Petr Roubal

Spartakiads

The Politics of Physical Culture
in Communist Czechoslovakia

Published by Charles University, Karolinum Press and Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences

Translation by Dan Morgan

Cover and layout by /3. dílna/

Epub conversion by Stará škola

First English edition

Originally published in Czech as Československé spartakiády, Prague: Academia, 2016

Czech edition reviewed by Michal Kopeček (Institute of Contemporary History, Prague), Muriel Blaive (Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, Prague)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of the Czech Republic.

© Karolinum Press, 2019

© Institute of Contemporary History, 2019

© Petr Roubal, 2019

Translation © Dan Morgan, 2019

ISBN 978-80-246-4368-7 (epub)

ISBN 978-80-246-4366-3 (pdf)

ISBN 978-80-246-4367-0 (mobi)

ISBN 978-80-246-3851-5 (Karolinum)

ISBN 978-80-7285-235-2 (Institute of Contemporary History)

Contents

1. Acknowledgements

2. Preface

3. A Genealogy of the Spartakiads

1. Ideology of the Organicism and Beginnings of the Mass Gymnastic Performances

2. A Physical Sonderweg and the POST-1848 Turner Movement

3. The Turners and the Third Reich

4. The Political Aesthetics of Tyrš’s Project

5. Sokol Slets Prior to the First World War

6. Segregation as Emancipation

7. The Mystery of Democracy – Slets during the First Republic

8. Strahov Stadium

9. Transformations in Slet Symbolism

10. The Left and Mass Gymnastics

11. The Communist Party and Sokol after the Second World War: the Search for a Common Denominator

12. The All-Sokol Slet of 1948 – “Can the People Betray?”

4. Symbolism of the First Spartakiad in 1955

1. “Socialism Is a Child.” School and Junior Days

2. A New Shift Begins

3. The Unbearable Heaviness of Folklore: Folk Dance and Spartakiads

4. Sokol Members from the Factories and Offices

5. Performances of the Armed Forces

5. Spartakiad Symbolism During the “Normalization” Era

1. Spartakiads with a Human Face

2. “Normalization” Spartakiads as an Image of Social Cohesion

3. Parents and Children Performing Exercises

4. An Amiable Background: Female Performances at Sparkiads during the “Normalization” Era

5. Junior Women and “Buds”

6. Soldiers and the Crisis of Masculinity

7. A Return to Sokol

6. The Organization of Spartakiads

1. Professional Discourse

2. The “Call to Arms” for the 1st All-State Spartakiad in 1955

3. A Return to a Tried-and-True Practice

4. Spartakiad Five-Year Plans

5. Physical and Ideological Training for the Spartakiad

6. Spartakiad Participants in Prague: Transportation, Accommodations and Food

7. The Disciplinary Space of Strahov Stadium

8. The Budget of Spartakiads in the Moral Economy of State Socialism

7. Society and Spartakiads

1. Open Resistance

2. Weapons of the Weak

3. Spartakiad Potlatch

4. An Enthusiastic Reception

8. Conclusion

9. Appendix

10. Bibliography

11. List of Illustrations

12. Index

Acknowledgements

The publication of this book would not have been possible without the support of a number of institutions, colleagues and friends. First and foremost, I would like to thank the Central European University in Budapest for their support. Without the advice and help of my supervisor, István Rév, my research would have undoubtedly remained captive to a Manichean view of the communist past. I would also like to mention the help of others on the Central European University faculty, particularly that of Jiří Musil and Marsha Siefert who generously shared their experiences with me. From a cultural-anthropological perspective, I am most grateful to my mentors from the University of Cambridge, Paul Connerton and Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov. No less important was the assistance of the late Henning Eichberg who helped me discover the cultural and political history of the collective movement. Hana Havelková and Libora Oates-Indruchová expanded my limited view of the subject’s gender implications. Martin Franc led me to superb resources on everyday life and consumption during the Spartakiads. Also, significantly contributing to my work were the comments and suggestions made by Adéla Gjuričová, Michal Kopeček, Vítězslav Sommer and Tomáš Zahradníček, colleagues from the Institute of Contemporary History. Discussions with Horst Bredekamp, Muriel Blaive and Maja Brkljačić during the early phase of research were also enlightening. Blanka Chocholová and Marek Chochola, who willingly searched the family archive of Václav Chochola and provided his unique photographs, also deserve my gratitude.

Research for this book was supported by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic (GPP410/11/P779), the translation by the Editorial Board of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. The English version of the book was for the most part edited during a research fellowship at Imre Kertesz Kolleg in Jena.

Preface

The concrete structure of the largest stadium in the world sits on a hill in Prague. Every five years from 1955 to 1985, two hundred thousand spectators, including prominent guests such as Tristan Tzara, Fernand Leger, Raul Castro, and Juan Antonio Samaranch, would watch from the stands an enormous mass spectacle unrivaled in magnitude the world over. The actors in this theater were gymnasts whose synchronized movements were meant to create the new language of a new society and provide an answer to the fundamental question of state socialism: What is a socialist people and what is their will?

All six of these spectacles known as “Spartakiads” took up only a few days over the course of the forty years of communist reign, yet we can hardly overstate their significance. Spartakiads were the most important communist ritual that best captured and literally embodied the new regime’s ambition to create a new person and new society – the objective here was nothing less than the embodiment of communism. In 1955, renowned Czech poet Vítězslav Nezval celebrated Spartakiads as a prefiguration of the future communist society: “If a thousand people can on a single command, / a thousand, upon a thousand people, who don’t know each other,/ don’t know each others’ names, don’t know, didn’t know each other, / if they can on a single command create a garden patch, / there’s no reason, sister, there’s no reason, brother, / there’s no reason to despair, my friend, my comrade, / over that which gave us our most challenging tomorrow.”[1] The vast funding that the party and state administration was willing to spend on this venture (between a half billion and one billion Czechoslovak crowns of that period for a single Spartakiad) attests to the importance that they attributed to it. Spartakiads were also ambitious art projects bringing together, in a real Gesamtkunstwerk spirit, a broad range of artistic spheres: from music and choreography, to film and architecture, to design and literature (along with the aforementioned poet Nezval, other renowned figures taking part in Spartakiad projects included painter and illustrator Karel Svolinský, architect Jiří Kroha, dancer Milča Mayerová, writers Ota Pavel and Arnošt Lustig, and cinematographer Jan Špáta).

Spartakiads impacted society’s everyday life in a way that no other political ritual, such as elections (voting dates were actually postponed due to Spartakiads) or May Day parades, could compare. Throughout the school year leading up to a Spartakiad performance, a million participants from the ages of twenty months to eighty years would train several times a week, and in Prague schools the school year would end early to accommodate Spartakiads. Scarce goods could be bought in Prague when Spartakiads were being held, though such goods would then understandably be even more difficult to find elsewhere and at other times. Spartakiads rhythmically arranged the lives of many Czechoslovaks, as attested to by the writer Ladislav Fuks who viewed Spartakiads as “milestones of sorts” people who “counted their own lives in terms of Spartakiad years, […] wondering if they’d live to see the next Spartakiad or even the one after that.”[2] People were humming Spartakiad musical hits such as Poupata (Buds) for years after the event had ended. They dreamed about Spartakiads, many friendships and romances began at Spartakiads, and even more than one life was conceived there (though not to the extent that the urban myth claimed) and, though rarely, people died there.[3]

It is not the aim of this study to cover all themes opened by the Spartakiads. Instead, four fundamental questions will be examined: Where did Spartakiads as a cultural and political phenomenon emerge from? What was their core message, or what was being said through Spartakiads? How were their logistics organized? How did the public react to the Spartakiads? The answers to these questions form the individual chapters of this book with the exception of the second question, whose response requires two separate chapters since Spartakiads symbolized one thing for people in the 1950s and something else for people after the Prague Spring of 1968.

