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Politics of Gymnastics: Mass Gymnastic Displays Under Communism in Central and Eastern Europe

University of Cambridge, Central European University, Budapest

Under communism, the symbolic potential of the body was multiplied in the mass gymnastic displays in order to portray the society as disciplined, strong, happy and beautiful and thus to legitimize its leadership. These gymnastic rituals followed the volkisch tradition of 19th-century mass gymnastics, which aimed at mobilization and homogenization of the `imagined community' of the nation. Behind the symbolic play of the mass gymnastics, there was, as Kracauer pointed out, a deeper relationship between modernity with its mode of production and gymnastics with its mechanization of the body. The relation, however, was not a direct one, mass gymnastic displays were used to aestheticize the mass production and therefore to deny the very logic of instrumental rationality that both the gymnastics and the production were built upon.

Key Words: body symbolism • communism • discipline • gymnastics • mass production • ritual

Body & Society, Vol. 9, No. 2, 1-25 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/1357034X030092001


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