This volume focuses on the modernist and avant-garde engagement with workers’ sport events that were organised or were planned to be organised in the cities of Central Europe and the USSR in the period of 1920–1932: Frankfurt am Main – Vienna – Moscow – Prague – Budapest – Berlin. During the 1920s and 1930s, two organisations of workers’ sport operated: the Lucerne Sport International/Socialist Workers’ Sport International and the Red Sport International, which held the socialist Workers’ Olympics and the communist Spartakiads, respectively. These events were not aimed at cultivating national victories and individual athletic records, but at mobilising workers for the class struggle and at creating new culture for the working class. This book examines the visual propaganda of the Workers’ Olympics and the Spartakiads expressed through paintings, sculptures, prints, illustrations, posters, postcards, photomontages, photographs, films, theatre and architectural projects. It emphasises the significance of workers’ sport for the artistic and social changes within a utopian project of a new culture, as visualised by the modernist and avant-garde artists, including Varvara Stepanova, Gustav Klucis, and Otto Nagel. This volume is of great use to students and scholars of the history of sport, art history and cultural history in interwar Europe and the Soviet Union.

This study challenges the rose-tinted view of the interwar period in Romanian history, which is often judged against the darkness of almost five decades of Communist rule. Romania, like several of the states of Eastern Europe, emerged from the First World War as it had entered it, as a predominantly agricultural country, and one of its major problems was the condition of the peasantry. This volume’s focus is the drive to improve that condition, on the collapse of democracy, and the search by Romania’s leaders for strategies to secure the state, to assert the country’s independence, and to maintain its territorial integrity in the face of the threat to the European order posed by two totalitarian systems, represented by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. By examining recent scholarship, this volume provides the most up-to-date account of Romania’s predicament in the interwar years. Romania, 1916–1941 is a useful resource for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars interested in foreign policy, politics, society, internationalization and late development in interwar Central and Eastern Europe.

This rich, in-depth exploration of Dada’s roots in East-Central Europe is a vital addition to existing research on Dada and the avant-garde. Through deeply researched case studies and employing novel theoretical approaches, the volume rewrites the history of Dada as a story of cultural and political hybridity, border-crossings, transitions, and transgressions, across political, class and gender lines. Dismantling prevailing notions of Dada as a “Western” movement, the contributors to this volume present East-Central Europe as the locus of Dada activity and techniques. The articles explore how artists from the region pre-figured Dada as well as actively “cannibalized”, that is, reabsorbed and further hybridized, a range of avant-garde techniques, thus challenging “Western” cultural hegemony.

Across a range of disciplines, urban morphology has offered lenses through which we can read the city. Reading the urban form, when conflated with ethnographic studies, enables us to return to past situations and recreate the long-gone everyday life. Urbanscapes – the artefacts of urban life – have left us the story portrayed in the pages of this book. The notions of time and space contribute to depicting the Jewish-Polish culture in central Poland before the Holocaust. The research proves that Jewish society in pre-Holocaust Poland was an example of self-organising complexity. Through bottom-up activities, it had a significant impact on the unique character of the spaces left behind. Several features confirm this influence. Not only do the edifices, both public and private, convey meanings related to the Jewish culture, but public and semi-private space also tell the story of long-gone social situations. The specific atmosphere that still lingers there recalls the long-gone Jewish culture, with the unique settlement patterns indicating a separate spatial order. The Author reveals to the international cast of practitioners and theorists of urban and Jewish studies a vivid and comprehensive account. This book will appeal to researchers and students alike studying Jewish communities in Poland and Jewish-Polish society and urbanisation, as well as all those interested in Jewish-Polish Culture.

Practiced and watched by billions, sport is a global phenomenon. Sport history is a burgeoning sub-field that explores sport in all forms to help answer fundamental questions that scholars examine. This volume provides a reference for sport scholars and an accessible introduction to those who are new to the sub-field.

Every five years from 1955 to 1985, mass Czechoslovak gymnastic demonstrations and sporting parades called Spartakiads were held to mark the 1945 liberation of Czechoslovakia. Involving hundreds of thousands of male and female performers of all ages and held in the world’s largest stadium—a space built expressly for this purpose—the synchronized and unified movements of the Czech citizenry embodied, quite literally, the idealized Socialist people: a powerful yet pliant force directed by the regime. This book explores the political, social, and aesthetic dimensions of these mass physical demonstrations, with a particular focus on their roots in the völkisch nationalism of the German Turner movement and the Czech Sokol gymnastic tradition. Featuring an abundance of photographs, Spartakiads takes a new approach to Communist history by opening a window onto the mentality and mundanity behind the Iron Curtain.

This collection of essays assesses the significance of sport for the European avant-garde in the first half of the 20th century from an international and interdisciplinary perspective. It shows the extent to which avant-garde art and culture was shaped by the dynamic encounter with modern sports.

In this richly illustrated catalogue of the ANS exhibit, "Full Circle: The Olympic Heritage in Coins and Medals," the author examines the role that numismatic material relating to both the ancient and modern Games has played in social and political contexts. In addition to the introductory essay, the catalogue provides a brief overview of the history of the Games and discusses over 130 objects, including ancient Greek coins, vases and sporting equipment, as well as modern medals, coins, and Olympic ephemera.

This unique and comprehensive collection brings together material from leading German scholars to examine the role of sport and PE in Germany from a range of historical and contemporary perspectives.