Waypoints: Lichtbund Karlsruhe e.V.
Hagsfeld, Karlsruhe, Baden-Württemberg · 49.04°N, 8.48°E
The Karlsruhe court case that undid the rival club was about mismanagement and, in the words of the club’s own historian, “shady dealings.” The seven or eight people who kept the rump name “Liga für freie Lebensgestaltung” in March 1948—and eventually renamed it Lichtbund Karlsruhe—did so partly because they had nothing else to keep. Club historian Alois Fertig, writing the club’s history in 1969, called it a “not-easy birth.” From that narrow start, on a succession of sites lost and rebuilt across the northeast edge of the city, the club became one of the largest FKK family-sports clubs in Germany: roughly 800 members in about 380 families by 2026, on six hectares of grounds the membership built themselves. The Lichtbund counts this as the seventh naturist site in Karlsruhe’s nude-bathing history. Here’s the seventh, and the century behind it.
The Place
Six hectares of green ground at the Füllbruch near Hagsfeld, on the northeast edge of Karlsruhe, enclosed by a Landschaftsschutzgebiet. The site runs dense with facilities: a 25-metre competition pool and a children’s teaching pool, a sauna open five days a week (Wednesday through Sunday, 14:00 to 20:30), volleyball and beach-volleyball courts, pétanque pistes laid out for up to fourteen groups simultaneously, ringtennis and badminton fields, six table-tennis tables, multi-use lawns for faustball and football, an open-air chessboard, and a perimeter running path. A children’s playground with climbing tower, sandpit, and fountain sits alongside a dedicated youth room. Over 300 camping parcels—each roughly 56 square metres, with electricity—accommodate tents, caravans, and motorhomes from May through September. A Gaststätte with biergarten anchors the social end. The club’s own formulation, from a 2010 profile of chairman Günther Hildenbrand, is apt: “Freikörperkultur ist mehr, als nur nackt in der Sonne zu liegen”—more than lying in the sun. Most of the athletic programme actually happens in the nude.
The Story
Organized FKK in Karlsruhe predates the club by a few decades. The 1968 jubilee named the correct headline, in Fertig’s history, as “38 years of organized FKK in Karlsruhe and 20 years Lichtbund”—putting the city’s first organized nudism at around 1930. An unnamed, unaffiliated group existed before 1931; by 1931 two organized bodies had formed. The larger called itself “Freie Menschen, Bund für sozialistische Lebensgestaltung und Freikörperkultur,” with a gymnastics hall and nude bathing on group hikes at remote spots. The smaller, “Lichtfreunde der Leibeszucht”—drawing members from Mannheim and Heidelberg down to Baden-Baden—held a ground in the Weingartener Moor: two huts, a plank platform reaching out into the lake with a hand-pump shower, sunbathing spaces, a ringtennis field, and a dense privacy screen. The municipality of Weingarten terminated that ground in 1941.1