The predecessors of Spartakiads, the German Turnfests followed by the Sokol Slets (in Czech a sokol is a falcon and a slet is a gathering of falcons), played a crucial role in depicting the imagined community of the German or Czech nation, understood as organic communities (Volk). The image of aligned rows of thousands of gymnasts, which we first encounter in German cities in the 1860s, was to compensate for the lack of uniform and deeply rooted national institutions. The further development of mass gymnastic performances, which soon became one of the primary means of political representation regardless of national or political borders, supports the notion that the human body is an ideological variable.[4] Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, who later became the first Czechoslovak president, scoffed at members of the Czech Sokol community for their flag-waving Slavism that he felt slavishly imitated the German Turners. That they did so under the leadership of “Sudeten” Germans Miroslav Tyrš and Jindřich Fügner was yet another point of ridicule. Yet the imitation did not end there. In the hopes of forging “synchronized Slavism” the Czech Sokols spread Turner gymnastics to other Slavic countries. Towards the close of the 19th century, social democrats also seized upon synchronized exercises: instead of the collective body of the nation, its participants displayed class solidarity. Following split in the workers’ sports movement, communist participants also embodied the revolutionary aspirations of the proletariat at the first Spartakiad in 1921. The image of the synchronized movement of male (and since the early 20th century also female) bodies evoked several fundamental political themes that were crucial for both nationalist and leftist movements: the subordination of individual will to collectivity, the aestheticizing of discipline (if it is beautiful, it must also be good), collective will, commitment to defense, faith in the rationalization of society and progress (for instance, the communists adopted Tyrš’s motto: “Forward! Not one step back! (Kupředu, zpátky ni krok! ).”

The synchronized movements of the participants represented a visual political strategy by which a mass of human bodies creates the image of the nation’s or people’s single collective political body. The Turner and Sokol adherents certainly were not the first to make use of this impressive metaphor. The title page for Hobbes’s Leviathan published in 1651 shows a crowned sovereign, whose body consists of a dense mass of individuals of both sexes, towering over the landscape. Having directly contributed to the creation of this image, Hobbes visualized here his social contract theory.[5] The individuals depicted are renouncing the right to live their solitary, miserable, nasty, cruel and short lives in an everyone-for-themselves war, and are forming a single collective political body of the state – a Leviathan. Since the mid-17th century when this political metaphor first appeared, the theme of the transformation of a mass of individuals into a single symbolic body has been incorporated into the repertoire of modern political regimes with a gradual shift in emphasis from the concept of the state to the concept of the nation and people. Spartakiad’s representation of the communist proletariat was part of this tradition, but also significantly changed it. The communist “working people”, that is to say, had the Janus face of an “obedient sovereign”: The people were understandably the highest authority in a people’s democracy (“all power belongs to the people”), but the decision of to whom, when and why was that of the communist party adhering to Marxist laws of historical development.[6] This theory held that the people themselves are not capable of thinking and acting; the people only know (as in the popular phrase “our people know well”) and they express what is on their mind through publicly articulated consent with the party’s policies. The image of a perfectly disciplined mass of Spartakiad participants, apparently not taking orders from anyone, managed to capture this antithetical nature of the communist people as an “obedient sovereign” much better than other political rituals. Obrana lidu, the daily of the Czechoslovak army, wrote that this was how Spartakiads were to demonstrate that the people of Czechoslovakia “stand unwaveringly behind the Communist Party, behind their National Front government, that they enjoy carrying out their bold and elaborate plans.”[7]

The means by which Spartakiads embodied the working people radically changed over the course of communist rule. The first Spartakiad in 1955 presented in its various mass gymnastic pieces the people as a perfect mechanism composed of distinct social and professional groups with a clearly defined task. Participants assumed the symbolic form of workers, farmers or proletarian intelligentsia and only together did they provide a complete testimony about the socialist people. All easily interchangeable symbolic elements formed distinctly defined components of the total mechanism “in our enormous socialist workshop.”[8] The symbolism of the mechanism was explicitly developed by the most successful performance of the first Spartakiad entitled A New Shift Begins, at the end of which the participants formed with their bodies the image of several huge turning cogwheels. In contrast to previous Sokol practices, the body and its movements were also subordinate to this mechanical logic. The participants’ bodies were materials for the creation of various words and symbols; their movement was then intended to depict a wide range of work activities.

In contrast to this, later Spartakiads, especially the three that fell within the “normalization” period, i.e. the consolidation period that followed the Soviet led intervention against the Prague Spring in 1968 and lasted till 1989, largely returned to the Sokol representation of the people as an organism.[9] The symbolic elements were no longer mechanically arranged one after another, but the symbolism of the individual compositions – a happy childhood, the beauty of a woman’s body, male courage – together created a firm and self-enveloped “organic” whole. If the symbol of the first Spartakiad consisted of a gear made up of the participants’ bodies, the Spartakiads during the normalization period were best encapsulated by parents (mothers) performing mass gymnastic routines with three- to six-year-old children that referred to the “unchanging” world of the nature and family. The mass choreography was also altered: instead of symbols and letters, the participants used their bodies to create simple abstract compositions of regular geometrical formations (one of the creators of the cancelled 1990 Spartakiad even suggested using Piet Mondrian’s abstract paintings for the choreography).[10]

These changes did not merely lead to a simple return to the Sokol tradition; the creators and sponsors of normalization Spartakiads also attempted to find the lowest common denominator between the ruling power and the public at large and to eliminate all disruptive elements (e.g. the traditional Soviet flag disappeared from Spartakiads during normalization). It essentially consisted of a strange type of dialogue in which the side holding all the power tried to find symbols and meanings acceptable for the ritual’s consumers. The prevailing view among scholars is that the communist rituals gradually became stale and turned into tedious duty. As explored in the fourth chapter, the Spartakiads’ development instead went in the opposite direction, becoming an effective and consensual ritual. Yet their success also raises the question of whether they could still be considered a communist ritual.

Considering the scale and complexity of the Spartakiads, another question that arises is how such a spectacle could have been organized by the notoriously inefficient communist bureaucracy. The explanation is not overly complex: despite the assurance of the journal Literární noviny that Spartakiads were “not merely an altered form of the Sokol Slets,” they were in fact just that.[11] In terms of organization, the Slets and Spartakiads shared a continuity that might even be considered smooth. Spartakiads were held at the Sokol Slet stadium built in 1926 and which more or less remained unchanged from the time of the final Sokol Slet until the 1970s. They followed up on the Sokol routines of simple physical exercises and the organizational network of Sokol clubs. Most importantly much of their success is owed to the professional expertise of former Sokol officials and authors of the mass gymnastic routines for the Slets, whose agenda gradually took over the specialized discourse on mass gymnastics. These individuals saw in state socialism the chance to implement the old slogan “Every Czech a Sokol!” (Co Čech, to sokol) through funding and political support that the new regime provided, while another part of the same Sokol subculture was serving long prison terms or seeking a new identity abroad in exile. Though the Communist Party gained a political ritual that legitimized their totalitarian ambitions, it came at the price that it provided or directly created a considerable autonomous space for former Sokol members to decide not only highly specialized matters, but also those of a conceptual nature. In addition to the involvement of former Sokol members, the almost absurd generosity of state institutions was responsible for the success of Spartakiads, which became part of the “moral economy” of state socialism, a kind of symbolic exchange of gifts between the Party and the people, whereby less lofty aspects such as financial calculations were disregarded. As the authors Ota Pavel and Arnošt Lustig wrote in 1965, the Spartakiad was “a gift to the republic to commemorate its twentieth anniversary and also a gift by the republic to all of its children.”[12]

The general public’s reaction to Spartakiads was characterized by a broad pallet of attitudes – from open resistance of those trying to prevent Spartakiads or ridiculing them (e.g., the famous animated filmmaker Jan Švankmajer combined Spartakiad photographs with illustrations from the books of the Marquis de Sade) to enthusiastic acceptance mainly by former Sokol members and their descendents. The most common reaction by far was the attempt to “use” Spartakiads to consume everything that the regime offered in its efforts to organize a successful ritual. Perhaps we could best describe this approach in employing the term Eigensinn, or obstinate willfulness, which describes a tactic of the oppressed. Such people tolerate the strategy of the ruling power to the extent that is necessary, but also pursue their own objectives as far as the ruling power allows.[13] Though the party was able, with the help of Sokol specialists, to create a picture of a perfectly “legible and obedient” mass on the field of Strahov Stadium, outside the stadium gates it could only helplessly watch as society appropriated Spartakiads and adapted them to its needs.

