Episode Transcript
UNLOCK Episode 33.1 — Antifascist Body Culture: A Brief History
Matthew Remski: Hello everyone. This is Matthew Remski, host of Antifascist Dad Podcast, following up on episode 33, which was called Rewriting the Body's Response to Violence with Maren Forsberg. This is a brief coda called Antifascist Body Culture: A Brief History, in which I seek out the century-old roots of what Maren is doing today.
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There is one line in the novel The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje where the narrator says: what is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.
And I'm thinking about this because in a manosphere world dominated by UFC spectacle, it's hard to imagine what antifascist physical culture looks like or where it can be found. And that's why I was so happy to come across Maren Forsberg's page. But she is not alone in this effort now, nor in the past.
A few years ago I interviewed historian Mark Roseman about his book Lives Reclaimed: A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany. It chronicles the Bund, a small utopian socialist group in Nazi Germany. Now this is not to be confused with the Jewish Labour Bund that Molly Crabapple is writing about in her new blockbuster book — but I'll get to that, because she has a bunch to report about physical culture as well.
Originally an educational community, the Bund that Roseman is writing about eventually evolved into an underground resistance network that rescued and hid Jewish people and developed a rich philosophy of solidarity and collective survival. It was a multiethnic and religiously diverse group of young people who were huge fans of something called Körperbildung, or body education, a central part of their ethics and daily practice. And it was directly juxtaposed with the body fascism that was dominant at the time in youth sporting culture in the Reich.
A man named Dore Jacobs was a key leader, and his main physical culture inspiration was something called eurythmics, developed by the Swiss composer Émile Jaques-Dalcroze in the early twentieth century. Students of eurythmics learned to express musical structures — tempo, dynamics, phrasing — through gesture and motion, integrating ear, mind, and body. Jacobs thought of it as a pathway to liberating the human spirit through physical rhythm, and to forge a new relationship with the body in a technological age, treating it almost like a form of physical psychotherapy. He really emphasized posture, movement, and he directed movement choirs to help individuals find their natural place within a collective.
And what's interesting is that the body fascists of that period had some of the same ideas, but they imbued those ideas with a sense of romantic ultra-nationalism — through this drive to reconstruct the original ethnic Aryan body, humiliated by defeat in the Great War.
During the Nazi era, this antifascist body education also provided the Bund with a cover for their illegal political meetings. So the Gestapo agents would raid the premises and would mistake their materials related to gymnastics and dance for evidence of some sort of harmless earthy cult rather than a political resistance group. The Bund also used these gymnastics classes to covertly sound out potential new recruits for their anti-Nazi activities, admitting people after careful tests of reliability. I guess — like eurythmics trust falls or something like that.
Okay, so then we have the work of Molly Crabapple, and her incredible new book is called Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund. In it, she chronicles the vibrant, revolutionary history of the Labour Bund, founded in Vilna — which was in the then Russian Empire — in 1897, within weeks of the launching of the international Zionist movement. And so she draws on family memoir and archival research and years of teaching herself Yiddish as she explores the notion of do'ikayt, or hereness. It's a Yiddish word, and it means the right to live with dignity in the diaspora — like wherever Jews find themselves, that's where their home should be.
Now, Maren Forsberg doesn't have this heritage, but I think it's fair to say that do'ikayt — the power of hereness — is what she's trying to offer the women and marginalized people in her classes who have been excluded from public space: a sense of I belong here.
Crabapple writes extensively about the Labour Bund's athletic club, which embodies this idea of do'ikayt in the body. The club was called Morgenstern, or Morning Star, and it was founded in 1926. It became the most popular sports club in Poland. It was a central part of the Bund's counterculture and served as a socialist counterpoint to the capitalist sporting of the dominant culture. So the Morgenstern Club organized hikes, bike races, gymnastics, and boxing matches. In the summer they rented pools so the kids could learn to swim. In the winter they operated ice skating rinks. In 1927, the club held a mass acrobatic display in a Warsaw circus with hundreds of gymnasts whose bodies moved together like a symphony, as Crabapple puts it. They also published a dedicated sports magazine called the Worker Athlete, which covered the games of the Morgenstern soccer teams and other events — a magazine that would stand out in contrast to the piles of fascist bodybuilding magazines flooding the market.
So this antifascist physical culture carried a strong internationalist ethos as well. Morgenstern athletes participated in the Workers' Olympiads, including the famous 1931 event in Red Vienna, which I'll get to. These were games that focused on world peace and brotherhood rather than nationalist bravado. Back in Poland, the Morgenstern camps and activities would bring together Jewish, Polish, and German children, teaching them that the struggle was democracy versus fascism, rather than nation versus nation or ethnicity versus ethnicity. And Morgenstern also intersected with a youth militia culture that used athletic training to fight nationalist thugs and defend Jewish neighborhoods.
