Berlin Sports: Spectacle, Recreation, and Media in Germany’s Metropolis

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.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Release date: Oct 14, 2024
• ISBN: 9781610758260

Book preview

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Berlin Sports

Spectacle, Recreation, and Media in Germany’s Metropolis

Edited by Heather L. Dichter and Molly Wilkinson Johnson

The University of Arkansas Press

Fayetteville

2024

Copyright © 2024 by The University of Arkansas Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book should be used or reproduced in any manner without prior permission in writing from the University of Arkansas Press or as expressly permitted by law.

ISBN: 978-1-68226-256-6

eISBN: 978-1-61075-826-0

28  27  26  25  24  5  4  3  2  1

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed by William Clift

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48–1984.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Dichter, Heather, editor. | Johnson, Molly Wilkinson, editor.

Title: Berlin sports : spectacle, recreation, and media in Germany’s metropolis / edited by Heather L Dichter and Molly Wilkinson Johnson.

Description: Fayetteville : University of Arkansas Press, 2024. | Series: Sport, culture, and society series | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: Berlin Sports: Spectacle, Recreation, and Media in Germany’s Metropolis presents a series of case studies that explore the history of sports in Berlin from the late nineteenth- to the early twenty-first century against the backdrop of the city’s sharp political shifts, diverse populations, and status as a major metropolis with both regional and global resonance. Focal points include a long-distance equestrian race in the 1890s; the role of media in discourses around urban life, gender, and celebrity from the 1890s to the 1920s; the intersection of grassroots participation and spectatorship with international diplomacy at the elite level in the postwar and divided period; the relationship between recreational associations, immigration, and youth counterculture; and the use of the 2015 European Maccabi Games, an international Jewish sports festival, to grapple with the infamous 1936 Nazi Olympics and cast Berlin as a post-anti-Semitic city. Through these thematic lenses of spectacle, recreation, and media, these essays provide important insights about sport and urban space, Berlin sport as both unique and typical of Germany, and sport as a vehicle through which Germany has engaged with the wider world— Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024014825 (print) | LCCN 2024014826 (ebook)

ISBN 9781682262566 (paperback ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781610758260 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Sports—Germany—Berlin—History. | Sports—Political aspects—Germany—History. | Sports—Social aspects—Germany—History. | Sports—Public relations—Germany. | Sports and state—Germany—History. | Antisemitism—Germany—History. | City and town life—Germany—Berlin—History. | Berlin (Germany)—History.

Classification: LCC GV612.5.B47 B47 2024 (print) | LCC GV612.5.B47 (ebook) | DDC 796.0943/155—dc23/eng/20240703

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024014825

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024014826

Contents

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

Series Editors’ Preface

There is no greater global phenomenon than that of sport. It permeates the lives of countless people, communities, and nations globally. Whether we recognize sport as competitive and bound by formalized rules or the movement cultures of diverse peoples engaged in distinct physical activities, sport abounds in all regions, cultures, and societies throughout the world. Sport is oftentimes celebrated because it has the power to bring people together from dissimilar backgrounds and because, through sport, individuals and groups may achieve extraordinary success, sometimes irrespective of race, gender, sex, sexuality, religion, class, (dis)ability, and identity. Conversely, sport may, too, be criticized due to persistent discrimination in its organizing structures and practices and threats it may pose to marginalized populations and vulnerable territories globally. For these reasons alone, sport is worthy of our scholarly attention and critique.

The Sport, Culture, and Society series aspires to promote a greater understanding of sport and disseminate scholarship and critical discourse related to the powerful influence of sport and its ability to change people’s lives in significant ways. The topical, temporal, and regional focus of monographs and anthologies included in the series is extensive, ranging from ancient athletic traditions, colonial and postcolonial politics, apartheid policies, global sporting events, sport and the law, intercollegiate athletics, urbanization, and athlete biographies. Contributors to the series come from a vast array of disciplines and adopt different methodological approaches, some infusing multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary styles and perspectives. Further, series contributors comprise a diverse group of scholars, including early career scholars and those with established reputations, whose contributions to the Sport, Culture, and Society series are characterized by exceptional and accessible scholarship.

