I can see why birthrates peaked in the GDR in the early 70s…
I was curious to try and figure out who took / why the picture was taken (like did someone pop in and go: “Hey! Cool to see you all naked can I take a shot or two???” Turns out it was part of a documentary photo series of working life) and I found cooler context on the host image site:
GDR - Company Polyclinic of VEB Palla Textile Works Meerane
Young women in a sauna belonging to the facilities of the VEB (state-owned enterprise) Palla Textile Works Meerane in the former GDR district of Karl-Marx-Stadt, photographed in 1973. Many large industrial enterprises in the GDR had so-called social facilities and company polyclinics attached to them, which combined various medical specialties under one roof.
Socialist countries in the 20th century having public wellness facilities everywhere mog the absolute fuck out of anything going on now. Goddamn America etc.
While there were deep structural problems that would lead to their downfall, it seems like the best time and place to ever be a normal human being might’ve been in the GDR or USSR of the 1970s.
Imagine how absolutely fucking amazing life would be in a 2026 USSR… I hate so much that they took that from us and that the best in the world right now is market socialism, and I can’t even have that and I live in a bourgeois regime with astounding unemployment, unaffordable shitty housing, ever-degrading welfare and institutions, and the looming threat of fascism.
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Aight, demonrat, you mad GDR stopped your ilk’s criminal shenanigans?
A brief list
The actions carried out by these operatives ran the spectrum from juvenile delinquency to terrorism; anything “to make the commies look bad”. It added up to the following remarkable record:8
• through explosives, arson, short circuiting, and other methods they damaged power stations, shipyards, a dam, canals, docks, public buildings, gas stations, shops, a radio station, outdoor stands, public transportation;
• derailed freight trains, seriously injuring workers; burned 12 cars of a freight train and destroyed air pressure hoses of others;
• blew up road and railway bridges; placed explosives on a railway bridge of the Berlin-Moscow line but these were discovered in time—hundreds would have been killed;
• used special acids to damage vital factory machinery; put sand in the turbine of a factory, bringing it to a standstill; set fire to a tile-producing factory; promoted work slow-downs in factories; stole blueprints and samples of new technical developments;
• killed 7,000 cows of a co-operative dairy by poisoning the wax coating of the wire used to bale the cows’ corn fodder;
• added soap to powdered milk destined for East German schools;
• raided and wrecked left-wing offices in East and West Berlin, stole membership lists; assaulted and kidnapped leftists and, on occasion, murdered them;
• set off stink bombs to disrupt political meetings;
• floated balloons which burst in the air, scattering thousands of propaganda pamphlets down upon East Germans;
• were in possession, when arrested, of a large quantity of the poison cantharidin with which it was planned to produce poisoned cigarettes to kill leading East Germans;
• attempted to disrupt the World Youth Festival in East Berlin by sending out forged invitations, false promises of free bed and board, false notices of cancellations; carried out attacks on participants with explosives, firebombs, and tire-puncturing equipment; set fire to a wooden bridge on a main motorway leading to the festival;
• forged and distributed large quantities of food ration cards—for example, for 60,000 pounds of meat—to cause confusion, shortages and resentment;
• sent out forged tax notices and other government directives and documents to foster disorganization and inefficiency within industry and unions;
• “gave considerable aid and comfort” to East Germans who staged an uprising on 17 June 1953; during and after the uprising, the US radio station in West Berlin, RIAS (Radio In the American Sector), issued inflammatory broadcasts into East Germany appealing to the populace to resist the government; RIAS also broadcast warnings to witnesses in at least one East German criminal case being monitored by the Investigating Committee of Freedom-minded Jurists of the Soviet Zone that they would be added to the committee’s files of “accused persons” if they lied.
You mean people couldn’t be overtly fascist without consequences? Oh no, what a shame. My sibling in god we’re literally on the verge of fascism in half the fucking world
Also, incredible to be saying this in 2026 where we interact mostly with others through billionaire-owned apps.
That’s fine, I’m a GDR loving communist so I could spend all day honestly saying “I support the socialist GDR!”. I’m currently living in 2020s USA, so probably the most advanced and comprehensive police surveillance state to ever exist outside of 2020s Israel and here it’s just to protect capital.
I wonder if something happened in the 40’s that might justify keeping an eye on all the Nazis that didnt get killed. Or an eye on all the Spies. Probably not.
I hate to be a downer but I feel like this genre of post is pretty gross. It feels categorically similar to the classic reddit post of Iranian women in bikinis under the shah, where the idea is that we awooga at women’s bodies (and it is almost always women) and, in doing so, implicitly support the government they live/lived under.
Is it a cool historical fact that the GDR had company saunas? Absolutely. But I feel like that’s not really what this post is about. There have been beautiful people in every time and culture, and the GDR has far more salient successes by which we can laud it without gawking at women.
