Coronavirus: Fight over nude swimming marks return of pre-Covid life in Europe

There is perhaps no better sign people are eager to move on from the coronavirus than the fact that a German lake district town is embroiled in a heated debate about nude swimming, and it has drawn national attention.

Lychen’s local council’s ban on naked swimming – and other activities such as naked yoga – has returned the town to the banalities of pre-coronavirus summers and earned it a spot on the national public broadcaster’s nightly newscast.

Sitting fully dressed in his backyard, pro-nudist council member Thomas Held, 54, acknowledged the interest in his fight against swimming trunks was “very strange”.

“I think there are so many more important things,” he added.

As elsewhere in Europe where coronavirus outbreaks have been brought under control, the snapback in Germany to familiar routines and more trivial problems has been rapid – for some, jarringly so.

Four months ago, few Germans expected summer 2020 to look anything like normal.

Chancellor Angela Merkel was warning 70 per cent of the population – 58 million people – could become infected. She said the country was facing its greatest crisis since World War II.

“Us humans, we don’t care too much about what’s happening 6000 kilometres away, most Germans don’t know anyone personally who has been infected.”

Andreas Mojzisch psychologist of the University of Hildesheim.

Germany is now experiencing what may be its sharpest economic contraction since the war, and it has reported more than 9000 coronavirus deaths. Still, it has so far been spared the worst of the pandemic and its fallout.

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Original publication 16 July, 2020

Posted on NatCorn 17th July 2020

Covid19, Germany, naturism, swim

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