Beyond the Gymnasium: Educating the Middle Class Bodies in Classical Germany, and: Rudolf Laban: The Dancer of the Crystal (review)

In the last twenty years, scholarly studies (Manning 1993, Toepfer 1997, Kant and Karina 2003) have attempted to explain the contradictory tensions of liberalism and proto-fascism found in 1930s German body culture and Ausdruckstanz. Two recent books, Heikki Lempa’s Beyond the Gymnasium: Educating the Middle Class Bodies in Classical Germany and Evelyn Doerr’s Rudolf Laban: The Dancer of the Crystal, add to the literature probing this historical conflict. Both books shed light on the early strains of romanticism that fed the body culture of the 1930s and provided a fertile ground for the aesthetics of Ausdruckstanz and Laban’s theories of movement.

Lempa’s book examines how body sciences in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany shaped the middle-class development of the self and the modernist connection between the body and ethical life. Lempa uses manuals, handbooks, topographic descriptions, travel guides, journals, and records of social clubs to reconstruct the social meanings of dietetics and the actual practices found within the developing body culture. Part 1 documents the development of the concept of bodily autonomy and the science of dietetics, focusing on principles of the animated body and the body’s role in healing. Part 2 examines the three aspects of bodily movement that played prominent roles in dietetics: walking, dancing, and gymnastics.

Dietetics was concerned with regulating the animated humors or contingencies of the body, as well as its environment, in order to heal or prevent disease. Lempa argues that dietetics influenced German middle-class culture from 1790 to 1850 and the search for “autonomy of the body” in the development of the modern self. Lempa traces the growth of dietetics as it changed to meet shifting cultural needs of the middle class and encompassed various movement practices, including walking, gymnastics, and dance. Most significant for dance scholars is Lempa’s discussion of gymnastics. Lempa writes, “Scholarship in German gymnastics rests on a rupture . . . Historians have explored the (proto)political nature of German gymnastics seeing it either as the godfather of German liberalism or the origin of the Germanic movement” (68). Lempa shows how gymnastics developed from an activity of dietetic moderation, to an activity of gentility and class identity formation, and finally to a focus on “pure” gymnastics, concerned more with form and performance than social meanings. In the early 1800s gymnastics changed dramatically as Friedrich Ludwig Jahn reshaped gymnastics training to harden the body and communicate the ideal of a mythic Germanic community, which reflected a national German identity rooted in tribal images. Integral to this recasting of gymnastics was Jahn’s Germanizing of gymnastics vocabulary, which severed gymnastics from its French history and posited it as a German movement.

In the 1820s, as the inclusion of women’s gymnastics, fencing, and dance emphasized bodily elegance rather than hardening, dance began to flourish in the social clubs, spas, and ballrooms of Germany. The minuet, with its strict spatial patterns, erotic undertone, and code of mutual recognition, became essential to the middle-class pursuit of Bildung. Lempa argues that the ensuing loss of set configurations in dancing (with the decline of the formal minuet and rise of the more democratic waltz) caused clubs to seek greater spatial control through socially exclusive member requirements, for which residency, religion, gender, and social class were determining factors. Interestingly, the attempts of the gymnastics and dance movements to establish a concept of self in relation to a defined community were combined with desires to maintain bodily autonomy from the state. When cholera surfaced in the 1830s, the epidemic prolonged the interest in dietetics as a preventative and moral lifestyle. Lempa’s argument is very detailed, and he follows the ideological development of body culture, making connections between the dietetic movement and the modernist...