Jahn (Lanz 1772 – Freyburg an der Unstrut 1852) was born as the son of a Prussian clergyman and had a chequered education. He failed to obtain the school-leaving certificate necessary to enroll as a university student, and from 1796 until 1803 attended a number of Prussian universities without gaining a degree. A formative encounter was the one at Greifswald with Ernst Moritz Arndt in 1802: Jahn’s language purism and anti-cosmopolitan patriotism crystallized under Arndt’s influence. Also, Jahn was to espouse that combination of anti-elitist populism and xenophobic national chauvinism which was characteristic of Arndt’s political thought. Unlike Arndt, however, Jahn was a man of action rather than an intellectual. His lengthy tract Deutsches Volkstum of 1810 is important in that its title first brought that essentialist term for “nationhood” into circulation, but its ideas are almost all derivative of Arndt and Fichte. The tract opposes the German Volk characterologically and morally to its many internal and external enemies (French, Poles, Jews, decadent foreign-leaning aristocrats), and in contrast to these is invested with characteristics such as sobriety, honesty, simplicity and earnestness; the Germans’ present-day decadence, exemplified in their political and cultural submission to French hegemony, is denounced, and a programme of regeneration and a return to native inner strength is proposed. Later portions of the book outline the utopian establishment of a restored Greater Germany, united around a new capital (Teutonia) and dominating continental Europe from Dunkirk to the Vistula and from Denmark to Istria.

By 1810, Jahn had already begun his most important form of activism: athletics as a training school for physical-force nationalism.  Physical education had become a part of late-Enlightenment pedagogics, and the educationalist Johann Christoph Friedrich GuthsMuths (1759–1839) had conceived a physical training programme as part of a well-rounded school curriculum. Jahn (himself attempting a career in teaching, but without the required qualifications) had encountered GutsMuths in 1807 and after 1810 applied athletic training into a national regeneration programme for the German Volk. To this end, he founded a semi-secret society and in the course of 1811 opened a sports field with gymnastic instruments near Berlin, the Hasenheide. The activities there involved exercises (collectively called by the German neologism turnen), which stand at the beginning of gymnastics as a sport and of physical education as a part of school pedagogics. More relevant for the present context is, however, the nationalist importance. Turnen was explicitly intended as an informal paramilitary drill to prepare young men for military service – by 1812 a war against Napoleon was becoming a widely-cherished prospect – and also as a way to organize and mobilize patriotically-minded young men. In both respects, the gymnastics movement was widely successful. Jahn became an ardent propagandist for young men to take service in the anti-Napoleonic Free Corps as soon as these were called up, and the victory of 1813 gave Jahn and his venture great national prestige. The establishment of students’ associations at various German universities after 1815 often went hand in hand with Turnvereine, and between them, student fraternities and gymnastic clubs as they reticulated across the German towns and cities formed a transregional grassroots movement consolidating the patriotic ferment of 1813 in the post-Waterloo years. The young men thus organized flexed their muscles in the Wartburg festivities of 1817, celebrating the anniversary of Luther’s Reformation and of the Battle of Leipzig, and indulging in the public burning of obnoxious anti-“national” books selected by Jahn himself. In the aftermath and government clampdown, the activists were persecuted as seditious “demagogues”. Jahn himself was interned and Turn-gymnastics were outlawed.

Liberated in 1825, Jahn was nonetheless banned from taking up residence in university towns or conversing with students or teachers, and lived under police surveillance in the small town of Freyburg an der Unstrut. His rehabilitation (like that of Arndt) came when Frederick William IV ascended the Prussian throne in 1840. The new king, whose outlook had been shaped by Romantic nationalism, also lifted the ban on gymnastics and even encouraged its adoption in schools.

No longer the populist activist of the 1810s, Jahn in his older days was fondly known as the gymnastic movement’s father figure, Turnvater Jahn. His stature was such that he was elected to the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848; alongside other old stalwarts like Arndt and Jacob Grimm, his seat was in the front row. After his death in 1852 the gymnastic movement continued to flourish, not only as an athletic sport or pedagogical instrument but also as a form of middle-class sociability with a national bias – like the flourishing students’ associations and male choirs. All of these participated in the increasingly fervent nationalism of post-1870 Germany (and also among German emigrant communities in America), but more in a reactive than in a proactive mode. Jahn himself was commemorated in a sentimental, apolitical way through numerous statues and street-names, which honoured his contribution to popular health education and his patriotism, while glossing over the xenophobic and racist aspects of his nationalism.