Bernd Wedemeyer-Kolwe. "Der neue Mensch": Körperkultur im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik. Würzburg: Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, 2004. 519 S. EUR 68.00 (paper), ISBN 978-3-8260-2772-7.
Reviewed by Chad Ross (Department of History, East Carolina University)
Published on H-German (February, 2006)
Mind the Gap: Body Culture, Body Practice, and Modern Germany
In his book, Bernd Wedemeyer-Kolwe primarily addresses a gap in the historiography of German sport, but also body culture and life-reform, and adds to that of dance, rhythm, nudism, alternative religions, and body building. Here body culture is identified as an independent development related to sports, gymnastics, and the turn-of-the-century reform movements like Lebensreform. This approach allows Wedemeyer-Kolwe to cast twentieth-century body culture and its development largely as a separate institution, while still acknowledging its roots in the older forms of sport and free time associations of the nineteenth century and beyond. Though always aware of the broader international, primarily Anglo-American context that body culture inhabited, Wedemeyer-Kolwe skillfully manages to define and limit his study to just the German body culture movement during the Wilhelmine and Weimar eras. Overall, his approach to this topic is refreshingly straightforward, if at times frustratingly so.
Wedemeyer-Kolwe's focus is narrowly constructed on the emergence of body culture (Körperkultur), its organization, practices, and methods rather than on the body itself, a decision that allows him to discuss his topic without recourse to linguistic trickery and theoretical jargon. A second set of questions that Wedemeyer-Kolwe asks addresses the reception of body culture among Germans and in German society generally, but also among fellow body culture enthusiasts, as well as the social and cultural meanings body culture possessed. Body culture was no unified movement, but is perhaps best understood as a grouping of similarly minded movements, often with considerable overlap among groups.
Though in practice considerable variation among body culture groups existed, some general points about body culture's enthusiasts as a collective body can be made. For example, they generally all agreed that theirs was an age of degeneration that would only be ended or repaired by intense work on the body. Generally, "body culture practices were to lead from a reform of the Self to a social reform of living, the success of which was to result in a 'New Person' standing in a 'New World'" (p. 14). Finally, the general trajectory of all forms of body culture discussed here was one of increased popularity and acceptance from the Kaiserreich through the Weimar Republic.
Contemporaries and body culture enthusiasts alike defined various currents in the broader body culture stream according to their primary organizational principle and practice, a tradition that Wedemeyer-Kolwe follows. Thus one finds a chapter on rhythm, another on the influence of far eastern religions (titled simply "Reinkarnation"), one on nudism (FKK) and a fourth chapter on body building and fitness. Though Wedemeyer-Kolwe's focus is limited to the Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic, in a final chapter he does look forward to the Third Reich--here seen as an interruption in the long-term trend of body development and attitudes--to bring a kind of an ending to the first few decades of body culture. The book has no formal conclusion, but rather a set of results and reflections about the body culture movement.
Each section is further subdivided into subsections that detail development, growth, membership, clientele, clubs, costs, and body practices of each of body culture's four main currents in both the Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic. Although this kind of devotion to organization is somewhat tedious, in the long run it allows both for the author to examine a particular branch of body culture in fairly close detail, and for the reader to make comparisons across the breadth of the movement. The book transmits a very solid understanding of the size, social composition, general evolution, and practices of body culture in its parts and as a whole over a three-decade period.
Of the themes in the four sections, rhythm has probably received the most previous attention, as it has found its historians from the world of dance, sports, and reform. Here, Wedemeyer-Kolwe skillfully navigates a bewildering sea of clubs, traditions, vocabulary, emphases, and mysticism to reproduce the origins, practices, and goals of rhythm in body culture. The origins of rhythm are located with Francois Delsarte's notion that every experience of the soul had a corresponding body movement, with the added goal of immediately translating those experiences to the body. Such translation was particularly open to interpretation and a number of schools of rhythm and movement developed, each of which centered around a particular personality, hence rhythm's abundance of schools and methods. Wedemeyer-Kolwe's contribution here is to identify which social groups attended rhythm schools and to chart the overall growth of related clubs. Women were overwhelmingly represented in rhythm (roughly 94 percent of participants), and overall numbers suggest that approximately 500,000 Germans became rhythm enthusiasts. Rhythm, like most aspects of body culture, achieved its apex in the Weimar Republic, when it emerged from its isolated colonies and schools and entered the world of popular culture. Its popular reception was undoubtedly aided by a drop in costs to attend rhythm schools, opening the door for wider social participation, which is characteristic of body culture in general in the Weimar Republic.
