Barney P. Hartston

"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"--