In this light, the Spartakiad example backs the theories of Malte Rolf, Karen Petrone and other scholars on Soviet rituals. In their view, Soviet rituals were usually not just boring ceremonies that viewers merely had to endure, but instead resembled folk celebrations or even, as Malte Rolf characterized them, a rausch or “a collective frenzy.”[14] Soviet society integrated them into its everyday life; the rituals gave structure to the collective memory, experience and expectations along similar lines. There thus occurred a kind of self-sovietization, i.e. an adaptation to the new Soviet worldview with its specific perception of time and space. Society could understand the rituals as meaningful, could actively take part in them and remember and look forward to them, but this did not at all mean that it also assumed the official standards of behavior or the official discourse. Instead, these regime-organized rituals formed a frame that society filled with its own festivity, often based on traditional, religious models. Yet these various forms of adaptation, appropriation and hybridization of a socialistic ritual did not at all weaken, but strengthened them. Their adaptation to society’s needs ensured that these official cultural practices penetrated the people’s lives.[15]

Nevertheless, Spartakiads occupy a somewhat specific place in terms of society’s involvement in socialist rituals. On the one hand it may seem that they created a very insignificant space for negotiations and non-conformist views. Each gymnast had his precisely defined space and predefined task; his movement could be analyzed and even retroactively corrected. It was a case of either performing the task or failing to: the participant either stood on his mark and performed correctly or he didn’t. In fact, the opposite was true. Spartakiads required extensive preparations of relatively stable social groups with their own social dynamics, including rehearsals in Prague that would last several days. Unlike the May Day parades, there was much space outside the performance itself for autonomous forms of celebrations. It could even be said that, more than a hybridization of a ritual, what occurred was a carnival-like inversion of values, as Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin refers to it.[16] The conduct of participants before and after the actual performance could be described as anything but the picture-perfect discipline that the participants’ bodies displayed during the mass gymnastic routines. In contrast to other socialist rituals, we also find a certain difference in terms of content. The symbolism of the Spartakiads focused much more than, say, the May Day parades on the human body with its semantic ambivalence and multivalence, which (along with the Sokol connotations) allowed the participants to interpret the ritual how they wished. Spartakiad symbolism enabled the involvement of many people who would have otherwise rejected the communist ritual. Yet this kind of inclusive ritual was the very objective of the political powers.

It should be pointed out here that this study is not a comparison of the Czechoslovak Spartakiad within the broader context of the ritual practices of Eastern Bloc countries. We would find throughout the Eastern Bloc a very similar picture of the synchronization of gymnasts and their use as a specific political medium. From a comparative perspective, perhaps the most interesting would be the Soviet, East German, and Yugoslavia mass-gymnastic performances which, like Spartakiads, made use of the fact that, unlike other symbols such as flags and emblems, the human body could much better represent the trans-national, or in the case of East Germany, the “semi-national” collective.

In Soviet Moscow, mass gymnastic displays already began appearing in the 1920s as part of the program of a broad range of parades on Red Square. During a short intermission of a procession or directly while they were marching, athletes would use their bodies to create various words or symbols, or would present the individual types of sports in a creative manner, as attested to by the superb photographs of Alexander Rodchenko.[17]

These performances, significantly influenced by the strong Russian and Soviet tradition of circus acrobatics, largely appeared in Soviet stadiums only after the Second World War and mainly as opening and final ceremonies of the All-Union sporting events. It was also here shortly after the war that a specific genre of mass choreography in the form of “living signs” composed of spectators in the stands was conceived. As described by Mikhail D. Segal, a leading theoretician of Soviet athletic rituals, this practice originally developed as a reaction to the specific practical problem that spectators in a stadium, unlike those in the stands on Red Square, dressed arbitrarily according to their own taste, thereby “disturbing the overall color composition.”[18] There was then just a small step from the attempt at having spectators wear the same color to having them form words and symbols. Organizers of the East German mass gymnastic performances in Leipzig, which otherwise followed up on the tradition of the Turnfests, copied and even improved this Soviet practice in a newly built stadium with a capacity of 100,000 people.[19]

Following several weeks of practice, twelve thousand spectators-cum-participants in the eastern stands of Leipzig Stadium used different colored paper signs to create rapidly changing words and symbols. Of all the Eastern Bloc rituals, the Leipzig Turnfests most resembled in character the Czechoslovak Spartakiads. Yet the Leipzig mass gymnastic festivals did not play such an important role in the East German political system, which is clear from the fact that they were held in Leipzig and irregularly. East Germany’s world-class sports in particular and its major international success assumed the role there of “embodying” the national community.

Yugoslavian mass gymnastic performances were linked to the strong Sokol tradition in the individual republics. The most important events were held at the Yugoslavian People’s Army Stadium as part of the annual celebrations of Youth Day (Dan mladosti) on May 25th, which also celebrated the birthday of Josip Broz Tito.[20] The cult of youth was directly wedded here with the cult of the leader, even after Tito’s death. A celebration of the leader, even if dead, as the primary motif of Youth Day, represents the main difference when compared to the Czechoslovak Spartakiads, whose objective was to present the people as the highest authority and were implicitly defined against the cult of the leader.

Although this book does not have overly extensive theoretical ambitions, it is not completely void of theory. It has been rather heavily inspired by Clifford Geertz’s understanding of rituals as elaborate discussions on the nature of power, which makes this power tangible and effective.[21] In this light, ritual does not merely serve as a political tool rendering ideological principles accessible to the masses, possibly covering the contradiction between ideology and social reality, but also creates its own autonomous political realm. This independence of the ritual from the political power leads to the perceived effect in which, as Geertz described it, the ritual does not serve the political power, but the power serves the ritual.[22] The symbolism of the ritual can be viewed as a text whose comprehension does not depend on a revelation of the hidden intentions of the ritual’s sponsors. It is enough just to read it, or possibly translate or decipher it. Just as we do not need to see into the head of the ritual’s sponsors, it is also not imperative for us to know what took place in the private worlds of individuals for the sake of creating legitimacy: what is important is the display (in this case it is physical) of consent in the public sphere. This book also draws on cultural anthropology’s view of the human body as a key symbol that, owing to its symmetry and multivocality, can be a metaphor for the entire political community.[23] Ownership of the body itself is part of the very foundation of liberal political theory and forms the individual’s autonomy that Canetti poetically expressed by comparing it to a windmill keeping everyone else at bay.[24] Mass gymnastic performances deliberately and explicitly attack the autonomy of an individual’s body, creating an aesthetic and political shock through this denial of corporeality.

