Theodor Siebert

Theodor Siebert (1910)

Adolf Eduard Theodor Friedrich Siebert (born October 25, 1866 in Weißenfels , † April 12, 1961 in Halle (Saale) ) was a German strength athlete , author and life reformer . He is considered one of the pioneers of bodybuilding and modern weightlifting .

Early years

Theodor Siebert was a son of the master brewer and businessman Christoph Gottlieb Siebert and his wife Amalie Siebert nee. White cock. He had a younger brother Carl Siebert, born in 1871, and three half-siblings, one of whom, Fritz, who was born in 1874 later lived in New Guinea.

According to his statements, Siebert's school days were characterized by “uncanny reading mania” and “lust and love for physical exercises”. However, he was unable to cultivate his love of sport due to a lack of good teachers and good gymnastics lessons. After graduating from school, he began a commercial apprenticeship, then a beer brewing apprenticeship and then went on a journey as a journeyman. He felt the work as a "bone mill": "I was sleepless for several weeks and my bones were trembling."

When Theodor Siebert was in Vienna and Jedlesee in 1886 , he met numerous beer brewers who were active as strength athletes, for example by pulling beer carts back and forth on one finger. At that time, heavy athletics was extremely popular among workers and craftsmen, and the beer-brewing cities of Vienna and Munich became strongholds . In 1886 Siebert returned to his parents' house and initially built dumbbells for himself there in order to train, but was called up for around two years of military service the following year. After the death of his stepfather, he took over the management of his parents' business in 1892 (the exact location is unknown).

The "athlete father"

A postcard from Georg Hackenschmidt, with his signature dedicated to Theodor Siebert

Between 1892 and 1894 Theodor Siebert began again "practically and theoretically in weight training, the difficult athletics, and in fact as a 'self-taught' according to the conditions at that time". From the 1890s he was also interested in topics outside of his previous bourgeois life such as theosophy , occultism and vegetarianism . From the mid-1890s he published articles in the Münchener Athleten-Zeitung and at the same time began his own scheduled training: "Living in a lonely village, cut off from all sports, I got myself two old 25 kg weights and was happy when after several months I was able to press the same (one in each hand) 5-6 times with both arms. "

In 1893 Siebert married Alma Jenni Müller (1865–1920). He himself later claimed that he had already seen his future bride around 1887 during an attempt with "magical smoke" in a hand mirror. The couple had a daughter, Else, who remained unmarried and lived with him until Siebert's death. In 1895, the year the daughter was born, the family moved to Alsleben (Saale) , where Siebert took over a brewery and bottled beer business. The following year, through his commitment, the gymnastics and athletes' association in Alsleben was founded in “Sieberts Bierhalle” . In 1901, the heavy athletics department separated and founded its own weight training club, in which the disciplines weight training and wrestling were practiced and weight tricks with which the athletes performed at circus and fairground events. As a result, Alsleben developed into a regional center for professional wrestling. In 1910, the club split off from both the gymnastics and strength sports clubs, workers' sports clubs; Siebert took over the chairmanship of the Workers' Athlete Club Siegfried in 1910 .

In 1898, Siebert's book, Catechism of Athletics , was published, which soon became a standard work, in which he linked his own training observations and those of other athletes with scientific findings. In the same year he traveled to Vienna for the anniversary exhibition to attend an athlete competition. He lived in the house of the sports journalist and official Viktor Silberer and met the elite of heavy athletics at the time: the amateur weightlifters Franz Stoehr and Wilhelm Türk , the professional athletes Georg Jagendorfer and Pierre Bonnes, and the professional wrestler Michael Hitzler . From then on he was on friendly terms with the wrestler and weightlifter Georg Hackenschmidt , whose trainer and mentor, the Russian Wladislaw von Krajewski , was also in Vienna.

His catechism of athletics had made Siebert known, and many heavy athletes turned to him for advice. Therefore, in 1901, parallel to his club activities, he founded the commercial first training school for athletics and physical culture in Germany with exercise rooms, light-air systems as well as accommodation and catering. He also traded in sporting goods and books as well as self-printed athlete postcards. In 1904 he founded his own publishing house in which he published his books and brochures; he has also written articles and essays for specialist journals.

Felix Graf von Luckner confirms that on January 11, 1935, he tore up an imperial address book with approx. 8960 pages in the Cafe Kobelius in Bad Liebenwerda .

Therefore Siebert became known nationwide, so that he was visited many times, including by Corvette Captain Felix Graf von Luckner , who was famous for tearing up a telephone book with his bare hands and crushing coins with his fingers. In order to further strengthen his enormous hand strength, he consulted the strength trainer Siebert in his physical school in Alsleben (Saale) as early as 1906.

