Sports novel

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First German sports novels. "Beowulf" by Manno in 3 volumes (1882) and "Derby" by W. Meyer-Foerster (1898)

The Sports novel belongs to the thematic organizing principle for epic large form in prose. Gero von Wilpert defines it as a novel from the sports milieu, which in the best case also takes the sporting events as the subject of an artistic statement.

The sports novel as a sub-genre of fiction

Sports novel is a sub-genre of fiction (such as Bildungsroman, developing novel, youth novel, time novel, etc.). The plot of the sports novel takes place largely in a sporting environment and is mostly centered around an athlete as the hero of the narrative text. There are two main focuses of literary design. On the one hand, the focus can be on dealing with competitive sport and its actors as an important part of society. On the other hand, telling about sport likes to focus on the person who does sport in their individual development, whereby the physical activity activities can also be located outside of organized sport. In the latter in particular, the sports novel becomes more closely related to the educational novel. Both directions are more often also interlaced with one another. Depending on the thematic focus, the sports novel also has a share in other novel genres, such as the adventure novel, crime novel, social novel or biographical novel.

The story of the sports novel

The imperial era at the end of the 19th century

  • 1882: Beowulf. A sports novel by Karl Manno (d. I. Karl von Lemcke), who explicitly sees himself as a sports novel , is likely to be the first novel in the German language.

About the content: The hero of the story, Beowulf von Hardenmut auf Hohenbuchen, is a modest, wise, deliberate and understanding character who is also characterized by strengths in riding, fencing, swimming and who, after waiting patiently, wins the related Schwanhilde von Gerfalkenstein as his wife . The novel takes place in the milieu of the north German and Austrian middle nobility and is above all a social novel that deals with the rise, fall and rivalries of people and families. The narrated time is to be set at 1850 to 1875, whereby the Franco-German war of 1870/71 represents a certain touchstone on which those called in the count's society can prove themselves, but the unworthy and adversaries perish.

The fact that this text is labeled as a sports novel in the subtitle is probably due to the fact that riding began to take off from the second half of the 19th century. more and more developed as a status symbol and leisure activity of noble society. Learning to ride, riding out and horse racing, including the skillful leadership of a horse in war, are to be understood in this novel as attributes of sportiness. However, the corresponding narrative passages are kept rather short and do not form a vanishing point in the progressive action. This suggests that at that time the sports novel label was already beginning to pay off in terms of publishing. Sport, especially equestrian sport, which has been very popular in England for a long time, represents a new element of movement culture that is particularly attractive for the upper classes of society and is increasingly finding its way into the world of novels.

So it is not surprising that three other early sports novels also show aristocratic society in its enthusiasm for riding and equestrian sports, with a passion for betting added here. Betting itself becomes a sport and the turf becomes a field of passion for betting, which is well suited for the representation of rich, ambitious, and also eccentric sportsmen , whose dealing with victory and defeat, with morality and immorality, with profit and ruin, however, is of great interest to these social novels .

  • 1888: From start to finish by Henry Hawley Smart . Translated into German by Franz Wohl. Leipzig: Freund o. J. [Engl. EA London 1884]
  • 1890: Up and down by Hermann Vogt . With 100 illustrations by H. Albrecht. Stuttgart: Krabbe undated
  • 1898: Derby. Sports novel by Wilhelm Meyer-Förster . Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt 1898.

The Imperial Era from the beginning of the 20th century to the First World War

Other early sports novels are also due to social innovations. Here it is mainly cycling and cycling that are taken up in some novels around 1900. In an early balance from 1902, Eduard Bertz lists nine novels for cyclists and four novels for racing drivers (p. 231). For him, this corpus is Der Vollmensch. A racing driver's novel (Leipzig 1902) because of its expertise and powers of observation, as well as the fascination and criticism of cycling, in fact the one true racing driver's novel in our literature (p. 134). It should not be overlooked, however, that the sports novels of the period up to the First World War are essentially entertainment literature with descriptions of upper class society, which means that their literary rank is largely limited. Against this background, it goes without saying that an explicit discussion of what sport is, what it brings with it as a new social phenomenon in terms of opportunities and dangers, etc., is still hardly of literary interest.

