Overview

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.

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9781682262566

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Reviews

""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 The1972 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

Author Information

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.

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