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Team–Work: The Olympics 1925 and 1931
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 February 2024
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For the cultural history of industrialized nations, particularly in the economies of the Global North, the period between 1890 and 1930 is associated with modernisms, as successive cultural movements that were formally innovative, highly subjective, yet also self-reflexive of their institutional and social functions. These movements proclaimed themselves as avant-garde; as cultural vanguards that visualize, materialize, and sound out abstract ideas in new artistic forms and practices. Many modernisms, from Futurism to social realism, regarded the human body as a performative projection plane for expansive ideas about movement and mobility, often conflating social reform with physical freedom, and mass action with political agency.
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References
Notes
1. Marx, Karl, Capital, vol. 1 [1867] (Moscow, 1977), 279Google Scholar.
2. Marx, Capital, 318.
3. F[ritz] Wildung, “Die Olympiade als Zentrum einer internationalen Kulturtagung,” Olympiade 1, 2 (August 1924): 2.
4. Wildung, “Die Olympiade als Zentrum,” 2.
5. Wilhelm Prager, Die Neue Großmacht, 1925, Deutsche Werkfilm G.m.b.H., Berlin, 35′, black/white, silent, Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum (DFF), digital scan 2018, archive no.19.625: available at https://www.filmportal.de/node/75833/stock#archivkopie.
6. A forty-eight-minute version of the film with German and English subtitles, as well as Dutch and French intertitles, was edited subsequently by Prager's Werkfilm company: Wilhelm Prager, Die Neue Großmacht, 1925, Deutsche Werkfilm G.m.b.H., Berlin, 48′, black/white, silent, Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum (DFF), digital scan 2019, archive no.22.493: available at https://www.filmportal.de/node/75833/stock#archivkopie.
7. Erinnerungsschrift Erste Internationale Arbeiter Olympiade Frankfurt am Main, 24.-28. Juli 1925 (Berlin, 1925), cover. Tank was credited as “artistic advisor” for Prager's film.
8. May and his team considered each integrated design ideas as representing the wider social structure; for example, architect and activist Grete Schütte-Lihotzky developed the Frankfurter Küche, the famed modernist reformation of the kitchen inside social housing, as a site for the feminist manifestation of domestic work and changing conditions of labor.
9. Participants of the International Congress in Frankfurt in 1924 to organize the games were uniformly male. On page fifteen of the fourth issue of the Olympiade journal, Elsa Volke wrote an article on “Women and Olympia,” advocating modern sportswear and exercising routines for working women to emancipate themselves socially and physically.
10. “Erinnerungsschrift Erste Internationale Arbeiter,” Olympiade 1.
11. Cultural historians who equate the visual languages of socialism and fascism often ignore their structural opposition in regard to the ownership of the means of production and the resulting control of the productive body of people; for her cinematic production, Riefenstahl used slave labor who were sent back to extermination camps after the filming was completed.
12. F[ritz] W[ildung], “Das Olympia der Masse,” Olympiade 1, 3 (September 1924): 1.
13. 2. Arbeiter Olympiade in Wort und Bild (Vienna, 1931), 5.
14. 2. “Arbeiterolympiade der Sozialistischen Arbeitersportinternationale,” Die Massenübungen: Musik/Bilder/Text/Geräte-Wettkampf-Übungen und Sprungtabelle (Vienna, 1931).
15. Die Massenübungen, 1.
16. Grube wrote “March of the Workers Sport,” a story on the Berlin Spartakiad for the “red sport”-issue of the socialist Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (A.I.Z.), 10:27 (1931), 532–33.
17. The German Democratic Republic commemorated their passing in 1963 with a series of stamps to raise money for the upkeep of monuments to anti-fascist resistance; available at https://www.arbeiterfussball.de/historisches/verbot-widerstand/ddr-briefmarken/ (accessed on May 30, 2022).
18. The original winner of the 200 meters women's race, the British I.K. Walter, who had distanced her compatriot M.L. Morrison by a considerable margin of 0.17 seconds, was disqualified when the organizers in Vienna found out that she had participated in the bourgeois women's-only event Olimpiadi della Grazia (The Olympics of Grace) in fascist Italy a couple of months prior.
19. Similarly, the Chilean junta under Augusto Pinochet used the Estadio Nacional Julio Martínez Prádanos as a prison camp to torture and kill political opponents and social activists. When the USSR refused to face Chile during the World Cup qualifiers of 1973 in this particular stadium (the Soviet football association had asked for a venue outside Santiago de Chile), the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) decreed that the game had to go ahead as planned, with only the Chilean team on the pitch, scoring into an empty net, while the USSR was disqualified from the 1974 World Cup tournament. The divisions between bourgeois and socialist sport continued with predictable outcomes.
20. 2. Arbeiterolympiade – Festführer (Vienna, July 1931), 49–50.
21. 2. Arbeiter Olympiade in Wort und Bild, 37.
22. 2. Arbeiter Olympiade in Wort und Bild, 37.
23. 2. Arbeiterolympiade – Festführer, 50.
24. Julius Deutsch, Unter roten Fahnen! Vom Rekord- zum Massensport (Vienna, 1931), 10.
25. Wildung, Fritz, Arbeitersport (Berlin, 1930), 111Google Scholar.
26. Wagner, Helmut, Sport und Arbeitersport (Berlin, 1930), 133–34Google Scholar.
27. Wagner, Sport und Arbeitersport, 134.
28. See, for example, Arsenal FC's manager Herbert Chapman during the 1930s or West Germany's national coach of the 1940s and ’50s, Sepp Herberger, who proclaimed that in order to win a match, the team has to consist of “eleven friends.”
29. The French word for “slipstreaming” is the physiological-cum-social term aspiration.
30. Albert Londres, a pioneering investigative journalist in France, who reported on his country's colonialism and imperialisms, published in 1924 the first book on the Tour de France, Les Forçats de la route (Forced Labor on the Road), a narrative viewed through the eyes of the cyclists, detailing the physical abuse of their bodies through inhumane conditions of the race and the resulting use of stimulants and drugs. See Londres, Albert, Les Forçats de la route [1924] (Paris, 2008)Google Scholar.