In this slim but fascinating volume, historian Erik Jensen offers sports as a figurative and literal arena for reconstructing the most basic class, race, sex, sexuality, and national identities. His context is the interwar years of the German Weimar Republic, and he tests his argument in the worlds of tennis, boxing, and track and field. Using a wide range of sources, including the journals of sports federations, sports weeklies, and documentation from the wider mass culture, he presents sports as a social and political opening to groups discriminated against on the basis of race, sex, and sexual identities and as a potent and dynamic means of redefining national character. Far from being a recreational pastime, this book dramatically illuminates sports as integral to forming identities—for individuals, for groups, and for the state.
In the chapter on tennis, Jensen argues that tennis presented a radical challenge to the definition of sex as the presumed distinction comprising men's and women's physical differences. He illuminates how co-ed tennis rocked traditional views of women as physically inferior to men and taught women “that there can be a community with men that lies clearly beyond a lustful sexuality” (p. 25). While we continue to debate whether men's and women's tennis should be played by the same rules, much less whether men and women should compete with each other, in the Weimar Republic tennis was a dramatic example of beliefs in gender equality.
By 1930, Weimar women's prowess at tennis had prompted some to refer to them as a “legion of Amazons,” including the possibility that women “would someday displace men in competitive tennis, just as the female warriors of lore had supplanted men in warfare” (p. 39). Commentators noted that women's “basic ground strokes are almost of the same power as men's, suggesting that male players could not necessarily count on having an advantage even in physical strength” (p. 41). Others contended that “women's competitive tennis is at the same level as the men's game, both technically and tactically” (p. 41). How and why did the idea that women should compete with men in tennis enter Weimar culture? Jensen does not say, but he points out that the elite cosmopolitanism of tennis players provided them with the opportunity to express sexual identity more openly, or at least with a greater fluidity: Tennis allowed men to project a softer masculinity, even as it allowed women to invoke a “harder one” (p. 48).
If it is surprising to find that tennis was a wellspring for beliefs about the equality of the sexes in the Weimar Republic, then the chapter on boxing may provide even greater revelations. Boxing in Weimar Germany was considered appropriate for women as well as for men in both sex-segregated and sex-integrated contexts. Jensen points out that although male boxers were well established by the 1920s, they by no means monopolized the sport; women's boxing also figured prominently in popular culture. The book illustrates posters from 1909 depicting women taking boxing lessons (p. 78), and mentions a 1928 ladies' handbook that encouraged women to box each morning for health (p. 81). In 1926, the sports journal Arena anointed a “goddess of boxing” —who represented not just women's boxing but also the entire, newly elevated sport (p. 93). That same year, a brochure published by the Hamburg-America Line featured pictures of boxing rings available to men and women alike on its ocean liners (p. 95).
Boxing was also promoted by Weimar culture as useful for women's self defense. In addition to opening the door for a “working-class chic among many middle- and upper-class men” (p. 52), boxing allowed women—and gay men—to take on a blue-collar masculinity that provided them with an opportunity to create new personas as aggressive, brutally strong, and capable of defending themselves. Some argued that women were even more suited for boxing than were men because of their “cruel, feline instinct” (p. 62).
Jensen argues that boxing contributed importantly to reestablishing German national character. The ideals of strength and endurance central to boxing supplied an exploitable new source of German identity in the wake of a defeat in World War I that some had attributed to German soldiers' physical weakness. A telling poster illustrated in the book shows German political and cultural heritage as traceable from Goethe to Bismark to Max Schmeling, the latter being a famous boxer (p. 61). In Weimar Germany, boxing, surprisingly, was attractive not just to women but also to intellectuals and performing artists as well. More predictably, perhaps, boxing appealed to Adolf Hitler, whose interest in the sport is traceable to its ability, literally, to embody “the individual capacity to endure suffering in the pursuit of victory” (p. 64), which was at the heart of his version of the national identity.
Track and field sports also provided an arena for reformulating basic Weimar identities. As early as 1919, both men and women were viewed as completely capable of running in track events. Jensen shows a 1926 illustration in a popular magazine of a female runner racing against her male counterpart to a dead heat (p. 110). The assumption that men and women have similar bodies and similar athletic ability, however, can unravel in the context of the political uses of women's reproductive roles. German humiliation in the aftermath of World War I created new demands on women's maternity as a source of national rebuilding and, as Jensen points out, that perspective led to fears that sports exertion could damage reproductive organs, or at least not promote fecundity. Eventually, however, the Nazis chose to view women's involvement in track and field as an investment in motherhood because of its benefit to physical health, while painting men's sports as akin to the martial arts needed by a strong German nation.
This well-written book offers much to learn and enjoy. The author, however, could have provided more political context and, in particular, more about the Weimar political culture as a backdrop for sports. How did sports reflect and, at times, become a metaphor for, the major problems of that time—the emergence of fascist and socialist movements, the Russian Revolution of 1917, the fall of the German monarchy in 1918, and the economic crises that plagued the interwar years? We also could have profited from an analysis concerning how educational law and policy governed the role of sports in schools, and whether those policies were contested. Finally, the author advances sports as a metonym for modernity without directly addressing modernity as a cultural or historical phenomenon, or suggesting how modernity is superior as an explanation for sports culture compared to other historical or political frameworks.
Aside from these few reservations, however, Body by Weimar is an important contribution to the study of sports and gender that uses as a backdrop a pivotal moment in Western history.
