Die Konstruktion des öffentlichen Sports und seiner Helden in der Tagespresse der Weimarer Republik by Swantje Scharenberg (review)

Swantje Scharenberg explores how newspapers shaped the popular images of six successful athletes in Weimar Germany. The six athletes—swimmer Ernst Vierkötter, sprinter Hubert Houben, race car driver Rudolf Caracciola, soccer player Johannes Sobek, boxer Hans Breitensträter, and fencer Helene Mayer—represent a nice cross section of the 1920s sports scene. Their athletic careers intersected with such diverse issues as professionalization, industrial automation, media hype, diplomacy, foreign trade, gender, and national identity. Parallel to examining how the sports pages covered the six athletes, Scharenberg also traces the emergence of sports reporting itself as an important component of media discourse. Professional sports journalism emerged in tandem with professional sports in the Weimar Republic, and former athletes wrote much of the early reportage, combining enthusiasm with an insider's knowledge of the challenges, strategies, and personalities involved. Most of the reporting that Scharenberg looks at in this study comes from the three daily editions of the Frankfurter Zeitung, which enjoyed a nationwide distribution and reception, but she also looks at magazines, as well as at regional and local newspapers.

Scharenberg demonstrates an impressive amount of research throughout the book, and she provides detailed stories about the individual athletes and the contexts in which they competed. The chapter on Vierkötter, who became the seventh person to swim the English Channel on August 31, 1926, includes a discussion of the fad for marathon swimming that swept Europe and North America in the mid-1920s. Wealthy benefactors sponsored prizes for increasingly daring swims, and Vierkötter himself emigrated to Canada at the end of the decade, where he briefly pursued a professional career swimming across various bodies of water. Scharenberg explores Houben's athletic successes against the backdrop of Germany's postwar exclusion from international sporting events. The press regularly compared Houben's times to those of the European and world champions, though, and Scharenberg points out that the French press in particular paid very close attention to German track-and-field performances, and that Germans read these foreign press reports with great pride. Newspapers, in other words, enabled a virtual competition between German and other European athletes at a time when officials were preventing actual competitions from taking place.

In the case of Caracciola, newspapers focused almost as much on the engineering of his cars as they did on the driving skills that he demonstrated, and this chapter allows Scharenberg to talk about the nature of the "hero" in an automated age. As with Houben, Caracciola's constant race against the clock had its counterpart in Germany's general workplace in the 1920s. While commentators viewed such pressure for greater speed and efficiency in the business world skeptically, the sports press praised that same pressure in its coverage of athletes. Caracciola, along with Sobek and Breitensträter, also focused the press's attention on the business of sports. All three raised the question of whether an athlete could be considered a hero when he was paid for his performance, a situation that Scharenberg contrasts with the knightly ideal of heroism. Finally, Helene Mayer's depiction in the Weimar press shows that female athletes, too, served as important role models and heroes, and Scharenberg notes that Mayer's dedication to her education—she studied law at the Goethe University and applied to study abroad in Paris and in the US—contributed to Mayer's public image.

Scharenberg describes these athletes' lives in great detail, and she provides lengthy examples from their press coverage. But Scharenberg's larger argument tends to get lost in the mix. She regularly quotes a dozen lines or more from a source, without following them up with comment, explication, or analysis. This gives the reader an impression of the patchwork of discourses, but it does not provide a larger picture of what was going on. In the chapter on what makes a hero, for...