Quickie History: Friedrich Jahn, “der Turnvater,” Invents Modern Gymnastics (and Starts the Bodybuilding Movement) Because Fuck Napoleon, That’s Why

If you recall my series on the wild and weird phenomenon of Muscular Christianity, you will recall that the West had a major movement to get buff for Jesus so that muscular black men didn’t steal up all of the white women and those stupid, can’t-speak-English-like-uh-Merican brown people couldn’t buck the imperial ambitions of Europe, starting in the 19th century. As stupid as that motivation was, it got Americans exercising, which was a damn good thing. That movement actually piggybacked off of another from a century earlier, which advocated exercise so the Germans (and later the Americans) could slaughter Napoleon (and in the US, racists/Southerners/haters of democracy) in the next war. It was started by a man named Friedrich Jahn (1778-1852) and was called the Turner movement (about which you’ve already read a bit here), designed to be a way for Germany to throw off French occupation (the French are not the pussies that you think, at least from a historical perspective) during the reign of Napoleon, and it combined physical training with political activism in an effort to create the ultimate 19th century human.

Though we think of Germany as a militaristic culture filled with gnashing teeth, thick, veiny biceps that look like 6x scale turgid cocks, that is really just a function of the hyper-effective German propaganda of WW2. Not only are the Germans traditionally a disorganized bunch of fractious shitheads generally ignored by the rest of Europe unless they needed to buy some mercs to conquer a distant foreign land, they are traditionally neither fearsome nor even interesting as a region, and they weren’t even a real place on the map until a hundred years after Americans adopted the Constitution. Genuinely, if you are an American, the history of Germany looks like the other states of Europe ate some bad Indian food and the explosive shits that followed are that region from the dawn of time until the mid-20th century.

“The War of the Third Coalition lasted from about 1803 to 1806. Following defeat at the Battle of Austerlitz by the French under Napoleon in December 1805, Holy Roman Emperor Francis II abdicated, and the Empire was dissolved on 6 August 1806. The resulting Treaty of Pressburg established the Confederation of the Rhine in July 1806, joining together sixteen of France’s allies among the German states (including Bavaria and Württemberg). After the Battle of Jena–Auerstedt of October 1806 in the War of the Fourth Coalition, various other German states, including Saxony and Westphalia, also joined the Confederation. Only Austria, Prussia, Danish Holstein, Swedish Pomerania, and the French-occupied Principality of Erfurt stayed outside the Confederation of the Rhine. The War of the Sixth Coalition from 1812 to winter 1814 saw the defeat of Napoleon and the liberation of Germany. In June 1814, the famous German patriot Heinrich vom Stein created the Central Managing Authority for Germany (Zentralverwaltungsbehörde) in Frankfurt to replace the defunct Confederation of the Rhine. However, plenipotentiaries gathered at the Congress of Vienna were determined to create a weaker union of German states than envisaged by Stein” (Wiki)

And that didn’t bring about unity. They maintained that confederation as Prussia attempted to exert its influence and Austria-Hungary continued to act (for lack of a better descriptive term) like Russians, and Germany descended into a series of revolutions (and reprisals against democratic agitators) in the 1840s and 50s, most of which resulted in the Turners taking their love of lifting and democracy West, to the United States. Before doing so, however, they changed the face of German politics forever, and they created the modern ideal of a strong, capable, intelligent, and organized German.

I should add here that the Franks who founded France were very definitively Germans, and the Eastern Frankish kingdom that ruled over Western Germany (it was on the east side of Frankish lands) was hardly the foppish French nonsense of which you might think from the Renaissance or later- these were axe-wielding murderbeasts who stopped the Muslim invasion of Europe in 732 and ostensibly preserved Western civilization in doing so. The reason the French speak a Romance language is that language, ethnicity, and culture are not necessarily correlated. The lands that the Franks conquered were occupied by Gauls, the Celtic-speaking peoples who displaced or killed the Neolithic culture there that preceded it (which is still visible in the Basques). The conquering people adopted the language of the populace, as rulers are usually wont to do, and this is how French became the most German-sounding Romance language this side of Portuguese.

Your culture has nothing to do with the color of your skin- the culture people adopt is a choice (it’s just that cultural options are limited in geographically remote or isolated places).

