ABSTRACT
This article is about a man who was one of the best known Danes abroad in the 1930s. His name was Niels Bukh, and from 1920 on he built an imposing gymnastics school in the small town of Ollerup on South Funen. His team of young elite gymnasts demonstrated his gymnastics on several continents – in the East, in North and South America, in Africa and in many European countries. For instance Bukh’s gymnasts gave demonstrations in the US in 1923 and 1926 and at the World Exhibition in New York in 1939. In several dictatorships too there was great enthusiasm about Bukh’s gymnastics, not least because the strict discipline, endurance and appearance of strength of the gymnasts seemed promising for military purposes, as was especially evident from the interest Bukh’s gymnastics enjoyed in several South American states during his tour in 1938. Bukh’s gymnastics could help totalitarian regimes to create a young generation typified by straightness, dynamism and endurance. The perception that the Bukh gymnasts almost merged into one organism in their synchronized movements was used by the regimes, especially with the young, as a symbol of order, discipline and national unity in countries like the South American dictatorships, but not in pluralistic and democratic states like the US and Canada, where interest in the country’s own youth education quite overshadowed the skills of the Bukh gymnasts.
