Greetings from the gymnastics festival, 1908/1912

Gruß vom Turnfest 1908/1912 IMG

This early 20th-century postcard features a portrait of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778–1852), the father of gymnastics, framed in a semicircle of oak leaves at the top center and his famous gymnastic motto, "Frisch, Fromm, Froh, Frei." To the left of the image is a gymnast in front of the Imperial Eagle; below is the gymnasts' greeting "Gut Heil!" and the gymnasts' coat of arms. The national symbolism emphasizes gymnastics as a German movement and its national-liberal political orientation. The postcard, sent in 1912, was probably issued for the 1908 gymnastics festival (Turnfest) in Frankfurt am Main.

Frisch-fromm-froh-frei – Gruß vom Turnfest, color picture postcard, Germany, undated [1908/1912], used 06.03.1912, unknown artist, publisher Gg. Jmfang, Frankfurt a.M.-Süd, Schulstr. I.; source: Historical picture postcards, University of Osnabrück, collection of Prof.. Dr. S. Giesbrecht, http://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:gbv:700-2-0006891-2, Creative Commons Some Rights Reserved Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/deed.de.