alive that afternoon. So I was in a little bit of, ahem, hot water.
Slinking back to my locker, I took a few deep breaths, shut my eyes tight (I don’t really know why), and changed out of my gym clothes. I opened my eyes and peered around. No-one was giving me a second glance.
I walked over to the shower room holding my ineffectual little square of gym towel that is small enough to fit in my gym bag, but not big enough to cover me up. A tall, blonde, athletic Aryan amazon sauntered past me nonchalantly, and I wanted to go hide in a corner. But I steeled myself and moved on. Onward to the Dusche (it’s going to take me a while not to find that German word funny).
There were already two other women at opposite ends of the shower room. Both were facing the wall and getting on with things. I set myself up in the far corner, trying to stay inconspicuous in the eyes of whatever bogeyman my vivid imagination had decided was watching me.
And then, at some point while standing under the hot water, I simply stopped caring. We were all just a bunch of people trying to get through our Monday, and worrying what anyone thought of me in here was about as ridiculous as wondering whether my fellow commuters on the U-Bahn were taking notes on my choice of shoes. I stopped comparing myself to everyone else, and stopped fancying that anyone else was comparing themselves to me.
I’m not saying I’m about to go join the nude volleyballers in the English Garden. But I’m a little less uptight than I was last week, and I’m pretty sure that’s a good thing.
