erman Society for Combating
Venereal Diseases, specially devoted to sexual hygiene, the
speakers constantly referred to the necessity of promoting
familiarity with the naked body. Thus Eulenburg and Julian
Marcuse (_Sexualpaedagogik_, p. 264) emphasize the importance of
air-baths, not only for the sake of the physical health of the
young, but in the interests of rational sexual training. Hoeller,
a teacher, speaking at the same congress (op. cit., p. 85), after
insisting on familiarity with the nude in art and literature, and
protesting against the bowdlerising of poems for the young,
continues: "By bathing-drawers ordinances no soul was ever yet
saved from moral ruin. One who has learnt to enjoy peacefully the
naked in art is only stirred by the naked in nature as by a work
of art." Enderlin, another teacher, speaking in the same sense
(p. 58), points out that nakedness cannot act sexually or
immorally on the child, since the sexual impulse has not yet
become pronounced, and the earlier he is introduced to the naked
in nature and in art, as a matter of course, the less likely are
the sexual feelings to be developed precociously. The child thus,
indeed, becomes immune to impure influences, so that later, when
representations of the nude are brought before him for the object
of provoking his wantonness, they are powerless to injure him. It
is important, Enderlin adds, for familiarity with the nude in art
to be learnt at school, for most of us, as Siebert remarks, have
to learn purity through art.

Nakedness in bathing, remarks Boelsche in his _Liebesleben in der
Natur_ (vol. iii, pp. 139 et seq.), we already in some measure
possess; we need it in physical exercises, at first for the sexes
separately; then, when we have grown accustomed to the idea,
occasionally for both sexes together. We need to acquire the
capacity to see the bodies of individuals of the other sex with
such self-control and such natural instinct that they become
non-erotic to us and can be gazed at without erotic feeling. Art,
he says, shows that this is possible in civilization. Science, he
adds, comes to the aid of the same view.

Ungewitter (_Die Nacktheit_, p. 57) also advocates boys and girls
engaging in play and gymnastics together, entirely naked in
air-baths. "In this way," he believes, "the gymna