"There lying deep in the darkness is life of our lives. It was sacred territory in a world ruled by other gods who were able to bring about peace due to the Olympic truce. But it remains holy territory for us as well. Those impulses for enchantment, that love of the fatherland, the consecration to art and the full application of energy to pursuit of joy - all these things should be offered to the clean rays of our enlightened world(38)."
- Ernst Curtius
At least partly due to the identification of the Germans with Olympia, the volume and detail of scholarship on classical sport has until very recently been almost overwhelmingly the work of German academics. But even apart from Olympia and German scholarship in classical sport, German artists and intellectuals have often been tempted to view themselves and their vigorous culture as possible reincarnations of the Hellenic titans and their culture. The discoveries at Olympia merely gave the German attachment to the Greeks another sentimental dimension.
It will be necessary to touch upon several aspects of nineteenth-century sport later on, but now I would like to describe briefly some distinctive developments in German physical education. Unlike the development of sport in the Anglo-Saxon world, which grew more or less naturally and without the prodding or attention of intellectuals, German sport has always been promoted by particular persons or institutions for special (usually nationalistic and/or political purposes. It should be pointed out here also that "sport" in tghis context is not sport as we think of it today. In fact, sport really ought to be considered an Anglo-Saxon invention only adopted by continentals late in the nineteenth century. Until then few Germans knew what "sport" was except from what they picked up in polemics. The Germans knew only "turning(39)."
...Under [Friedrich Ludwig] Jahn's leadership turning became a movement (Turnbewegung) for inspiring young men and for making them fit. The movement and the turners played major roles in the organized resentment against Napoleon's occupation of Germany and then in the revolutionary pressure to bring about German national unity. In these decades of imposed political stability in central Europe, the turners' movement was one of the few expressions of community and patriotic solidarity avalable to the restless Germans. Jhan's movement grew in appeal and became established in the minds of its bourgeois ideologues, its lower bourgeois ideologues, its lower bourgeois participants, and its aristocratic enemies as an institution and a complex of attitudes that were paramilitary and conducive to democratic agitation.
As Germany consolidated her position with rapid economic advances in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the turners were no longer seen as potentially disrupting. Scientific, artifical, disciplined exercise had been integrated into the various German systems of universal education. The clubs of the turners became focuses for local social life, while the ever larger national turners' meetings became occasions for mass demonstrations of loyalty to the united and prosperous Second Reich (40).
...Some cosmopolitan Germans, of course, were well informed about the rather different progress of physical education and, especially, of popular recreation in England. These developments, which, like turning, had their origins in the eighteenth century, had become part of English life and consciousness without the help or notice of ideologues or officials. The English leisured classes hade games like hockey and their two kinds of football, rowing, boxing, horse racing, and all sorts of footraces and field events. In fact many observers of the British sporting scene in the eighteenth and nineteenth centureis were struck by the fact that, as in aaancient Greece, noblemen might participate in agonistic competition with commoners, and that there existed in England, as in ancient Greece, the athletic hero. It was also well known that a taste for Anglo-Saxon sporting events had become well established in America, Canada, and Australia. German critics of the artificiality and rigidity of German physical education proposed that their countrymen at least examine these appealing exercises, competitions, and games which were called "sport(41)."
-The First Modern Olympics, Richard D. Mandell
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