Recordings from year 2: Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit #1

In 2024 and early 2025 we worked our way through a silent film from 1925: Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit created at the famous Ufa studios in Berlin, this documentary gives a cross-section of German physical culture in the mid-twenties – from outdoor living, to dance, to sport to that fascinating and slippery topic: gymnastics, and so much more.

We took our time combing through this film in five-minute increments, looking at the fascinating, sometimes bizarre, sometimes heroic and sometimes frightening characters behind the important developments in physical culture at that time. We looked back through the century before the film was made, and to the century ahead. As it turns out, the practices, and the stories that infuse them, are still very much with us today.