UNLOCK 33.1 Antifascist Body Culture: A Brief History

I wanted to trace the century-old roots of Maren Forsberg's antifascist self-defense work, so I dug into three overlapping histories.

First: the German Bund's use of Körperbildung — body education through eurythmics — as both a resistance philosophy and a cover for anti-Nazi organizing.

Second: the Jewish Labour Bund's Morgenstern athletic club in interwar Poland, which united boxing, gymnastics, swimming, and internationalist youth camps under the banner of do'ikayt, the right to belong wherever you are.

Third: the Austromarxist Workers' Olympiad of 1931 in Red Vienna, where 25,000 athletes gathered to demonstrate that the worker athlete and the militant soldier for socialism were one and the same. I close with a passage from my book on bully culture in mainstream phys ed, and what it can feel like to step in and stop violence.

Follow Maren Forsberg on Instagram and find her self-defense workshops through her page.

Mark Roseman, Lives Reclaimed: A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany

Molly Crabapple, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund

Julius Deutsch, Antifascism, Sports, Sobriety: Forging a Militant Working-Class Culture, ed. Gabriel Kuhn (PM Press)

Michael Ondaatje, The Cat's Table

Bread and Puppet Theater

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