Berlin Sports is an anthology that is both exceptional and accessible. In this collection, coeditors Heather L. Dichter and Molly Wilkinson Johnson underscore Berlin’s important role as a sports metropolis, highlighting that the broader history of sport in Berlin far transcends the well-known and well-studied 1936 Olympic Games. As such, Dichter and Johnson have assembled a team of expert contributors from varying disciplines and career stages to produce the first book-length study to explore the history of sport in Berlin from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. The focus of Berlin Sports is indeed comprehensive. As such, the editors have creatively organized the book. First, recognizing Berlin’s complex political and cultural history over the 130 years covered in the collection, the chapters are presented chronologically, beginning in Imperial Germany, then moving through the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, Cold War division, and the post-reunification era. Second, due to the wide range of sports disciplines showcased throughout the collection, including football (soccer), equestrianism, basketball, tennis, boxing, skateboarding, and international sporting contexts, the editors draw readers’ attention to the three core themes that emerge throughout the collection: sporting events as spectacle; recreational sports, community, and identity; and media and celebrity. Further, individual authors creatively and adeptly weave together primary and secondary source materials in each chapter to present Berlin’s lesser-known sporting histories. Importantly, all authors draw from the photographic archive to construct new narratives to help shape understandings of past events, places, and people. Although each chapter assumes a unique focus, surveying distinct and important questions in Berlin’s sporting history, collectively, they work together to demonstrate that the 1936 Olympic Games were by no means the first nor the last time Berlin assumed such prominence in the international world of sport.

David K. Wiggins and Christine O’Bonsawin

Acknowledgments

The University of Arkansas Press has for many years published within its Sport, Culture, and Society series a subseries of books on sport in an American city. We would like to express our gratitude to both David Wiggins and Christine O’Bonsawin, the series editors, and D. S. Cunningham, editor at the press, for their interest in expanding this subseries to a city outside of the United States. With that support, Berlin Sports was born.

The communication technology that became more widely adopted during the global pandemic allowed two scholars—who had been introduced via email as graduate students over twenty years ago but still have not met in person—to speak regularly to produce this book. An open call for papers provided a wealth of new and exciting scholarship on sport in Berlin, and it has been a pleasure to work with all of the authors who contributed chapters to this book: Barnet Hartston, Alec Hurley, Erik Jensen, Will Rall, Jeffrey Jurgens, and Kai Reinhart. We also thank Annemarie Sammartino who, as a scholar of urban history but not of sport, agreed to write the conclusion, which reflects on several themes within the volume as a whole.

We are grateful for the guidance of everyone at the University of Arkansas Press and especially of the anonymous reviewers, who provided valuable suggestions. We also thank all the contributors’ institutions that provided funding to enable the inclusion of images.

Heather L. Dichter and Molly Wilkinson Johnson

August 2023

Berlin sports landmarks:

(1) Olympic Stadium

(2) Teufelsberg

(3) Breitscheidplatz

(4) Poststadion

(5) Sportpalast

(6) Herthaplatz

(7) Friedrich Ludwig Jahn Sportpark

(8) Gençlikspor Soccer Club

(9) Tempelhofer Feld

(10) Seelenbinder Hall

(11) Estrel Hotel

INTRODUCTION

Berlin as Germany’s Sporting City

HEATHER L. DICHTER AND MOLLY WILKINSON JOHNSON

One of the most iconic stories of sport in Berlin, and of the Olympic movement more broadly, is that of African American athlete Jesse Owens winning four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics, colloquially known as the Nazi Olympics or Hitler’s Olympics. Aided by the overwhelming media presence in Berlin for the Olympic Games as well as by the stills and videos from Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, the story of Jesse Owens—and the Berlin Games that formed its backdrop—has yielded documentaries, biographies, academic analyses, and children’s books galore, both in the United States and internationally. The politicization of the Berlin Olympics, their racial politics, and the art and architecture of the Reichssportfeld (the elaborate sports complex and Greco-Roman stadium that stand as the largest intact architectural site from the Nazi era remaining in Germany) have been thoroughly explored. The association of Berlin with the 1936 Olympic Games is so strong that, to this day, any discussion of Berlin as an Olympic host city remains fraught with the heavy history of that event.¹ The enduring legacies of the Berlin Olympic Games even shaped the narrative framing of Germany’s other Olympics, the 1972 Munich Games.² Yet, Berlin’s role as sports metropolis far transcends the 1936 Olympic Games, and this collection brings the broader history of sport in Berlin to light.

