What’s the Connection Between US Strongman Culture and Ethno-Nationalism?
July 25, 2024
Editor’s Note: Are we living in the dystopia of Mike Judge’s 2006 film Idiocracy? Judging by the proceedings of the Republican National Convention, some would say yes. At the end of his speech, retired pro-wrestler Hulk Hogan ripped off his shirt to reveal a red Trump-Vance shirt underneath, effectively endorsing our former despotic Cheeto and his underling. Our former despot in chief even blew him a kiss. Since when did strongman culture have anything to do with ethno-nationalism? As Michael Andor Brodeur writes in the following passage from Swole: The Making of Men and the Meaning of Muscle, the connection goes as far back as a few centuries. That’s right. It was already baked in.
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For millions of gym bros like me, the closure of gyms nationwide amounted to the loss of a primary habitat, a source of identity.
And for many of the men I watched unravel online—throwing tantrums on social media over the perceived oppression of public health measures, mask mandates, and home quarantines—the loss of the gym compromised a key source of their manhood. Many men found themselves going stir-crazy, fashioning their own improvised backyard gyms out of disused sawhorses, five-gallon buckets of paint, sandbags, and barrels.
This type of resourcefulness, I imagine, is how it must have been for the meatheads of yore—those sepia-tinted nineteenth-century strongmen, wrestlers, and assorted swole-timers we envision when we think of the vaudeville stage or an old-timey circus: twirly moustache, leopard loincloth, massive barbell. You know the ones.
Those sturdy, swarthy Halloween-ready archetypes are inspired by a real-life pantheon of fin de siècle fitness phenoms—formative musclemen of the late nineteenth century like Eugen Sandow (a.k.a. “The Father of Bodybuilding”), George Hackenschmidt (“The Russian Lion”), Louis Cyr (“The Canadian Samson”), and Arthur Saxon (“The Iron Master”).
And each of these iconic beefcakes was himself the product of a sweeping “physical culture” movement that originated in nineteenth-century Europe and swept across the Atlantic to the States. A wave of widespread cultural shifts and political upheaval through the 1800s set the stage for a wholly revised vision of manhood, masculinity, and “manly” health that still shapes our perception of the American male body.
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The history of American gym culture can be indirectly traced back to the influence of one notably diminutive and highly figurative strongman. If it hadn’t been for famed French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte’s decisive trouncing of Prussian forces at the 1806 Battle of Jena-Auerstädt, young Johann Friedrich Ludwig Christoph Jahn (who settled on “Friedrich”) might never have declared his own personal war on weakness.
Born in 1778 in the Prussian state of Brandenburg (in current-day eastern Germany), Jahn studied history, theology, and philology as a young man before moving to the capital city of Berlin to teach secondary school physical education. This was a period of remarkable innovation for the young athlete and educator, who devised several of the apparatus that remain central to modern gymnastics, including the rings, the balance beam, the pommel horse, the parallel bars, and the horizontal bar.
A proud Prussian in a time prior to a unified Germany, when clusters of Germanic principalities (once part of the fallen Holy Roman Empire) were fending off the advances of France, Jahn was deeply stung by Napoleon’s swift victory and subsequent occupation of Berlin. His response to the defeat was visceral in more ways than one, inspiring him to establish his own center dedicated to the training and strengthening of young Prussian men of fighting age.
For his gymnasium—which, to honor Germanic etymology, he termed Turnplatz, derived from the German turnen, “to practice gymnastics”—Jahn likely drew inspiration from two influential figures in the growing field of physical education: Johann Guts Muths, a teacher and gymnastics pioneer whose 1793 treatise Gymnastik für die Jugend served as a primary phys ed manual, and Franz Nachtegall, a gymnasiarch (gym owner) in Copenhagen who directed Denmark’s Military Gymnastic Institute under King Frederick VI.
Nachtegall shared Muths’s view of a physical fitness shaped by Enlightenment ideals—a properly exercised body was itself an extension of moral, social, and intellectual fitness. These are tenets directly transposed from the gymnasia of ancient Greece, which drew as much admiration from Muths as “soft and effeminate people” attracted his ire.
Jahn opened his first Turnplatz in 1811 at Hasenheide, an area outside of Berlin. It was nothing special: a simple but useful array of ropes, bars, beams, blocks, dumbbells, clubs, and other rudimentary gymnastic equipment. A vast open turf was reserved for running drills, playing field games, and practicing gymnastics—and its members became known as Turners (German for “gymnasts”).
