German gymnastics club

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German gymnastics club flag with gymnast's cross

The German Gymnastics Association (DT) was the umbrella organization for civil gymnastics clubs in Germany from 1868 to 1936.

prehistory

The gymnastics movement, which was based on the “gymnastics father” Friedrich Ludwig Jahn , never saw itself as just a sporting organization, but always had a political, civic, national component. In addition to the fraternities , the gymnastics associations (in many cases there was also a personal union) played a leading role in the bourgeois revolution of 1848. The first gymnasium was built by Jahn, who saw gymnastics primarily as "physical education", in 1811 on Berlin's Hasenheide . Soon after his model, gymnastics fields followed in other cities in Germany and, as a result, clubs that organized regular operations there, e.g. B. the oldest still existing sports club in the world, the Hamburg gymnastics club from 1816 .

History of DT

The German Gymnastics Association was founded in 1868 by Theodor Georgii and Ferdinand Goetz as an amalgamation of gymnastics clubs in Germany and also of German gymnastics clubs in nearby countries (e.g. in Prague). Georgii became the first chairman and Goetz, a full-time doctor in Lindenau (Leipzig) , became honorary managing director. Ferdinand Goetz was chairman from 1895 until his death in 1915. Goetz was a strict opponent of all competition ideas, but could not assert himself in the DT in the long run. But he achieved that the performance evaluation in the gymnastics all-around competition was "capped". This promoted a broad range of services and the top performance in individual disciplines was counterproductive. While in the athletic decathlon the point scales for the individual disciplines are open upwards and thus help individual top performances to compensate for poor performances in other disciplines, the gymnastics all-around competition had upper scales (more than 10 points per discipline not possible), which means that poor performance is not compensated for was possible and the gymnastics ideal of personal performance range without peak performance was favored.

The workers gymnastics clubs , which were founded after the Socialist Act was repealed in 1890, did not join the DT, but founded the Workers Gymnastics Federation (ATB) in 1893 . This separation was also wanted by the DT, which saw itself as a purely civil association. Goetz was considered one of the harshest critics of workers' sport , which he denied the necessary moral and national maturity.

In 1924 the German gymnastics association broke up with the other top sports associations: At their imperial meeting, the DT decided on the “clean separation of gymnasts and athletes” , which was justified by the fact that the other sports associations (especially the ball sports associations) did not also consider themselves political , but only understood as sport-specific associations. Politically, the DT was not understood as a party-political orientation, Turner belonged to all political parties on the right of the SPD (social democrats and communists were organized in workers' sports), but DT can at least in its breadth be understood as a German national organization. With the "clean divorce", all gymnastics clubs that belonged to the DT had to withdraw from the other sports associations. Many of the civic gymnastics clubs split up because footballers, handball players and track and field athletes in particular founded their own clubs.

The German gymnastics association gave itself under its new "leader" Edmund Neuendorff at the main committee meeting on 8/9. April 1933 in Stuttgart a National Socialist orientation. This included u. a. the application of the regulations of the National Socialist Act to restore the civil service (" Aryan Paragraph "), with which Jewish members of the gymnastics clubs were excluded. Here, “not only the speed, but also the radicalism with which the gymnasts proceeded” was unparalleled.

On the occasion of the German Fighting Games in Nuremberg on July 27, 1934, the reorganization of the entire gymnastics and sport system in the German Reich Association for physical exercises was announced; the area of ​​gymnastics formed the "Fachamt I". The DT was thus effectively dissolved, the formal dissolution followed two years later by resolution of an extraordinary gymnastics day in Berlin on April 18, 1936 on September 30 of the same year.

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Oberturnwarte

Successor organizations

After the Second World War , the German Gymnastics Federation (DTB) was founded in the Federal Republic of Germany as the successor organization to DT , which also joined the German Sports Federation (DSB), so that the “clean divorce” between gymnasts and athletes came to an end. Since the workers' sports clubs that were banned during National Socialism , insofar as they were re-established as such, now joined the “bourgeois” professional associations, all gymnasts were united under one roof for the first time.

In the GDR , the German Gymnastics Association (DTV) was founded as a sub-association of the German Gymnastics and Sports Federation of the GDR (DTSB) as the new top organization for gymnastics. This joined the DTB after the unification of the two German states in 1990.

sports

Apparatus gymnastics and gymnastics games

Main sport in the federated clubs in DT was the Artistic Gymnastics , that later came the so-called turn games like rounders , Fistball , Prellball .

Other sports

In the time of the “ clean divorce ”, other sports were also competed under the care of DT in order to enable those athletes who had remained in the gymnastics clubs and thus separated from their professional associations to continue their sport. Some of these played their own German championships.

Soccer

German football championship of DT (finals):

The DT footballers even formed a selection team that played two international matches against the Netherlands (July 6, 1927 2-2 in Cologne, July 24, 1932 5-0 in Dortmund).

Handball

As early as 1921 - and thus before the clean divorce - the DT began to host German field handball championships. From 1931, the DT champions then played playoffs against the German handball champions of the German Sports Authority for Athletics (see German handball champions ). German handball champions of the DT were:

rugby

Only in 1928 did the DT also hold its own rugby championship in tournament form, which the Heidelberg gymnastics club from 1846 was able to win.

marathon

On August 30, 1925, the "1st German Marathon Championships " took place in Leipzig . The gymnasts came to the athletes a week earlier: The first German marathon championship of the "German Sports Authority for Athletics" (today's German Athletics Association, DLV ) led from Halle to Leipzig on September 6, 1925 . The distance run by the gymnasts on August 30th was only between 40 and 41.48 km long (the figures vary) and thus shorter than the 42.195 kilometers set by the International Association for Athletics ( IAAF ) in 1921 . Johannes Theuerkauf won in 2:37:38 hours. Further German gymnastics marathon championships took place in 1926, 1927, 1929 and 1930, the last also in Leipzig.

See also

literature

  • Hartmut Becker: Anti-Semitism in the German Gymnastics Association. Academia Richarz, St. Augustin 1980, ISBN 3-88345-302-1 .
  • Ders .: Anti-Semitism in the German gymnastics movement before World War I. in: stadium . International Journal of the History of Sports, 15, 1989. pp. 1-8.
  • Lorenz Peiffer: The German Turnerschaft - Your political position during the Weimar Republic and National Socialism . Ahrensburg 1976, ISBN 3-88020-048-3 .

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Notes / individual evidence

  1. ↑ That means with the exception of those associations that joined the proletarian workers' gymnastics union from 1893 onwards .
  2. ^ Arnd Krüger : Is there any sense in competition, specialization and the striving for records? The struggle between Turnen, sports and Swedish gymnastics in Germany . In: Guy Bonhomme (ed.): La place du jeu dans l'éducation. Histoire et pédagogie . FFEPGV, Paris 1989, pp. 123-140; also in French: Source signification peut-on accorder à la spécialisation, à la compétition et à la recherche de la performance: Les luttes d'influence entre turnen, le sport et la gymnastique suédoise en Allemagne . In: Supplément en français de l'édition bilingue , ibid, pp. 3-14.
  3. ↑ Thyll Warmbold: The 'Aryanization' of German sport under National Socialism . Advanced seminar work. Seminar for Middle and Modern History, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen 2007, p. 15. (online as PDF)
  4. ^ Frank Gottert: Marathon City Leipzig. The marathons in Leipzig 1897-2018 . Leipziger Universitätsverlag, Leipzig 2019, ISBN 978-3-96023-232-2 , pp. 26-49 .

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