It is hard to overestimate the role of the Czech gymnastic association, Sokol, in the formation of Czech national identity. Andreas Luh's monograph makes it very clear that the same can be said about its Sudenten German counterpart, the Deutsche Turnverband, revealing the Bohemian Lands as a space where the body, movement, and politics are intricately linked. This book offers a thorough examination of this grassroots force behind the identity formation and unification of Sudenten German politics of the 1920s and 1930s. Luh describes the emergence of the German gymnastic association out of the nineteenth-century nationalist struggle, emphasizing its relationship with the younger but larger Czech rival, on the one hand, and—on the other—the position of the movement in the broader German physical culture movement, especially concerning the so-called “Aryan paragraph.”

The main focus of the book is the transformation of the gymnastics movement that occurred under leadership of Konrad Henlein at the very end of the 1920s. For most of the twenties, the Deutsche Turnverband remained on the platform of Georg von Schönerer's Pan-German racist nationalism, opposed to party politics, “negativist” toward the new Czechoslovak state, and steadily losing its youth membership. With Henlein's new leadership, the movement of the 1930s adopted an ideology of a distinct Sudeten Volkstum (inspired by Viennese philosopher Othmar Spann), which was to be educated, trained, and protected by the Deutsche Turnverband.

In contrast to the traditional narrative of Sudeten German politics, Luh shows that this shift included an “activist” position toward the Czechoslovak state and rejection of Anschluss with the Reich. It must be noted, however, that the author fails to acknowledge that Henlein's support for a “slawisch-deutsch-magyarisch-polnisch-ruthenischen Vielvölkerstaat” was framed by an idea of German-dominated Mitteleuropa. The book concludes with the failure of this project in 1938, which was caused not only by pressure from Hitler and the movement's own Nazi radicals, but also by the hard-line Czechoslovak leadership. The very final chapter deal with the Gleichschaltung of the Deutsche Turnverband. Luh convincingly argues against seeing Henlein's movement merely as a Nazi inspired “fifth column” and instead portrays it as a movement firmly rooted in the indigenous völkisch tradition and ethnic conflict of the Bohemian Lands. This is not to say that Luh is trying to whitewash the movement. He makes very clear its antidemocratic, anti-Semitic nature, the role of the Führerprinzip, and active participation of many members of the Deutsche Turnverband in the hierarchy of the Nazi regime.

This book published in 2006 is a reprint of the original 1988 version; and despite its undeniable strengths, the resulting twenty-year gap is unfortunately rather visible—both literally and figuratively. The most serious shortcoming is the dependence on sources available in West Germany in the mid 1980s, including the publications of the movement, especially the journal Turnzeitung des Deutschen Turnverbandes, and personal accounts. Not only were crucial archival sources telling the Czech side of the story omitted, but the archival materials of the Deutsche Turnverband, especially of its regional centers, were also not explored. Such a broader archival base would allow a narrative that goes beyond the intellectual and organizational history of the movement to explore its everyday dimension, as well as the dynamic relationship between the German movement and the Czech majority.

Moreover, the book suffers from the fact that it was written before the Czech-German historiographical debates of the 1990s, which focused on the question of what role the Sudenten German minority played in the destruction of Czechoslovakia (and vice versa). Despite these limitations and despite the appearance of more recent studies on the subject (for instance the collection Češi a Němci ve světě tělovýchovy a sportu / Die Deutschen und Tschechen in der Welt des Turnens und des Sports, edited by Marek Waic [Prague, 2004]), Andreas Luh's monograph remains the most detailed study of the Deutsche Turnverband and represents a gateway to the study of the identity building process among the Sudenten Germans.