Books: Marc Engelhardt (D)

Marc Engelhardt is an author and freelance foreign correspondent. For two decades, he has reported for German TV and radio broadcasting station Deutschlandfunk and ARD, among others, first from Nairobi and now from Geneva on events at the United Nations and the more than 200 international organisations, which have their headquarters on Lake Geneva. He is a member of the correspondents' network “Weltreporter“ [en: “World reporter“] and was its chairman for 5 years. He has edited several books, including 2018's “World community on the brink. Why we need a strong UN.“.

Marc Engelhardt travelled the world and sought out places or events, where people are undressed – for celebration, for devotion, for reflection, for the enjoyment of art, for sport, for recreation, or simply to find happiness. In many cultures and societies, the practice of communal nudity is certainly still present today, although usually not in the hustle and bustle of public, daily life, rather on quiet, contemplative occasions. Often, these activities are not an invention of our time, but are maintained as living traditions going back to ancient times.

Whether it is about hiking nude in nature or practising sports nude, about nude ritual acts, about a nude visit to an art museum, where you can let sculptures and paintings of nude people have an effect on you, or about the simple pleasure of going on holiday nude in a naturist village – the author always describes not only his personal experiences and impressions gathered on site in the respective environment, but also knows well, how to make the respective cultural or historical context for the nude practice plausible to the reader, through quotations and anecdotes from history.

These explanations lead to the reader quickly gaining an understanding, why people have chosen nudity for their activity or why it is simply part of it. Although the described nude situations will certainly be unfamiliar to most readers, as a reader you gain an understanding of the effect, which nudity has on people, through the relaxed descriptions: The intensity of the experience increases, as does the concentration, on what is really important.

With his book, Marc Engelhardt presents a collection of stories, which will also serve as an incentive for one or the other curious person, to try out such nudity themselves – there are opportunities for this, we now know, almost everywhere in the world!