Body by Weimar argues that male and female athletes fundamentally recast gender roles during Germany's turbulent post-World War I years and established the basis for a modern body and modern sensibility that remain with us to this day. Sportswomen and men embodied modernity - quite literally - in all of its competitive, time-oriented excess and thereby helped to popularize, and even to naturalize, the sometimes threatening process of economic rationalization by linking it to their own personal success stories. Enthroned by the media as the new cultural icons, athletes radiated sexual empowerment, social mobility, and self-determination.
