Berlin Sports

In many American cities individual athletes professional teams and university sports are integral to the cities' sporting identities. Berlin in contrast features no single hallmark sport team or annual event. Five political regimes wartime destruction and four decades of division instead fostered ever-changing teams allegiances and venues. Yet the desire to play and watch sport continued unabated across these political watersheds. <i>Berlin Sports: Spectacle Recreation and Media in Germany's Metropolis</i>?explores the history of sport in Berlin from the late nineteenth- to the early twenty-first centuries against the backdrop of the city's sharp political shifts diverse populations and status as a major metropolis with both regional and global resonance.<br>  <br> This book begins with a long-distance equestrian race in the 1890s and continues with the role of media in spectacle celebrity urban life and gender from the 1890s to the 1920s.It then turns to grassroots sport participation and spectatorship as well as sport diplomacy at the elite international level during the postwar period and the years of German division. Next it explores recreational sport associations within the context of immigration and youth counterculture. It concludes with the 2015 European Maccabi Games an international Jewish sports festival through which Berlin sought to grapple with the infamous 1936 Olympics and showcase Berlin as a cosmopolitan and multicultural city. Taken together the book's scholarly essays on all of these sporting endeavors reveal the rich and varied sporting culture in Berlin and yield fresh insights into spectacle recreation and media in the city.<br>