The spartan setup of the Turnplatz makes sense considering its ancient inspiration. Jahn modeled it after the gymnasia of ancient Greece. These public centers of athletic, academic, and military training were far removed from our modern fitness palaces of iron, chrome, and mirrored glass. But like the overcrowded gyms of twenty-first century America, the gymnasia of ancient Greece were cultural hubs—home to storied Panhellenic athletic contests like the Pythian games (which started in Delphi around the sixth century BCE) and the Olympics (which started around the eighth century BCE in the sanctuary of Olympia).
Only freeborn men and boys and authorized resident visitors were eligible to attend ancient gymnasia—it was a small fraction of ancient Greece’s largely enslaved population—and those who benefited from access were privy to elite military training, studies with influential philosophers and sophists, and the benevolence of the gods.
The primary pursuit at ancient gymnasia was to maximize one’s individual potential as a citizen—one’s arete, described by scholar Stephen Miller as an amalgam of “virtue, skill, prowess, pride, excellence, valor and nobility.”
Similarly, the thrust of the Turnplatz, and the network of Turnverein (or Turners unions) that sprung up to connect about 150 clubs operating by 1815, was primarily about Germans building a strong Germany. Historian Eric Chaline points out that Muths and his disciples flipped the script of the nature and function of physical education: “Physical fitness, or fitness for purpose, was not an individual attainment freely offered to the state by the citizen, but a social obligation demanded by the state of its citizens.”
“As long as man has a body, it is his duty to take care of, to cultivate it, as well as his mind, and consequently gymnastick exercises should form an essential part of education,” Jahn writes in his 1816 fitness manual, Deutsche Turnkunst. “Where man exists, there gymnastick exercises have, or at least ought to have, a place; they are the property of mankind, not confined to any one nation, or part of a nation.”
As universal as Jahn’s phrasing (translated by fellow Turner Charles Beck for the 1828 English edition, A Treatise on Gymnasticks) may be, athletes at any given Turnplatz weren’t just there to develop their bodies but their sense of Deutschheit, or Germanness. The Turnverein weren’t the only places where fitness served a sense of nationalism. Sweden established a Royal Gymnastics Institute, and the similarly physical Sokol movement spread across the Slavic region and Slovene countries in the mid-1800s. Their impact has carried into the twenty-first century; even today’s Olympic gymnastics culture carries with it a vestigial but vital nationalistic charge.
In 1813, Jahn helped to form the Lützow Free Corps, a volunteer force supporting the Prussian army’s fight against Napoleon, and led a battalion to halt the expansion of the First French Empire. Following Napoleon’s ultimate defeat at Waterloo in 1815, Jahn returned to Berlin for a short-lived reprise teaching gymnastics. In 1819 Austria’s foreign minister, Klemens von Metternich, instituted the Carlsbad Decrees—a set of brutally repressive laws intended to quell pro-unification activity and sentiment across the German Confederation by censoring the press, removing liberal educators, disbanding Burschenschaften (nationalist fraternities), and banning gymnastics, especially those practiced by Turners, perceived by authorities as a clear threat. Jahn was promptly arrested for revolutionary activity and imprisoned for nearly one year. After a five-year period of confinement to Kolberg, his freedom was granted on the condition he avoid cities with schools and universities and abstain from any further instruction in turnen.
Though the politics of the Turnverein were liberal enough to attract the ire of the state, Jahn’s own patriotism edged into ethno-nationalist völkisch territory. In 1810, for instance, he wrote, “Poles, French, priests, aristocrats and Jews are Germany’s misfortune.”
Jahn’s calls for the preservation and empowerment of a German homeland made for easy appropriation a century later, offering the National Socialist Party a ready-made conceptual template for propaganda promoting Germanic superiority, all steeped in repurposed imagery of classical antiquity (even as the Nazis themselves banned independent Turnverein). The writer Daniel Kunitz describes Jahn as “an exemplar of that Romantic idealist generation which combined an admiration for ancient Greek culture and the struggle for freedom from absolute monarchy that, for some like Jahn, devolved into an inward looking, racist parochialism.”
After Jahn’s arrest and release, his Turnverein would continue operating quietly around Germany, with the official ban on them lifting in 1842 and the Damenturnverein opening gymnasium doors to women in 1845. But the failed revolutions of 1848 against the German Confederation sent many devoted Turners into exile—part of a larger contingent of “Forty-Eighters” that landed on American shores with very specific ideas about how men and their bodies fit into the making of a nation.
About the Author
Michael Andor Brodeur has been the classical music critic at the Washington Post since 2020. Previously, he held editorial and staff-writer positions at the Boston Globe and Boston’s Weekly Dig. His essays, humor, and criticism have also appeared in Nylon, Thrillist, Entrepreneur, Medium, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and other publications. He has also released 5 music albums under different monikers, most recently writing and performing electronic music under the name New Dad. He is the author of Swole: The Making of Man and the Meaning of Muscle.