Turnen Around the World
Turnen Around the World by Gerald Gems, published by Bloomsbury Academic on November 17, 2023, is a comprehensive exploration of the German Turnen movement and its global impact. This 312-page book presents an international collaboration of prominent sport historians who examine the movement’s origins, development, and lasting influences from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. The narrative highlights how Turnen, initially a male nationalistic movement rooted in gymnastics, evolved politically during significant historical events such as the German Revolution of 1848.
Readers will find a detailed assessment of how the Turnen movement spread through refugees, colonizers, and immigrants, leading to diverse outcomes across various cultures. The book discusses the dual nature of Turnen societies, some of which resisted assimilation while others adapted to their host cultures, influencing local physical practices and educational standards. Additionally, it notes the enduring presence of Turnen in Germany, where it remains a major physical culture association with millions of members. This edition provides a thorough historical context for understanding the social history of sports and recreation, particularly in Europe and beyond.
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Turnen around the World represents an international effort by an assemblage of prominent sport historians to detail and assess the worldwide scope, effects, and residual influences of the German Turnen movement over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A male nationalistic movement based on gymnastics and other physical activities established in response to the Napoleonic wars became even more political in the German Revolution of 1848. Refugees, colonizers, and immigrants spread the political and cultural aspects of Turnen throughout the world thereafter, with varying results that still resonate today. In some cases, Turnen societies resisted assimilation and took an isolationist stance retaining their own culture and language. In others they gradually assimilated, adapting and adopting the norms, standards, and values of the host cultures while establishing educational and physical culture practices that endured. In still other areas a nominal, but peripheral effect influenced local physical practices. Within Germany, the Turners remain the most substantial physical culture association in the country with more than five million members, around 70 percent being females.
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