European Gymnastics from Enlightened Rationalism to Romantic Nationalism

Abstract

By the time the first Sokol club was founded in Prague in 1862, European gymnastics was an established system that had evolved through a century of innovation and discovery. Originating in the Enlightenment with the experiments of educational reformers intent on reviving the Greek ideal of kalokagathia, which the Roman poet Juvenal had summarized as “mens sana in corpore sano,” gymnastics achieved widespread recognition and popularity after Friedrich Ludwig Jahn turned it into a vehicle of romantic German nationalism with the Turnverein movement.¹ Jahn brought gymnastic training out of the school classroom, contributed important new techniques and apparatus to the field, and used the discipline of training and the panoply of ritual to instill his gymnasts with a sense of national duty and solidarity. Fifty years after the beginning of the Turnverein, the founders of the Sokol adapted Jahn’s concepts to Czech circumstances and harnessed the potential of gymnastics to promote national consciousness among the Czech masses. The history of the Sokol, therefore, begins with the Turnverein and with the traditions of European gymnastics that gave rise to it.