Turnen Around the World

Turnen around the World represents an international effort by an assemblage of prominent sport historians to detail and assess the worldwide scope, effects, and residual influences of the German Turnen movement over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A male nationalistic movement based on gymnastics and other physical activities established in response to the Napoleonic wars became even more political in the German Revolution of 1848. Refugees, colonizers, and immigrants spread the political and cultural aspects of Turnen throughout the world thereafter, with varying results that still resonate today. In some cases, Turnen societies resisted assimilation and took an isolationist stance retaining their own culture and language. In others they gradually assimilated, adapting and adopting the norms, standards, and values of the host cultures while establishing educational and physical culture practices that endured. In still other areas a nominal, but peripheral effect influenced local physical practices. Within Germany, the Turners remain the most substantial physical culture association in the country with more than five million members, around 70 percent being females.