Body by Weimar

For a long time, the history of sports has tended to limit its interest to sport’s inherent structures and developments. It has failed, and often continues to fail, to analyse sport in a broader context. In the last few years, however, there have been efforts to examine the significance of sport in relation to social, cultural and political developments. Jensen ties in with these approaches, which, in the case of Weimar history, have started examining boxing, football and other competitive sports in general to explore the culture and society of Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s. Jensen views sport as an important part of Weimar culture and uses it to illustrate broader developments and debates about gender roles and modernity. He examines mainly press articles (journals of national sports associations, sports magazines, daily press), but also includes (pop) cultural products such as films, advertising, music and penny fiction. He argues that competitive sports offered a physical expression of a modernizing society and a means of articulating responses to changes. The body images and discourses on modern lifestyle that crystallized around competitive sports made a lasting contribution to physical culture and strongly influenced Weimar Germany. According to Jensen, this influence was even stronger than that of popular movements such as hiking and Turnen, which promoted the recovery of the natural body from the constraints of a rejected modernity.

Art · Art history · Athletes · German · Modernity · Physical therapy · Political science · Sociology · Weimar Republic · Classics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Medicine · Physical education and sports games research · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts · Sports, Gender, and Society