ABSTRACT
A founder of gymnastics schools, Niels Bukh became one of the great sons of the Danish nation but was later branded as ‘un-Danish’. This essay focuses on Bukh’s political development in the year of the Nazi’s seizure of power in Germany in 1933. The story of Niels Bukh became the story of the struggle waged over the symbolic meaning of his gymnastics. The lack of a fixed link between gymnastics as expression and the interpretations to which it gave rise meant that on the one hand Bukh’s team gymnastics could embody the democratic spirit of rural culture, and on the other could exemplify the unity of the Germanic tribe – a symbol of the ‘aryan race’.
