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Reviewed by:
  • Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender, and German Modernity
  • Yvette Florio Lane
Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender, and German Modernity. By Erik N. Jensen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. ix plus 184 pp.).

Weighing in at around 140 pages of text, Erik N. Jensen’s Body by Weimar examines the field of competitive sport, and the uses to which it was put in furthering social and cultural goals during the tumultuous years of the Weimar Republic. In this slim volume, Jensen argues that organized sport has played a much larger part in the formation of both individual identity and national consciousness than has been reflected in the historiography of modern western societies. In turn, this lack of scholarly interest among historians and academic history departments has resulted in the fracturing of sport history from the broader discussion. Jensen’s study is a corrective, and with it he suggests useful ways in which historians might glean insights about time and place through a critical analysis of sport, much as others have fruitfully analyzed the visual arts, film, literature, and the many mass-cultural products of the period.

Most of Jensen’s arguments rely on printed sources such as the journals produced by the national sport associations, the popular sports press, and, to a lesser degree, general readership newspapers and magazines and their feuilletons, as well as other cultural sites in which sport is highlighted. An extended analysis of the impact and influence of these sources would be welcome in order to gain a clearer understanding of the degree to which sport discourse penetrated different groups and how, and why, this changed over time.

Jensen builds on recent studies that address the body as a site on which were mapped German notions of nationalism, scientific and technological progress, and the physical and mental well-being of citizen and state. The crux of this study is the way in which gender, class, and physical culture were employed in the postwar rebuilding of the defeated nation. Jensen aims to demonstrate that, “The catalyzing power of sports in general, as the Weimar media regularly commented, bore a disproportionate responsibility for the new roles that men and women played in postwar society (84).” With the creation of celebrity-athletes and the emphasis on competition–along with the attendant influence of experts and quantitative evaluation–sport emerged as an integral component in Weimar’s much-contested project of modernity.

While the study focuses on the years between the republic’s birth in 1918 to its demise in 1933, the temporal analysis actually extends both before and beyond those political markers. Implicit is an argument for continuity, yet Jensen does not overstate his case. Rather, he allows the reader to appreciate the full range of conflicting messages and contradictory beliefs that confronted the German population during this period.

The book is structured around three popular sports—tennis, boxing, and track and field—and examines the gendered aspects of each. As he shows, it was in tennis where women could shine in a way not possible in other fields of play. The phenomenon of female tennis stars highlighted the outstanding abilities of women as professional athletes, while at the same time it had a chilling effect on tennis as a sport through which traditional masculine identities were formed. Women’s success in tennis inverted the pattern of male dominance in the gender hierarchy, while boxing and track and field produced different tensions. [End Page 586]

Despite gathering much attention as spectacle, boxing was not considered a serious or respectable professional sport for women. For the most part, women’s boxing remained little more than a sideshow, although as a very visible reminder of the postwar upheaval of tradition and of women’s increasing—and destabilizing–independence, it hit its mark. On the other hand, the newly eroticized and objectified image of the male prizefighter indicated a significant shift. Women–and men–gazed on boxing icons such as Max Schmeling in ways that more seriously threatened gender ideologies and more thoroughly embraced modernity’s tenets of rationalization and perfectibility than the novelty of women’s boxing enthusiasm.

Finally, track and field events, Jensen argues, provided the ground in...

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