In any event, the Germans were well sick of having Frenchmen stomp through their lands and fuck all of their women, and Jahn decided that physical fitness would be the German people’s salvation, as the Austrians didn’t seem terribly interested in helping their linguistic brethren join England, Sweden, the Dutch, and France in the relative civilization of the 19th century or in helping keep French dicks out of German women. He’d arrived at that conclusion after no small amount of study, so it wasn’t as if he simply pulled the idea of out his ass- the man was nearly as well-rounded as Da Vinci before him. And the evidence was right in front of them- Germany’s historical nickname might as well have been “French Looting Lands” due to the fact that French soldiers used their supreme physical fitness to impose their will on the Germans, proving they could outmarch any other soldiers on planet Earth.

The reason the French were so fit is that they’d been obsessing about the Greeks’ fitness for close to 300 years. Medieval French

“educators, philosophers and theologians sought to reestablish the contribution of physical development to the Greek tripartite of mind-body-spirit, primarily as a way of improving physical health and vigor.

One of the more impactful Renaissance writers relative to the application to exercise to combat skills was the French monk and physician François Rabelais. Rabelais used two novels Pantagruel and Gargantua, published in 1533 and 1535 respectively, to espouse the physical nature of the human spirit and the physical needs of war. The protagonist, Gargantua, was provided with an apt tutor, “a young man from Touraine, named “Esquire Gymnast,” who provided training in vaulting, hand to hand combat, running, swimming, gymnastics, and lifting “leaden” weights.”

Gargantua’s physical exercises epitomized Rabelais’s ideal of physical culture through his extensive recitation of nearly all known gymnastic exercises. All of Gargantua’s physical training was in preparation for the “gentleman’s occupation”—war.

Approximately 20 years later the Italian writer Hieronymus Mercurialis, made significant contributions to the development and application of gymnastic exercises. Mercurialis was a physician and philosopher, who became the first to document the benefits and application of physical exercise when he published De Arte Gymnastica (1569). Mercurialis divided exercises into three categories: legitimate (used for general health), military and athletic (dangerous). He was the first Renaissance writer to directly address the hygienic and medical benefits of exercise and the application of exercise in preparation for war. Indulging in a bit of hyperbole, Mercurialis selected the name “medicine ball” for the weighted balls used for gymnastic exercise” (East 3-4).

From there, the Dutch began developing gymnastics at the outset of the 19th century, and their love of tumbling and rope climbing spread throughout Europe, but most notably in France, of course. While the French got fitter than the Germans, Jahn studied theology and philosophy at Halle Universtity, but left in 1806 to join the Prussian Army to defend his homeland against the baguette-waving invaders to the East.

The French under Napoleon had gotten pretty fucking big for their britches, and it took four European coalitions to finally stop the French from forcing everyone to consider snails to be an acceptable appetizer. Napoleon formed a country in Western Germany he initially called the Confederation of the Rhine and then later the Kingdom of Westphalia, which comprised Hesse and much of the western half of what is now Germany. Though it was nominally independent, it was a vassal state of the French and Napoleon, and it gave Austria and Prussia, the German powers, a reason to quibble and fight even if they seemed to think the people of Germany were aggressively uneducated, unruly, and unmanageable white trash. It wasn’t as if the people of those nations were suffering under French control, either, as it was intended to be a model Napoleonic state.

Interestingly, the model Napoleonic state is precisely the type of thing Jahn came to advocate because it had all of the trappings of a modern liberal government:

“The constitution made all male residents citizens with equal rights. Thus serfs were liberated, Jews emancipated, and socage abolished. The Napoleonic code was enacted, doing away with guilds and providing for the right of capitalism. A metric system of weights and measures was introduced” (Wiki).

In any event, Friedrich Jahn ostensibly fought on the behalf of his fellow Germans for three years, and in

“1809 Jahn left the army and moved to Berlin where he began a career as a teacher. One of his additional duties was to ‘supervise’ his male students two afternoons a week following academic classes.

Finding it difficult to maintain the level of attention and discipline to which he was accustomed in the army, Jahn introduced a myriad of the exercises and games to the afternoon program. In an attempt to find a constructive use for their energy he took the boys to a nearby empty field where they practiced jumping, climbing, vaulting, and throwing and played chasing and “war” games” (East 7).

The German military had already implemented a bit of physical fitness training under German military reformer and surprisingly not-shitty guy Gerhard von Scharnhorst,

“and in keeping with von Scharnhorst’s physical training plan, Jahn developed a new physical training program called “turnen” (gymnastics), ostensibly to revitalize the German national “spirit.” Rather than focusing on elite performance, Turnen focused on the whole body, to improve the fitness level of young males in preparation for war. Often known as the Turnvater–father of modern gymnastics, Jahn opened the first open-air Turnplatz in Berlin in 1811 and initiated a society of gymnastics called the Turnvereine. The Turnvereine movement was a “modern revival of the Greek ideal of building manhood in a harmonious development of body, mind and character” (East 8).

