Untitled

Erik Jensen
an important fight as a consequence. In the film, Schmeling actually sang about
the need for a boxer to remove himself from the influence of women:
The heart of a boxer knows only one love: the battle for victory above all else . . . And
once his heart beats for a woman, passionately and loudly: the heart of a boxer must
forget everything, otherwise the next guy will knock him out. 75
Boxing commentators, and boxers themselves, regularly asserted that one could
not box at peak level and have a relationship with a woman at the same time. After
the boxer Rudi Wagener began courting a film starlet in 1924, Rumpelstilzchen
predicted, “She will gradually cause a weakening of his muscles!” 76 In a 1927
article from Sport und Sonne, the American champion Gene Tunney argued that
women only divert the boxer’s attention and weaken his resolve: “If all of his
thoughts and everything within him is not concentrated on his retaining his crown
. . . he will necessarily make mistakes and will probably be dethroned.” 77 Many
male spectators feared that women would inhibit the crowd, as well as the boxers.
A letter published in Boxsport in 1925 declared, “We want to scream and yell to
our heart’s content at boxing matches and not be restrained out of respect for the
weaker sex.” 78
According to some reports, though, these male spectators need not have
expressed concern for the sensibilities of the “weaker sex.” In fact, some writers
described the female spectators as more enthusiastic about the violent aspects of
the sport than their male colleagues. In the same 1929 Arbeitersport article that
criticized the blood-thirstiness of boxing crowds, Fritz Wildung noted the significant
numbers of equally exuberant women in the arenas. 79 In “Inge und der
Boxkampf,” even as the protagonist grew increasingly repulsed by the match, she
noticed other women in the crowd enjoying themselves immensely. “There she
saw the men’s expressions, contorted with excitement and passion, and in the eyes
of the women an expression that she had seen flare up only in Madrid at the bullfights.”
80 In fact, commentators during the Weimar Republic noted a small, but
vocal contingent of women at most matches who reveled in the violent displays
and exhibited precisely the same behavior that boxing sophisticates had come to
associate with working-class men and “improper spectatorship.” Rumpelstilzchen
wrote that many women, by nature, enjoyed a bloody fight, rather than feeling
repelled by it:
The forehead of one boxer has been beaten and the area around the left eyebrow ripped
open. His opponent already has a shoulder that was beaten bloody by the second round.
A pair of young women on the main floor, block A, lick their lips in deep satisfaction.
This is nature, not decadence or perversion . . . I cannot understand how men, who
certainly know this cruel feline instinct, can drag their girls with them to a boxing match
at the Sport Palace. 81
94