The Finitude of Sports Performances and the Infinite Number of Reproducible Images – A Case Study on Sporting Heroes in Twentieth-Century Germany

Abstract

Modern sport regards itself as the self-evident representation of the escalation principle: faster, higher, further! As a system of social action, however, it seems to have reached its boundaries, since potentials for growth have been exhausted following the successful recruitment of women, young people and lower social classes and the triumphant conquest of distant regions of the world. The article asks whether it is possible to compensate for the social limits to the growth of sport, or even surmount them by increasing the production of images instead of increasing and intensifying social action. The study is carried out using the example of the sporting hero in Germany in the twentieth century, i.e. ‘in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (Walter Benjamin).