Hans Surén

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Hans Surén (born June 10, 1885 in Berlin , † February 17, 1972 ibid) was a German officer , book author and a pioneer of naturism .

Life

The son of a captain in the General Staff suggested the family tradition according to the officer's career one. In 1905 he became a lieutenant in the 3rd railway regiment in Berlin and Hanau . In 1912 he made his field pilot license and became a member of the " Old Eagles in Berlin ". In 1913 he became first lieutenant in the Imperial Protection Force for Cameroon . During the First World War , Surén was stationed at the Garua garrison in the north of the colony. With his assistance, numerous defensive entrenchments were built there against attacks from the neighboring colony of Nigeria . In 1915 he was taken prisoner by the British. In 1917 he was exchanged for neutral Switzerland and soon afterwards released to Germany. Until March 1919 he took part in fighting in southern Russia and Turkey . He first ended his military career with the rank of major. Surén later described his war experiences in Africa in his book Kampf um Kamerun .

The English captivity possibly opened the way for him to sport . As early as 1907 Surén was able to take over a punching ball from England and - because it was forbidden for officers and under false names - he had boxed , wrestled , fencing , dumbbell training , rowing and stretching gymnastics . In order to be able to purchase gymnastics equipment, he lived a spartan way. In all weathers he completed an endurance run at night without clothes. Here his tendency towards nudism was already indicated . Later he was also photographed naked with a punching ball.

From 1919 to 1924 Surén was director and teacher of the Army Sports School in Wünsdorf near Berlin. This is where his work on gymnastics with the medicine ball originated . Later he was once again temporarily used as an inspector ("Oberstarbeitsführer") for physical education in the RAD ( Reich Labor Service ). In 1920 Surén married Aenne Bodenstein. The marriage remained childless.

In 1924 Surén started working as a freelance sports writer. In doing so, he mainly tried to lead the youth to outdoor and sunny life, to healthy, hard physical exercise on a gymnastic basis as well as to simplicity and closeness to nature. In his best-known book Der Mensch und die Sonne (1924), he broadly presented his thoughts on sporty and naked life in the sun. This book was revised into a bestseller with worldwide recognition: in the first two years after it was published, it had 61 editions, by the end of the Second World War it had sold 250,000 times. Several editions have been translated into English.

The second revision was published in 1936 under the title Mensch und Sonne - Aryan-Olympic spirit with a strongly racist influence and numerous quotations from Hitler's book Mein Kampf . He demonized Jews ("... oriental, Jewish nomadic poison ..." (p. 53)) and quoted Goebbels, Rosenberg and Hitler extensively. Adolf Hitler knew Surén's book and adored him and his ideas. It was never known what prompted Surén to this racist formulation, perhaps also to change his position. What speaks for him, however, is the fact that he published articles in nudist magazines before 1933, but never an article in the Nazi-related publication Deutsche Leibeszucht .

In 1941 Surén was charged with presumption of office and using a false title. In 1942 he was expelled from the NSDAP for public masturbation and sentenced to a fine. Surén spent the last years of the Nazi regime in the Brandenburg prison .

After 1945 Hans Surén withdrew completely because he was working on a philosophical work The Meaning of Our Life . It is not known whether it was completed and relocated. Apart from quotes, Surén's books are factual and have given the nudist movement many new followers. However, Surén himself never belonged to a nudist association.

In 1952 Hans Surén was made an honorary member of the German Association for Naturism .

literature

  • Hajo Bernett (1978): The ideology of German gymnastics . In: Sportwissenschaft 8 (1), pp. 7–23.
  • Dieter Pforte (1989): Hans Surén - a German nudist career . In: M. Andritzky & T. Rautenberg: "We are naked and we call ourselves you". From friends of light and sun fighters. A history of nudism . Giessen: Anubas, pp. 130-135
  • Gieselher Spitzer (1983): The German Naturism. Idea and development of a popular education movement at the intersection of life reform, sport and politics. Ahrensburg near Hamburg: Verlag Ingrid Czwalina.
  • Ders .: (1986): Gymnastics and parade march? The role of Hans Surén for the introduction of physical exercises in the early days of the National Socialist Labor Service . In: G. Spitzer & D. Schmidt: Sport between independence and external determination. Pedagogical and historical contributions from sports science . Bonn: Institute for Sports Science, pp. 193–212.
  • Bernd Wedemeyer-Kolwe: »The new person«. Physical culture in the German Empire and in the Weimar Republic , Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2004, ISBN 978-3-8260-2772-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hans Surén: Battle for Cameroon - Garua. Scherl, Berlin 1934.
  2. ↑ 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.Surèn on p. 146. http: //library.la84 .org / SportsLibrary / JSH / JSH1991 / JSH1801 / jsh1801i.pdf
  3. ↑ Thea Dorn, Richard Wagner: The German soul . Knaus, 4th edition, 2011, pp. 157ff.
  4. ↑ Thea Dorn, Richard Wagner: The German soul . Knaus, 4th edition, 2011, p. 161. On this page there is also an illustration of a naked bronze statuette Surén with a medicine ball.
personal data
SURNAME Surén, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German officer, author and a pioneer of naturism
DATE OF BIRTH June 10, 1885
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH 17th February 1972
Place of death Berlin