While much of the city’s sporting experience has mirrored developments in other major cities and across Germany, Berlin’s unique political history has also contributed to striking differences. Since the advent of modern sport in the late nineteenth century, the city of Berlin has been central to five different political regimes identified with four different political ideologies: imperial, democratic, fascist, and communist. The creation in 1871 of a unified German Empire with Berlin as its capital coincided with the development of modern sport in the second half of the nineteenth century. Gymnastics and sport associations emerged as integral to the urban environment, with Berlin slated to host the (canceled) 1916 Olympic Games. With the end of World War I and the demise of the German Empire, Berlin became the capital of Germany’s first democratic government, known as the Weimar Republic. The plethora of political parties that characterized the Weimar Republic was mirrored in the country’s sport landscape, with people joining sport clubs based on similar political and religious divisions found in German society. With Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and Berlin’s transformation into the capital of the fascist Third Reich, both recreational and elite sports were centralized into Nazi organizational structures and subordinated to Nazi racial ideologies. With the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945, the four victorious Allied powers divided and occupied Germany, ultimately leading to the creation of two separate German states for half a century: the democratic and Western-aligned Federal Republic of Germany, created from the American, British, and French zones and including West Berlin, and the communist German Democratic Republic, created out of the Soviet occupation zone and with East Berlin as its capital. At the height of the Cold War, sport became a primary arena for the symbolic struggle between East and West Germany. West Berlin also absorbed many of the Turkish-born guest workers who migrated to Germany beginning in the 1960s. By the 1970s, Berlin was the world’s second largest Turkish city after Istanbul, and by the early 1980s, non-Germans constituted 12 percent of Berlin’s entire population.³ In 1991, the reunified German government voted to move the national capital from Bonn to Berlin, unleashing a flurry of architectural and urban development projects for the capital city and even an unsuccessful bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games. Twenty-first century Berlin remains a locus of immigration, not only from Eastern Europe and Russia but also the Middle East and Africa, with an estimated one-third of all Berlin residents in 2022 coming from a migrant background.⁴

Berlin’s status as a large, diverse metropolis and cultural center—an identity that coexists with its position as a capital city for much of the period from the late nineteenth century to the present—has fostered an urban identity that in many ways transcends its Germanness and presents particularly fruitful possibilities for the study of modern sport in the urban environment. As David Clay Large argues, from the Wilhelmine era through the Cold War, many Berliners and other Germans have viewed Berlin, both affirmatively and with some degree of ambivalence, as a city that belonged more to the world than to Germany.⁵ Berlin has often drawn the attention of cultural critics and students of the city and of modernity itself. As Sabine Hake writes, Weimar culture displayed much metonymic slippage between Weimar Berlin and modern metropolis.⁶ Postwar divided Berlin continued to hold global significance, with the Berlin Wall functioning, according to Janet Ward, as a synecdoche for the entire East–West line dividing Germany, Europe, and the world.⁷ Since German reunification in 1990, Berlin has carefully cultivated its status as a global city. The 1990s featured many public debates and high profile architectural and urban planning engagements with Berlin’s Nazi and communist pasts, and in the 2000s Berlin followed a successful urban marketing plan designed to draw creative and economic entrepreneurs, as well as tourists who wanted to visit historic sites such as the 1936 Olympic Stadium.⁸

Berlin Sports explores the history of sport in Berlin against this backdrop of the city’s sharp political shifts, diverse population, and status as a major metropolis with both regional and global resonance. This volume is the first book-length study to explore the history of sport in the city of Berlin from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first century. Scholarship has focused on sport more broadly in Germany or has been limited to a narrow time period or topic, including publications on the 1936 Olympic Games, the Cold War, the socialist World Youth Festival of 1951, and Berlin’s bids to host the 1968 and 2000 Olympic Games.⁹ With focal themes of spectacle, recreation, and media, this volume contributes to three areas of historiography: sport and urban space, Berlin sport as both unique and typical of Germany, and sport as a vehicle through which Germany has engaged with the wider world.

