Confederation and Control: Mass Gymnastics and the Czech and German Bodies Politic

This essay analyzes gymnastic displays of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Czechs and Germans through the lens of mass performance. Modern gymnastics arose, first in Germany then across Europe, within the context of widespread social and political fragmentation in the nineteenth century. The essay argues that gymnastic training and performance techniques parallel shifts in the sociopolitical conception of the people in the age of mass politics. This evolution—from voluntary consolidation of individuals to centralized control of populations, from numerous persons to a uniform mass—took embodied form in the development of mass performance techniques. German and Czech gymnastic movements, the Turners and the Sokols, serve as paradigmatic examples of a vast modern phenomenon that, while largely forgotten today, was wildly popular from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Mass gymnastics represents one attempt to stabilize unstable social or national identities, part of an emerging discourse about equality, national identity, and the body politic.