Karl Gaulhofer

Karl Gaulhofer (born November 13, 1885 in Feldbach , Styria, † October 28, 1941 in Amsterdam , Netherlands) was an Austrian gymnastics teacher, eugenicist and cultural critic.

Life

After his one year military service, he studied natural history, mathematics, physics and a one-year training as a gymnastics teacher at the University of Graz ; He completed this in 1908 with the teacher examination and in 1909 with a scientific doctorate. He taught at the secondary school until the outbreak of war, before serving as a lieutenant and later commander in World War I, highly decorated on the southern and eastern fronts. After the war he was back at the same school for a short time before he was assistant officer (later head of department) for physical education at the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education from 1919 to 1932 . In addition, he was a specialist inspector for physical education and was able to transfer his ideas into practice.

He took a holistic view of physical education and gained international attention with the "natural gymnastics" he developed with Margarete Streicher . Since the training of gymnastics teachers in Austria before the First World War was strongly oriented towards the training of instructors, he wanted a movement education from the child, which should not only address the talented gymnasts, but also set movement tasks in order to perform the movements "from the child" to let (and not to be trained according to uniform guidelines). Together with Streicher, they wanted to abolish the "child-hostile subordination gymnastics" according to Adolf Spieß . In his “Cultural History of Human Movement” (1930), he tried to clarify what was “natural” (= independent of culture) and what was “unnatural” about the movement. In doing so, he started a debate that was only held two generations later in the cultural turn . Natural gymnastics should promote children's autonomy.

At the same time, in 1928 Gaulhofer succeeded in adopting an ordinance to include "racial hygiene" as part of the school curriculum for physical exercises in the eighth grade of middle school, which was the first and last successful attempt to establish eugenics in the curriculum in Austria. With the means that were available to him in the Ministry of Education, he subsidized, among other things, the Vienna Society for Race Care . Gaulhofer was also a founding member and board member of the “Austrian Federation for Public Appeal and Heritage” , which around 1930 was one of the most successful eugenic associations in Austria.

Gaulhofer achieved the reform of gym teacher training at universities as well as school and club gymnastics in Austria; In 1932 he moved to the Netherlands for political reasons, where he became rector of the Academy for Physical Education in Amsterdam . After the “ Anschluss ” in March 1938, he joined the NSDAP , to which he had been close as a leading eugenicist. In the same year he called for political physical education, for which "breed" and "type" should form the basis.

Gaulhofer served himself up in the party and after the German occupation of the Netherlands became an advisor to the Reich Commissioner. In Germany, Konrad Paschen was closest to him with his perspective of the weakest student. Gaulhofer expressly welcomed the invasion of the German troops into the Netherlands and now called for political physical education in which “breed and type” are fundamental.

After his death in 1941, one of his students, Karl Schindl , wrote an obituary for Gaulhofer, in which he described him as a "fighter for the Third Reich ". "He walked the road to National Socialism knowingly, he walked with the heavy weight of a man who is mature and experienced, who has a worldview and an image of the greater fatherland ...", said Schindl.

Works

• Natural gymnastics , 3 volumes, 1930–42 (with M. Streicher); System of school gymnastics, edited by H. Groll, 1966.

Honors

In 1968 the Gaulhofergasse in Vienna- Brigittenau (20th district of Vienna) was named after him.

literature

• Hermann Andrecs (ed.): Legacy and Order: Essays on Sports Education; on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Karl Gaulhofer's birthday. Vienna: Österr. Federal publisher 1985.
• Arnd Krüger : Konrad Paschen . An appreciation, in: Arnd Krüger & Dieter Niedlich (ed.): Causes of the misery of school sports in Germany. Konrad Paschen on his 70th birthday. London: Arena 1979, pp. 266-275.
• Thomas Mayer: Healthy genes in a healthy body? The cooperation between eugenics and gymnastics reform using the example of the Austrian reformer Karl Gaulhofer (1885–1941), in: Michael Krüger : Mens sana in corpore sano . Gymnastics, gymnastics, games and sports as subjects of educational policy from the 18th to the 21st century. Hamburg: Czwalina 2008, pp. 56-76.
• Wolfgang Rechberger: Karl Gaulhofer. Historical-biographical studies on the life and work of the Austrian school gymnastics reformer. Salzburg: IFFB Sport and Exercise Science 1999.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Vienna's street names since 1860 as “Political Places of Remembrance” (PDF; 4.4 MB), p. 162f, final research project report, Vienna, July 2013