Introduction

Excelling in physical contests has been an object of collective pride from the days of the Olympic Games in classical Greece. Medieval tournaments, Renaissance ball games and 17th/18th-century village sports all had their winners, heroes and myths. Typically for the 19th century, however, was that systematic exercise and a conspicuous display of physical strength became part of a nationalist agenda. Simultaneously, the rise of standardized and organized sport, often the result of a renaming and revitalization of already existing local practices, became integrated into nationalist tendencies as well. The physical ideals of sport and gymnastics are an important literary and symbolic embodiment of national movements. Interacting as it did with the rise of middle-class leisure-time sociability, sport manifested itself in a strong associational life and called forth not only the display of physical prowess, but also the communal experience of mass gatherings, flag waving, ritualized ceremonies and communal singing. Sports displays were nationalist vehicles par excellence.

Some qualifications are in order. First, sport and gymnastics are not interchangeable. Despite their similarities, they came from different traditions and each played a distinct role within cultural Romanticism. Whereas gymnastics originated in the German-speaking parts of Europe (Switzerland and Prussia) and contained both Enlightenment-educational and militaristic elements, sports originated particularly in England (although the nobility and gentry of most of Europe knew traditional rural pastimes such as hunting, riding and fishing). Simultaneously, other less prestigious popular recreations flourished around fairs and markets. First in England, but during the 19th century also on the Continent, these games (often involving violence and gambling) became the object of moral criticism, and preference was given to regulated, standardized and fair sports including ball games, tennis and athletics. This moral interpretation of sport became a strong signifier of an English moral ethnotype; originating at boys’ schools, it entailed military aspects and the pedagogical ideal of the “Christian gentleman”: a combination of Victorian gender values (manliness and resilience), a Romantic notion of courageous medieval chivalry, and Protestant values of self-control, fairness and work ethic. During the 19th century, this definition of sport became dominant, first in England and its Empire, then gradually also internationally.

Whereas sport was about (fair) play and local, national and international competition, gymnastics focused on physical exercise and mass performances. The precise nature of the relationship between sport and gymnastics on the one hand and national identities on the other varied from one political setting to another. Also, local traditions and loyalties tended to interfere with nationalist ambitions. All this leads to diffuse and changeable discourses and practices. In this variety of muscular cultural Romanticism, strong, medium and weak links between gymnastics, sport and the nation can be distinguished.

Strong links

A strong connection exists when physical activities are associated with a moral cultivation of the national community. Physical training serves to strengthen national resilience and military capacity, while accompanying accessories (flags, songs, costumes, images, effigies) invoke the nation’s symbolical presence. Examples in point can be found in Prussia, the Czech and Polish lands, Ireland and the Basque Country. Movements there often opposed foreign or international sports (often of English origin) as undesirable competitors and threats to the nation’s authenticity.

Rebuilding the Fatherland: The German Turnvereine

Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778–1852), failed student with a passion for German culture and a vehement disapproval of the post-1806 French hegemony over Prussia, fiercely propagated national regeneration. His Deutsches Volksthum (1810) rejected the baleful and effeminate influence of French culture (including Roman Catholicism), but also tuned its xenophobia against Poles and Jews. His ideal of a strong German state under Prussian leadership based on active popular commitment and purged of defeatism and degeneracy was to be achieved by physical paramilitary training: all-round systematic exercises, long-distance walking, swimming, fencing and shooting.

Jahn put his physical revival project into practice by initiating the first German public open-air Turnplatz on the Hasenheide near Berlin in 1811. He started a movement of gymnastics associations, Turnvereine, for which he travelled the country like a missionary. Mobilizing both middle- and working-class young men, these egalitarian associations aimed at popular empowerment, combining regular physical exercise with an ideal of moral purity and patriotic political activism. In time these fed into the volunteer militias that took part in anti-Napoleonic campaigns.

Jahn’s word Turnen was a linguistic purism, purportedly derived from the times of Arminius the Cheruscan, whose victory over the Roman legions in the first century AD was at this time turned into an allegorical prefiguration of anti-Napoleonic resistance. After Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Leipzig (1813), both the ideals and many members of the Turnvereine spread to new students’ associations, the Burschenschaften (the one in Jena being initiated by Jahn himself). Their politicization led to a government clampdown also involving the gymnasts. The so-called Turnsperre (1819-42) demonstrated the extent to which national-political activism had become associated with this type of sport association. Unsurprisingly, Turner also played a part in the revolutions of 1848 and were strongly represented in the post-revolutionary emigrant wave, spreading their Turner-ideology to other countries. Particularly the German-American Turner movement flourished among German immigrants in the US; its associations and giant gymnastic festivities providing a forum where German customs, rituals and cultural practices continued, albeit in a slightly Americanized style.

