Abstract:This essay analyzes gymnastic displays of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Czechs and Germans through the lens of mass performance. Modern gymnastics arose, first in Germany then across Europe, within the context of widespread social and political fragmentation in the nineteenth century. The essay argues that gymnastic training and performance techniques parallel shifts in the sociopolitical conception of the people in the age of mass politics. This evolution—from voluntary consolidation of individuals to centralized control of populations, from numerous persons to a uniform mass—took embodied form in the development of mass performance techniques. German and Czech gymnastic movements, the Turners and the Sokols, serve as paradigmatic examples of a vast modern phenomenon that, while largely forgotten today, was wildly popular from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Mass gymnastics represents one attempt to stabilize unstable social or national identities, part of an emerging discourse about equality, national identity, and the body politic.

中文翻译：

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邦联与控制：大众体操与捷克和德国的机构政治

摘要：本文从大众表现的角度分析了19世纪和20世纪捷克和德国人的体操表演。在19世纪广泛的社会和政治分裂背景下，现代体操开始兴起，首先在德国，然后在整个欧洲。这篇文章认为，体操训练和表演技术与大众政治时代人们的社会政治观念的转变平行。这种演变-从个人的自愿合并到人口的集中控制，从无数的人到统一的群众-在群众表现技术发展中体现了形式。德国和捷克的体操运动（Turners和Sokols）是巨大的现代现象的典范，这些现代现象在今天已被人们广泛遗忘，从19世纪初到20世纪中期，它在当时非常流行。大众体操运动是企图稳定不稳定的社会或民族认同的一种尝试，是有关平等，民族认同和身体政治的新兴论断的一部分。