This discussion has been raised before in conversations with friends around the world, but I feel the need to bring it up again. The contradiction of nudity and conservativeness amongst the Germans.
The conservativeness. Since being here I haven't seen one girl with a low cut t-shirt, slightly revealing shirt or even a glimpse of a heaving bosom that you see in all the ads for German women at bars! Go to any bar or friends b'day party in Aust, Canada or UK and women are bound to be wearing dresses or little going out tops that have some sort of femininity about them (especially even in the UK/Can winters when its freezing and clothes are still minimal at best - often involving some décolletage exposed to air). Yet here, its the opposite.
If I'm even wearing a singlet top 10 centimetres from my neck (no cleavage present), I am still the most revealing. The standard uniform here day and night is a high neck t-shirt/long sleeve top, jeans and sneakers/boots. Variations on this are only in colour and adding a coat/hat or gloves. I have still not yet seen one german wearing stilettos or pointy toed patent leather heels. Maybe this is reserved only for summer months? I hold my breath (and my wonderful shoe collection) in anticipation…
Then we get to the contradiction.. nudity!
The first issue is with nudity in saunas - it being not an issue. Actually wearing a swimming costume in, you'll be asked to remove it. This also means if your in there with your family, everyone gets their gear off… and when I've asked, they don't find this strange - not even if they have to get their kit off in front of their parents! (Steph - for you and all the germans I know out there defending this!).
Next is the press. In newspapers women are topless, on billboards and posters around town, women are advertised to be at clubs half naked and some even make ME blush! There are more exposed women in pictures in public than you would get in a Ralph/Maxim monthly magazine.
Below I have two pictures that I have managed to snap up whilst taking tourist pictures around town...
And then we get to the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. One moment she is being photographed bare back-sided and no one really cared, nor did she even take legal action to the newspaper who printed it (The Sun - UK) - and I quote from German newspaper - Spiegel Online "Had that happened in the States, though -- George W. stripping down in the Rose Garden after a particularly strenuous mountain bike ride, for example -- the outrage would have been two-fold. Disrespect for the country's leader on the one hand. But on the other, folks would be asking themselves what the hell a president was doing disrobing in public. The Merkel photos, though, triggered no such questions. "
Then the same leader goes to the opera with a plunging neckline, and everyone is up in arms!? http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,547512,00.html
I'm unsure if its the German social circles I run in, the cities I have taken habitat in in Germany, and a paranoid mind to show some skin here but from now on I have taken to wearing skivvies/turtle necks, and anything with a high round neck. If there is a slight v-neck present, be sure I'll whip out a scarf to cover up any forbidden skin. Summer shall be very interesting.
