Games In Berlin Research Articles

Ernest Wilimowski – Polish and German National Team Player with an Unspecified Nationality

Athlete migration is not only an effect of contemporary globalization. Football migration is nothing new and has a long and complex history. Ernest Wilimowski, who was the only football player to represent both Poland and Germany, is a part of that history. Wilimowski was born in 1916 in Katowice, which was then part of the German Reich. In 1922, Katowice and a part of Upper Silesia were annexed to Poland. Wilimowski won the Polish football league four times. In the Polish national team, he scored 21 goals in 22 matches. In 1936, for infringing the amateur rules, he was dropped from the Olympic team and did not take part in the Berlin games. In 1938, he took part in the World Cup in France. Following Germany’s attack on Poland in 1939, he started playing for German clubs, and in 1941 made his debut in the Third Reich’s national team, in which he played eight times and scored 13 goals. Wilimowski was a modern athlete unconfined by national ties. Despite a complex political situation in Europe, he strived to achieve his sports objectives and his decisions were based on pragmatic motives.

The Merit of Stefan Chaprashikov for Carrying the Olympic Flame in 1936

The purpose of the present research is aimed at presenting new information related to the activities of Stefan Chaprashikov and his role in conducting the first Olympic torch relay for the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936. Several areas for gathering information are covered: research of foreign literature, review of all publications of Bulgarian researchers in the field of the Olympic movement in Bulgaria, which present information on the subject. In terms of methodology, all information found in scientific and popular sources is systematized and processed on the basis of the biographical method, content analysis, comparative and critical analysis. This publication presents newly discovered information, in three articles from periodicals and in two official BOK documents, which present information that the idea of holding the first torch relay was Stefan Chaprashikov’s. These findings will shed light on the history of the Olympic movement in Bulgaria and will form a new perspective in discussions on the topic discussed by other contemporary researchers of the Olympic movement.

Putting Russia's Ban in Historical Perspective: A Curated Interview

Putting Russia's Ban in Historical Perspective: A Curated Interview

Die deutsch-französischen Sportbeziehungen von 1919 bis 1942

The article begins with Germany’s exclusion from the Olympic Games 1920 in Antwerp and 1924 in Paris. Whereas sports relations between Germany and France slowly returned to normal in bourgeois sports, French workers’ sportsmen already in 1922 visited the festival of the workers’ sport federation in Leipzig. After these preliminary remarks the article focuses on the National Socialist era. From 1933 to 1939 France was Germany’s most favoured sport partner. The German Reich used the Olympic Games of 1936 to present itself as a peace-loving country. However, as the occupation of the demilitarized Rhineland on March 7, 1936 shows – between the Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen (February 6–16) and the Summer Olympics in Berlin (August 1–16) – this was only camouflage. The article enlarges on the initially very positive, but in the end exceedingly critical French press coverage of the Olympic Games in Berlin. The harsh criticism of the “jeux défigurés” provoked the well-known reply by Coubertin, who expressed himself positively about the “Berlin Games illuminated by Hitlerist strength and discipline”. The German-French skiing leisure activities 1938, organized by the Hitlerjugend (HJ), were exploited by the propaganda as a symbol of common understanding. The gestures of understanding culminated in a joint cultural conference in Baden-Baden, where for the first time a bust of Coubertin was set up. In spite of the violation of the Munich Agreement and the occupation of Prague by German troops, several French sports associations came to athletic competitions to Germany in summer 1939. The article ends with the Reichssportführer’s futile attempts to continue sports relations with France during war time.

Coubertin und Hitler

Based on one of Coubertin’s eulogies to Hitler of 8 May 1935, Coubertin’s admiration for Hitler, which has been negated or glossed over by research, is re-examined. A thorough evaluation of the diaries of Carl Diem (Secretary-General of the Organising Committee of the Olympic Games in Berlin 1936) shows Coubertin’s early and consistently positive interest in the “Führer”. Coubertin saw Germany as the “guardian of Olympism” and suggested “the foundation of an institute for the permanent study of the Olympic Games”, to which he bequeathed “his papers and unfinished projects”. As a result, an International Olympic Institute (IOI) was founded in Berlin on 22 April 1938, which received indirect recognition from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) by publishing the Olympic Review as its official communication organ. The article concludes with Carl Diem’s attempts to use Coubertin as propaganda for the Third Reich even after his death by emphasising, among other things, “the military nature of his attitude”.

