by Ian Buruma
Coubertin was a tireless lecturer, but he had a difficult time convincing headmasters of French lycées to adopt English games. He did, however, make at least one convert. The headmaster of the Ecole Monge in Paris, M. Godart, was so impressed that he tried to teach his pupils to play cricket (how successfully, I don’t know). Godart, naturally, joined Coubertin’s committee. But one cricket fan was hardly enough. The problem was that many members of the committee remained unconvinced by the Arnoldian theme. They were for physical exercise, to be sure, and wished to combat decadence, but not necessarily by playing cricket or football. The other great European power, Germany, offered an alternative that appealed more to French conservatives, particularly those of a militarist stamp.
Less than a century before, German patriots, in an effort to rebronze their youth after being humiliated by Napoleon’s armies, came up with mass calisthenics, or Turnen, as a desirable form of exercise. This had been the brainchild of a rather unappealing figure named Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778–1852), also known as the Turnvater. Turnfather Jahn despised Jews and loathed the “educated class,” as well as the Frenchified aristocracy, whom he blamed for undermining the true German Volksgeist. On the occasion of his seventieth birthday, a mass of healthy gymnasts sang an ode to the Turnfather, which gives us a rough idea of what they were about:
We know nothing of masters and slaves
But follow our leader with joy.
We shall fly our stormy course,
While sticking to the planned order.
See how our violent power rages!…
Mass calisthenics, stretching and straining in unison, swinging from rings and jumping the pommel horse were not just “natural,” “fresh,” “healthy” pursuits; they expressed the virtues of the German Volk, as defined by romantic patriots: storminess and order, raging power and the Führerprinzip. One might draw a rough political distinction between this form of German drill and the British games, which Coubertin himself compared to the difference between Sparta and Athens. The former promotes unity, military discipline, and collectivism, while the latter encourages competition, individual enterprise, and a preoccupation with rules and laws. Naturally, Coubertin wanted France to inherit the spirit of Athens. He may have been conservative, but he was not a militarist. Sports, in his opinion, should produce free men, not soldiers. But most of his colleagues who were at all interested in the uplifting properties of physical exercise thought the German variety lent itself better to rebronzing than the British fashion for chasing balls around a field. And who could blame them? Memories of Sedan were fresher than those of Waterloo.
Coubertin’s faith in Anglo-Saxon sportsmanship never wavered, however, even though it was sometimes severely tested. He thought it would be a good idea to have a French team take part in the Henley Regatta. This was not so easily arranged, for, as Coubertin admitted, “the British were jealous of their nautical insularity.” Furthermore, their rowing men were “aristocrats in every sense of the word.” This was not true of the French, who had a less exalted view of amateurism. Many of their rowers were paid money to race; worse than that, some were manual workers. Nonetheless, after some deft diplomacy involving the French ambassador in London, Coubertin persuaded the British Amateur Rowing Association to accept a French team, and he made very sure it didn’t contain a single manual worker.
In 1893, a train draped in red, white, and blue pulled into Henley with its French team on board. The English crowd, in striped blazers and white ducks, greeted the French with three cheers and a flutter of straw boaters. However, the race itself put a nasty dent into international goodwill. It became known as the “crise du rowing.” Coubertin followed the contest from the judges’ boat. The French team was in a comfortable lead when, suddenly, on purpose or not, the gentlemen of the Thames Rowing Club knocked the French boat into a buoy and went on to win. The French were furious. After some hesitation, they decided to protest. Coubertin then gave them a lecture in his best after-dinner style: good sportsmanship, Tom Brown, not victory but the game itself, and so on. The protest was dropped, but the French rowers muttered amongst themselves about typical “British cant.” The visit to Henley was not repeated the following year.
