German Gymnastics Festival 1963
The German Gymnastics Festival in Essen in 1963 was the third German Gymnastics Festival after the Second World War . The 25th German Gymnastics Festival was held from July 15 to 21, 1963 under the motto “Come on, everyone should join in!”. Among the guests was the then Federal President Heinrich Lübke .
event
In 1959, Essen prevailed against its competitors in Berlin, Dortmund, Düsseldorf, Hanover and Cologne as the venue. The sports facilities were built especially for the German Gymnastics Festival in Essen in Rüttenscheid , to the east of the Gruga site. Preparations for this began in early 1961, when the Grugabad was built. The facilities included a multi-purpose hall , which was later called the gymnastics festival hall , the festival meadow to the east and the Grugastadion to the south of the festival hall . For the first time in Essen, it was possible to hold handball tournaments in the gym in the gymnasium.
Around 40,000 participants came to the German Gymnastics Festival in Essen, 30,000 of whom were active athletes, of whom 12,000 competed in club gymnastics. More than 25,000 participants were 25 years old or younger. A large number of participants from abroad left the festival victorious. This made the German Gymnastics Festival in 1963 the largest sporting event in the Ruhr area to date .
What was new was that the B-youth , the age group from 15 to 16 years, was allowed to participate in community-related events, as well as the A-youth , the age group from 17 to 18 years, the participation in a kind of preliminary stage to gymnastics Competition. There were also competition championships on the trampoline and in apparatus gymnastics . A festival was held under the motto "Come on, everyone should join in!" In addition, simple computers were used as calculating machines for the first time.
On Sunday afternoon, July 21, 1963, after a parade of around 35,000 athletes through downtown Essen, the final rally took place on the festival meadow with around 110,000 visitors.
As a result of the gymnastics festival, the so-called Jedermannsport-Movement took place in Essen, in which non-club-bound, athletically enthusiastic people were active in around eighty amateur courses offered by the Essen Sports Office at the time. Otherwise, sport was only common in clubs at that time. The later “City Association for Physical Exercise” was merged into today's “Stadtsportbund Essen (SSB)”, and the public courses changed, of which there are still over fifty successors.
The area today
None of the sports facilities have survived today. The fairground, where the grandstands were located on earthen walls, was initially divided into three soccer fields, two ash pitches and one grass pitch, and in the 1980s it was redesigned into a car park for the neighboring Essen exhibition center. The Grugastadion , which never had its own football club, was finally closed in 2001, as was the gymnasium a year later. After the entire site was leveled, today's “Office Park on Gruga Alfredstrasse” and newly laid streets were created.
The gymnastics festival monument, which was presented to the city of Essen in 1963 by the German Gymnastics Federation, stands on the former festival grounds . The bronze sculpture on a stone base comes from the sculptor Adolf Wamper and was initially on the southern facade of the gymnasium. After its demolition in 2002, the monument was given its current location in May 2003, whereby the original concrete base was replaced by the current base made of Anröchter dolomite with the inscription "GERMAN TURNFEST / ESSEN 1963". The monument was entered in the list of monuments of the city of Essen in 2004.
literature
- German Gymnastics Festival Essen 1963 - Experience and memory. Wilhelm Limpert-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1963, DNB 364724013 .
- Gymnastics Committee of the Association of Dt. Gymnastics Festival Essen (Ed.): German Gymnastics Festival Essen 1963. July 15th to 21st. Gutenberg printing house, 1963, OCLC 838120417 .
- Herbert Neumann (Hrsg.): German gymnastics festivals: mirror image of the German gymnastics movement. published by the German Gymnastics Federation. Bad Homburg 1985, ISBN 3-7853-1444-2 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Extract from the list of monuments of the city of Essen (PDF; 856 kB) accessed on April 6, 2018