High Performance in Elite Sports: A Cultural History of Medicine, Psychology, and Society during the Weimar Republic and Nazism, 1918-1945

This project develops a new approach for the understanding of sports in a modern industrialised society. Taking Weimar and Nazi Germany as a case study, it investigates the cultural significance of sports performances by looking at the meaning of performance concepts in medical, psychological, and popular discourses. The goal is to determine how narratives about sporting performance fostered individual performance orientations among Germans that undermined loyalties of social class. In this respect, the project will provide valuable insights into Nazi attempts to propagate the German racial community as a performance-oriented community (Leistungsgemeinschaft).