All this was discouraging. It might have impaired Coubertin’s faith in sports as an instrument of international goodwill. In fact such setbacks spurred him on toward ever-grander schemes. His aims went far beyond the always delicate relations between Britain and France anyway. In 1889, he had visited the United States on a government mission to study American university education. He discovered to his dismay that German calisthenics was popular in the New World. The battle between Athens and Sparta raged in America too. At a conference of physical education experts in Boston, Coubertin witnessed a demonstration of collective exercises by the boys of the Boston German Turnverein. He sat through this display of Spartanism in polite silence and then made a speech in his most florid after-dinner style, extolling the régime Arnoldien. He quoted William Gladstone’s “testimony” and added that every Englishman was imbued with Arnold’s ideas, and indeed that Arnold’s reforms had been one of the most significant events in modern English history. His speech was received without enthusiasm.
If the spirit of Tom Brown was soon to merge with Coubertin’s projection of ancient Greece onto the modern scene, there was one other event that enhanced the British influence on his Olympic dream. It came to him one year after the American trip, in Much Wenlock, a village near the Welsh border, roughly halfway between Birmingham and Shrewsbury. Since 1849 this has been the charming venue of the annual Much Wenlock Olympic Games. The founder was an eccentric squire named Dr. W. P. Brookes, doctor and magistrate. Dr. Brookes, whom Coubertin later described as “a whiskered old bird with medals pinned to his chest,” had heard of Coubertin’s plan to hold a Congress on Physical Training at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition and invited him to the Much Wenlock Games of the following year.
Dr. Brookes was a man after Coubertin’s heart: “an English doctor from an earlier age, romantic and practical at the same time.” The two men shared an interest in games, pageantry, patriotism, ancient Greece, and combating unwholesome thoughts. The Games were an English bucolic fantasy out of Thomas Hughes, mixed with a dose of Hellenism. Festivities began at a local inn, where a herald with white feathers in his hat arrived on horseback. This marked the start of a procession to the “Olympian Field” (the local cricket ground). Members of the committee led the march through narrow cobbled streets, decorated with flags with Greek inscriptions. The worthies were followed by the Wenlock band, schoolchildren singing hymns and casting flowers from their baskets, and finally by mounted yeomen bearing the Wenlock association badge on their uniforms. To Coubertin it was a vision of heaven: a world of pomp and English sports governed by fine committee men.
Apart from playing a game of cricket, the Wenlock sportsmen, a mixture of farmers and squires, ran, jumped, and stuck pigs, “tilted” heavy bags of metal from their horses, and pegged tents. The winners kneeled in front of the local landowner’s daughters, kissed their hands, and were crowned with laurel leaves. Distinguished guests and people of high rank were honored by the ceremonial planting of oak trees named after them. Coubertin was delighted to be honored in this manner. Champagne was poured onto his tree from a silver cup, which was passed from mouth to mouth by the officers of the day. Banners of red, white, and blue were hoisted. And the Wenlock band struck up a recognizable version of the “Marseillaise.”
Only in England …, thought Coubertin, enraptured by the scene. Thomas Hughes might have lamented the love for the native earth of Berkshire, as railways and empires drew young men into the wider world, but here in Shropshire, people were still local as well as national patriots. “The Anglo-Saxon race alone has succeeded in keeping up the two feelings,” wrote Coubertin, “and in strengthening the one through the other.” To be sure, Dr. Brookes had had ambitions beyond Much Wenlock. He had hoped to export his Olympic idea, to Athens ideally, b
ut although he once managed to persuade King George of Greece to present a silver cup to the Wenlock association, his games never got farther than Birmingham.
Coubertin, on the other hand, finally succeeded in organizing the first modern Olympic Games in Athens. It had taken an astonishing amount of committee work, after-dinner speaking, entertaining of grandees, battling against German gymnasts, and cajoling of important ladies and gentlemen, titled and untitled, to support his ideal. At times it must have seemed as if only Coubertin still believed in it. The International Olympic Committee, founded in Paris in 1894, with much fanfare, toasting, and Olympic hymn singing, was in the beginning little more than a grand masthead with noble intentions. Gallons of claret, tons of roast meat, and mountains of sorbets were consumed before the Games in Athens could finally begin in the spring of 1896.
