Adolf Koch

Who was Adolf Koch?

Adolf Koch was a German school teacher and leader of the Freikörperkultur movement in German in the 1920s and 1930s.

Koch studied psychology and medicine at the Friedrich William Institut. He also studied with Magnus Hirschfeld at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. Subsequently, he trained to be a school gymnastics teacher, finding in nude physical exercise the symbol of 'a new beginning for a new society'. Finding difficulty in putting his radical body culture ideas into practice at two mainstream schools in Moabit in the early 1920s, with the support of the Prussian government he created its own Institute for nudist education, which by 1929 had 3,000 pupils.

The poet Stephen Spender remarked after visiting Germany on the extent to which the Freikörperkultur was visible in the Germany of the late 1920s:

The sun – symbol of the great wealth of nature within the poverty of man, was a primary social force in this Germany.