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Open-air gymnastics: Even for younger children, the gymnastics movement urged health through movement - at least in this it looks amazingly modern (pen lithograph around 1820)
Photo: bpk
The Hasenheide has changed a lot since Friedrich Ludwig Jahn was last here.
And he wouldn't like it: the park area, once a royal hunting ground for small game, is now in the middle of the city between Kreuzberg and Neukölln.
Walkers, skateboarders and joggers share the area with drug dealers.
Minarets of the Sehitlik Mosque on Columbiadamm tower above the trees;
a Hindu temple is under construction.
The Jahndenkmal is still there - something out of date and not infrequently sprayed.
In the days of the "gymnastics father" there was more forest here and only a few places for excursions.
In 1810 Jahn had just started a teaching job at the Plamann Institute in Berlin's Unterwasserstraße.
Napoleon had moved into Berlin four years earlier, the "Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation" was history - but Jahn and others were working on his resurrection.
The then 32-year-old moved to Hasenheide with a horde of volunteers every Wednesday and Friday.
It must have been a strange sight: Jahn, with a billowing beard, probably sometimes wore the "old German skirt" he had designed himself, black and made of coarse linen.
He taught "strength and agility exercises" in the park: "Walking, running, jumping and carrying are free exercises, as free as the air.
The state can demand this from everyone, from the poor, the wealthy and the wealthy, ”wrote Jahn in 1810 in his main work“ Deutsches Volksthum ”.
Sport, according to the message, is not for self-optimization, but for the state or the nation.
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