„Entlang der Farbenlinie“ W. E. B. Du Bois in Nazi-Deutschland

Abstract The African-American sociologist and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) travels to Germany in 1936 for a five-month research stay. In his weekly column in the “Pittsburgh Courier,” he reports on the Olympic Games in Berlin, the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, and vocational training at Siemens. In the last articles, which appeared after he had left the country, he presents his analysis of National Socialist society. He observes life in the totalitarian dictatorship “along the color line,” from a postcolonial perspective. To his own surprise, he finds that he himself experienced no discrimination, while the persecution of the Jews, which cannot be grasped with the category of “skin color,” surpasses in popular cruelty and government policy the racism he himself experienced and criticized in the United States. The essay discusses Du Bois's reports from the German dictatorship on the basis of their first German-language edition and in the context of the debate about anti-Semitism versus colonial racism and “multidirectional memory.”

Antifascist Athletes? A Reappraisal of the 1936 Berlin Olympics

Abstract In Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl offered representations of idealized Aryan athletes and their democratic counterparts, including Jesse Owens. Her evocative images shaped historical memory and the historiography of the Berlin Games as either a German propaganda victory or a moment of athletic antifascist resistance. The notion of the Berlin Games populated with ‘democratic’ and ‘fascist’ athletes is largely ahistorical. Riefenstahl’s fascist/antifascist dyad prompted scholars to ask questions about appropriate athletic behaviors, but it also required them to elide contrary histories, including Owens’ own experiences of racial segregation in the United States. A more holistic view of the Games, that encompasses both the antifascist resistance to it and the ultimate decision of most athletes to attend, confounds any analysis that slips sportsmen and women into neat heuristic categories of fascist and antifascist and opens the door to the possibility of personal politics outside of the dyad of fascism/antifascism.

“Big or Not at All”: Two American Counter-Olympic Events of 1936

Abstract Historians have written a great deal about the 1936 Berlin Olympics and its many controversies, especially the boycott movement. Little attention has been paid to what happened to those counter-Olympic efforts in the aftermath of the boycott movement. This article discusses two counter-Olympic festivals in the United States in the summer of 1936. The Workers’ Olympiad in Cleveland, Ohio, a modest affair organized by a local Czech gymnastics society over the Fourth of July weekend, was a noteworthy event within the Czech American community but faced too much competition from other higher-profile athletic events to make a significant national impact. The World Labor Athletic Carnival, organized by Jewish labor leaders in New York City, attracted a number of Olympic-caliber athletes but struggled to mount a legitimate challenge to the Berlin Games. The shortcomings of these counter-Olympic efforts suggest some of the failings of workers’ sport in the United States more generally.

Piłka nożna w województwie łódzkim w latach 1920–1939. Zarys dziejów

In Łódź and other bigger towns of Łódzkie region football was played since the beginning of the 20th century. After gaining independence by Poland on the territory of the newly proclaimed voivodship it soon became the most popular sport discipline. It also had its fans in the country. The organizer of football championships was the Regional Association of Football of Łódź which was founded in 1920. After the year of 1925 the organizer was Łódź Regional Football Association (ŁOZPN). The region was placed on 4-6th position in the country. The highest level of sport education were presented by clubs and associations in the very town of Łódź. The leading role was played by Łódzki Sport Club. The footballers of ŁOZPN were appointed to the national representative team. Antoni Gałecki (ŁKS), a participant of XI Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936 and Football World Championships in France in 1938, gained this honour 22 times. The biggest obstacle of the development of football was the shortage of fields.