Similar to scholarship on the many US cities explored in the University of Arkansas’s Sport, Culture, and Society series, this volume examines how sport—whether local sport clubs rooted in associational life, elite level sport, spectator sport, or international sporting events—both reflects and informs urban landscapes and civic identities in a dynamic city.¹⁰ Indeed, European cities like Berlin share much in common with North American cities when it comes to sport as entertainment within the urban experience, such as the construction of large stadiums or the creation of ski jumps and hills in urban indoor arenas to provide lessons for people who living far from mountains.¹¹ In 2012, however, Thierry Terret and Sandra Heck lamented in a special issue of The International Journal of the History of Sport that minimal work had been done on sport and urban space in continental Europe, and in the decade following their special issue there has not been much further scholarship on this topic.¹² Considering multiple sports and time periods—through the challenges of playing football (soccer) among rubble and broken public transportation, the shifting ethnic composition of Berlin’s neighborhoods, or the public spaces of the modern concrete jungle where young skateboarders could develop their skills and tricks—reveals the extent to which sport and the urban landscape shape one another in a single European city, just as they do in so many US cities.

Sport in Berlin, however, unfolded within a different context from sport in US cities in several striking ways. Berlin’s political history makes the city’s sporting developments unique relative to other cities in Germany and elsewhere around the world.¹³ In many American cities, including those studied thus far in the University of Arkansas Press’s series, individual athletes, professional teams, and university sports are integral to the cities’ sporting identities.¹⁴ In contrast, Berlin features no hallmark sport, team, or annual event, as five political regimes, wartime destruction, and four decades of division have fostered an ever-changing landscape of teams, allegiances, and venues, even as the desire to play and watch sport continued unabated across these political watersheds. The politics of memory have also shaped Berlin’s sporting history, which is particularly evident in the site of Berlin’s Olympic Stadium. The stadium complex remains a frequently visited sport heritage site in Berlin because of the 1936 Nazi Games.¹⁵ Unlike in other European cities, where the professional football team’s global prominence makes their modern stadium one of the city’s top tourist destinations (such as Camp Nou in Barcelona or Allianz Arena in Munich), the Olympic Stadium complex’s main draw for visitors remains its historic past and the fact that it is a large and intact example of Nazi architecture rather than its role as Hertha BSC’s home ground or as the venue of any recent international sporting event.

Finally, this volume demonstrates that Berlin played an important role within Germany’s sporting traditions with local, national, and global implications that extend far beyond the infamous 1936 Olympic Games. As the country’s most prominent sports destination, with some of the best venues and home to numerous elite athletes and media outlets, Berlin provided many opportunities for Germany to engage with the wider world through sport. The city’s sports writers, who were often athletes or sport officials themselves, contributed to and shaped both national and international discourses about gender, Orientalism, Taylorization, and modernity. Large sporting events that took place in Berlin contributed to international perceptions of the city, and the 1936 Olympic Games were by no means the first or last time that Berlin assumed such prominence in the international world of sport. Like other sport venues around the world, the Olympic Stadium and its larger complex has continued to host major international events, including numerous FIFA World Cups (1974 and 2006 men’s, 2011 women’s) and the 2009 track and field world championships. Coverage of international sporting events that have taken place in Berlin, along with attention to sport celebrities based in or visiting Berlin, shape the spectacle of sport within Berlin and influence how future athletes and fans—from anywhere in the world—engage with and perceive both the city of Berlin and country of Germany.

Through a series of case studies, Berlin Sports showcases the broad and diverse history of sport in Berlin from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. It 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 the postwar period and the years of German division, exploring both grassroots sports participation and spectatorship, as well as elite sports, as a medium of international diplomacy. Next, it analyzes recreational sport associations within the context of immigration and youth counterculture, before concluding with an examination of the 2015 European Maccabi Games, an international Jewish sports festival through which Berlin sought to grapple with the infamous 1936 Olympics and showcase contemporary Berlin as a cosmopolitan and multicultural city. Taken together, all of these sporting endeavors reveal the rich and varied sporting culture in Berlin.

