Historical work on the foundations of movement systems is always interesting, but a significant acquisition by UBC Library Rare Books section two years ago opened up new opportunities for kinesiology historians to investigate aspects of body culture during Vienna’s interwar years. The library acquisition included a large and eclectic collection of photographs and documents (mostly in German) that had belonged to Hanne Wassermann, a Jewish gymnastic teacher who grew up during Vienna’s ‘golden autumn’. New developments in radium research, psychology, physiology and anatomy as well as gynecology led to a particular fascination for the body and the flourishing of a variety of functional gymnastic systems at that time.
UBC Kinesiology professor, Patricia Vertinsky, and graduate student, Aishwarya Ramachandran, have been tracing the development of Wassermann’s ‘gymnastic methode’, and her contributions to early developments in massage therapy and daily gymnastic systems, through a scattered collection of documents involving gestalt psychologists and celebrated physicians and scientists. Forced to flee Hitler in 1939, Wassermann eventually arrived in Vancouver in 1943 where she began to teach gymnastics and massage therapy to Vancouver’s Jewish elite. Her involvement in physical culture systems in Vancouver over the next several decades will be the focus of the next phase of research into the Wassermann collection.
You can read about the development of Wassermann’s Gymnastic ‘Methode’ in Vienna in Vertinsky and Ramachandran’s recently published first exploration of Wassermann’s activities.