Finally, it should be noted that this study does not perceive the communist regime as totalitarian. Should this term appear here, it is describing the notion of some historical players rather than social reality. The dystopian visions of Hannah Arendt’s totalitarianism aptly characterize the ambitions of communist leaders (at least for the first half of the 1950s) who undoubtedly wanted to achieve total control over society, or at least create such an impression (e.g., through the image of perfectly aligned rows of Spartakiad participants). The concept of totalitarianism as a description of social reality is inapplicable, as several decades of revisionist historiography of state socialism has already shown.[25] Society under communism may have been “communist,” but it certainly remained a society in the sense that it continued to be made up of a complex of contradictory social interests and groups, from which each created its own “communism,” i.e. its own modus vivendi with the dictatorial power of the communist party, often at the expense of other social groups.

1Nezval, Vítězslav: “Sborový zpěv”. Nový život, 1955, vol. 7, n. 9, pp. 893–896.

2Fuks, Ladislav: “O spartakiádě trochu jinak”. Rudé právo, vol. 60, 2. 7. 1980, p. 5.

3Dryje, František: “Sen o spartakiádě, 26. 8. 80”. Analogon, 1996, vol. 8, n. 16, p. 44.

4Hoberman, John M.: Sport and Political Ideology. University of Texas, Austin 1984, p. 53.

5Cf. Bredekamp, Horst: Thomas Hobbes Der Leviathan. Das Urbild des modernen Staates und seine Gegenbilder. 1651–2001. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2003.

6Fidelius, Petr: Řeč komunistické moci. Triáda, Prague 1998. The people thus resemble the fish from Emir Kusturica’s film Arizona Dream: The people don’t think, the people know.

7“Krása i zbraň”. Obrana lidu, vol. 14, 2. 7. 1955, p. 1.

8“Květiny bílé po cestě…”. Rudé právo, vol. 35, 3. 7. 1955, p. 2.

9For a general discussion of the term “normalization” in Eastern Europe see Fulbrook, Mary. “The Concept of “Normalisation” and the GDR in Comparative Perspective.” In: Mary Fulbrook (ed.): Power and Society in the GDR, 1961–1979. The “Normalisation of Rule”? Berghahn Books, New York, Oxford 2009.

10Belšan, Pavel: “Choreografie a funkce náčiní, nářadí a režijních prostředků ve skladbách ČSS”. In: Sborník ze semináře FTVS UK Praha k problematice hromadných vystoupení Československé spartakiády. Metasport, Ostrava 1986, p. 56.

11Frýd, Norbert: “Jsme bohatší”. Literární noviny, 1955, vol. 4, n. 28, p. 1.

12Lustig, Arnošt – Ota, Pavel: “Úvod, k němuž jsme nechtěli hledat název”. In: Vladimír Dobrovodský (ed.): III. celostátní spartakiáda 1965. Sportovní a turistické nakladatelství, Prague 1966, unpagin.

13Alf Lüdtke came up with this term and originally used it to describe the power relations in Prussia in the first half of the 19th century, though he also applied it in his later works to Nazism and communism.. See Lüdtke, Alf: “The Role of State Violence in the Period of Transition to Industrial Capitalism. The Example of Prussia from 1815 to 1848”. Social History, 1979, vol. 4, n. 2, pp. 175–221; Lüdtke, Alf: Eigen-Sinn. Fabrikalltag, Arbeitererfahrungen und Politik vom Kaiserreich bis in den Faschismus. Ergebnisse, Hamburg 1993; Lüdtke, Alf: “‘… den Menschen vergessen‘? – oder: Das Maß der Sicherheit. Arbeiterverhalten der 1950er Jahre im Blick von MfS, SED, FDGB und staatlichen Leitungen”. In: Alf Lüdtke – Peter Becker (eds.): Akten, Eingaben, Schaufenster – Die DDR und ihre Texte. Erkundungen zu Herrschaft und Alltag. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1997, pp. 189–222.

14Rolf, Malte: Das sowjetische Massenfest. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2006, p. 243; See also Klimó, Árpád – Rolf, Malte: “Rausch und Diktatur”. Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 2003, vol. 51, n. 10, pp. 877–895.

15Binns, Christopher A. P.: “The Changing Face of Power. Revolution and Accommodation in the Development of the Soviet Ceremonial System I., II.”. Man (New Series), 1979, vol. 14, n. 4, pp. 585–606; 1980, vol. 15, n. 1, pp. 170–187.

16Bakhtin, Mikhail M.: Rabelais and His World. Indiana UP, Bloomington 1984.

17Cf. Lavrentiev, Aleksandr Nikolajevich: Alexander Rodchenko. Fotografii. Planeta, Moscow 1987.

18Segal, Mikhail D.: Fizkulturnoie prazdniki i zrelishcha. Fizkuľtura i sport, Moscow 1977, pp. 20–21; See Edelman, Robert: Serious fun. A history of spectator sports in the USSR. Oxford University Press, New York 1993. We come across simple messages spelled out by the spectators’ bodies even earlier in stadiums of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

19Rodekamp, Volker (ed.): Sport: Schau. Deutsche Turnfeste 1860–2002. Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig, Leipzig 2002; Johnson, Molly Wilkinson: Training Socialist Citizens. Sports and the State in East Germany. Brill Academic Publishers, Leiden 2008.

20Grigorov, Dimitar: “‘Druže Tito, mi ti se kunemo.’ Ritual and Political Power in Yugoslavia. Tito’s Birthday Celebrations (1945–1987)”. In: Joaquim Carvalho (ed.): Religion, Ritual and Mythology. Aspects of Identity Formation in Europe. Pisa University Press, Pisa 2006, pp. 275–292.

21Geertz, Clifford: Negara. The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali. Princeton University Press, Princeton 1983, p. 102 and 124. See Bell, Catherine: Ritual. Perspectives and Dimensions. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2009, p. 129.

22Geertz, C.: Negara, p. 13. In his analysis of the symbolic policy of the later Roman Empire, which he explicitly compares to the practices of state socialism, Paul Veyne similarly opposes a functionalist understanding of rituals when he writes that the emperors “did not provide euergesiai in order to gain and maintain power, but because they had it.” Veyne, Paul: Bread and Circuses. Historical Sociology and Political Pluralism. Penguin Books, London 1992, p. 261.

23Douglas, Mary: Purity and Danger. An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1978; Turner, Victor W.: The Forest of Symbols. Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1967.

24Canetti, Elias: Crowds and Power. The Viking Press, New York 1962, p. 17.

25See for instance Fitzpatrick, Sheila (ed.): Stalinism. New Directions. Routledge, London 1999; Jarausch, Konrad (ed.): Dictatorship as Experience. Toward a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR. Berghahn Books, New York – Oxford 1999.