I’m not going to argue with your opinion, but I think there’s more to this image than just
Shared nudity is incredibly vulnerable and intimate, and I cannot imagine any situation where I would want to be nude around my coworkers. It’s a cliche nightmare that you hear people describe as a joke. I mean, sure, in a sauna nudity could be considered common (although I’ve never been in one where anyone was nude, it’s always been all bathing suits in my experience). But if we take the caption at face value, the fact that these women who are coworkers share this level of comfort with each other speaks to an integration of labor, social life, and baseline trust that I as a modern worker in the United States cannot fathom.
i had a finnish friend once describe to me that teenagers there do not have fetishes about other teenagers boobs because theyve all seen their grandmas tits (sometimes the friends even saw his grandmas tits!). being nude with family and friends is just normalized and not a
situationtldr being american makes you inherently reactionary, expunge the horniness from yourself over a piece of cloth being on someone or not and realize that we will all be dust soon
After moving there, yeah nudity is more normalized, at least in places where nudity is expected. There are saunas in work buildings and coworkers can have business meetings in the sauna. I read somewhere that in the sauna, everyone is equal, something about removing all the symbols of status. Also when I go swimming, it was a shock that Finnish changing rooms are very public, everyone is just naked there. It was uncomfortable for me at first, but once I got over the hurdle of realizing no one gives a shit, we’ve all got bodies, it became quite freeing.
Describing sexual attraction to a secondary sex characteristic as a fetish is such a take
The way it manifests is a fetish, though.
Plenty of societies were completely naked, the form of sexual attraction and sexual acts were very different due to this material reality.
What do you think the word fetish means?
Plenty of societies were completely naked,
Peoples in climates that experience lower than mid 70s F require clothing, so most
I’m seeing you’ve got some pretty big hang ups on this if you can’t comprehend that the mode of sexual attraction isn’t universal. I recommend reading about societies beyond our place and time and seeing what various courtship rituals there are and what people fantasized about. How we relate to each other’s bodies is definitely taught and not some inherent primal urge to ogle women or something
And a fetish is anything beyond having actual sex with someone, you can fetishize big naturals, yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partialism
Obviously you didn’t even bother reading your link.
I really don’t think an even small minority of people have a breast fetish as is described by that Wikipedia article.
Workplace conditions definitely factor into it, and workplace saunas were decidedly not a thing in West Germany. But the entire concept is built on an idea of nudity being no big deal in appropriate contexts that was not specific to the DDR, but has existed in European culture since the naturalist movements in the earliest days of the 20th century, a movement that was largely normalized in both German cultures by the 1970s. It always had more traction in the DDR, and that may have indeed been due to the less performative, less perfectionist, less stressful culture that arose under AES material conditions, but we should not forget that America is just extremely fucked up about nudity. To the point that even West Germans have always joked about the American double standard of being super prudish about boobs while having no problem with the most egregious displays of violence.
gawking is kinda how you feel about it, but i am mostly being jealous
Sis I’m envious too but the comrade who posted this added “I can see why birthrates peaked in the GDR in the early 70s”. The post, in general, is obviously leering at these women.
Edit: also, even in centering one’s relationship to the subjects as envy, this indicates that the way this post works sees the womens’ (attractive) bodies as the central content, and historical context as pastiche which can project meaning onto it.
You can’t construct a one-sentence reply to your post as “centering the women’s bodies” when that reply exists specifically because you brought the subject up. I agree that the OP sounds gross, but it’s absolutely worth pointing out that there’s different ways to relate to naked women than immediately sexualizing everything, not to mention that there’s ways to view women in a sexual way that do not involve objectifying them.
We should stop getting so worked up about naked bodies. The problem isn’t nudity, the problem is that somewhere out there, heterosexual men still exist and taint people’s ways to look at naked women.
I’m more jealous of the whole concept of just being in one of their shoes, it seems they’re having a good time. Of course they’re attractive and that’s part of the context but I don’t have any good friends I feel I can hang out like this with really here in America without it getting weird cause Americans are really weird about nudity. I’ve been to saunas with people in Germany before but I wouldn’t describe them as good friends.
Gotcha - apologies for misreading intent to your message, that’s definitely a failing on my part. I’m sorry that you feel isolated that way, and I do hope you can find some friends who you can connect to on that level.
Mfw my company doesnt have its own sauna
Why tf cant I have big naturals like thid wtfff
Ladies way outta my league
Clearly you need more sauna time, comrade!
No one wants to see my muffin top and tired old wiener, I’ll go jump in the pool with my shirt on.
You need pills from the gas station, fix ya right up
Under communism the gas station dick pills have been rationed. 6 month wait minimum.
Intellifuck!
idk no one really cares, when i last visited a sauna in germany i was transitioned for a while and they didnt even seem to care that i had a tired old wiener as a woman
You’re a lot more comfortable than I am. The thought of having my girl hog on full display around strangers is nightmare inducing.
i get it, tbh id probably be like that in america. culture in many parts of europe is just different they dont really care about the sex segregation thing so much in many public saunas. it probably catches the eye but no one commented on it, i think people were more suspicious about old guys lurking in corners
Yeah we got those puritan brainworms
It’s up to you, but who cares what anyone wants to see. German public saunas cost money now, but at least they are still full of people of every body type just relaxing. Older people make up the majority actually. People politely ignore each other and suffer/enjoy the heat quietly.
