Adamski, a police officer in Berlin who investigates organized crime, first started going to a nudist camp at a lake outside Berlin after he met his wife, whose family owned a cabin there. One weekend, when he had just about gotten used to stripping in front of his in-laws, he bumped into the highest-ranking colonel in his precinct β who promptly challenged him to a game of table tennis. Adamski said as he prepared to join a triathlon where the swimming and running portions of the race were naked.
Germans love to get naked. They have been getting naked in public for over a hundred years, when early naturists rebelled against the grime of industrialization and then the mass slaughter of World War I.
Nearly years later, entire stretches of German waterfronts are designated as nudist beaches. There is a nudist hiking trail. There are sporting events from nude yoga to nude sledding.
German saunas are mixed and naked. People regularly take their clothes off on television, too. To a relative newcomer, like my British husband, all this nudity can be disconcerting. Naked bodies floated on top of the water in the saline pool and lounged on submerged seats around the pool bar.
They lined up for ice cream in the garden area, wearing only flip flops and sun hats and in one case a T-shirt but no pants. Just when we thought we had seen it all, it was time for Zumba in the main pool. I knew I had to write something about naked Germans when I happened upon a whole field of them sunbathing on my way to work. One story Germans love telling about Ms. Merkel is that the night the Berlin Wall fell, she stuck to her weekly sauna appointment before heading across to the West for a taste of freedom.
