Beach body brief

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By Erik N. Jensen

Summer officially arrived on June 21, and as Americans anticipate lounging by pools and vacationing on beaches, they also look in the mirror and worry about how that midriff will look, once it’s squeezed into a swimsuit.  Despite the country’s rising obesity rates, our society has not grown more accepting of different body types and sizes.  We seem, if anything, to have become less accepting of them.  Women in the 1950s and 1960s, a recent New York Times article noted, didn’t mind a muffin top here or a bulging thigh there, but “Today, it’s assumed that only the lean, muscular, hairless and ab-defined will feel comfortable in a bikini.”

That lean, muscular, and ab-defined standard would have looked completely familiar to women (and men) living in the 1920s, however, and there are some remarkable similarities between the physical ideals of that post-WWI decade and those of today.  Then as now, society placed a premium on achieving streamlined, athletic bodies in men and women alike, and this was perhaps nowhere so true as in interwar Germany.  A 1925 essay in a German magazine foreshadowed the spirit, if not the phraseology, of later Elle and Seventeen articles when it decried the “flabbiness and muscular atrophy” of the unexercised body and instead promoted “slender… taut-breasted girls” as the new ideals.

In an episode that would strike terror in the hearts of every self-conscious beachgoer today, Germany’s very first democratically elected president of the new Weimar Republic, Friedrich Ebert, suffered the humiliation of having an unflattering photograph of himself in a swimsuit published on the cover of Berlin’s leading illustrated weekly on the day of his inauguration in August 1919.  Political wags compared him to a walrus, and, within weeks, satirists from across the spectrum had spliced his image into a slew of mocking (and widely circulated) postcards, posters, and cartoons.  They presented Ebert’s slightly sagging body (the man was 48 years old, after all) as a metaphor for his incapacity to govern the country, portraying him as literally unfit to lead.  The relentlessly mocking tone of those media criticisms makes Us Weekly’s contemporary ridicule of celebrity cellulite seem gentle by comparison.

The quest for a toned body in 1920s Germany, though, was not just about looking hot in a bikini (which, in any event, wasn’t even invented until after World War II).  It was also about counteracting the negative consequences of an increasingly mechanized and sedentary lifestyle.  At the same time, as the economy sped up, business leaders insisted that their workers needed to keep pace.  A modern society, in short, demanded modern bodies.

Here, too, a comparison of the body cultures of Weimar Germany and of our own society reveals striking parallels.  When Business Owner magazine proclaimed in a June 7 article that “workers who engage in regular physical activity perform better at their jobs…which is something that can really help a company’s bottom line,” it built on a body of studies linking exercise to productivity that stretches back nine decades and more.

First Lady Michelle Obama’s promotion of physical fitness and better nutritional habits for Americans is a direct continuation of domestic initiatives that go back to the Eisenhower Administration, but it also a faint echo of the programs launched by the German government in the 1920s to rehabilitate a population that observers at the time saw as weakened by war and made soft by “decadence.”

And, finally, when the New York Post featured then-President-elect Barack Obama’s impressive physique on its December 23, 2008 cover as indicative of his capacity to government (“Fit for Office: Buff Bam is Hawaii hunk”), it simply made the same connection between leadership ability and a chiseled torso that the Berlin press had made in 1919.

In many ways, the “bikini body” that so many Americans are striving for in these first days of summer is simply another articulation of the “Weimar body” of nearly 90 years ago.

Erik N. Jensen is Associate Professor of History at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio and author of Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender, and German Modernity.

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