In 1987, a lavish parade wound through the streets of East Berlin. The procession, to celebrate the 750th anniversary of the city’s foundation, took five hours to pass the podium seating the great and the good of the East German regime. The best views went to First Secretary Erich Honecker and his wife, Margot, the Minister for Education. There was little to distinguish this scene from a thousand other cold war pageants until the arrival of a float bearing topless mermaids. The moment when TV cameras panned from these barely clad participants to show the Honeckers’ reaction (Erich beaming, Margot slightly strained) went down in East German legend. The contrast with East Germany’s previous leader, Walter Ulbricht, could hardly have been greater. Ulbricht’s “Ten Commandments of Socialist Ethics and Morals,” handed down in 1958, included the exhortation: “you should live cleanly and decently and respect your family.” In keeping with this moral hard line, the Communist regime had attempted to outlaw nudism altogether in the 1950s. Policemen had patrolled the Baltic beaches, fining and arresting bathers without swimsuits. Nudist organizations had been dissolved or driven underground, and those wishing to continue their hobby had been forced into either subterfuge or outright defiance of the regime. By the 1980s, however, public nudity was widely practiced in East Germany. Indeed, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, nudity has been seized upon as one of the most visible markers of East German difference. While nudism was well established in certain West German beaches and parks (the English Garden in Munich is the best known), its acceptance was by no means a matter of course. In West Germany, and in Western Europe and America