Historical Overview of Sports in Berlin

Since the early nineteenth century, Berlin has played an integral role in physical culture and sport in the German lands. The German gymnastics movement (Turnen), led by Friedrich Ludwig "Turnvater" Jahn, began at the Hasenheide, to the south of Berlin, in 1811 during the Napoleonic Wars. Gymnastics associations, known as Turnvereine, were strongly allied with burgeoning ideas of German nationalism and masculinity and spread across the country throughout the nineteenth century, and in 1861 Berlin hosted the second Deutsches Turnfest.¹⁶ University fraternities in the nineteenth century adopted the military and aristocratic practice of fencing duels, which also reinforced German ideas of masculinity, honor, militarism, and nationalism.¹⁷

Following Germany’s 1871 unification, gymnastics and later sports associations remained centers of civic life, recreation, and political and social identity in Berlin, the capital city of the new nation-state.¹⁸ Accompanying Berlin’s industrial growth, gymnastics and sports associations tied to working-class culture joined the city’s recreational landscape by the 1890s. Reflecting the growing city’s diversity, many gymnastics and sports associations of this era organized along confessional lines, including Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish clubs, such as Bar Kochba Berlin, Germany’s first Jewish gymnastics club, founded in Berlin in 1898.¹⁹ Newspapers, including sports pages, were integral to the booming metropolis, with B.Z. am Mittag unveiling its first sports supplement in 1905. Berlin’s sports media covered recreational sports as well as the many sporting events that attracted spectators and fostered interest in sports celebrities.²⁰

As British sports began to make inroads in Germany, the Berlin sport scene evolved.²¹ The variety of sports played in Berlin, and Berlin’s importance more broadly, led the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to select Berlin to host the VI Olympic Games in 1916, although World War I led to their cancelation.²² Sport further exploded in Berlin during the Weimar years of the 1920s. The city hosted numerous sporting events and celebrated sports stars and their extraordinary feats from the German Grand Prix to world-champion boxer Max Schmeling.²³ Spectator sports were integral to Berlin life in the 1920s, inspiring not only the sports pages but also the creative and intellectual work of Berlin’s intelligentsia. The fifth movement of Walter Ruttmann’s famous film Berlin: Symphony of a Big City (1927) prominently featured spectator sports, including six-day cycling races.²⁴ Weimar feuilleton writers, such as cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer, engaged with mass sports and sports spectacle as a magnifying lens that helped them process modernity and the modern metropolis.²⁵ The interwar period was also a golden age of women’s sport in Germany just as it was in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. Women’s sports teams and individual athletes drew large crowds and extensive media coverage.²⁶

Sport during the Third Reich was entirely subsumed by Nazism. Sport clubs, like other associations in Germany, had to adapt to Nazi structures and racial policies as part of the process of Gleichschaltung (coordination). Socialist and communist sport clubs closed, and Jewish athletes could only participate in sport in the late 1930s via the few remaining Jewish sport clubs.²⁷ Sport and physical education played a key role in Nazi paramilitary efforts as Germany prepared for future war. Adults found recreational athletic activities through the Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) organization.²⁸ Younger Germans participated in sport through the Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth) and Bund deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls), which emphasized sporting activities with a martial aim, like boxing, or team sports to foster a sense of (Nazi) community for boys; sports for girls focused on their role as future child-bearers through activities such as rhythmic gymnastics.²⁹ During the Third Reich, physical education increased in importance within the school curriculum as well. Acknowledging the centrality of sport to the Nazi state, the Allies implemented a policy explicitly controlling sport during the first year of Germany’s postwar occupation, thereby marking sport as an arena requiring denazification measures.³⁰

After World War II, Berlin stood at the center of the Cold War, with political division shaping recreational sport and sport competitions. In some ways, the two Germanies’ sport systems were interrelated, especially when athletes from both countries had to compete for a single German Olympic team before the IOC allowed both German states to have completely separate teams beginning in 1972. In 1963, there was even a short-lived proposal for West Berlin and East Berlin to host the 1968 Olympic Games.³¹ For the most part, however, sport on both sides of the Berlin Wall followed different trajectories. Recreationally, West Berlin saw the revival of many prewar athletic clubs and the creation of new associations that encompassed established sports such as tennis and football as well as new sports such as skateboarding. As in the pre-Nazi years, West Berlin’s sport clubs operated autonomously of the state as independent associations. In contrast, East Berlin’s recreational sport landscape featured an array of centralized sport clubs tied to East Germany’s industries