The nudist movement, called “Free Body Culture,” is not to the liking of West German tourists, who are a serious source of income for travel agencies and city authorities. Citizens of the former Federal Republic of Germany do not want to see naked bodies around them. “This is not to everyone’s taste, and by no means always a pleasant sight,” they say, and demand that the authorities of coastal towns allocate special zones for adherents of nudism in the least visited parts of the beach.
In some cities, for example in Warnemünde, these demands have already met with success. However, such a decision has only intensified relations between the two groups of vacationers, and nudists who stray into the wrong zone risk getting a handful of sand in the face from particularly militant guardians of decency.
Disagreements over nudist culture are turning into a plane of deeper differences between Eastern and Western Germans, who call each other disparagingly “Ossis” and “Wessis.” According to nudists, “Western tourists are poisoning the atmosphere here. It is simply a shame that Germans from the West are so intolerant. We have been driven from our own beach onto some pitiful strip of sand at its edge. Being a nudist is not a crime”!
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