Training Socialist Citizens: Sports and the State in East Germany (Studies in Central European Histories, 44)

Book info: Training Socialist Citizens: Sports and the State in East Germany (Studies in Central European Histories, 44) (Hardcover, 248 pages) – Brill, 2008. Language: English.

Offering a counterbalance to previous scholarship on elite Olympics sports and doping scandals, this study analyzes how the East German government used participatory sports programs, sports festivals, and sports spectatorship to transform its population into new socialist citizens. It illuminates the power of the East German dictatorship over its population, the ways that citizens participated in, accommodated to, and resisted state goals, and the government’s ultimate failure to create eager socialist citizens. It also highlights the orchestration of participation in modern dictatorships, the role of mass participatory sports as both a valuable political tool and a popular leisure activity, and elements of continuity and change in twentieth-century German history. Editorial Reviews Review "...eine stringente, kreative und sprachlich klar präsentierte Studie..."
H-Soz-u-Kult, Uta Andrea Balbier, German Historical Institute, Washington D.C.

'Molly Wilkinson Johnson has produced a welcome addition to a growing area of scholarship, the history of sport, which itself must be seen in the broader context of a burgeoning literature on the academic study of sport. [...] this book certainly makes a solid contribution to this area of research [...] and it will be of interest to anyone working in the history of sport and the study of state citizen relationships in dictatorship more broadly.
Jonathan Crix, Slavic Review, vol. 69, no. 1 (Spring 2010) About the Author Molly Wilkinson Johnson earned a Ph.D. in Modern European History from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 2003. She is an assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.