Gymnastics in a New Key: the Sokol in the Maelstrom of Modern Politics

Abstract

In a famous essay on fin-de-siècle Austria, the historian Carl Schorske described the harsh rhetoric of the new mass-based political movements which had supplanted the old style of the parties of liberal elites as “politics in a new key.”¹ A new tone was also heard in the Sokol movement, where the Progressive Era dream of making every Czech a Sokol was fading, as the forces of modernity fragmented the once unified national community and spawned new parties of interest. Despite declaring itself “above politics,” the Sokol could not remain aloof from the fray. New gymnastic rivals challenged the Sokol’s hegemony and prompted a drive to strengthen the club’s ideological unity, if necessary by expelling dissident members. This struggle for the identity of the organization that took shape in the debates about the extent and direction of the St Wenceslaus Day Resolution in the waning years of the nineteenth century was still not completely resolved by the time war broke out in 1914.