Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender & German Modernity

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Haven
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Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender & German Modernity

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Post by Haven » 28 Sep 2015, 19:23

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Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender, and German Modernity
Erik N. Jensen
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2010

Here's a simple–or should we say simplistic?–line of political reasoning: communities are made of people; people can either be sick or healthy; communities, therefore, are sick or healthy depending on the sickness or health of their people. This logic is powerful. It explains success: "We lost the war because we, individually and therefore communally, were ill." And it explains victory: "We won the war because we, individually and there communally, were healthy." And it suggests a program for political progress: get healthy and stay that way. It's an old idea. We find it among the Greeks, the Romans, and throughout the various 19th- and early 20th-century programs for "national renewal" that swept Europe and Asia.

In his excellent book Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender, and German Modernity (Oxford UP, 2010), Erik Jensen explores how Germans of the Weimar era were seduced by this "self-wellness = national-wellness" logic. They'd lost a war, and they couldn't understand why. They knew that German culture wasn't the problem. They believed–and with some good reason–that it was the most advanced in the world. So perhaps, they thought, the problem was some failure in themselves. They had grown weak and ill. Yes, that was it. So something had to be done about it. As Jensen shows, it was. And here's the really interesting part, at least by my lights: it wasn't done by the state. The Weimar government itself, though hardly disinterested, did not lead the campaign to make the German body well. Rather, "ordinary Germans" did. They began to play and follow sports, and to form countless clubs that played and followed sports. Sports became, well, "progressive" among the "right thinking people." Rich and poor. Men and women. Everyone played. For Germany.

Audio interview with the Author: http://newbooksinhistory.com/2011/04/01 ... d-up-2010/

BOOK REVIEWS


German Studies Review

This well-documented and finely illustrated study looks at Weimar modernity through the prism of three forms of competitive sports: tennis, boxing, and track and field. Jensen’s investigation employs an impressive variety of sources, including sports journals, fiction, and film. Its great strength lies in the intricate and multilayered connections and comparisons the author draws between female and male athletes and between different periods in German history, as well as its treatment of the transnational relationships between Germany, the United States, and Great Britain.

http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=s ... rescu.html

Journal of Social History

Weighing in at around 140 pages of text, Erik N. Jensen’s Body by Weimar examines the field of competitive sport, and the uses to which it was put in furthering social and cultural goals during the tumultuous years of the Weimar Republic. In this slim volume, Jensen argues that organized sport has played a much larger part in the formation of both individual identity and national consciousness than has been reflected in the historiography of modern western societies. In turn, this lack of scholarly interest among historians and academic history departments has resulted in the fracturing of sport history from the broader discussion. Jensen’s study is a corrective, and with it he suggests useful ways in which historians might glean insights about time and place through a critical analysis of sport, much as others have fruitfully analyzed the visual arts, film, literature, and the many mass-cultural products of the period.

https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type= ... 2.lane.pdf

European Review of History

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1 ... ode=cerh20

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