Adolf Koch (pedagogue)

Adolf Karl Hubert Koch (born April 9, 1896 ; † July 2, 1970 ) was a German pedagogue and sports teacher . He was the founder of a gymnastic movement named after him and a pioneer of nudism .

School time and military service in the First World War

Adolf's father Karl Koch, a trained carpenter, was a firefighter. Adolf had a sister a year and a half younger. The family was Protestant. Adolf Koch grew up in Berlin-Kreuzberg. After starting school in 1902, he attended elementary school from 1903, which he graduated in 1911. After finishing elementary school, Koch entered the Kyritz preparation facility . He broke off this teacher training in 1914 and volunteered as a war volunteer. In the war he saw the chance to escape the constraints and the strict order of the boarding school. Koch was used as a medical soldier (nurse). He was judged well for his services and given a rather high distinction.

Training to become a teacher, study of pedagogy and medicine

After the end of the war he returned to Berlin and resumed teacher training in the spring of 1919, which he completed in autumn 1920 with the first state examination. In addition to this training as a primary school teacher, he began studying pedagogy and medicine at the Royal Friedrich Wilhelms University . The main focus of his studies was the subject of "hygiene". a. Lectures on the " physiology of women" with Fritz Albert Lipmann ( Nobel Prize 1953), who taught in Berlin until 1931 and to whom Koch kept coming back in later lectures.

Until 1919, Koch had no contact with nudism. It was only with the subject of hygiene that he began to be interested in naturism. He read nudist magazines like Beauty and attended cabarets with naked dancing. Here Koch was particularly fascinated by the expressiveness and elegance of the dancer Della de Waal .

Immediately after his teacher training (September 1920), Adolf Koch went to school and became a class teacher in the 4th class for girls at an elementary school in Berlin-Kreuzberg. He tried to realize his reformist ideas of a "new education" and was active in the Bund decided school reformers until 1923 . This included putting the relationship between mind and body on a new basis. In his opinion, physical education was neglected by limiting itself to monotonous gymnastics. For health reasons, Koch promoted daily body cleaning and dental hygiene, which were not a matter of course at the time.

Development of cooking gymnastics

In 1921 he also began gymnastics training at Anna Müller-Herrmann's "School for Physical Education and Movement Education" in Berlin-Charlottenburg. At this time, expressive dance, which aims to depict feelings and moods in movements, was just becoming fashionable. In addition, Koch dealt with the sometimes quite different gymnastics methods of Bess Mensendieck , Rudolf Bode , Emil Jaques-Dalcroze , Dora Menzler and the anthroposophical Loheland gymnastics . Koch tended towards the exercises according to Dora Menzler, which in his opinion combined the advantages of the different gymnastic systems. Successful physical education required him to do the exercises in the nude. Anna Müller-Herrmann and Dora Menzler were enthusiastic about this idea.

Koch's goal was now to develop a modern general body and posture school, with free dance gymnastics according to Mary Wigman . Encouraged in particular by Müller-Herrmann, Koch also developed exercises especially for children. The joy of movement, the play instinct and the imaginative imagination of the smaller children were included. For the older children he developed work exercises that were based on gravity and momentum among other things.

It was important to Koch that boys and girls practiced together, because the children should also learn to respect the body of the opposite sex and learn that nudity in itself is not sexual. In 1923, Koch finished his gymnastics teacher training . At the Kreuzberg school he could not introduce the gymnastics he had developed; only on class trips they occasionally bathed naked in remote lakes.

At the end of the school year 1920/21 Adolf Koch had to leave this school. He was transferred on charges of indecently touching a girl on the stomach. The medically trained cook did not deny the touch, but spoke of a medical examination. In fact, the girl was taken to the hospital with suspected appendicitis. Adolf Koch was transferred anyway and came to a school in the east of Berlin with some difficult-to-raise children.

First use of his method

Through this transfer, Koch first came into contact with the nudist movement that had existed in Berlin since shortly after 1900. Some of the parents had come together to form a “friendship group” to do something for their bodies in their free time, there were no statutes. The children formed the Sonnenland youth guild group . Adolf Koch now had the opportunity to bring his gymnastics into this association. Parents and children gathered every Saturday for gymnastics in the youth home Mariannenufer 1a. Initially, it was only a group of 10 to 13 year old boys and girls who did gymnastics together in the presence of their parents naked.

At the end of 1922 he brought the gymnastic exercises into his school lessons with the children initially dressed. Rector Ruthe certified Koch that he was "particularly suitable for gymnastics lessons". Koch wanted to introduce nudity as an essential part of the exercises he developed. Since this was not possible in regular school operations, an initiative arose in June 1923 with some of his students and their parents, the parent groups for free physical culture . The classrooms and auditorium served as practice locations outside of the lesson times. Due to the increasing interest, these rooms were soon no longer sufficient.

