In many American cities, individual athletes, professional teams, and university sports are integral to the cities’ sporting identities. Berlin, in contrast, features no single hallmark sport, team, or annual event. Five political regimes, wartime destruction, and four decades of division instead fostered ever-changing teams, allegiances, and venues. Yet, the desire to play and watch sport continued unabated across these political watersheds.
Berlin Sports: Spectacle, Recreation, and Media in Germany’s Metropolis explores the history of sport in Berlin from the late nineteenth- to the early twenty-first centuries against the backdrop of the city’s sharp political shifts, diverse populations, and status as a major metropolis with both regional and global resonance.
This book begins with a long-distance equestrian race in the 1890s and continues with the role of media in spectacle, celebrity, urban life, and gender from the 1890s to the 1920s.It then turns to grassroots sport participation and spectatorship as well as sport diplomacy at the elite international level during the postwar period and the years of German division. Next, it explores recreational sport associations within the context of immigration and youth counterculture. It concludes with the 2015 European Maccabi Games, an international Jewish sports festival through which Berlin sought to grapple with the infamous 1936 Olympics and showcase Berlin as a cosmopolitan and multicultural city. Taken together, the book’s scholarly essays on all of these sporting endeavors reveal the rich and varied sporting culture in Berlin and yield fresh insights into spectacle, recreation, and media in the city.
Heather L. Dichter is associate professor of sport management and sport history in the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University in Leicester, England. She is the author of Bidding for the 1968 Olympic Games: International Sport’s Cold War Battle with NATO and editor of Soccer Diplomacy: International Relations and Football Since 1914.
Molly Wilkinson Johnson is associate professor of history at the University of Alabama in Huntsville where she teaches German and European history. She is the author of Training Socialist Citizens: Sports and the State in East Germany.
“Berlin Sports is a fascinating and multi-faceted collection of essays on Germany’s capital of sport from the Empire to the present. Dichter, Wilkinson, and their expert contributors convincingly show that Berlin’s sporting history cannot be reduced to the Nazi Olympics of 1936. Students and aficionados of modern sport and culture will find this engaging collection essential.”
—Kay Schiller, co-author of The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany
“By telling the story of Victorian-era equestrians and Cold War skateboarders, Turkish footballers and Jewish Olympians, this vividly written, empirically rich, and theoretically sophisticated volume shows us that there was more to sport in Berlin than the 1936 Olympic Games, offering dynamic new perspectives on the character and contradictions of German modernity.”
—Eric Kurlander, author of Modern Germany: A Global History
Berlin Sports Series Editors Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Berlin as Germany’s Sporting City
Heather L. Dichter and Molly Wilkinson Johnson
1. A Failed Showcase: The Great Berlin-Vienna Distance Ride of 1892
Barnet Hartston
2. Celebrity and Spectacle: Adolf von Guretzki’s Influence on Berlin’s Early Twentieth-Century Sports Writing
Alec Hurley
3. Power/Play: Sports, Journalism, and Contested Modernity in Weimar Berlin
Erik Jensen
4. Rebuilding the Beautiful Game: Occupation, Football, and Survival in Berlin, 1945–1946
Will Rall
5. United Sport in Divided Berlin: Negotiating the 1964 All-German Olympic Team Trials Venues
Heather L. Dichter
6. Beyond Integration: Amateur Football among People of Turkish Backgrounds in Berlin since the 1960s
Jeffrey Jurgens
7. Californization and Sport as Lifestyle: The Development of Skateboarding in West Berlin, 1970–1990
Kai Reinhart
8. The 2015 European Maccabi Games: The Ambiguities of Historical Reconciliation in Berlin
Molly Wilkinson Johnson
Conclusion: The History of Sport as a History of Berlin
Annemarie Sammartino
Selected Bibliography
Contributors
Index
Sport, Culture, and Society is a series from the University of Arkansas Press that publishes monographs and collections for academics and general readers in the humanities and social sciences. Its focus is the role of sport in the development of community and the forging of individual, local, regional, and national identities.