Even though the jealous Greeks did everything to keep Coubertin out of the public eye, he had reason to feel satisfied as he moved into the Hotel Grand-Bretagne in Athens. For Coubertin had won on most fronts. There would be more athletics than gymnastics. The Games would be strictly for amateurs. The number of German athletes (or French, for that matter) was small. Athens had never looked more splendid. Crowned heads and sporting gentlemen had gathered from many countries, and the spirit of ancient Greece was poised to lead the world to a splendid future of brotherhood and peace.
One of the spectators was Charles Maurras. He had been touring around his beloved classical ruins, jotting down ill-tempered remarks about the degeneracy of modern Greeks. He expected nothing good to come from the Games and deplored the cosmopolitan confusion of races. As he wandered through the crowds, Maurras was infuriated by the barbaric Americans, who behaved “like big children” and chattered in their ghastly “patois.” He asked himself (or rather the readers of his account) who benefited from this cosmopolitanism? Why, he said, the Anglo-Saxons of course: “That least cosmopolitan of peoples, that most chauvinistic of races …” For, after all, “didn’t the jargon of their games do far too much to promote a language with which the planet is already infested?” It irritated him no end that he had to converse with a Greek in English, but he was happy to report that he massacred the language with his French pronunciation.
And yet, as soon as the Games began, Maurras’s mood got better. The weather was very fine, and the air smelled of cypress and oleander. He even began to change his mind about the effect of this extraordinary spectacle. In fact, he concluded, this cosmopolitan festival would not result in a deracinated melting pot after all; on the contrary: “… when different races are thrown together and made to interact, they repel one another, estranging themselves, even as they believe they are mixing.” A cosmopolitan gathering, he thought with deep satisfaction, will become “the joyous battlefield of races and languages.” For ethnic conflict, not some wishy-wishy notion of human brotherhood, is the way of nature. Besides, there was another benefit to be derived from the Games: the Latin peoples will become aware of the absurdity, the insolent ambitions, and the tyranny of the Anglo-Saxon race.
One does not have to be a Maurrasien and hate Anglo-Saxons, liberals, and Dreyfusards to see flaws in Coubertin’s nobly inspired vision of universal brotherhood. International festivals, cultural exchange programs, Boy Scout jamborees, folk-dancing competitions, singing contests, world expositions, and sporting tournaments have done little to preserve the peace. Some sporting events (soccer in South America) have even caused wars, though perhaps not to the extent Maurras was hoping for. Torchlight parades, flag waving, and rituals of universal brotherhood have not resulted in mutual understanding. And even if they had, it wouldn’t have done much for peace. Wars are not the result of our lack of cultural or historical understanding of other nations. They start for political reasons, to preserve a tyranny at home, or to conquer land or resources. Dreamers of a world without politics, of a world ruled by good intentions and religious sentiments, are vulnerable to the political forces they seek to ignore. Such, alas, was to be the fate of Pierre de Coubertin and his International Olympic Committee.
In 1936 it was Hitler’s turn to host the Olympic Games, in Berlin. He was, in a perverse way, the perfect man to carry out Coubertin’s vision. Hitler also had classicist fantasies. He thought the Germans were descended from the blond and blue-eyed ancient Greeks. His capital city, to be renamed Germania, would be a classical metropolis with acres of Doric columns and vast temple domes. No one before Hitler had managed to replace party politics with pageantry, pagan rituals, and torchlight parades on such a grand scale. His was the moral order from hell, and his ways of rebronzing the Germans after their humiliation at Versailles caused many to doubt the wisdom of staging the Olympic Games in his capital. The I.O.C. had no such doubts.
The president of the I.O.C. was a tall, slim, dapper notable of Coubertin’s kidney, a Belgian named Comte Henri de Baillet-Latour. The Americans, in particular, insisted that he visit Germany in 1935 to check on the rumors that all was not well, especially in race relations. The count, who had worked briefly with the Prince of Wales and listed racing and hunting as his chief recreations, spent two days in Berlin, where he had a meeting with Hitler. He was satisfied that allegations of anti-Semitism were old hat. Opposition to the Berlin Olympics, he said, was political. The I.O.C. was nonpolitical. And criticism of Hitler’s Germany was based on assertions “whose falsity it has been easy for me to unmask.”