Jahn posthumously became a revered figure in post-1871 Germany. The first Jahn statue was erected in Berlin in 1872. Numerous Turnvereine from all over the country and abroad had subscribed to it. In the following years, more than fifty other Jahn monuments arose, all celebrating the resilient new state.

Slavic nationalism: The Sokol movement

A similar strong connection between gymnastics and burgeoning nationalism can be discerned in several parts of Central and Eastern Europe. Pivotal was the founding of the so-called Sokol (“Falcon”) movement by Miroslav Tyrš in 1862 in the Czech lands within the Austrian-Hungarian Double Monarchy. Tyrš (born Emmanuel Tiersch) and his father-in-law and close collaborator Jindřick Fügner, both of ethnic-German origin, had become Czech nationalists. As a student in Prague, Tyrš fought in the revolution of 1848, and developed a keen interest in Czech language, art and history, resulting among others things in him contributing philosophical articles to the first Czech encyclopedia. The “Physical Training Union” (Sokol’s original name) aimed at providing physical exercise to all nationalities, but when Bohemia’s Germans refused to associate with Czechs, Tyrš began to promote the club as a Czech-only forum.

Although Sokol started as an opposition to Jahn’s chauvinistally German movement, it did appropriate certain elements from the Turners. Tyrš and Fügner copied the nationally symbolic accessories and the physical exercises and military attitude (although he wrote them down in a book of his own, Základy tělocviku,“Basics of Physical Training”, 1865). Although, contrary to the German Turnvereine, Sokol did actively engage with political issues, it asserted a separate cultural identity; its training rooms were designed in Slavic style, with reminders of Hussite military leaders, whose busts and portraits served as decoration. Next to physical training, Sokol also provided education highlighting the Czech past, and became very popular among Czech patriots. Tomáš Masaryk, for instance, observed Sokol training from an early age.

Sokol culture travelled with Czech emigrants to Western Europe and the USA, and also inspired national movements in other parts of Eastern Europe. Poles (particularly those in the German-governed parts), Bulgarians, Croatians and Slovenes took to its physical nationalism, showcasing their physical prowess in local and international public performances. It thus created a Central European Slavic ambience with a strong sense of collective identity. Despite the seemingly similar outlook, however, Sokol did harbour different national orientations. This became particularly apparent after 1918, when independent states were formed in Central Europe. While the Czech Sokol retained its original liberal and secularist character, the Polish Sokol became increasingly influenced by conservative Catholicism.

Gaelic and Basque sport

While the German and Slavic movements instrumentalized gymnastics and its mass performances as a vehicle for nationalism, the Irish focus was on modern sport derived from English types. While English sports were embraced, appropriated and incorporated in national traditions in the majority of European countries, Irish nationalists perceived them as foreign and hostile. Alternatives were sought that could be identified as traditionally Irish; the Gaelic Athletic Association (founded in 1884) became the promotor and organizing body.

The GAA was promoted by the Roman Catholic Church, which meant that its clubs were organized on a parish basis and could draw on a history of informal, local popular pastimes and ball games. Rules varied widely, as did the length of the games and the involvement of the viewers. In the second half of the 19th century these were regulated  into the main types of hurling and Gaelic football (a game containing elements of both English soccer and rugby). These sports gained considerable popularity and fed into growing nationalist sentiment. The same nationalist link was at work in Irish dancing, cultivated as an Irish analogue to Scottish Highland dances by the Gaelic League. The popularity of both sports and dances among large parts of the Irish population made these activities key vehicles for nationalist mobilization.

Basque nationalism was spurred both by cultivating pelota as an indigenous and nationally Basque sport and by adopting English football (Athletic Club de Bilbao). Bullfighting on the other hand met with mixed responses: on the one hand it was perceived as part of a popular local and rural Basque tradition, fitting perfectly the idealized image of the baserriterrak (“independent farmers”); on the other hand it could also be seen as a Spanish and therefore foreign practice.

Medium-strength links

In several European countries there were looser connections between gymnastics and sport on the one hand and nationalist tendencies on the other. Physical activities became associated with nationalist tendencies to a certain extent, national sport teams were cheered on and physical pageants were used to highlight festivities and celebrations; but this was neither in the service of an explicit nationalist agenda, nor did it draw on a Romanticized vision of a nationally authentic past.

Furthermore, non-nationalist tendencies were at work: localism and internationalism. All over Europe, regions with local sport traditions that did not align with nationalism acted as counterweights to nationalist tendencies. This could either take the shape of regionally particularist traditions (ice-skating and hand-palm tennis in the Dutch province of Friesland) or of a regionally assertive adoption of an international sport (hiking in Catalonia and football in Barcelona).