Honour and Dignity: The Peru Case at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin

The 1936 Olympic Games are considered to be the explicit union of sports and politics. Many studies have analysed the accomplishments of Jesse Owens at Hitler’s Olympics. However, football provides another collision between sports and politics at the same Olympic Games, which also impacts the debate regarding the relationship between sports and politics. That relationship is rarely studied. Football had been out of the Olympic programme of the 1932 Los Angeles Games and returned to the programme for the 1936 Berlin Games. However, on its return there was an incident in the match between Peru and Austria in the second round of the tournament. It all started when a spectator invaded the field and kicked an Austrian athlete. The match was restarted and Peru won the game in overtime. After the game the Austrians formalized a protest and FIFA set up a European committee to review the case. Through historical analysis, from official documents and newspapers of that time, this episode showed two points: that FIFA was a Eurocentric entity; and that sports and politics go together, after all, since in the rescheduled new game, Peru, as a protest and in a demand for dignity, withdrew its entire delegation from the Olympic Games.

The Reporting of the Journalists of “Raz, Dwa, Trzy” at the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936

The Olympic Games of 1936 in Berlin found sports and Olympic movement in the Second Republic of Poland at astage of developing and strengthening its organizational structure. The most famous and honored sport newspapers were: “Przegląd Sportowy” from Warsaw and – published by “IKC” concern from Cracow – “Raz, Dwa, Trzy”. The circulation of both titles constituted more than 3/4 of the circulation of all the sporting titles in the Second Republic of Poland. In this paper reports of “Raz, Dwa, Trzy” correspondents of the Olympic Games and the capital of Germany were presented. The analysis of the reporting of the journalists of “Raz, Dwa, Trzy” from the The Games of the XI Olympiad in Berlin allows to conclude that the narration of the reports fully corresponded with the aforementioned Polish-German Press Agreement of the 7th October 1934 and its basic assumptions. At the same time it was in accordance with the appreciation expressed to German organizers by foreign correspondents. The relations of the correspondents from Cracow indicate that Hitler’s’ regimentation reached its goals also in this environment. Enormous sports and infrastructural investments in the Third Reich, together with incorporating the modern technology, high degree of social discipline and the penchant for order and cleanliness, so typical for Germans, found their expressive reflection in the pages of “Raz, Dwa, Trzy”.

“Would You Die for the Fatherland?”: Disciplining the German Commemorative Body

“Would You Die for the Fatherland?”Disciplining the German Commemorative Body Scott Venters (bio) Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 film Olympia opens with a lyrical montage of the ruins of the Acropolis slowly breaking into view through a blanket of haze. The heroic sounds of Windt’s and Gronostay’s neo-Wagnerian score function as a docent, leading the viewer to marmoreal visions of the supple Medici Venus and the taut Myron Diskobolus. The latter deliquesces before the eyes to be replaced by the sinewy body of German decathlete Erwin Huber. The antique past is tenderly fleshed out by the German body, and classical Greece is sutured onto the present as an act of commemoration in this documentary of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Yet there was another conversation with antiquity occurring during the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games, a conversation edited from Riefenstahl’s final cut; this conversation was a more subtle, more circuitous, more tendentiously manipulated dialogue between the Nazis and the ancients that produced an embodied transcript of Foucauldian-defined discipline enacted by the youth of Germany. Along with his fabricated torch-lighting ceremony and its spurious classical origins, the chief architect of the ceremonies, Secretary General of the Organizing Committee Carl Diem, entertained the crowd from forty-nine nations assembled in the newly constructed Olympiastadion with a four-part mass spectacle entitled Olympic Youth. Hans Niedecken-Gebhard, a pupil of Rudolf von Laban, directed an international agglomeration of children between the ages of eleven and eighteen through a series of lavish [End Page 39] displays. The first scene consisted of games and dances culminating in a human formation of the rings on the Olympic flag. Next followed a mass dance titled “Maidenly Grace” in which 2,300 youthful girls danced in circular, liquid motion and then parted to reveal the venerated modern dancer Gret Palucca, gracefully sliding through the steps of a waltz. In the third scene the children of all participating countries marched into the stadium with their respective national flags. But in the final movement this international harmony was shattered by a call to the youth of Germany to sacrifice their lives when the fatherland was in danger. Drilled into a rigidly formal position on the field by the upper ranks of the Hitler-Jugend (Hitler Youth), the affirmative answer was reinforced by the unrelenting mass of assembled young bodies beckoned by the Führer. A mock sword battle between professional dancers followed, culminating in Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” sung by fifteen hundred voices in the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which attempted to reestablish a rapprochement. However, the unsettling call upon the youth to die for Deutschland and the intimations toward war had been made. In just a few years, many would die for or because of the fatherland.1 It is at this performative moment, caught in valorizing official reports published without the benefit of hindsight—when the trained, docile body appears most at odds with the Athenian-Hellenic notion of liberty, when play rubs against war, and when the antinomies of youthful innocence and political ideology become a tangled mass—that disciplinary power is most evident. It is also at this moment—when the corporeality of youth seems completely confined by militaristic discipline, when freedom is coerced from their limbs, and when the romantic oath elicited from the young wears only the mask of voluntarism—that a disturbing call to antiquity is being made. It is in this moment that the hoarse whispers of antiquity mingle with the cries of modernity. Those young, pliant, healthy bodies that would go on to join the SS and gas those deemed adulterated, deformed, and impure—Jews, Poles, Gypsies, the hereditarily ill, and homosexuals—had actually been conditioned into premilitary formation by a complex genealogy that had its roots in a sublimated homoeroticism. In a sense, that very same desire, through a complex historical process, had turned in upon the non-normative “abject” parts of itself. I am referring not to the facile association between the Hellenic Olympics and its original culture’s valorization of same-sex desire but to the distinctly German influence that laid the foundations for Riefenstahl’s...

