Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender, and German Modernity (review)

This well-documented and finely illustrated study looks at Weimar modernity through the prism of three forms of competitive sports: tennis, boxing, and track and field. Jensen’s investigation employs an impressive variety of sources, including sports journals, fiction, and film. Its great strength lies in the intricate and multilayered connections and comparisons the author draws between female and male athletes and between different periods in German history, as well as its treatment of the transnational relationships between Germany, the United States, and Great Britain.

Looking at the intersections among concepts of the body, gender, and modernity, each of the three chapters focuses on a specific competitive sport and offers a detailed analysis of that sport before and during the Weimar years. The first chapter argues that men’s tennis was deemed a form of amusement, and that male tennis players were considered representatives of a rather soft, yet overtly sexual masculinity; women’s tennis, on the other hand, was deemed a more competitive sport, with female tennis players crafting “a new vision of femininity that featured competitiveness, independence, and a hard, muscular physicality” (36). Chapter two focuses on boxing and argues that male pugilism—despite its increased institutional support during the Weimar Republic—continued to be driven by the crass sensationalism typical of its origins in Wilhelmine circuses. Jensen argues that although boxing meant financial success for male prizefighters, thanks to their self-presentation as heartthrobs inside and outside the ring, it did not ensure similar financial security for women. In the latter case, boxing had shifted by the middle of the decade away from the tawdry realm of Wilhelmine burlesque theaters and instead become a fashionable fitness routine for the middle classes. The third chapter shows how track and field promoted a modern, streamlined, and androgynous body in both male and female athletes, with the former being attacked by critics as Taylorized and the latter as unmaternal. But, in fact, this sport reaffirmed gender-specific roles as part of the national rejuvenation ideal by preparing men as future soldiers and women as healthy, modern mothers.

Three relatively minor shortcomings of Jensen’s analysis deserve mention. One involves the organization of the chapters: while chapter 2 and most of chapter 3 astutely interweave the examination of male and female athletes, the first chapter devotes one subchapter to male and another to female tennis players, instead of adopting the integrative analytical approach of the other two chapters. The second shortcoming regards the somewhat imbalanced use of feature films throughout the book. While there are numerous examples of boxing in films, only one film is analyzed in chapter 3, and there are only vague references but no actual examples of film in the first chapter. One wonders if this reflects film availability, or whether the intense representation of boxing in film has a deeper cultural relevance: pugilism may have been considered more compatible with mass forms of entertainment like cinema because of its working-class connotations and gendered images. The excessive training of male boxers promoted a virile masculinity, which contrasted with the softness associated with tennis players and the fragility of track and field athletes. At the same time, because it was marketed as part of a woman’s fitness routine and not as a competitive sport, female boxing did not connote masculinization in the way that female tennis and track and field did.

Lastly, Jensen’s analysis of the masculinization of women glosses too quickly over the image of the Amazon, and does not examine views that equated masculinization with female homosexuality, topics explored in Katie Sutton’s book The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany (Berghahn, 2011 [reviewed in this issue—ed.]). These criticisms do not detract from the complexity of this informative and entertaining study, which should be essential reading for scholars and advanced students of Weimar alike.