A Genealogy
of the Spartakiads

The idea behind the communist mass gymnastic performances stems from 19th-century nationalist movements that aspired to forge the image of a perfect national community unified under a single will. Yet as a specific form of interaction between the human body and political power, their genealogy stretches back further, all the way to the disciplinary projects of (early) modern times whose objective was – as Michel Foucault describes them – the subordination of the body and its more efficient economic use. In addition to other physical displays such as working, hygiene, eating or sex, sports and physical exercises were also subordinated to this “political economy of the body.” Two disciplinary techniques are essential for the genealogy of Spartakiads: political anatomy and social geometry. Foucault defines political anatomy as the way political power subjects the human body to a detailed inspection and manipulation, in which it is “examined, disassembled and reassembled” in order to gain the utmost control over it.[26] Society is then exposed to one other discipline that could be called “social geometry”. This redraws traditional or random social bonds and replaces them with the regular distribution of bodies in a perfectly arranged grid. The disciplinary power, in Foucault’s words, “manufactures” individuals: it “‘trains’ the moving, confused, useless multitudes of bodies and forces them into a multiplicity of individual elements – small separated cells, organic autonomies, of genetic identities and continuities, combinatory segments.” Both techniques are instruments of power and science through which the body and society are studied as well as controlled. Visibility and a clear arrangement make up a key aspect of the disciplinary project: human bodies are exposed to the gaze of power, whether real or alleged, through which they become “perfectly legible”.[27]

Of all the disciplinary techniques of this early modern project, mass gymnastic exercises were derived more than anything else from military drills as refined over the centuries. These drills gradually created a specific understanding of the body as perfect parts of a killing machine. The methods applied in this death production predated American Frederick Taylor’s “scientific management” by nearly three hundred years.[28] Control over human movement was achieved by reducing it to a few dozen acts that were precisely defined and described (or drawn) in military manuals. This political anatomy, through which the body and weapon were united, was supplemented by a social geometry in which a uniform time (using drumbeats) and a uniform space (the regular arrangement of bodies on the exercising grounds and ideally also on the battlefield) was created. The military manuals were usually a military secret, and as such were printed in very few copies: the exact movements had to be “inscribed” or, rather, “copied” directly into the bodies of the military recruits.[29]

As Ulrich Bröckling has shown, under absolute monarchy the battles were won by the militaries that managed to best maintain control over their troops. This is why military manuals focused such little attention on the accuracy of shooting and more on shortening the interval between salvos and the synchronization of shots so that it would sound as much as possible like a single shot (for instance, in his military manual from the early 17th century Johann Jacobi von Wallhausen did not list “aiming” among the 32 movements that a soldier should make between his individual shots).[30] After the first shot, the soldiers were anyway shrouded in thick smoke and they would lose sight of the enemy line. Of high importance was the visibility of their own troops dressed in colorful uniforms so that they resembled “ornate birds” and could be controlled.[31] The objective of military drills during early modern times was not so much the subjugation of the enemy as the subjugation of the body of a side’s own troops. This was less about killing technology and more about getting-killed technology.

The affinity between the production of a healthy body in gymnastic exercises and the production of death in military drills was also noticed by Horkheimer and Adorno in their Dialectics of Enlightenment: “Those who extolled the body in Germany, the gymnasts and outdoor sports enthusiasts, always had an intimate affinity to killing, as nature lovers have to hunting. They see the body as a mobile mechanism, with its hinged links, the flesh upholstering the skeleton. They manipulate the body, actuating the limbs as if they were already severed. The Jewish tradition instills an aversion to measuring human beings with a yardstick, because the dead are measured – for the coffin.”[32]

Ideology of the Organicism and Beginnings of the Mass Gymnastic Performances

The 19th-century nationalist gymnastic movements were the immediate predecessors of communist mass gymnastic performances in Central and Eastern Europe, a fact that the communist organizers never tired of stressing. They often arose as a reaction to a military defeat.[33] Military failures in the Napoleonic Wars led part of the Prussian elite to try to reform military and civilian institutions. The “nationally awakened” intelligentsia, which absorbed universalistic intellectual stimuli of the Enlightenment and French Revolution, including a new view of the “natural” human body and its movements, became involved in the reforms. It also assumed, as George Mosse pointed out, an enlightened theory of the people and the revolutionary practice of political rituals that were to “embody” this theory and provide tangible proof of a volonté générale.[34] Yet in the spirit of Romanticism it adapted these stimuli to the needs of a new national community (the Volk), i.e. a spiritual, rather than a political union based on, in the words of Isaiah Berlin, an “ideology of organicism.”[35] In the absence of a united state and its institutions, national endeavors were aimed at creating the image of a united national organism – tending to its roots in the national past understood as the past of the “tribe” and not the past of institutions, overseeing its growth (not limited by state borders) and protecting it and immunizing it from “foreign” influences and from a seemingly endless line of national enemies.

The Prussian educator Friedrich Ludwig Jahn took up the strategically important task of democratizing gymnastics, which until then had been practiced almost exclusively only in aristocratic circles.[36] In terms of temperament – he was always disheveled and repeatedly expelled from his studies due to debts and acts of violence – Jahn was an unlikely founder of a movement that a few decades later was to produce images of perfect discipline.[37] The fruits of his intellectual labors were also undisciplined: his unsystematic and unoriginal writings, particularly the book entitled Deutches Volkstum, were filled with outbursts of hatred against all enemies of the German nation, such as Poles, French, priests, nobles and, above all, Jews. In Jahn’s view, all of these people constituted a threat to the purity of the German people: “The purer the nation, the better; the more mixed, the worse […] Inferior nations and inferior languages must disappear or be exterminated.”[38] Marriage to a foreigner was, in Jahn’s eyes, “the mere copulation of animals” and a betrayal of one’s country.[39] Elsewhere he states that the German people need a war to realize their own essence and that a wilderness zone guarded by hungry wolves and bears needed to be created on the borders of the future unified Germany (which was to include, in addition to Austria, also Denmark and the Netherlands).[40] In his radicalism and charisma, Jahn attracted the awakening nationalist movement that was gaining particular momentum at German universities; he also had a considerable knack for acquiring funding from the Prussian throne for both himself and his supporters.[41]

Jahn began systematic “patriotic exercises” with Berlin students on specially prepared training grounds of the Prussian army outside the city walls in 1811. These events, which were soon attended by hundreds of students, became a popular spectacle for Berlin society and inspired the establishment of many other Turner clubs in Prussia and later in other German states as well. Turner exercises became a fixed part of the curriculum of Prussian schools; Jahn and many of his students held important posts in the school system and in other state institutions. Yet the rapid spreading of the Turner movement did not last long. After Turner member Karl L. Sand stabbed to death the conservative playwright August von Kotzebue (two years earlier at a gathering in Wartburg, Turner students had burned his writings), Turner clubs and later gymnastic exercises as such were banned. Jahn and many other trainers then spent a number of years in prison.[42]

After his release from prison, Jahn no longer wielded much influence on the Turner movement, which following the defeat of the revolution in 1848 was taken strongly in tow by the Prussian military. However, his legacy fundamentally formed in several regards the movement’s further development. As a self-taught linguist, Jahn created special German gymnastic terminology and even came up with the very term turner, derived from torner in the mistaken belief that it was an old Germanic word meaning “warrior.” Jahn and his colleagues then formed from that root dozens of terms such as Turnplatz, Turnverein, Turnlehrer and Turnerkreuz (the symbol of the Turner movement consisted of four letters “F” arranged in a cross shape[43] ). Turner members then created their own lingo, Turnsprache, whose perfection was the responsibility of a special group of experts, the Turnkünstlerrat. The compilation of new gymnastic terminology was motivated partly by linguistic purism, which had become an obsession for Jahn, and partly by an attempt to conceal the aristocratic, or courtly origin of many of the new favorite exercises, such as balancing or exercises on pommel horses. The original terminology also gave the impression of a new and exclusive society. The democratic addressing of a person with Du instead of Sie, the introduction of the informal greeting Heil and the simple uniform attire made of unbleached linen were all directed toward the same goal, i.e. the creation of a “horizontal community.”

Jahn also founded the tradition of public gymnastic performances by Turner members, the Turnfests, even though these festivals hardly resembled the “classic” Turnfests of the latter third of the 19th century. One glaring difference was the complete absence of military drills, which Jahn greatly opposed (the French occupying forces at that time would not have appreciated it either).[44]

Jahn considered the festivals to be a “human necessity” where ideas materialized and were experienced.[45] Unlike the rowdy and chaotic festivals of student Burschenschaft fraternities, the Turnfests were to be a meaningful ritual, “a means of unification that eliminates differences in faith, differences of geographic and class origin and creates a model of common German life.”[46] Turnfests were also intended to present the new movement to the public, to gain political support for it and to convince at least part of the public to join the exercises. It was for this reason that Jahn devoted much attention to choosing the place to hold the festivals: they needed to be easily accessible and to provide the spectators with a good view of the exercise grounds. Yet perhaps Jahn’s greatest legacy was his own myth as the founder or father of gymnastics (Turnvater), to whom almost all the German gymnastic movements and all political regimes turned for decades as a source of inspiration.

