The University of Arkansas Press is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of Berlin Sports: Spectacle, Recreation, and Media in Germany’s Metropolis, edited by Heather L. Dichter and Molly Wilkinson Johnson.
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.
Heather 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 coauthor of Diplomatic Games: Sport, Statecraft, and International Relations since 1945.
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.
Berlin Sports will be published in the Fall of 2024 as part of the University of Arkansas Press’s Sport, Culture, and Society Series. The series, edited by David K. Wiggins and Christine O’Bonsawin, seeks to promote a greater understanding of the aforementioned issues and many others. Recognizing sport’s powerful influence and ability to change people’s lives in significant and important ways, the series focuses on topics ranging from urbanization and community development to biography and intercollegiate athletics. It includes both monographs and anthologies that are characterized by excellent scholarship, accessible to a wide audience, and interesting and thoughtful in design and interpretations. Singular features of the series are authors and editors representing a variety of disciplinary areas and who adopt different methodological approaches. The series also includes works by individuals at various stages of their careers, both sport studies scholars of outstanding talent just beginning to make their mark on the field and more experienced scholars of sport with established reputations.