In doing so, Jahn invented the parallel bars, the rings, the balance beam, the pommel horse, and the horizontal bar, all of which became standard equipment for gymnastics.

Friedrich Jahn hadn’t had his thirst for French blood yet slaked, and he quit teaching in 1813 to join the Lützow Free Corps, a volunteer unit mostly comprised of craftsman and laborers, but which also boasted a serious contribution from the literary and artistic fields, as those people comprised 12% of their total number (along with at least two women).

“Many of [Jahn’s] “students” from the Turnplatz followed him into the Lutzow Freikorps. After numerous engagements his unit received national and international recognition for their physical prowess and discipline in battle. Jahn attributed his unit’s military success to the utilization of turnen as a physical training model. Almost 15,000 Turners fought in combat during the Franco-Prussian War. Following his military successes, Jahn became consumed by the need “to develop the ‘perfect German’, physically prepared for life and war” (East 8).

He commanded its third battalion until after the fall of Napoleon in 1815, leading his massive troupe of mostly untrained raiding forces in looted uniforms dyed black, then returned to Berlin and work as a teacher at his gymnastic club. 

The following year (1816), he published the Deutsche Turnkunst zur Einrichtung der Turnplätze (A Treatise on Gymnastics), and modern gymnastics was born.

In addition to all of the shit we now take to be standard in gymnastics, Jahn’s book was essentially the Arnold’s New Encyclopedia of Bodybuilding for the 19th century. Treatise (click here to read it) covers everything from building and maintaining good posture to techniques and training methods for track and field sports (and highly recommends hill sprints for fitness); directions and training methods for climbing using everything from the poles used in real Indian yoga, ladders, and ropes; throwing and shooting; how to contest and manage a contest for gymnastics; how to manage a gym; pulling, carrying, and pushing loads, as in strongman; weightlifting; wrestling; and general fitness shit like jumping rope- in short, it was a one-stop shop for workout information. If it was purchased almost exclusively by sub-150 pound “men” who don’t lift and typically find themselves living in their parents’ homes it would have been Bodybuilding.com, but luckily it went on to actually spur positive social change and a watershed movement for exercise rather than school shootings and other incel/MGTOW bullshit.

Speaking of which, the little dicks on the right locked Jahn up almost the second the war was concluded, and he spent a year in prison as the conservatives in the German government attempted to figure out how to read and write. Once they’d knocked that brain-buster out, they confined him to the city of Kolberg for five years, then banned him for life from living in a city with a secondary school or a university. The rest of the Turners, seeing Jahn inexplicably jailed by people who clearly had a serious lead deficit in their diets, fucked off to the United States, where they spread their love of democratic ideals and physical fitness wherever they landed. The use of Indian clubs became common across the US and Britain in seriously short order, and the British in particular developed a newfound love for visible abdominals.

“Many early Turners headed to the Ohio Valley, and the first Turner Society formed in Cleveland in 1848. And the National American Turner Organization formed in 1850. By 1855 there were 74 Turner Societies with over 4500 members (men), and the number jumped to 10,000 by 1860. At it’s peak, there were over 300 Turnverein with close to 50,000 members! The largest still in existence is the Turnverein Sacramento, established in 1854 (go California!).”

Turners opposed all forms of oppression, and as champions of equal rights, the were firmly opposed to Slavery. Because of  Vater Jahn’s principals of liberty and equality, they were the first to volunteer for the Union Army at the beginning of the Civil War (in fact 2/3 of the Turners in America signed up). Their military training and discipline helped provide leadership for the Army. Turners stood guard at President Abraham Lincoln’s Inauguration, and they made up the Honor Guard at his funeral” (German Girl).

It was from this wellspring that the entire fitness movement sprang, and without the contribution of this man and his rabid, hardass, democracy-loving liberal followers that you and I are the jacked and awesome motherfuckers everyone knows us to be.

Wanna know more about the Turners? You can read about the Turner movement in the US on the website of what I think is the last remaining Turnverein in the world: https://sacramentoturnverein.com/history/

SUPPORT THE STRENGTH SPORTS UNDERGROUND AND A ROGUE ACADEMIC HELLBENT ON FORCIBLY EDUCATING EVERY PERSON WHO’S EVER LOOKED ASKANCE AT A BARBELL.

Sources:

East, Whitfield B.  A historical review and analysis of Army physical readiness training and assessment.  Fort Leavenworth: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2013. https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a622014.pdf

Liked it? Take a second to support Jamie Chaos on Patreon!