The Turner Clubs of Old Wien

There are moments in life
when you suddenly realize that
your body will no longer cooperate
for certain physical activities.

And yet you valiantly persist
despite the inevitable awkward distress. 

 

Today I present a set of postcards
from one of my favorite artists,
Fritz Schönpflug,
who playfully illustrates
those foolish moments we all know.

 

 

 

 

The first postcard shows a portly gentleman in midair as he trips up on the coming down part of his attempted pole vault. His companions gasp in alarm. Fritz Schönpflug (1873–1951) was a native of Wien (Vienna), Austria and was a self-taught artist who created thousands of caricatures like this that gently make fun of Viennese life during the last decades of the Hapsburg Empire.

 

This particular postcard was sent from Leiden, Netherlands on 30 May 1921, three years after the collapse and dissolution of the Austrian monarchy, but the illustration dates from at least 12 years earlier.

 

 

 

 

 

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In this next card a group of men struggle with lifting weights in a gymnasium. One unbalanced fellow looks like the same stout man in the first card. The signature of Fritz Schönpflug in the lower right corner has a number 909 which signifies that he created it in 1909. But the card has two red stamps from the postal service of Česko-Slovensko or Czechoslovakia which not a nation then and only became one in 1918 following the breakup of the Austrian Empire at the end of World War One. 

 

The postmark is 13 March 1920. One the back the publisher B.K.W.I. provides a series number 705 – 1 which indicates that this card is the first in the series.

 

 

 

 

 

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Here the ginger-hair man with Pince-nez glasses (called Zwicker in German or Kneifer or Klemmer in southern Germany and Austria) from the previous card has an unfortunate collision with a gymnastic horse. It's unclear if he will succeed. The postmark is unclear but the 5 heller stamp of Emperor Franz Joseph dates it before 1916 at least. On the front and back is a lengthy message written in a most curious script. It doesn't resemble German or any of the other languages of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire that I know, so I believe it is a secret code that uses characters known only to the recipient. It must have puzzled the postman.

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In this last postcard the big man returns on another gymnasium apparatus where he has become wedged between the parallel bars. His fellow gymnasts help to extricate him from a rather embarrassing predicament. The writer dates the card 26.6.14. which coincidentally was two days before the tragic assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina by the Bosnian-Serb student Gavrilo Princip.

The back of the card has a short message and signatures of several people. Besides the common green stamp of the Emperor Franz Joseph there is an unusual extra stamp  that provides a perfect clue to explains the activity that Schönpflug was lampooning in this series. 

 

 

The stamp has a caption, Deutscher Turnerbund ~ German Gymnastics Federation and cost 2 heller. The patriarchal man with the long beard pictured on the gray stamp is Johann Friedrich Ludwig Christoph Jahn (1778–1852) the founder of the German gymnastics movement. This was likely a special stamp produced to benefit the organization. Perhaps the signatures are members.

 

A native of Brandenburg, Prussia, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, as he was commonly called, was an educator and nationalist in the early 1800s when Napoleon's French army was conquering much of Europe including many German principalities. After serving in the Prussian army he moved to Berlin in 1809 and became a teacher. His deep concern with Napoleon's harsh dictatorship inspired Jahn to create a gymnastics program to restore the physical and moral health of his countrymen. He started his first Turnverein ~ gymnastics club in Berlin in 1811. These clubs soon became popular all around the Germanic states for their liberal political ideas as well as physical culture. 

 

In 1813 Jahn rejoined a special volunteer unit of the Prussian army called the  Lützow Free Corps commanding a battalion and working in the Prussian secret service. After the defeat of Napoleon Jahn was appointed a state teacher of gymnastics, and he helped form the first student patriotic fraternities. His political activities advocating for principles of liberal democracy in the Turnverein associations led to his arrest and imprisonment by  Prussian authorities and a crackdown on the movement. When he was finally released in 1825 he was barred from Berlin and forbidden to teach gymnastics.

 

 

Nonetheless Jahn wrote a number of works, one of which was a treatise on gymnastics where he promoted the use of parallel bars, rings and the high bar. This next illustration came from one of his books and shows what the first pommel horse looked like in international competitions. Note that it has no head but it does have a tail.

 

 

Illustrations of pommel horse exercises
from an English translation of Treatise on Gymnasticks
by Friedrick Ludwig Jahn, 1828
Source: Wikipedia

The Turnverein movement became very popular with German men in the 1840s and many Turners, as they were called, took part in the 1848 German Revolution.  Though the revolution failed, the ideals of the Turnverein unions were taken to America and other countries by German emigrants. German gymnastic clubs were established in many American cities with large populations of Germanic people.

 

One German Turner club was in Milwaukee and a photo of its gymnasium shows a group of men dressed very like Schönpflug's turners sitting astride various gymnastic equipment.

 

Gymnastics room in the National Gymnastics Hall at Milwaukee, ca. 1900
Source: Wikipedia

 

In the early 1900s, there were several Turnverein unions in Wien. One of the oldest was called the Floridsdorfer Turnverein which was established in 1865. On its 40th anniversary in 1905, a group of twenty strong and agile young men and women formed an impressive assemblage for a photograph. It's not impossible that Fritz Schönpflug saw them and was inspired to sketch a postcard series of them in action. 

 

 

40th anniversary of Floridsdorfer Turnverein, Wien, Austria in 1905
Source: ftv1865.clubdesk.com

 

What I enjoy about Fritz Schönpflug's colorful cartoons is the way he depicts the lively and colorful people of Wien. His pen and paintbrush captures motion, and emotions too, that were impossible in that era for a camera to pickup. He had a talent for observing human actions and imaging absurd situations that made people laugh then and now a century later.

 

 

 

The Turnverein movement was very progressive for its time and included women. Not surprisingly Schönpflug could not help creating a series on the female gymnasts too. Here is one postcard showing a poor woman entangled on the rings who has got her knickers in an uncomfortable twist. Her coach is not impressed.

This card was sent from Sainte-Maxime, a commune on the south coast of France, on Friday, 25 Novembre 1910. Though it has a canceled French stamp on the front, there is no address on the back but instead a very long message. The block letters allowed me to make a translation but it is not as interesting as it looks. Suffice to say it reads in part:

                                        My dear Suzanne,                                                                        
The time flies, here we are at the end of the year, because, in a month on the same date, we will celebrate Christmas tasting the goose, and here in Provence, the flat guinea fowl renowned and dear to the "Mocos."                        ....
.....Goodbye, waiting for your news, I send a thousand affectionate kisses,
                        Louis Valette                                                                                    

 

I can almost hear Suzanne giggle when she first opened the letter and saw the card. There are more postcards in this series that I have yet to find, so once I add them to my collection readers may expect a reprise on the silly Turners of old Wien. 

 

To finish here is a film
from the Oregon Historical Society
entitled Grunts and Groans
It is an amateur silent film produced by Herbert Miller in 1933
 of the Portland, Oregon Turnverein Gymnasium
of which Mr. Miller was a member.
This short mockumentary is pretty silly
but no doubt it would have made Fritz Schönpflug
laugh to see his characters come to life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is my contribution to Sepia Saturday
where springtime has everyone jumping.