Among his numerous visitors to Alsleben, however, there were also some “businessmen and freeloaders”, so Wedemeyer. They listened to the "good faith" Siebert in order to subsequently bring their own books onto the market without, however, mentioning the actual author in a word. Siebert was finally forgotten. This finally led Wedemeyer to say: "The revolution in strength sports took place without its inventor, so to speak."

Later years

In 1913 Theodor Siebert ran into financial difficulties and his inn was foreclosed. The following year the family moved to Halle (Saale), where he ran a sporting goods and bookstore as well as a publishing house. His bookstore specialized in sports, life reform, counseling, and the occult. In the years to come, however, he mainly published his own publications with other publishers. In 1921 he published the guide to practical occultism in his own publishing house . Wedemeyer's assumption that his turn to occultism may have been related to the fact that, as an “athlete father”, he had received recognition in the professional world, but he was unable to derive any financial benefit from it and was increasingly bitter. That is why he withdrew from the field of sports and turned to the occult and esotericism.

Siebert lived increasingly poor conditions in Halle, which worsened after he had to remove numerous unwanted books from the range during the Nazi era ; they were picked up in a truck without any compensation, as he later stated. He described himself as "apolitical", but helped opponents of National Socialism, which is why he was refused the honorary citizenship of Alsleben requested by the local researcher Karl Labbert in 1935 , even though his 70th birthday was celebrated and celebrated in the newspaper. In 1952 he had to close his bookstore for reasons of age and then lived on a minimal pension. Labbert's attempt to get him financial support from the GDR authorities because of his services to sport failed, and his friends had to support him with food parcels. When Siebert died on April 12, 1961 at the age of 94, he was physically weak and blind.

In 1991 the Theodor-Siebert-Platz was named after him in Alsleben .

Theodor Siebert's ideas

Theodor Siebert was one of the first to promote the development of strength sports from haphazard exercise to targeted physical training and combined this with the worldview of life reform: the goal was a harmoniously trained body. At first he observed and documented his own training and also orientated himself on other professional strength athletes like Louis Dürlacher (called Professor Attila ) and Eugen Sandow as well as on the wrestler Carl Abs . He also corresponded with well-known experts of his time, such as the Austrian sports journalist Viktor Silberer, who published the book Handbook of Athletics and Training for All Sports Branches in 1885 , as well as physicians and physiologists .

Even before 1900 Siebert developed progressive resistance training on which many other training systems, especially in North America, were based; for example, the popular American bodybuilder from the beginning of the 20th century, Alan Calvert , referred to Siebert. In addition, however, he gave - which was novel - advice on diet and lifestyle. He advised against tobacco consumption and heavy alcohol consumption and advised competitors to abstain from sex ("Venus is the greatest enemy of the athletic disciple.") He recommended fresh air, regular washing and baths as well as a protein-rich, meat-rich diet with lots of vegetables and fruits, but warned from overeating. He himself had briefly gained experience with vegetarianism in the 1890s, but quickly got away from it again. Only in later years did he recommend avoiding meat "because it contains a lot of poisonous ingredients". He also rejected corsets, tight clothing and shoes. In general, he advised a “simple, natural way of life”.

In his 1907 published the second edition of the book The weight training can be seen that Siebert meted out to the health aspect of its training concept becoming increasingly important and he is in his views more radical positions of nudism was approaching in which he about recommended a workout in nudity. He recommended raw food , “whole bread”, unpeeled rice, bee honey and “pure water” as a drink as the preferred diet . This "outer purity" should also lead to inner purity and lead the athlete to control sexual vices. He also propagated breathing techniques inspired by the Far East and later also naturopathy . Wedemeyer sums up: “With his health system, which shows many features of successful social discipline, he can be considered a typical representative of a more radical life reform movement, criticism of civilization and society and the turn to the supposedly opposite 'natural' way of life with the unity of body, mind and soul had written on their flags. "

Theodor Siebert had his first inclinations towards spiritism as early as the 1880s , and he also dealt with the ideas of the theosophists, Buddhism and the new spirit movement . On the title page of his book How will I become a professional athlete or a wrestler , published in 1919, a snake and a left-turning swastika can be seen that have no ethnic reference, but rather indicate its connection to Buddhism. From the 1920s, Siebert's interest in occult and spiritualistic, but also in Asian practices such as yoga intensified . Due to his preoccupation with these topics, however, he was increasingly sidelined in athletics circles. A collection of sources and literature on him is in the archive of the Lower Saxony Institute for Sports History .