Establishment of the Institute for Naturism

So he founded his institute for nudism and in 1924 the physical culture school Adolf Koch , with which he eventually built thirteen gymnastics schools in Germany. In addition to gymnastics, their program also included alternating showers, high-altitude solar radiation, medical examinations and care, discussions on all problems and further lessons. The school management also included the well-known sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld .

Old documentaries from the Koch schools show families, adults, children and young people dancing, jumping and hopping naked through a room, acting according to Adolf Koch's instructions. Koch described the process as follows:

“If, for example, I let girls and boys run free at the beginning of an hour, first one after the other, then forwards and backwards, then mixed up, that doesn't seem to make much sense, but for the individual it is a playful reorientation in space, with and on the neighbor Awaken the sense of touch and the surprises, the twists and turns, in a few minutes joy. A precise sequence of our gymnastics lessons cannot be determined because there are no rigid forms of exercise. The focus is always on having fun and enjoying exercise. Of course, these relaxed gymnastics lessons can also be carried out in the great outdoors. "

It was a significant step for the nudist movement. In Berlin, in addition to several naturist associations founded around 1900, there was now his institute in Friedrichstrasse, naturist swimming and gymnastics took place in the Stadtbad Mitte (Gartenstrasse). In addition, he had a stately site in Selchow with sports and playgrounds, a lake and barracks.

Prohibition by National Socialism

The successes of these schools were preceded by hard battles. Several lawsuits have been brought against him, none of which resulted in a conviction or the closure of schools. The processes cost time and energy, but also made Koch known. After 1933 the total ban by the National Socialists hit him harder. His institutes were closed, also because he refused to part with his Jewish employees. His writings were on the list of "forbidden and un-German books" and were publicly burned when the books were burned in Berlin. Koch did not allow himself to be deterred, he continued to work illegally, founded two new institutes one after the other under different names and helped many Jews and other victims of Nazi persecution. He was officially called up during the war as head of sport for the wounded and the follow-up treatment of the disabled ( Marquardt Castle near Berlin).

After the Second World War

After 1945 he immediately began building up a new institute, which the Berlin Senate soon recognized as a "free school facility". At this institute for physical culture (Adolf Koch Institute) founded in 1946 in the Hasenheide in Berlin-Neukölln , Koch's wife Irmgard (born July 26, 1923), who ran the institute together with her husband, also gave gymnastics lessons.

The German Association for Naturism (DFK), for which Koch's public relations work was too aggressive, distanced itself from him and expelled him in 1964. The association bowed to the pressure of the public during the Adenauer era , which promoted naturism z. T. still regarded as harmful to young people and immoral . Adolf Koch died on July 2, 1970.

One focus of Irmgard Koch's work was the promotion of nudist gymnastics, for which she also traveled a lot, for example to Switzerland and Hungary. In addition to the gymnastics lessons, which she conducted herself until 2003, she gave lectures on health and nutrition. In 2003 Irmgard Koch withdrew from the club and moved to her daughter in Sanitz (near Bad Doberan on the Baltic Sea). In 1951, the nudist association “Familien-Sport-Verein Adolf Koch e. V. ”.

Programmatic background

Koch is one of those pioneers of nude culture who stand for the international and humanistic currents of the nudist movement. In its beginnings, following a fashion trend of the late imperial era, this movement was partly shaped by misinterpreted Darwinian ideas. Koch, on the other hand, came from a socialist , not the “völkisch” tradition of nudism. With the title of the magazine he published, “We are naked and call us you” , Adolf Koch stood - based on the ideals of the Enlightenment - as a motto giver for the tendency towards egalitarian self-claims of undressed group life.

Fonts

• Physical education and nudity. Accusations and Confessions (Ed.), Leipzig 1924
• Nudity, physical culture and upbringing. A gymnastics book , Leipzig 1929
• Physical culture and education , Berlin 1950.

literature

• Adolf Koch gymnastics (= Helios . Special edition). With contributions by Max Hodann , Frances Merill, Otto Münchenhagen, Albert Müller, Irmgard Richter and Adolf Koch. Rudolf Zitzmann Verlag, Lauf near Nuremberg 1959.
• Adolf Koch: (Anniversary publication of the International Naturist Library Kassel / Brauntal ).
• Andrey Georgieff: Nudity and Culture. Adolf Koch and proletarian nudism. Passagen, Vienna 2005, ISBN 3-85165-693-8 (dissertation University of Stuttgart 2005, 159 pages)
• Arnd Krüger : There Goes This Art of Manliness: Naturism and Racial Hygiene in Germany, in: Journal of Sport History 18 (Spring, 1991), 1, 135 - 158. http://library.la84.org/SportsLibrary/JSH/ JSH1991 / JSH1801 / jsh1801i.pdf Dis. 19th February 2017

Web links

• Background information about the person Adolf Koch
• biography
• Literature by and about Adolf Koch in the catalog of the German National Library
• amadelio: Life reform, nudism and the photographer Gerhard Riebicke (video) , June 2007