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Erik Jensen
The large part of the public that still remembers the talk of boxing’s brutality from before
the war has no idea of the refinement of this sport. It is worth enlightening people;
reading materials must be created that discuss boxing glowingly and in layman’s terms,
that describe its rules, that outline the hard training and that demonstrate good, athletic
fights in words and pictures. 30
As early as 1919, Illustrierter Sport advocated “Sportliche Erziehung” (the rearing
of good spectators, as if by parents) in an article that decried the unappreciative
boxing crowds who simply wanted to watch a slugfest: “Hopefully the time is not
so far off when our public has gathered a true knowledge of boxing, recognizing
the subtleties of this sport and no longer going there in order to see bloody
noses.” 31 The magazine entitled the article, fittingly, “More self-control at boxing
matches.” Because of boxing’s regulated violence and its very recent emergence
in Germany as a fully sanctioned sport, boxing reporters often went to great lengths
to dampen the baser emotions on display at fights and hoped to instill, instead, an
appreciation of the subtleties of the sport.
Although radio and the press played potentially positive roles in the promotion
of informed spectatorship, their attention also had a flip-side that made some
boxing commentators, themselves members of the press, wary, since the media
also attracted sensation-seeking spectators and accelerated the sport’s commercialization.
Socialist and communist journalists regularly decried the market-driven
side of boxing, but even the mainstream boxing press criticized the drive for
greater sensationalism and larger crowds. Many linked this commercialization
directly to the growing US influence on German society and pointed to the United
States as a frightening sign of things to come. A reader of the mainstream sports
journal, Der Leichtathlet, for example, warned in 1927 of the encroaching
Americanization of German sport: “One should not forget that America in its
athletic development . . . has taken paths that are anything but exemplary and that
our avoidance of these paths can only be deemed a positive outcome.” 32 Americans
thought of sport solely in business terms, he argued, and he pointed to the
professionalization of sport and the high salaries for top players in the United
States as examples. The editors of Der Leichtathlet commented that the reader had
described a well-known situation, but that his letter served as a necessary reminder
and dire warning.
If boxing owed much of its success to its sheer novelty and to its active
promotion by the media industry, it also attracted an immediate following in the
early years of the Weimar Republic partly because the very nature of the physical
struggle resonated with large numbers of Berliners. The actor Fritz Kortner, both
a fan and practitioner of boxing in the 1920s, stated: “What plays itself out in the
ring mirrors life. As mercilessly, as furiously as the boxers go at one another, so
bitterly do we all fight for our existence.” 33 Not only did boxing provide a nice
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