International contacts and transfers ensured a transnational proliferation and international standardization of modern sport. Football spread to every country in Europe and beyond, and within time was played by similar rules and regulations. From the turn of the century onwards, it began to thrive on international competition, involving mobile fandom, and transfers of knowledge, trainers and players. To a certain extent, the same can be said for gymnastics. Although there were fierce disputes about pedagogics and exercise systems (cf. the Swedish Ling system, the Danish system and German power Turnen), large international gymnastic meetings took place from the late 19th century onwards, celebrating peace and the brotherhood of men. Teams from the Nordic countries, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Germany, frequented these meetings, expressing feelings of internal connection through gymnastics.

The reinvention of the ancient Olympic Games is another case in point. On the one hand, distinct nationalist motives underpinned this initiative. Rebuilding France as a nation was one of the motives of the initiator Pierre de Coubertin; and the Greek appropriation of the first event in 1896 was drenched in patriotism, with the two Greek crown princes accompanying the Greek winner of the mythical marathon on his last metres as one of many highly symbolically loaded examples. On the other hand, Olympism also became a strong signifier for internationalism, both discursively and symbolically. The modern Olympics explicitly identified itself as an international movement. Plugging into the growing popularity of standardized sports within Europe and the United States, the Games were framed as a vehicle for fostering friendship between the youth of the nations. It advocated the rebirth of the “Olympic truce” during the course of the Games, and over time adopted international symbols like the five rings, representing the five continents.

These factors combined resulted in a multi-faceted sport culture throughout Europe. In most Nordic countries for instance, sport tended to ally itself to a tradition of civic-national engagement. Sport became part of a pattern of increasing leisure-time individualism and personal freedom, and sport clubs were grassroots organizations with individual, private membership, a certain conformity and an egalitarian ethos. Sport (and also gymnastics, rooted firmly in the Swedish and Danish educational system) became a way of balancing individual freedom and equality with educational and hygienic physical exercise. Sweden in particular strongly identified with international sport and used its hosting of the 1912 Olympic Games to present itself as a modern and forward-looking society.

Even so, some nationalist inflections of sporting culture can be discerned. In Denmark, sport became part of the Grundtvig educational agenda of moral regeneration, along with gymnastics and folk dance. Handball was cultivated as a Danish sport, precisely because it combined individual skill and collective performance.  In Finland, the Fennoman ideology prevented an adoption of Swedish-style gymnastics, but competitive sports were adopted: athletics and, from the 1920s, a national variant of baseball (itself invented in the US in the 1850s) called pesäpallo. Last but not least in Norway, skiing was established as a national project by a small national group. As early as 1812, Colonel Diderich Hegermann recommended skiing for young-adult boys as a winter exercise and pre-military training for young-adult boys. In Sweden, too, skiing was utilized as a nationally distinguishing feature. Fuelled by popular tales about two skiing brothers who opposed Danish rule and helped Gustav Vasa to establish Swedish monarchical self-rule, skiing became part of nation-building, resulting in the 1920s in the establishment of the popular Vasaloppet, a cross-country ski race.

Weak links

In various European countries sport became part of popular culture without overtly symbolizing the nation or expressing a specific national agenda. Thriving sport cultures in Romania, Hungary or the Netherlands functioned without symbolically relying on invocations of the nation. Romanian and Hungarian physical culture eschewed the Slavic Sokol format; indeed, the Hungarian authorities discouraged Sokol-style initiatives amongst theSlovak population, which instead turned to hiking in the Tatra Mountains. Hungarian sport activities (swimming, shooting, fencing) started as early as the 1830s and continued after the failed revolution of 1848-49. Sport and gymnastic clubs did become a platform for anti-Austrian sentiment, but without ethnic self-definition (and including Jewish participation). The celebration of the Hungarian millennium in 1896 was highlighted by various sporting competitions with international attendance from Italy, France and Germany. Its international outlook gave Hungarian sports prestige throughout Europe, with Ferenc Kemény becoming one of the founding fathers of the International Olympic Committee. Hungarian athletes participated in all but one Olympic Games.

In the Netherlands, modern sport was imported in the second half of the 19th century, mostly through English business contacts, and hence initially strongly Anglophile in tone. It attracted a good number of enthusiastic participants and increasing spectatorship, but also collided with the diffraction of the Dutch public sphere along confessional-religious lines. Catholics, Protestants and Social Democrats had, to varying degrees, their own institutions and sociability, each appropriating sport in their own way, leading to muscular Catholicism as well as a strong socialist sport culture, alongside a Protestant critique of sport and physical culture. Sport in the Netherlands, owing to its religiously compartmentalized loyalties, lowered rather than enhanced nationalist tendencies.