Fostering community spirit through sport ?
Soria, Charlotte
Fostering community spirit through sport ? - 2024.
89
In 1934, the Koch & te Kock company in Oelsnitz im Vogtland (Saxony) initiated a new company social policy, with sports activities helping to politicize its workers, in the service of the National Socialist “People’s Community,” the Reich, and the Führer. This policy was supported by the creation of new forms of companies, the Betriebsgemeinschaften, and their increasing integration with the ideological and eugenic objectives of the Third Reich. But this dynamic was also the result of a specific social milieu, of a company where the managers and a large part of the workforce were, from 1934 onward, active members of the “Movement” (DAF, KdF). It was therefore the product of a high degree of self-mobilization. In this context, the company was transformed through dynamics of exclusion based on ideological criteria, and then inclusion through sport and the importance placed on body care. For those included in the “Community,” participation in sports and leisure activities organized by the “Movement” from 1937 onward had become a special entitlement. And through the collective practice of company sport, for men, and for the women who volunteered, the aim was to create the “people’s body” (Volkskörper). This heuristic analysis closes by raising the question of the production and spread of National Socialist ideology from below, within a social organisation that was a resource for it: a company.
Fostering community spirit through sport ? - 2024.
89
In 1934, the Koch & te Kock company in Oelsnitz im Vogtland (Saxony) initiated a new company social policy, with sports activities helping to politicize its workers, in the service of the National Socialist “People’s Community,” the Reich, and the Führer. This policy was supported by the creation of new forms of companies, the Betriebsgemeinschaften, and their increasing integration with the ideological and eugenic objectives of the Third Reich. But this dynamic was also the result of a specific social milieu, of a company where the managers and a large part of the workforce were, from 1934 onward, active members of the “Movement” (DAF, KdF). It was therefore the product of a high degree of self-mobilization. In this context, the company was transformed through dynamics of exclusion based on ideological criteria, and then inclusion through sport and the importance placed on body care. For those included in the “Community,” participation in sports and leisure activities organized by the “Movement” from 1937 onward had become a special entitlement. And through the collective practice of company sport, for men, and for the women who volunteered, the aim was to create the “people’s body” (Volkskörper). This heuristic analysis closes by raising the question of the production and spread of National Socialist ideology from below, within a social organisation that was a resource for it: a company.
Réseaux sociaux