A Physical Sonderweg and the POST-1848 Turner Movement

The defeat of the liberal revolution of 1848 and the unification of Germany as orchestrated by “pre-modern” (east) Prussian elites sent German policy on a “special path” through modernity, for which the term Sonderweg came into use.[47] Setting out on a similarly special path – if we allow that a “normal path” exists – was the gymnastics movement. Gymnastics (the term “sport” was almost a slur) was not for one’s individual benefit or enjoyment, but was intended to be a national duty, carried out with a clear, usually military purpose, collectively and without a competitive element. The liberal nationalistic radicalism of Jahn (he died in 1852) and his students faded away after 1848 and was replaced by loyalty to the Prussian ruling elite, by the militarization of the movement, support of imperial policy and conservative values. What had not changed was the ideological foundation that lay in the Volk concept. Yet towards the end of the 19th century, an emphasis placed on the organic unity of the national community paradoxically led to a permanent split in the gymnastics movement.

Turner gymnastics, which during the period of Jahn’s influence were more of a competitive nature with an emphasis on individual performance, also underwent a transformation. The form of the Turner gymnastic practices, as we know it from later Turnfests, Sokol Slets and ultimately communist Spartakiads, was created by molding Jahn’s gymnastics to the needs of physical education in schools. German trainer and teacher Adolph Spiess is mainly credited with this adaptation. In working with school children while in exile in Switzerland, Spiess realized that Jahn’s system was not suited for this purpose since it required a special space, complex equipment and individual attention to the gymnasts. By eliminating the equipment and the more difficult exercises, Spiess came up with the Freiübungen (calisthenics) in the 1830s. These were exercises that did not require equipment and that could be carried out in any space, enabling an entire class to exercise as a collective with all the children making the same movements simultaneously. Spiess also introduced the Ordnungsübungen (marching exercises) by which participants were easily arranged, strict order was maintained and which, according to Spiess, was to resemble military discipline.[48] As a singing instructor, Spiess also strove to make the exercises rhythmic, and even composed simple scores for physical education. Pehr Henrik Ling’s Swedish physical education system also took a similar route. Ling too made do without equipment, but went much further in regulating and controlling the participants’ movements, with the precision of the exercises taking precedence over performance.[49]

Calisthenics were soon adopted by the Turner movement, primarily as a way to cope with the prohibition of exercising outdoors. Turners began to build richly adorned gymnasiums (Turnhallen) that held not only an importance for gymnastics, but also became the cultural and spiritual centers of the movement. One of the architects described them as “sanctuaries,” in which a man “removes his hat and a woman holds her tongue.”[50] Strict discipline needed to be ensured in the limited space of the gymnasiums to prevent collisions between the gymnasts. Moving into covered spaces meant that exercising no longer depended on the weather or time of day, and thus enabled the involvement of workers, who gradually outnumbered all other participants. Yet in democratizing the exercises, the attempt at achieving the participants’ perfect discipline also intensified. Marching exercises were increasingly introduced along with the calisthenics, and in time it was difficult to distinguish Turner gymnastics from military drills.

The nature of the Turnfests, which continued to be the primary means of displaying the movement, also changed. Instead of focusing on displaying the exceptional performances of individuals, they now concentrated on the perfect discipline of the participants.[51] It is in the Turnfests of the early 1860s that we first come across the image of the synchronized movement of thousands of men, dressed in the same outfit, performing simple calisthenics to create, in the words of the organizers, a tüchtige, kompakte Masse (an efficient, compact mass).[52] The most important of these Germany-wide Turnfests, held in Leipzig in 1863 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the defeat of Napoleon, saw the participation of some twenty thousand Turners, of which eight thousand performed the same calisthenics for tens of thousands of spectators. At the time the Turner movement had roughly 170,000 members and nearly two thousand clubs. After overcoming a crisis in the 1870s, Turnfests of a similar size were usually held in five year cycles in different German cities that vied for the chance to organize the event. In time, mass calisthenics became the festivals’ main program at the expense of other parts of the program.[53] As the Turner movement rapidly expanded in the early 20th century, the number of Turnfest participants multiplied several times over. In 1913, in Leipzig (to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig) over sixty thousand Turners took part in the exercises.

The exercises themselves at the Turnfests bore a broad range of meanings. The synchronized movement of the gymnasts from all the German states (aller deutschen Stämme) and their uniform dress evoked, above all, the image of a country united in the same movement. The effect of such exercises becomes apparent if, for instance, we take into account that soldiers of the German Imperial Army did not wear matching attire, since their uniforms represented the various German states.[54] Following the completion of Germany’s political unification, the Turnfests expressed the desire for a broader “spiritual” unification of the entire German nation regardless of state borders. The active participation of Turner clubs from the Austrian and Czech lands was among the factors that served this purpose. The unified movement of gymnasts and their visual uniformity was also proof of the Turner aspiration to not only transcend state borders, but also social classes and political parties, and to represent the German nation in its entirety. Furthermore, Turnfests showed a Germany that was militarily strong and prepared to go beyond the mere Realpolitik of Otto von Bismarck. At the Leipzig Turnfest in 1913, where 17,000 Turners performed synchronized calisthenics, Ferdinand Goetz, a key figure of the Turner movement, declared: “We demonstrated that we are a united nation that is strong enough to dictate its laws to the world.”[55]

Turnfests successfully managed the dual role of awakening national passions and controlling them, while expressing collective national sentiment and steering them in the right direction.[56] The geometrical crowds of the Turnfests implicitly referred to their alter ego, to the potential “other crowds” of revolutions and social turmoil that were lurking in the shadows. These festivals also represented a visual political utopia of sorts: they did not present Germany as it was, but how it could be if the Turner ideal was successful implemented. That the Turnfests communicated visually through the symbolism of the body and its movement played an important role, enabling them to overcome the limitations of other forms of national communication, such as the written word, and to evoke strong emotions not unlike a religious experience. The exercises for the Turner members, who not only envisaged their imaginary community, but also physically experienced it, was an even stronger experience. It is in this light that Henning Eichberg points out the connection of all three meanings of the word “movement” in these exercises: political movement, physical movement, and emotional movement.[57]

By performing their synchronized calisthenics at Turnfests, the Turners were not only demonstrating their Germanhood, they were demonstrating their masculinity. Women did not perform at Turnfests until right before the First World War at the Leipzig Turnfest in 1913.[58] As George Mosse and others have noticed, Turner exercises represented a kind of response to the basic dilemma of male identity of the second half of the 19th century.[59] The ideal man was to be passionate and disciplined, rational and spiritual, civilized and primitive. He was to be the equal of the historical heroic models of the Teutonic warriors (the Vikings were the model for the Swedish gymnasts and the Hussites for the Sokols) and also a member of modern bourgeois society. Voluntary discipline, the cultivation of the body in precise accordance with the given rules and the synchronization of movement with other men creating the image of a single national body – all at least seemingly spanned the antithetical demands placed on male identity of the 19th century.[60]

However, Germany was not unified by the exercises of Turner men in matching uniforms, but by the brutal effectiveness of the Prussian military and political machine. The Turner movement (since 1868 under the umbrella of the Deutsche Turnerschaft) thus lost its primary raison d’être.[61] Beginning in the 1880s, the Turners also had to deal with new competition in the form of sports imported mainly from England that became, especially for the youth of the middle and upper classes, much more attractive than gymnastic exercises and military drills. In absolute terms, the Turner movement continued to grow. With more than one and a half million members – even though a considerable number of them belonged to the category of non-exercising members (Maulturner) – it was on the eve of the First World War the largest sports organization in the world and also a key part of German civic society. Nevertheless, the relative importance of the Turners was on the decline. The Turners responded to the loss of their dominant position by embracing conservative and even chauvinistic values and upholding the cult of the emperor – support for Bismark’s foreign policies and oppression aimed against the left in Germany.[62]

The shift toward the right led to the splintering of Germany’s physical education movement along political, ethnic and gymnastic lines. At the end of the century their previous support for anti-socialist measures led to a separation of working-class Turners (Arbeiterturnerbund), who, though radically differing from nationalistic Turners in their political views, shared their larger right-wing rival’s support for the ritualization and militarization of physical education as well as their opposition to sports. At the same time, there was dissension regarding newly introduced sports, and it created irreconcilable tension between sports, especially soccer, and gymnastics, which then accompanied physical education for decades in Central Europe.