In his section on the reception of Far Eastern religions in Germany and body culture, Wedemeyer-Kolwe both continues his previous interests and breaks new ground. Although not explicitly physical like rhythm, nudism and body building, Buddhism, Mazdaznan, and other examples were nonetheless critical components of most if not all body culture forms, as well as of Lebensreform in general. Even in the Wilhelmine era, a fairly strong literary reception of far eastern religious texts was present among the educated elites and middle classes. After the turn of the century, however, the physical practices of religions such as Buddhism began to find more and more followers in Germany, though the spiritual goals never found an audience. In part this story is one aspect of the blossoming of the alternative religions in the years just prior to and especially after World War I. Far eastern religions were mined by Germans for practices that could develop the body into a better form (yoga), and were often coupled with prevailing Western or German ideological needs. Thus, for example, yoga was favored for its regulation of breathing, but instead of helping a German find nirvana, it was combined with Aryan racism. The author writes that, "Each race possessed its own karma, and precisely the German could ascend racially because in yoga the 'spirit of Aryan Germanness' glowed" (p. 152). The true contribution of the far eastern religions to body culture was that of a set of rules and practices by which to live so that the day was regulated in a way that constantly elevated the body. This stance, too, is characteristic of body culture.
On the subject of nudism (FKK), Wedemeyer-Kolwe could have proceeded from a number of different directions, but remains true to his effort of relating body culture and its practices back to German society at large. For example, rather than searching for reasons why Germans would choose to be publicly naked, the author treats nudists as innovators in body culture for their contribution of "experimental" body exercises and movements (p. 241). Despite contributions by nudists to movement and exercise, and despite what Wedemeyer-Kolwe describes as the quasi-religious importance of movement for FKK, movement was theoretically underdeveloped by them. Thus what qualified as movement and exercise, in FKK at least, was a combination of old and new forms: classic gymnastics and modern isometric exercises, but also paddle-boating and folk dancing. Understandably, the importance of being naked assumed the bulk of nudists' attention, and other concerns, such as exercise, movement, and developing theory to underpin their activities, were neglected by nudist authors.
It is in the otherwise well-written section on nudism that some of the limitations of Wedemeyer-Kolwe's organization become most apparent. Though he patiently traces the development and subsequent splintering of nudist clubs and organizations, we never learn why this utopian ideology, which publicized itself as being able to overcome social and class divisions, fractured so spectacularly among so many groups. Also, given the physiological differences between men and women made obvious by nudist activity, one wonders why there is no discussion of women in nudism (or body culture at large for that matter. Did body practices have the same effect on the bodies of men and women? Were there different goals? Practices? Effects?)
One characteristic of all Lebensreform endeavors is their virtually universal profit orientation--in spite of their mystical, utopian, occasionally transcendentalist rhetoric. This business aspect of Lebensreform and its body culture relative is especially evident in the body building and fitness movement. Professional athletes founded nearly all the early fitness studios, and indeed the movement would remain the domain of such professionals (often responsible for inventing their own systems) for many decades. The best expression of the commercial nature of body building, however, is less studios, which were often quite well furnished with weights and equipment, but rather the burgeoning market in books and home exercise.
In exploring the market for home exercise and training books, Wedemeyer-Kolwe is most able to determine the clientele for such products. Whether in the (quite expensive) fitness studio or in the privacy of the home, fitness and body building appealed to certain types: "officers and soldiers, but above all else men and women of independent means, academics, intellectuals, artists, and writers" (p. 326). Indeed, body culture could be said to be the preserve of such middle groups. Body culture in general was the middle-class antipode to the proletariat world of organized free-time body activity. Body culture was enormously popular, and Wedemeyer-Kolwe rightly points to the social integration of its many aspects as the key indication of its success. Books and magazines devoted to various forms of body culture were legion and sold very well, often extending to a number of editions.
Wedemeyer-Kolwe's sources are impressive, and range from the archival to the popular. (His use of postcards to chart the impact of body building is especially noteworthy). One general criticism of the book is that it lacks any kind of theoretical explanation or analysis of body culture and its practices. However, to be fair one should note that the body culture movement itself lacked an overall theoretical guiding principle (there is the idea of creating a "New Person," but who this person might be was poorly explained by the body culture movement itself). Wedemeyer-Kolwe's most important contribution is to cement the finding that body culture, with its emphases on discipline, performance, endurance, self-control, and other classic middle-class traits, was the way in which the new middle classes "arrived at their socialization" (p. 430). Overall, this book is an important contribution to a number of genres, including sport history, body history, and Lebensreform.
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Citation:
Chad Ross. Review of Wedemeyer-Kolwe, Bernd, "Der neue Mensch": Körperkultur im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
February, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11425
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