‘In our case, it seems obvious the British Organising Committee piped the tune’: the campaign for recognition of ‘Ireland’ in the Olympic Movement, 1935–1956

In the 22 years between 1935 and 1956, the Irish Olympic Council and its later variant the Olympic Council of Ireland engaged in a struggle with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for the right to be recognized as Ireland in Olympic competition and to include Irish nationals regardless of their place of residence on the island on the team. After competing as Ireland in 1924, 1928 and 1932, the landscape changed significantly in 1935 when Ireland was rebranded as the Irish Free State and its selection was limited to the state's boundaries by the IOC. As a result, Ireland failed to compete in the 1936 Berlin Games and over the next two decades Irish Olympic officials engaged in a campaign for the right to select Irish nationals, regardless of where they resided in the island and to be recognized as Ireland for Olympic purposes. This had serious implications for Irish sport and had the potential to split the national federations on political boundary lines.

The 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm – The First Meeting of the Highly Trusted Men and What Happened to Them Since

At the Olympic Games in Stockholm in 1912, Johannes Sigfrid Edström, Avery Brundage, Carl Diem and Karl Ritter von Halt met each other for the first time and started to cooperate afterwards. From the 1930s they all played a very important role in IOC and in the Olympic System (I prefer system instead of movement). The article examines the role of the network in the international discussion about the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936, the networks perceptions of the Jews and their cooperation with the Nazis, the networks importance for the denazification of Karl Ritter von Halt after the Second World War and the influence in IOC to West Germany and East Germany during the Cold War until the 1972 Olympics when East Germany participated for the first time as a sovereign state and Avery Brundage resigned as president of the IOC.

“Her symbol was civil war”: Recovering Muriel Rukeyser’s Lost Spanish Civil War Novel

In 1936, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser traveled to Spain to report on the People’s Olympiad, an alternative to Hitler’s Berlin games. Instead, she witnessed the outbreak of civil war. Rukeyser’s writings on her experience span more than forty years, including a lost, unpublished novel, Savage Coast . Recently recovered from her archive, the novel is significant because it hybridizes the forms of aesthetic and political modernism and provides a more complex understanding of how women modernists write about politics and history through modes that both interrogate and transform the boundaries of genre.

Leni Riefenstahl und Susan Sontag: Gibt es im Sport eine faschistische Ästhetik?