Further splintering, this time along ethnic lines, paradoxically did not occur because the German Turners were overly chauvinistic, but because they were not chauvinistic enough. In 1887, the Austrian gymnastic clubs, based on the von Schönerer model, began introducing into their statutes the “Aryan paragraph” that was intended to ensure “purely German” exercises.[63] Gradually the entire organization of Austrian Turners (the so-called XV Region) was “aryanized” in this way. The opposition of the Germany-wide Turner organization, the Deutsche Turnerschaft, to this process, which in Goetze’s view only led the Turners astray from their main task (i.e. the struggle “against the common enemy – the unified Slavs,”)[64] and the dispute over what to do with clubs refusing the Aryan paragraph eventually led to the Austrian Turner organization becoming independent.

In response to this discrimination, but also under the influence of Zionism and of the Muskeljudentum idea, many Jewish gymnasts joined their own Jüdische Turnerschaft.[65] Its founders included prominent athletes such as Alfred Flatow, a repeat Olympic champion in gymnastics who later died at the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

The Turners and the Third Reich

Following the First World War the Deutsche Turnerschaft remained firmly on the right of the political spectrum (though formally maintaining all along the status of a non-partisan organization that transcended class), actively opposing the Treaty of Versailles and striving for the integration of all Turners regardless of state borders. Rather than moving toward Nazism, the German Turners gravitated toward the conservative right, just as their primary objective remained their concerns for the nation, not for race (a much stronger affinity between Nazism and the Turner movement was evident in Austria and the Sudetenland).[66] Even though the number of Turner members stagnated during the period following the First World War, two Turnfests during the Weimar Republic (Munich in 1923 and Cologne in 1928) eclipsed their predecessors both in terms of the number of active participants (250,000 and 300,000, respectively) and in the difficulty and complexity of the performed exercises.

The ambivalent relationship of the Turners to the new regime (and vice versa) became apparent soon after the Nazi takeover. The Deutsche Turnerschaft reacted to the new political situation with changes in its leadership: Nazi Party member Edmund Neuendorff, who in the 1920s had urged the Turners to preserve the purity of Nordic blood, became its leader.[67] Another regular Turnfest, this time in Stuttgart, had been coincidentally planned for late July 1933 and needed to be modified to fit the needs of the new regime.[68] Even though it could only be partially changed (a Turnfest’s preparation took several years), the new leadership of the Deutsche Turnerschaft made use of it to express its loyalty to Adolf Hitler. Neuendorff announced at that time that an army of Turners stood prepared Seite an Seite, Schulter an Schulter (side by side, shoulder by shoulder) with the SA and Stahlhelm to march towards the greater German future.[69] He also took the opportunity to declare his opposition to sports, which he believed did not create the proper feeling of brotherhood, unlike calisthenics, which took on a new meaning in the Third Reich: “When we speak of the Turner brotherhood, we mean German socialism. This is the new national-socialist thinking that currently prevails throughout the Deutsche Turnerschaft.”[70]

Yet the pandering of Turners to the Nazi regime received only a lukewarm reception. Although Hitler praised the Turnfest as a “festival of German strength,” he shortly afterwards forced the German Turner association to disband “out of a feeling of responsibility for National Socialism.”[71] The tension between Nazism and the Turners arose from two fundamental problems: First of all, as a totalitarian project National Socialism could not allow a massive organization with millions of participants and its own totalitarian-spirited program of transforming German society to autonomously exist by its side. Secondly, the Nazi leadership did not have a clear sports policy. In Hitler’s view, the nation’s health did not so much depend on hygiene and physical education, but on racial hygiene. Though in its anti-intellectualism Hitler appreciated the importance of gymnastics in school education, it was clear from his passion for boxing and its “aggressive spirit” where he stood in the conflict between the Turners and sportsmen.[72] Many Nazi sports leaders, such as Carl Diem, the organizer of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, and Reichssportführer Hans von Tschammer und Osten, opposed calisthenics and especially mass gymnastic performances, which they saw as “constrained drills.”[73] In contrast, Alfred Baeumler, whom sports historian John Hoberman considers “the only Nazi sports theoretician worthy of attention,” defended Turner exercises. The Turner exercise grounds (Turnplatz) was for him a physical and symbolic expression of German community, and as a public educational institution he believed that the Turner association deserved to occupy a position in the “center of culture and of the state.”[74]

The Turnfest in Wroclaw (Breslau) in July 1938 was already entirely in the hands of the Nazi state. Despite its reliance on traditional Turner membership and the Turner organizational apparatus, its aesthetical facets strongly resembled the Nazi party rallies in Nuremberg (e.g., the use of floodlights to create a vertical space above the stadium). The Turnfest, which took place under the slogan Vor uns liegt Deutchland, In uns marschiert Deutschland, Und hinter uns kommt Deutschland (Germany lies before us, Germany marches in us, Germany is coming behind us), was clearly intended to express support for Hitler’s aggression abroad.[75] Among the foreign guest participants, most of the attention by far went to the delegation of seventeen thousand Sudeten Germans headed by their “leader” Konrad Henlein.[76] Another Turnfest was to be held five years later in 1943, this time in Leipzig at the intensively constructed Adolf Hitler Sportfeld designed by Werner March (who had also designed the Olympic Stadium in Berlin).[77] Yet this Turnfest never took place due to the unfavorable turn in the war.[78]

Despite all efforts by the Turners, they were unable to use the Turnfests (precisely due to their deeply rooted tradition) to express the dynamics of the new Nazi regime and its totalitarian ambition. This task fell to the Nazi party rallies in Nuremberg, which, although they greatly borrowed from the mass choreography and organizational practices of the Turnfests, fundamentally differed in content not only from the Turnfests, but also from the later communist Spartakiads. The main theme of this mass spectacle was the interaction between the omnipotent, hypnotic leader and the malleable mass of members belonging to Nazi organizations. The choreography of the Nuremberg masses (quite poor indeed when compared to the Turnfests or Spartakiads), Speer’s architecture and the film representation in Leni Reifenstahl’s Triumph of the Will were subordinate to this main idea: a completely new understanding of the people, which arose from the will of the leader and whose main objective was to serve the leader. This is well documented by a photograph published in 1935 in a book about the preparations of the aforementioned film and which shows Riefenstahl, Speer and Hitler preparing for the Nuremberg rallies.[79] Hitler is shown in the photograph using strips of paper, each of which represents several thousand SA troops, to create the mass choreography for the Nuremberg rally. Such a representation of a political leader as the creator of the malleable crowd is inconceivable within the context of Turnfests and certainly not in the case of communist Spartakiads which were, as we will later see, to depict the will of a “spontaneous” self-molding people.