Okay, so I mentioned this Workers' Olympiad in 1931 in Vienna. Well, I came across a great book called Antifascism, Sports, Sobriety: Forging a Militant Working-Class Culture. And it features selected writings by Julius Deutsch, who was a leading figure in the Austromarxist movement — a distinct school of Marxist thought centered in the Austrian Social Democratic Workers' Party, the SDAP, which was functional from about 1920 to 1934.
Now, Austromarxism was a promising movement positioned early on in socialist history by theorists like Otto Bauer as a third way between liberal reformism and revolutionary Bolshevism. They envisioned a full-on cultural movement aimed at creating disciplined new human beings and a new human society. And they implemented it in their democratically won foothold of Red Vienna, where they integrated urban housing, food supply, and transportation reform with a kind of muscular Marxism that united sports, sobriety — because alcohol was a big problem — and paramilitary defense. But in 1934, the Austrian Civil War resulted in the rise of an authoritarian Austrofascist regime, which banned the SDAP and dissolved all affiliated workers' organizations.
So in this little book we have an account from Deutsch about the 1931 Workers' Olympiad. Twenty-five thousand athletes, and the opening ceremony featured four thousand workers enacting the history of the working class. The whole show ended with an oversized capitalist's head being busted into pieces like a big piñata — maybe it was papier-mâché. It makes me think of Bread and Puppet in Vermont.
Now, this event didn't fly national flags or play national anthems, but participants gathered as brothers and sisters under the flag of socialism and competed as comrades rather than national rivals. The event also directly responded to fascist militarization by allowing workers' defense units to perform alongside traditional athletes. So these formations would stage marches and firearms drills, and the overall goal was to show that the worker athlete and the militant soldier for socialism were one and the same. Deutsch describes how this sent a message to Hitler and Mussolini that marching masses can turn into fighting masses if need be. And so the exercises stood in contrast to body-fascist movements rooted in chauvinism and nationalism that used sports to foster national hatreds and prepare for state-led war.
The Olympiad was driven by the Austromarxist belief that a socialist revolution required a corresponding cultural revolution, where the celebration of the culture of the body — Körperkultur — went hand in hand with militancy and of course avoiding liquor. The idea, which developed in practice over about a decade, was to forge a proletariat that was mentally and physically prepared to overthrow capitalism and resist the fascist guard dogs. Bourgeois sport meant individualism, competitiveness, and commercialism. Workers' sport meant collectivism, community, sportsmanship, and health.
They also wanted to fight what Deutsch calls the performance mania of bourgeois sports. Running competitions were replaced by walking tours, swimming races became life-saving courses, and wrestling duels were transformed into collective workouts. They rejected the value of master athletes and meaningless records — like one guy jumping a few centimeters higher than the other. Deutsch wrote about a physical culture that wouldn't just reproduce the brutal and egotistical desire for success found in capitalism.
So much of this sounds so great to me, and it's kind of wild to think of a whole social movement in which the parents are telling their kids that heroic competition isn't the point. Training began as early as age twelve with a group called the Red Falcons, a scouting-style group focused on working-class loyalty — in direct contrast with the Hitler Youth. They got them started really early.
Now here's a last piece from Deutsch. He says that this vision of bodily culture — aimed at the physical and mental liberation of the worker — was also a way to undo the physical deformities caused by factory labor and to rescue workers from the stupor of their exhaustion.
You know, in reviewing all of this, I can't help but think of all the kids I grew up with, and the kids that I know now, who had such conflicted experiences of physical culture — whether in sport or dance or just a gym in a school. I grew up playing baseball in a pretty serious way and I loved it. But even at the height of my baseball career, I wasn't doing half as much obsessive practice as the boys who were into hockey — who had to get to the rink at five-thirty in the morning, who had games every day after school, and who were on the road for some tournament every weekend. But I also remember getting to this fork in the road in the organized baseball I played, where at around age sixteen, if you weren't in a top-tier athletic position, you weren't going to find anywhere formal to play. Because as the age rose, the competitive population narrowed, and that left everyone else just to play pickup ball back where they'd started out as six-year-olds. But that's what happens with a commodified activity that isn't primarily about culture or pleasure or solidarity.
Then I got older, and as I moved into the feminized world of yoga, I would hear all of these stories of girlhoods spent in rigid and obsessive ballet training — and then they would just be excluded once they developed and didn't match the ballerina standard. And some of them carried that discipline into the yoga world and drove themselves to injury.
