Beautiful Bodies, Exercising Warriors and Original Peoples: Sports, Greek Antiquity and National Identity from Winckelmann to ‘Turnvater Jahn’

This essay attempts to reconstruct links between the reception of antiquity, notions of the body, and national identity formation in Germany around 1800, from the perspective of the history of ideas. It posits that at the time of Goethe specific concepts of athletes and of competition emerged in the different discourses of aestheticists, historians, anthropologists, politicians and educationalists. These different concepts ranged from Johann Joachim Winckelmann's apotheosis of the Greeks, via the educational theories of the philanthropes and Wilhelm von Humboldt's enthusiasm for Hellas, to Friedrich Ludwig Jahn's Turnbewegung. Within the history of ideas, these all share the impetus to articulate a cultural critique of the present. Just as sports and athletic competitions were integrated into idealized Greek life, they were now supposed to form an important element of the individual and collective existence of Germans in the future.