Champions of Weimar republicanism draped the postwar democracy in the mantle of poets and thinkers, harking back to the classic achievements of a nation of culture. But even as they did so, the citizens of the republic were going mad for prizefighters, revue girls, and recordsetting sprinters. Observers of the times framed the rising currency of and fascination with performing bodies as both symptom and catalyst of important shifts in interwar German life – and modernity generally. Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit (Paths to Strength and Beauty), which premiered on 16 March 1925 at Berlin's opulent Ufa-Palast am Zoo cinema, occupies an interstice between the dizzying expanse of Körperkultur (body culture) and those who sought to define it.

Paths to Strength and Beauty strikes today's eye as an unintentionally comic melange. One grins at the documentary images of the modern body beautiful, chuckles at the contrived sequences that admonish viewers to kickstart fitness regimens, and nearly guffaws at the hackneyed reenactments of grand physical achievements of ages past (classical Greece in particular). Weimar-era critics, however, took this film as an impressive and important part of an emerging body culture, the seriousness of which is reflected in the attempts of the authors quoted above to bring gravity to the discourse of the physical and rescue the body from its equation with superficies. “Unfortunately, body-culture is still too neglected in Germany, unlike in other nations,” wrote one reviewer in the Reichsfilmblatt. “This film will open the eyes of many people and show them the debt they have incurred to themselves.”