  • 1900/01: The swimmer. Story of a Passion by John Henry Mackay

This novel seems to be one of the first novels with an artistic statement (after Gero von Wilpert: Sachwortbuch der Literatur. P. 772). This is not only the first time that swimming is used, but a member of the lower social class is also chosen as the main character. What is also new is that the entire novel is now devoted to the personal importance of swimming for the hero Franz Felder on the one hand, and to his relationship to swimming as a competitive sport on the other. The inner world of being a swimmer contrasts in an attractive literary way with the social appropriation by the outside world of organized swimming. The swimmer is not just a 'sports novel'. It is the story of the rise and fall of an individual who is proud of his or her individuality, but in the end has to realize that individuality alone does not make viable (Hubert Kennedy: John Henry Mackays Der Schwimmer. Reactions to a novel )

The Weimar period

The years of the Weimar Republic are regarded as the first high point of the sports novel. The enormous popularization that sport experienced in this epoch as a leisure activity for health and physical performance, as well as spectator and media sport, has also moved the writers, and some of the most important, to submit analytical-critical and fictional texts on sport. Now, newer and mass-produced sports such as football, boxing, tennis, bicycle and car racing, and mountain sports also form the narrative context of the sports novels. It is noteworthy that the secondary efforts on the genre of the sports novel are still mainly concerned with the texts of that time (see: Fischer, Gamper, Rothe, Sicks). In his comprehensive study, Kai Marcel Sicks viewed 36 sports novels from the Weimar era and carefully analyzed selected ones.

His conclusion: The stories told by the sports novels of the Weimar Republic are about the longing for great triumphs and the shame of bitter defeats, the struggle with overwhelming opponents and passionate sexual desires. Despite the stereotypical nature of their narratives, the sports novels are tied into complex semantic interactions. They make their own contribution to a debate that was held in the twenties, especially among intellectual circles, about the position of sport in the modern world, about the hopes and fears associated with the young cultural technique of sport. (P. 227).

Nanda Fischer has a large number of sports novels from the first third of the 20th century. centrally viewed under the criterion of gender relations, the staging of masculinity and femininity; The work makes it clear how diverse the authors use the sports worlds, which at the same time become a sports metaphor (p. 12) of the narrative intention and generate sports models.

  • 1927/28: Station on the horizon by Erich Maria Remarque. Serial in Sport im Bild (1927/28), another popular novel, is published by Fischer under Heroic Dreams and Dream Heroes. Analyzes the idea of ​​the utopian man as an athlete (p. 99); the main character stands for the masculinity concept of the player who seeks the experience of speed as the highest increase in life in car racing as in the life game (p. 120) .
  • 1928: Sport around Gagaly by Kasimir Edschmid. Zurich: Zsoltay 1928 classifies Fischer under sports careers because of the central position of the sports metaphor (p. 186). The novel sings the high song of the athlete and the athlete of a matter-of-fact sportiness , which sets them apart from the actions of mere muscle people (p. 186). The one mentioned again and again in the secondary literature
  • 1931: Frieda Geier, a flour traveler. Novel about smoking, exercising, loving and selling. by Marieluise Fleißer. Berlin: Kiepenheuer 1931 classified under career women and was honored by Fischer primarily because he first pays homage to the new sporting spirit (vitality, fighting spirit, fairness) , but then also uses the sport metaphor for barbarism, domination and violence (p. 230).

Sports novels from the Weimar period are more often on the borderline between young people and adults than they are addressed. Examples for this are:

  • 1926: sports girl. Novel from the gymnastics and sports life of the German wife by Hugo v. Waldeyer-Hartz. Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang 1926
  • 1930: Sport Hansi, a tennis novel for young girls by Clara Schelpers. Stuttgart: Levy & Müller 1930
  • 1930: Sport Hansi at the start, a sports novel. by Clara Schelpers. Stuttgart: Levy & Müller 1930

Such novels for young people also referred more frequently to the new image of sport typical of the Weimar period, as well as to the image of the new woman (see: Rolf Geßmann: Sport in der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur. Pp. 385–421.)

The period from 1933 to 1945

  • 1935: The team. Novel of an athlete's life by Friedrich Torberg. Leipzig / Mährisch-Ostrau: Kitts 1935. This well-known novel is interpreted by Fischer under sport as a model of social systems or social subsystems (p. 76); the protagonist finds his way back to her after a temporary distance from his swimming team.

