Skin-Deep Problem Divides Germany : Lifestyles: The fall of the Berlin Wall may have united two countries, but one thing both sides can’t seem to agree on is nudity.

“The fences aren’t our idea,” says Wolfgang Weinreich, unlocking the wire-mesh gate at the entrance to his nudist colony, set amid the spinach fields and apple orchards of this village in western Germany. “We don’t need fences. The fences are the authorities’ idea.”

Weinreich pulls in through the entrance, passes the guardhouse and parks his car. As vice president of the German Assn. for Free-Body Culture, he has been spending a sunny morning explaining this German phenomenon to a clothed visitor and is winding up with a tour.

An American would probably unfrock the term “free-body culture” and call it nudism, but that sounds a little off-color to Weinreich; he prefers the less provocative naturism.

Beyond a bamboo screen, up a curved path posted with no smoking signs, Weinreich’s naturist vision unfolds: Orderly rows of trailers, most with canopied front porches and concrete foundations, line a neatly cropped lawn at the top of the hill.

“You can see, there are no fences,” Weinreich says. “In regular campgrounds, people will put up little fences around their sites or mark off the boundaries with garden gnomes. But at our camp, this is not allowed. If I want to sit down at that table”--he points at a white garden table next to somebody’s trailer--”no one would say anything against it.”

Weinreich swings right at the tennis court and descends a stairway through the forest to the swimming hole. Here and there, fellow naturists are making their way along the path. No one is wearing any clothes, but each carries a beach towel.

“That’s the difference between nudism and naturism,” Weinreich observes approvingly. “A naturist always carries a towel with him, to sit on. A nudist just sits down anywhere he wants.”

A morning spent within the respectable confines of the Arzdorf nudist colony helps underscore a great cultural paradox: Germany is a famously order-loving country, with a rule to govern nearly every imaginable human situation; yet Germany is also a country that proves, against all reasonable expectations, a mighty fortress of tolerance when it comes to stripping down to one’s pelt.

It may be a violation to drive in Germany without a pair of rubber gloves in your car, to do the laundry after 10 p.m., to garden on Sunday or to give your newborn a name that doesn’t reveal his or her sex--but if the TV networks air a soap ad showing a topless woman in the shower, nobody gets on the horn to complain.

Bra ads here feature bare-breasted women pulling on their undies before the cameras. Sober, respected news weeklies go to press with covers rivaling Playboy centerfolds. Sun worshipers take it all off in the parks. Dance-club patrons show up in nothing but garter belts and a few spaghetti-thin leather straps. It all may be a bit of a jolt for the American tourist, but in Germany, it’s just part of the landscape.

Going nude “is a way of thinking that a healthy body ensures a healthy soul,” says Weinreich, who before becoming a full-time nudist official and activist taught theology at a Catholic girls’ school. As long as you follow the rules, everything’s fine.

But what are the rules?

This has been a fighting question in Germany for the past five years. For, as Germans have discovered in the time since the East was merged with the West, the two old Germanys observed their nudist traditions in markedly different ways. Bringing the separately evolved free-body cultures into sync has been a challenge for Germany--one that has put the Teutonic devotion to rule-making on display.

Cut to the northeastern corner of Germany, the Baltic coast, where the small town of Goehren lies on a two-mile stretch of unspoiled white-sand beach. Whispering pines line the shore; small, child-friendly breakers toss shells onto the sand.

For 44 years, these pleasures were all but forbidden to those from the Federal Republic--the West. Once Germany unified, curious Wessis flooded to these shores to partake of the natural beauty that had been beyond reach for all those Cold War years.

But one look at the beach and its dune-to-dune nakedness and they soon huffed off to the office of the mayor, Carola Koos.

“They came to find me, saying they would never come back unless things were changed,” Koos says. “They wrote letters, and articles, which they submitted to the newspaper.”

What was bothering her new compatriots from the West, Koos discovered, was the absence of some sort of fence between the happy nudes and the clothed beach-goers. The arriving westerners “wanted a strong borderline,” she says. “Even in the water. What they would really love is a curtain.”

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Weinreich’s no-fences assertions notwithstanding, it turns out that western Germans apply certain clear standards when it comes to nudism. Laws enacted in the socially conservative 1950s call for nudist colonies to be designed so as not to offend the morals of unsuspecting passersby; the wholesome Free-Body Culture newsletter was supposed to be mailed in plain brown paper.