There is a photograph of Comte de Baillet-Latour, wearing a frock coat, a pair of elegant gloves, a gray top hat, the I.O.C. chain, and a foolish grin, as Hitler receives a bunch of flowers from Gudrun, the five-year-old daughter of Carl Diem, another Hellenist, and the organizer of the Berlin Games. The “Horst Wessel Song” and “Deutschland über Alles” roared out from the crowd, and thousands of arms shot up. Banners were unfurled, the Olympic bell tolled, and the athletes came marching into the stadium. The French raised their arms, the British did not, for they decided the Olympic salute was too close to the Nazi one and wished to avoid misunderstandings. After the German team was greeted with another rousing chorus of the “Horst Wessel Song” the crowd went quiet. And the recorded voice of Coubertin, quivering with age (and perhaps emotion), was played over the loudspeakers. It was his special message for the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games: “The important thing at the Olympic Games is not to win, but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not to conquer, but to struggle well.” It went on for a long time in a similar vein, none of it objectionable, all of it grotesquely out of tune with the time and place. Coubertin had become as absurd as “King Henri V” brooding in his South Tyrolean home.
The point here is not that Coubertin, or Baillet-Latour, or the other gentlemen Coubertin once called the “disinterested high priests of the Olympic idea” were proto-Nazis. Whatever their politics (or lack of them), Nazis they were not. Maurras’s ethnic chauvinism was closer to Nazism than Coubertin’s sporting visions. But Coubertin’s quasi-Platonic brand of Anglophilia, with its worship of the muscular English gentleman, the Corinthian sportsman, the spiritual aristocrat who rules a world without politics by dint of his moral superiority, cultivated by cricket and Dr. Arnold, is dangerously naïve. Ideals of unity unchecked by democratic politics lead to tyranny. Nostalgia for aristocratic rule, untouched by the selfish materialism of common men, is easily manipulated by malevolent demagogues. Some very grand English gentlemen found their ways to Hitler and Göring during the 1930s, not always in bad faith. The ease with which Hitler turned Coubertin’s Olympic dream into a Nazi festival was the final consequence of a noble vision that took Tom Brown’s School Days too seriously.
CHAPTER
NINE
WAGNERIANS
MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER HERMANN REGENSBURG ARRIVED in England on the afternoon of January 8, 1882. It had been a rough Channel crossing: for three hours out of six, he had been sick; the lavatories were flooded; most of the space along the railings was taken. He still felt groggy as he emerged from Charing Cross Station in the eve
ning and caught his first whiff of the “sickening, stinking air” of London. Nevertheless, that same night, after enjoying a hearty dinner at his elder brother Adolph’s house, he headed straight for the German Gymnastic Society—the Turnverein—on Paneras Road, behind King’s Cross Station.
Hermann Regensburg, from Frankfurt am Main, had come to London to find a job. Adolph, originally Adolf, but now simply “Ad,” had already established himself there as an increasingly prosperous stockbroker. He lived in a fine Nash house on Regent’s Park. In the drawing room was a full-length portrait of his wife, Frances, painted by a fashionable society artist. Frances was born in Budapest. She spoke English in a husky drawl. Her clothes were very expensive and a little overelaborate. She liked to be known to her friends as “Lady Ad.”
It was only natural for Ad to take his brother to the Turnverein. They were, after all, German Jews, and the place to meet other Germans was the Gymnastic Society. I doubt that they spent any time turning. Hermann joined the society’s Literary Section, which specialized in amateur theatricals—mostly German farces, some in the original language, some translated into stilted English. Although he soon learned to speak English precisely and became a British subject (in 1887), a Tory, and a member of the Junior Constitutional Club, Hermann never lost his German tastes. His favorite amusement was Skat, a three-hand card game. And in a good mood, surrounded by family in his Hampstead home, with apfelstrudels all round, and a fine cigar smoldering readily at hand, he would lean back and recite random lines from old comic sketches, popular in the Frankfurt of his youth, chuckling softly to himself.