Abstract des Autors

The development of modern sports in Germany is related not only to the rapid
progress of industrialisation and urbanisation at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century, but also to the social inventiveness of the emergent German bourgeoisie. Modern sports were the invention of the so-called educated class. They were popular among the sons of the German elite. Educated at Germany’s colleges and universities, these young men and boys shaped the everyday life of the nation’s university towns. One of the consequences of the institutionalisation
of modern sports within the university was that sports were politicised to a degree unknown in the English-speaking world. The rivalry between sports enthusiasts and proponents of the gymnastic exercises (Turnen), that were Germany’s traditional form of ‘body culture’, had political ramifications that persisted
throughout Germany’s late nineteenth century modernisation and into the 1920s, when the old Wilhelminian regime was brushed aside and a new democratic and republican system, the Weimar Republic, was installed in 1919.