Fonts

• Catechism of Athletics . Commission publisher from Max Lehmstedt's bookstore, Weißenfels a. S. 1898, OCLC 252913063 .
• Weight training . Kade, Leipzig 1907, OCLC 780300433 .
• What system should I use to train? Brief description of the training methods in question and their inventors . Theodor Siebert Verlag, Alsleben as [u. a.] 1910, OCLC 174229435 .
• How do I become a professional athlete or a wrestler? Confidential practical advice, clarification and training secrets . E. Siebert, Halle (Saale) 1919, OCLC 72193214 .
• Guide to Practical Occultism . Publisher E. Siebert, Halle (Saale) 1921, OCLC 72193208 .
• The new weight training. A practical school for gaining exceptional muscle and physical strength. Most successful method by which the most famous wrestlers and athletes have been trained . 3 volumes. Fritz Frommel, Ludwigsburg 1923, OCLC 73318597 .
• Albert Emil Brachvogel: The riddle of Hildburghausen . Ed .: Theodor Siebert. Globus Verlag, Berlin 1925, OCLC 7207641 .

literature

• Bernd Wedemeyer: The athlete's father Theodor Siebert (1866–1961). A biography between physical culture, life reform and esotericism . Norbert Klatt Verlag, Göttingen 1999, ISBN 3-928312-08-1 .

Web links

• Power people: Purposeless beauty, A Göttingen folklorist wrote a cultural history of bodybuilding . In: Der Spiegel . No. 15 , 1996, pp. 202–203 ( online - April 8, 1996 , with the illustration: “Athlete father” Siebert: “Salvation of the trinity of soul, mind and body”).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Wedemeyer, Der Athletenvater Theodor Siebert , p. 69.
2. ↑ Thomas Taugnitz: The family of the "athletes father" Theodor Siebert (1866-1961) from Weissenfels an der Saale . In: Journal for Central German Family History . tape 59 , no. 1 , ISSN  1864-2624 , p. 239 ff .
3. ↑ Theodor Siebert: How I became an “athlete father”. In: Die Athletik, illustrated monthly journal for popular sport , new series ( ZDB -ID 600136-1 ), 2nd year 1921/1922, page 63. - quoted from: Wedemeyer, Der Athletenvater Theodor Siebert , p. 43.
4. ↑ Wedemeyer, Der Athletenvater Theodor Siebert , p. 43 f.
5. ↑ Quoted from: Wedemeyer, Der Athletenvater Theodor Siebert , p. 46.
6. ↑ Wedemeyer, Der Athletenvater Theodor Siebert , pp. 44, 46
7. ^ Theodor Siebert: Catechism of Athletics . Commission publisher from Max Lehmstedt's Buchhandlung, Weißenfels as 1898, p. 43 f . Quoted from: Wedemeyer, Der Athletenvater Theodor Siebert , p. 48.
8. ↑ ^{a b} Wedemeyer, Der Athletenvater Theodor Siebert , p. 50.
9. ^ Wedemeyer: Der Athletenvater Theodor Siebert , p. 51 f.
10. ^ Brigitte Haberland: Count Luckner in Alsleben. In: Civitas Alslebiensis Alsleben / Saale e. V. - Heimatverein Alsleben an der Saale, year 2007, issue 18, pp. 69–70.
11. ↑ Wedemeyer, Der Athletenvater Theodor Siebert , p. 83.
12. ↑ Wedemeyer, Der Athletenvater Theodor Siebert , p. 85.
13. ↑ Wedemeyer, Der Athletenvater Theodor Siebert , p. 56.
14. ↑ Wedemeyer, Der Athletenvater Theodor Siebert , p. 213.
15. ↑ Wedemeyer, Der Athletenvater Theodor Siebert , pp. 59, 212.
16. ↑ Wedemeyer, Der Athletenvater Theodor Siebert , p. 215 ff.
17. ↑ Wedemeyer, Der Athletenvater Theodor Siebert , p. 227.
18. ↑ Wedemeyer, Der Athletenvater Theodor Siebert , p. 64 f.
19. ^ ProQuest: Building Strength. Alan Calvert, the Milo Bar-Bell Company, and the Modernization of American Weight Training. ProQuest, 2006, ISBN 978-0-549-67909-7 , p. 157. ( limited preview in Google Book Search)
20. ↑ ^{a b} Wedemeyer, Der Athletenvater Theodor Siebert , p. 92.
21. ↑ Wedemeyer, Der Athletenvater Theodor Siebert , p. 90.
22. ↑ Wedemeyer, Der Athletenvater Theodor Siebert , p. 95.
23. ↑ Wedemeyer, Der Athletenvater Theodor Siebert , p. 95 f.
24. ↑ Wedemeyer, Der Athletenvater Theodor Siebert , p. 96.
25. ↑ Wedemeyer, Der Athletenvater Theodor Siebert , p. 97.
26. ↑ http://nish.de/index.php/archiv.html