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"Berlin Sports: Spectacle, Recreation, and Media in Germany's Metropolis presents a series of case studies that explore the history of sports in Berlin from the late nineteenth- to the early twenty-first century against the backdrop of the city's sharp political shifts, diverse populations, and status as a major metropolis with both regional and global resonance. Focal points include a long-distance equestrian race in the 1890s; the role of media in discourses around urban life, gender, and celebrity from the 1890s to the 1920s; the intersection of grassroots participation and spectatorship with international diplomacy at the elite level in the postwar and divided period; the relationship between recreational associations, immigration, and youth counterculture; and the use of the 2015 European Maccabi Games, an international Jewish sports festival, to grapple with the infamous 1936 Nazi Olympics and cast Berlin as a post-anti-Semitic city. Through these thematic lenses of spectacle, recreation, and media, these essays provide important insights about sport and urban space, Berlin sport as both unique and typical of Germany, and sport as a vehicle through which Germany has engaged with the wider world"--
About the author
Heather L. Dichter is associate professor of sport management and sport history in the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University in Leicester, England. She is the author of
Bidding for the 1968 Olympic Games: International Sport's Cold War Battle with NATO and editor of
Soccer Diplomacy: International Relations and Football Since 1914.
Molly Wilkinson Johnson is associate professor of history at the University of Alabama in Huntsville where she teaches German and European history. She is the author of
Training Socialist Citizens: Sports and the State in East Germany.