East Germans, on the other hand, had discovered in the early years of their repressive state that going bare on the beach was one of the few freedoms they were ever likely to enjoy. They fought valiantly to keep free-body culture just that: Free.

Files kept by the despised East German secret police, painstakingly preserved and archived since the Berlin Wall came down, show various Communist functionaries calling nudism “a dangerous cult,” an example of “decay” and “imperialistic decadence.”

The East German government prohibited public nudity entirely in 1952 and even dispatched police officers to the beach to enforce the ban. The militant nudists threw the outnumbered, clothed officers into the water.

“As soon as something is prohibited, of course, it becomes more attractive,” says Jusciak Peter, a 35-year-old eastern German bricklayer who has brought his wife and two young sons to the beach at present-day Goehren. “Going nude in East Germany was a way you could provoke the state.”

After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Peter, like many fellow easterners, traveled west to sample the beaches he was never allowed to see during the Cold War. He and his wife, Diana, decided they like the eastern shores better.

“We prefer the mixture of clothed bathers and nudists,” Diana Peter says.

“It’s more open, more relaxed,” says her husband.

Indeed, the Peter family sat in full view of a scene reminiscent of the old East: Nudists young and old waded in the surf, played volleyball and built sandcastles; other beach-goers walked nonchalantly among them in their swimsuits.

But the tranquillity is deceptive. Goehren, like many other prime beaches on the Baltic coast, has concluded an uneasy truce between east and west by drawing literal lines in the sand. Mayor Koos, herself an avowed eastern nudist--”a normal woman,” as she puts it--decreed the closest 1,000 yards of beach a swimsuit beach, the farthest 1,000 yards a nudist beach and the 1,000 yards in the middle mixed.

The system works imperfectly: The boundary signs saying “F.K.K.”--the German initials for free-body culture--keep getting stolen, so those who want to take a walk on the wild side can’t be sure where the official wild side is. Those who accidentally stray into swimsuit territory run the risk of being filmed as they bound in the surf by clothed western men wielding video cameras.

Western Germans “are very nosy,” complains Rose-Marie Hinze, 65 and celebrating her wedding anniversary on the beach in only a floppy sun hat and a little coral-colored toenail polish. “They walk up and down the boardwalk so that they can peek at the nudists.”

She can spot the Wessis a mile away, she adds, by what she mockingly calls their “culture stripes”--the white lines they get by sunbathing with their swimsuits on.

“Somehow, [western Germans] have imposed their will on us,” says Koos, who isn’t at all pleased with the fruits of her peacemaking. “It’s a question of money. There are very few [trade] apprenticeships here in Goehren and no jobs.” However peculiar the western ideas about nudity, she says, easterners must cater to them because the westerners are wealthier and can sustain Goehren’s new free-market economy.

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Far across Germany in his screened-off encampment, Weinreich agrees that the free-and-easy eastern nudist way is more to his liking.

“It was normal throughout the East to bathe nude anywhere, without any rules,” he says. “They didn’t stop to ask whether it was allowed. This is ideal. I have always said that we could learn a lot from the East Germans’ sense of naturalness.”

If only it didn’t collide with what the West has come to consider the natural order of things.

“Sociology tells us that if three people want to do something together, they have to organize,” Weinreich says. “If you want to play volleyball, you have to make up rules. If you collect stamps, you have to have an organization to trade them. If you breed dogs, there is an organization. There is no other way to develop as a society, except by organizing.”

So, soon after the Wall fell, Weinreich traveled to the former East, to teach the people there how to regulate nudism--er, naturism. Since the East German state forbade people to form clubs on their own, he says, easterners knew next to nothing about incorporation laws, fee structures, tax write-offs and grantsmanship.

Which is a shame, because under German law, a social group that formalizes itself, registers with this or that ministry and complies with a bewildering array of statutes governing group activity stands to gain certain benefits. The government just might be good for a subsidy to build a volleyball court. Or, nudist-club dues might be deductible from the members’ taxes, as long as the camp can make even a faintly plausible case that its presence in the land advances “the public interest.”

And what about the easterners who simply want to shuck their clothes and shake it?

“I regret, in certain ways, that the western style is going to dominate,” Weinreich says. “But in the end, it will do so.”