SPORT 1913 - 2013

part two_CHAPTER 6

TABLE 1: Amount of individual members of the member unions of the LSI/SASI in 1931.

than a half of them came from the German ATSB (Arbeiter-, Turn- und Sportbund) alone ( See Table 1, page 99) . Since the aims of the working class sports movement were complementary to the goals of the international working class movement, it is clear that the efforts of the international work- er sport movement, too, were antithetical to those of the Olympic movement and interna- tional unions of different branches of sport. Therefore it strove to shake itself free from the signs of the degeneracy of sports – national- ism, chauvinism, commercialism, profession- alism, one-sided emphasis on setting records – all those negative features it had observed in bourgeois sporting life. The worker sport move- ment wanted to bring up the working class youth of the world in the spirit of peace and international solidarity separately from the bourgeois sport movement so that the above- mentioned fringe phenomena of bourgeois sporting life would not also spread to the do- main of the working class sport movement. The international worker sport movement remained isolated from the Olympic move- ment (IOC). In order to retain the cultural in- tegrity of the worker sport, the LSI/SASI estab- lished an Olympic movement of its own which organised three summer and three winter games in six years’ interval (Nitsch 1984, 113– 137): 1925 Frankfurt/Main, Germany and Sch- reiberhau, Germany; 1931 Vienna, Austria and Mürzzuschlag, Austria; 1937 Antwerp, Belgium and Johannisbad, Czechoslovakia.

The fourth Workers’ Olympic Games in 1943 were granted to Helsinki. That these games could not be realised because of the Second World War is certainly not as well- known as the cancelling of the 1940 IOC’s Olympic Games in Helsinki. Along with competitive athletics, these games placed great emphasis on mass perfor- mances and cultural events. An effort was made to turn physical exercise – as the Ger- man labour sport leader Fritz Wildung empha- sised – into the working class’s new interna- tional language which would be capable of breaking down all language barriers and in- creasing the international solidarity of the working class (Wildung 1930, 117). The Workers’ Olympic Games were mag- nificent sport events although the participa- tion was not as large as in the IOC Olympic Games. For instance, the first winter games in Schreiberhau 1925 hosted only four nations: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany and Fin- land participated whereas sixteen nations sent their athletes to the first IOC winter games in Chamonix in 1924. For the workers’ summer games 1925 in Frankfurt/Main, elev- en nations participated while the IOC summer games in Paris 1924 counted 44 participating nations. Also, the standard of the results was in the IOC games in most sport disciplines better than in the Workers’ Olympic Games. Still it is necessary to remember that it was not the aim of the worker sport movement to compete with the bourgeois sport in records. On the contrary, according to the worker sport

Country

Amount of individual members

Germany

1 211 468 293 700

Austria

Czechoslovakia

– Czechoslovakian

136 977 70 730 30 257 21 624 20 000 16 795 12 909

– Sudetenland

Finland

Switzerland

Denmark

Netherlands

Belgium

France

6 000 5 000

Alsace-Lorraine

Poland

– Polish – Jewish – German – Ukrainian

7 000 4 369

938

1 925

Norway

10 000 5 171 5 000 4 250

Lithuania

United Kingdom

Palestine

United States of America

697

Romania Yugoslavia

2 500 1 800 1 750 1 600

Hungary Estonia

Total

1 872 460

99