ABSTRACT
The main argument of this chapter is that the histories of Nordic countries in the 19th and 20th centuries – as a hybrid – are located within two European traditions; that sport has made a valuable contribution to this hybrid; and that sport as a wordless activity exacerbates a non-martial nationalism which must be distinguished from ordinary ‘hot’ nationalism, so often criticized. On the one hand stands the tradition that a classical European main road goes from
reason to civilization, namely, that the critical intelligentsia in France and England, provoked by absolutism, advanced a series of Enlightenment ideas that, by means of educational and Enlightenment activities, spread down to the arsenal of ideas of the rest of the social classes and spawned the French Revolution with its promises of freedom, equality and fraternity; principles that later – with variations – achieved universal validity in Western Europe. On the other hand stands the history of Germany and Eastern Europe, which since the
1800s testifies to an entirely different sequence of historical development than that outlined above. Here it is not just a question of a lack of liberalism, but rather direct terror and tyranny, with dictatorships being the rule rather than the exception. German historians have thus operated with the concept of the German Sonderweg to designate this other tradition in Europe. Fundamentally, it is dominated by an anti-rationalistic current that was first expressed in soulful romanticism with its sense of the irrational and that which was not rationally justified. This tradition cultivated a radical revolt against the clear light of reason and instead celebrated the phenomenon of Dämmerung,1 which designates a nostalgic longing for holistic communities in which controlled equality in the shape of communitas, rather than unimpeded freedom, is in focus in Germany. As has been said about Germany in the 19th century, nowhere in Western Europe was the population regarded so much as subjects and so little as citizens.2 Particularism rather than universalism was the focal point in Germany, inasmuch as the organization of society was still rooted in the feudal estate society. In Germany it was not the universalistic liberté, égalité, fraternité of civilization that was at a premium, but rather the ability of the state to create machtgeschützte Innerlichkeit, that is, the individual’s intense desire to realize his or her subjective core potential.3
