You have better things to do with your time than read this book, or at least the latter two-thirds of it. The first-person narrator, Alexander, is interesting, and a bit odd in an interesting way. He’s a historian of sorts, unattached to any academic institute, specializing in the ancient Near East: Chaldean studies, Aramaic studies, and much more along those lines. He’s 60, though he thinks he can pass for 50 or perhaps a bit younger. He is alone at this stage of life, and he’s wealthy enough to possess a house in a central Munich neighborhood, a house he has decorated in what he thinks is a beautiful fashion but actually just reveals a peculiar devotion to the color moss green. Alexander is full of himself, and not self-aware enough to realize it. Early in the novel, Augustin is having him on every bit as much as he is portraying him as a sympathetic narrator.

The title translates as The School of the Naked, and the first scene shows what Augustin has in mind. Alexander is on the verge of visiting the nude sunbathing section of one of Munich’s outdoor public swimming pools. Nude sunbathing in Germany is known as FKK, “Freie Körper Kultur,” “Free Body Culture.” The movement started in the late 19th century, grew in the 1920s, was mostly repressed by the Nazis, and returned after the war in both East and West Germany. In Munich, naturists colonized parts of the English Garden, a large park in the center of the city. By the 1970s, two large lawns at the southern end of the English Garden were officially recognized as FKK areas, and were not sealed off — as was customary in many other places — by fences or shrubberies. In the years that followed, Munich (as well as other German cities) established nude areas attached to their outdoor public pools, although these were generally set apart by some sort of visual barrier.

Die Schule der Nackten begins with Alexander standing outside just such a barrier at the fictional Jakobi pool, contemplating entering — there’s a very German sign that says “Entry only allowed without clothing” — and then losing his nerve. After a day at his studies, he returns to the Jakobi, screws up his courage and enters the FKK area. Whereupon he immediately commits a faux pas by getting undressed inside the gate. Worse, he feels that every eye in the place is upon him. With a little more experience — once committed, Alexander becomes a daily visitor — he realizes that what people do is find a place in the FKK area to set down their towel and only then do they take their clothes off. Further, the way people face tends to move with the sun over the course of the day, so the initial impression he had of everyone watching him had everything to do with the sun and nothing at all to do with him. Lack of self-awareness strikes again, and not for the last time.

The next few chapters collect Alexander’s impressions of people and events at the FKK section of the Jakobi pool. Even with no clothes and very little talking, people’s personalities emerge. Cliques and hierarchies form, social structures accrue even in a realm that is theoretically free of all of that. As anyone who has experience with Germans and beaches will already have guessed, there are fierce yet passive-aggressive struggles about the placement of towels in relation to particularly good spots. Alexander — and by extension Augustin — is a careful observer of the small details that add up to impressions, and he makes the observations interesting. There’s the group of octogenarian ladies that he falls in with many afternoons, who have their own area between nursing home and pool, and who converse much more than the other guests. There’s the square-shaped man who has brief anti-social outbursts. The regulars seem to take it in stride, and even know how often he should take his medications to keep things from getting worse. This could have been the foundation for stories of close observation and human foibles.

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