In her famous essay Fascinating Fascism, Susan Sontag pointed out that the interaction between the leader and mass at the Nuremberg rallies took the form of a carefully orchestrated sadomasochistic orgy: “The Fascist dramaturgy centers on the orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets, uniformly garbed and shown in ever swelling numbers. […] it glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death.”[80]

Sontag believes the role of the leader in the Nuremberg rallies was understood as “sexual mastery of the ‘feminine’ masses, as rape. The expression of the crowds in Triumph of the Will is one of ecstasy. The leader makes the crowd come.”[81] The Nuremberg rallies were a culmination of the described development of the German Turners’ choreography of the masses, but in their “leader principle” they were also its negation.

1. A poster for the 1938 Turnfest in Breslau (Wrocław) (National Museum).

The Political Aesthetics of Tyrš’s Project

Prevalent throughout all German-speaking countries, Turner gymnastics also strongly influenced Germany’s non-German speaking neighbors: Belgium, Denmark and, particularly, Bohemia.[82] The Turner movement then spread from Bohemia to other Slavic countries with the notable exception of Russia, where the direct impact of instructors of Turner’s system played a primary role. The speed and facility by which the Turner habitus of gymnastics was copied follows a more general trend of imitating national movements in Central and Eastern Europe that (despite attempts at making them distinct from one another) were based on the same cultural repertoire. Once a nationalization model was created, it was easy to make it – in the words of Benedict Anderson – “available for pirating.”[83]

Moreover, the penetration of the gymnastics system into different linguistic regions was facilitated by the non-linguistic nature of this form of culture: there was no need to translate gymnastics, it could be directly copied. The “universal” language of the body and its movements enabled it to rapidly spread, following the political liberalization of the 1860s, to all the major towns of the Slavic lands.[84] The cultural transfer of the Turner habitus, as also demonstrated by Tyrš’s example, was mostly carried out “physically” through the practical experience of future instructors in instructor-training institutions. The fact that most of these gymnastics movements had a strong anti-German barb, and at best considered the German Turners to be their rival, did nothing to prevent the rapid spread of Turner gymnastics.

That Turner and Slavic Sokol gymnastics were so similar meant that Sokol members needed to be all the more distinct in their appearance. The Prague Sokol uniform design therefore became one of the dominant issues of the movement’s earliest phase, while the nature of the exercises was not even really discussed.[85] Designed by the renowned artist Josef Mánes,[86] the uniform was composed of, in addition to Garibaldi-like red shirts, a broad range of components of supposed Slavic origin, with “German” features such as buttons and button holes scrupulously avoided.

Near the end of the 19th century Tomáš G. Masaryk had poked fun at Sokol for its dependence on the German model, illustrating the “beer-hall patriotism” of the Young Czech Party: “with such Slav and Czech patriotism it is no wonder… that they drew from Germans ideas and national institutions. Sokol can serve as the best example of this: a purely German concept transferred by an ethnic German to us and decked out with national eclecticisms.”[87] Yet Masaryk’s characterization was not wholly accurate since Sokol did in fact differ from the Turners in several regards. One prominent difference was that Sokol was created fifty years after the Turner clubs, i.e. in a completely different developmental phase of the gymnastics culture. Sokol adopted Turner gymnastics in its highly disciplined, militarized and also decidedly non-revolutionary phase with its already encoded resistance to sports. The central ideological motive of the Turners – i.e. the unification of all German-speaking people into a single cultural community, if not directly into a single state – did not play a dominant role with the Sokols, whose main motive was to solidify a national community in the struggle against a stronger German opponent. Sokol also had to deal with the fulfillment of its own program, i.e. with political independence and redefining the sense and purpose of the gymnastics movements rooted in it, much later than the Turners. Finally, a fundamental difference can be found in the roles of Jahn and Tyrš in forming the programs of both movements, despite the fact that both held in their mythologies the same position of founding fathers.[88] Lacking Jahn’s charisma, Tyrš made up for it with his systematic thinking and (pseudo-) scientific approach. Unlike Jahn, he was a true ideologist who equipped his movement with a basic theoretical canon.[89]

Masaryk was right in claiming that Sokol’s founder Miroslav Tyrš, like his foremost colleague Jindřich Fügner, came from a purely German, Sudeten milieu.[90] Though they had their roots in a different social setting, Czechification meant the chance for social ascension and social prestige for both of these young German-speaking men. In Tyrš’s case, this was also an existential matter.[91] As Vladimír Macura has pointed out, converting to a Czech national sentiment offered the opportunity to help create a completely new “world,” even if it was only a “Czech world.”[92] Both also Czechified their names for the needs of their new roles. Fügner only changed his first name from Heinrich to Jindřich, but Tyrš’s name underwent the following gradual modifications: Friedrich Tirsch, Friedrich Tirš, Bedřich Tyrš and, finally, Miroslav Tyrš.[93]

As a graduate and instructor of private physical education institutions, Tyrš held the exceptional position of an “intellectual gymnast” among Prague’s young nationalists – both among the young Czech politicians not involved in the gymnastics movement, who were present at the birth of the Sokol movement, and among ideologically and often even nationally “unconscious” gymnasts, who were dazzled by his intellectual prowess. Tyrš’s writings, particularly the programmatic tract Náš úkol, směr a cíl (Our Task, Direction and Objective), like his two works on Základový tělocvik (Basic Gymnastics) and Tělocvik v ohledu esthetickém (Gymnastics from an Aesthetical Perspective) acquired for many years the unchallenged status of a professional and ideological canon. Despite later revisions, these writings remained an essential referential frame for leading figures of the Sokol movement and later also for post-war communist gymnastics.

Our Task,Direction and Objective, which Tyrš mostly prepared during his rehabilitation in Switzerland following a nervous breakdown, was created under the influence of the French defeat in 1870.[94] It is a strange mix of social Darwinism, the Czech tradition of political thinking, references to antiquity and Feuerbach’s and Schopenhauer’s philosophies.[95] Tyrš’s ideas on the Sokol program were based on collectivism – voluntary discipline and submission of the individual to the interests of the whole. The proper Sokol was, in Tyrš’s view, one for whom the “individual is nothing and the whole everything.”[96] Collective gymnastics were then not only intended to transform the Sokol community, but also the entire “Czecho-Slav” nation. Even though the motto “Every Czech a Sokol!” was used somewhat later and in a different context,[97] he was already arguing here that the Sokol endeavors could not possibly be considered complete until “every Czech was also a Sokol.”[98] It was in this sense that Sokol was to supposedly differ from all other associations: while it still was not required that everyone be a member of a chorus, industrial or scientific club, the Sokol movement meant the “physical and partly moral education and refinement of the entire Czecho-Slav nation, its instruction aimed at strength, bravery, nobility and increased defensive power.” It was therefore important to eliminate the boundary between the audience and gymnasts, “in time, all the spectators must not disappear, but take turns entering from the stands to the athletic field and for some years long to train there.”[99] The Sokol therefore was not intended to be an unachievable model, but a good example for the whole nation to follow.[100] Tyrš referred to Feuerbach’s statement, which was then often attributed to Tyrš himself: “Whatever the people do not know, nobody knows! Whatever the people still haven’t learned, nobody has learned! Whatever has not happened to the people has not happened to anyone!”[101] The roots of Tyrš’s later motto about Sokol being above party affiliation can also be found here: “This thing of ours is not for political parties, but for the entire nation.”

Vážení čtenáři, právě jste dočetli ukázku z knihy Spartakiads.
Pokud se Vám líbila, celou knihu si můžete zakoupit v našem e-shopu.