ABSTRACT
In the 1920s and 1930s hundreds of thousands of working-class men and women across Europe watched and participated in sport. International competitions were organised with the express intention of undermining national rivalries. Women took place in athletic contests free from the shackles of discrimination. In Frankfurt, Vienna and Antwerp, tens of thousands gathered for huge sporting festivals that could attract more spectators and athletes than the Olympic Games. But these activities were not organised by commercial entrepreneurs or moralistic educationalists. This was a sporting culture based on socialism and the labour movement that sought to provide an alternative to the nationalism, male chauvinism and hyper-competition of the commercial and amateur models of sport. The rise of the workers’ sport movement in Europe was inspired by the growth
of the socialist and the trade union movements, and spurred by the lack of sports facilities available to working-class people. The German Social Democratic Party (SPD), as with almost everything else in the pre-1914 European workers’ movement, provided the model for others to follow. The German workers’ sport movement evolved from the left-wing of the Turner movement. As a result of the failed democratic revolution of 1848, the Turner had split into a constitutional monarchist wing, backed by Friedrich Jahn, and a radical democratic wing. Many of the radicals emigrated to the United States. By the 1890s those who identified with Jahn had become increasingly right-wing and anti-Semitic, having the replaced liberalnational flag of black, red and gold with the imperial flag of black, red and white.2
The growth of the SPD, which had been founded in 1863 and legalised in 1890,
inspired the creation of the Arbeiter Turn-und Sportbund (ATSB, Workers’ Turner League) in 1893. By 1900 it had 37,000 members, which increased to 153,000 by 1910. Although not formally linked to the SPD, the tenor of the movement can be gauged from the attitude of the leaders of its workers’ cycling association: ‘[if] we consider the party and the trade unions in this class war as the main block of the army, which is marching forward like the infantry and artillery, then we worker cyclists are the red hussars, the cavalry of the class war’.3