Now today, our two boys are also kind of liminal to bourgeois sports. They have some friends who are enmeshed in hockey or soccer or rugby to such an extent that those friends have no social time. And at the local YMCA, our older kid is the one who kind of looks like Kurt Cobain running on the treadmill in his street clothes while the jocks pose in front of the mirror with their weights and their broccoli hair. Our younger one homeschools and he's gotten into paintball and now airsoft. And this is wonderful for him because his particular flavor of autism really has to put functional meaning to physical activity. It's not a competition for him — it has to have purpose. And so it really works. And for his birthday, he wanted to gather a gang to go to an indoor airsoft field. And so the older one helped assemble some of his brilliant slacker friends, and everybody played and they loved it and they got BB welts. And they were all so goofy about it — they'd come back from a match and they would say, let's do that again, but without the guns this time. And you know, these are kids who are not into organized sports. And I think it's because our families all know that there's something of a racket going on.
Now I study up on physical culture in Morgenstern and Red Vienna, and I can see that what they built was something of a structure that I and these kids and so many kids that I knew could have played in, because the goals were fun and solidarity. I think there would have been so many who would have loved this, and I think there are so many that would love this now. I can't imagine that we won't get our acts together and make it happen sometime soon.
But I want to end with a piece from my book that addresses the bully culture of mainstream phys ed. And I want to do it as a bit of a tribute to Maren's work in Copenhagen. This comes from chapter six, which is called Standing with Scapegoats.
When I was in junior high school, there was one outsider kid who was physically small, not confident in sports. They wore thick glasses and braces on their teeth. They sat alone at lunch. They were super smart at math and computer programming. And I think this made some of the insiders jealous — because the insiders would hurt and harass this kid at random moments throughout the day whenever they could get away with it. It was like a compulsion. Like if they didn't pick on this kid every few hours, they got hungry.
And so at recess there were violent attacks — from tripping to accidental punching to full-on locking them in their locker. Now, I wasn't an insider, but I participated in two ways that I still feel terrible about. Sometimes I smirked along when the kid got teased or pranked, secretly relieved that I wasn't the target. And sometimes I stood at a distance while the kid was tripped or had their shoes stolen. I could have told them their shoes were in a downstairs toilet bowl soaking in filthy water. But that would have meant two things: it would have been weird to tell them about the soggy shoes without offering to help retrieve them, and that would have been gross. And then helping them would have compromised my own precarious status in relation to the insiders.
But then not doing anything became intolerable.
One day in gym class, all of this constant low-level harassment erupted into a storm of violence. We were playing basketball. Everyone had their own ball to dribble and practice shooting. And then the gym teacher had to leave the room for a few minutes. And suddenly every insider got the same idea at the same time — that it would be funny to hurl all the basketballs at this kid's head. And so the balls started flying. One hit the kid on the shoulder, another hit their back. And I realized that this was dangerous — that while dodging one ball, they could get hit in the face with another. This could break their glasses or their nose.
And something snapped inside.
And I ran toward the kid and shielded them as I pulled them towards the gym door and out into the hallway. And I can't remember what happened after that, but I know that no one got caught and nobody asked the kid if they were okay.
When I stepped up in that moment, every worry I'd had about how I would be isolated if I stood up for this vulnerable person just disappeared. Didn't even occur to me. It was so obvious what I had to do that my mind emptied itself of every mundane concern.
Afterwards, in the quiet hallway, with the kid able to retreat to the classroom, I stood there and felt a flood of warm relaxation roll through my body. I can only think this was because my worry about being excluded was just gone. I wasn't excluded. In fact, I had actually joined another group, for a clear reason. When I went back into the gym, that calm feeling stayed with me, and I knew that the insiders were still activated by that moment. But I didn't care. I just started shooting hoops again.
So an amazing thing can happen when you stand up for a vulnerable person. You can feel more dignity in yourself. And I don't think this is about being a hero, because it's not wrapped up in getting praise — that's not why you do it. No one should throw a parade for you when you do a simple thing. Anyway, I think what happens is that by standing up for a vulnerable person, you stand up for yourself as well.
The great secret — the source of anxiety that fuels this dynamic and the revelation that can free us from it — is that no one is truly an insider. True insidership must always be an impossible ideal. Everyone has some part that makes them odd and isolated, some part that must be hidden. And when you sacrifice insidership to justice and love, that part can finally be accepted.
You don't lose anything. You gain a part of yourself.
Take care of each other, everyone.