Abstract Susan Sontag, in a famous essay called “Fascinating Fascism”, first published in 1974, argues that Leni Riefenstahl, who by that time had made a conspicuous come-back as a photographer in the U.S., had always and would always adhere to fascist aesthetics. This essay seeks to demonstrate that as early as 1936, when Riefenstahl began to work on her film Olympia (1938), she had already discarded fascist aesthetics and replaced it by a yearning for what Dreyfus and Kelly, in their important 2011 study, All Things Shining, would call the secular transcendence attaching to sports events that involve top athletes. Since Riefenstahl wanted, and actually managed, to capture such moments of secular transcendence during the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin through her technical perfection as a film director, she had already implicitly begun to enter on a career which - if we allow for David Foster Wallace’s belief that top athletes fascinate Americans by appealing to their twin obsessions with competitive superiority and hard data - would eventually resemble a typically American career, whereas Sontag’s philosophical attitude remained firmly rooted in European thought until her death in 2004. The careers of these two famous women therefore call for a reconsideration of what we tend to regard as the primary importance of the immediate historico-cultural context of a person’s life.

The Olympics, Jesse Owens, Burke, and the Implications of Media Framing in Symbolic Boasting

One of the most enduring figures of the Olympics is Jesse Owens, the track and field athlete who won four gold medals at the 1936 Games in Berlin. Although Owens's athletic achievements were impressive, he is more remembered for being the athlete who singled-handedly brought down the Nazi's theories of Aryan supremacy. This aspect of Owens's identity owes less to his performance and more to the Olympic media's ideological framing. Over time Owens was transformed from a world-class athlete to a transcendent hero. The Olympic media framed Owens as a communal hero, boasting of his accomplishments as if they were their own, infusing him with ideological significance. A Burkean examination of the media's framing surrounding Owens shows that the ideological image eventually outshined his identity.

Dominion Nationalism or Imperial Patriotism? Citizenship, Race, and the Proposed British Empire Olympic Team

Abstract In the aftermath of a calamitous British performance at the 1912 Olympic games in Stockholm the British Olympic Association (BOA) announced a plan to consolidate the various units of the British Empire into a single Olympic team for the forthcoming 1916 Berlin games. Casting their eyes ahead towards Berlin, an event generating extra importance given the continued escalation of Anglo- German antagonism, the BOA conceived that a unified Greater Britain team would solidify colonial and dominion relations with the old mother country and salvage Britain’s self-perceived reputation as the leader of modern sport. Efforts to maintain Britain’s global sporting position by welding the United Kingdom and its colonial possessions into a formidable Olympic team faced stern opposition. The growing political independence of Britain’s colonies and dominions, coupled with the perilous administrative task of selecting, organizing, and financing a transcontinental British team compounded problems with the BOA’s imperial ambitions.

Higher, faster, stronger … and more money

PurposeReviews the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoints practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.Design/methodology/approachThis briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.FindingsBack in 1948 in the aftermath of the Second World War, the Olympics and its representatives were keen to begin again with their global event after the sour taste left by the Berlin Games in 1936 and the ensuing 12‐year hiatus due to the war. Issues such as massive corporate sponsorship, drug scandals, professionalism and viewing figures in the billions were a thing of dreams.Practical implicationsProvides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.Originality/valueThe briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to‐digest format.

The Empire Savers

Following a calamitous British performance in Stockholm, the British Olympic Association (BOA) embraced the 1916 Olympic Games in Berlin as a viable platform through which to restore British prestige. Cognizant of the inadequate organization that had hindered previous British Olympic teams, the BOA established a Special Committee to help raise and prepare a team for the Berlin games, an event that generated extra importance given the escalation of Anglo-German antagonisms during the early twentieth century. The Special Committee's attempt to raise vast sums of money through a public appeal in order to revolutionize British amateur sport evoked charges of professionalism from across the British Isles. The fear that athletic specialization would erode the traditions of Britain's amateur sporting culture, combined with the nation's general apathy towards the Olympic movement significantly hindered the BOA's reform efforts, before the outbreak of World War I overran the Berlin games.