(From 1933 Torberg was one of the banned writers in the 3rd Reich, but published the novel under his name in Leipzig in 1935.)

Special sub-genre of the sports novel in the youth field

Since sport is also a noticeably “youthful” area of ​​activity, its actors are very often young people or young adults. This is why so many sports novels can also be classified as children's and youth literature; Boundaries are often difficult here and do not necessarily say anything about the literary quality.

When is a novel a sports novel?

The labeling of a novel as a sports novel is made more difficult by the question of the quantitative proportion of sports-related narration. How many shares of space make a novel a sports novel? If sport only serves as a narrative slide, such a work is more likely to be about something other than sport and the text can be viewed less as a sports novel. If a work only refers to sports through comparatively few, but still central passages, it becomes more difficult to classify it as a sports novel. So the literary-aesthetic question arises as to what the concise or broader narrative of sport has for the design intentions of the novelist, e.g. B. for plot, figure constellation, build up tension. There are hardly any studies on such a literary phenomenology of the sports novel, but rather on detailed studies such as body images, gender issues, fighting and game motifs, language, individual sports (e.g. boxing).

Two trends in the sports novel

Two striking manifestations characterize the sports novel. Especially when it comes to superficial tension, topicality, descriptions of the milieu, case histories or personal relationships, its triviality tends towards consumer literature. In the sports novel with an artistic statement (G. Wilpert), the author avoids clichéd narrative patterns.

literature

  • Eduard Bertz: Sports novels. In: The time. Vienna, August 10, 1902, No. 413, pp. 135-138. After: Eduard Bertz. Philosophy of the bicycle . Extended new edition ed. v. Wulfrath Stahl, Hildesheim / Zurich / New York 2012, pp. 226–235.
  • Peter Dbod: The physical exercises and their poetic expression in the narrative art of the 20th century . Thesis. DSHS Cologne, SS 1966.
  • Nanda Fischer: dream heroes, sport girls and gender games. Sport as literature. On the theory and practice of a production. F&B Verlag, Eching 1999.
  • Michael Gamper: In the fight for the favor of the masses. About the relationship between sport and literature in the Weimar Republic. In: Hans-Georg von Arburg, Michael Gamper, Dominik Müller (eds.): Popularity. On the problem of esoteric and exoteric in literature and philosophy. Ulrich Stadler on his 60th birthday. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1999, pp. 135–163.
  • Rolf Geßmann: Sport as a motive in literature. Comments on the design and symbolism of the novel Bread and Games by Siegfried Lenz. In: Literature in Science and Education. Volume 6, H. 3, 1973, pp. 143-155.
  • Rolf Geßmann: Sport in children's and youth literature. In: Norbert Hopster (Hrsg.): The children's and youth literature in the time of the Weimar Republic. Part 1, Peter Lang, Frankfurt 2012, pp. 385–421.
  • Hubert Kennedy: John Henry Mackays The Swimmer . Reactions to a novel. In the S. Reading John Henry Mackay. Selected essays . San Francisco 2002, pp. 138-153.
  • Wolfgang Rothe: Sport and Literature in the Twenties. A note critical of ideology. In: Stadium. Vol. VII, No. 1, 1981, pp. 131-151.
  • Kai Marcel Sicks: Stadium romances. The sports novel of the Weimar Republic. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2008.

Early sports novels on the Internet (completely online, as a PDF file)

  • Hawley Smart: From Post to Finish . In three volumes. Vol. III, London 1894, p. 282. (archive.org)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. see: Gero von Wilpert : Subject Dictionary of Literature (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 231). Kröner, Stuttgart 1955, DNB 455687811 , p. 691; furthermore: Ivo Braak: Poetics in brief. Basic literary terms. An introduction. Hirt, 1969, p. 190.See also: Roman
  2. See: Gero von Wilpert: Subject Dictionary of Literature (= Kröner's pocket edition. Volume 231). 6th, improved and enlarged edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 1979, ISBN 3-520-23106-9 , p. 772.
  3. Karl Manno
  4. ^ Henry Hawley Smart
  5. Hermann Vogt
  6. ^ Wilhelm Meyer-Förster
  7. Eduard Bertz
  8. John Henry Mackay
  9. Gero von Wilpert
  10. Hubert Kennedy
  11. Erich Maria Remarque
  12. Kasimir Edschmid
  13. Marieluise Fleißer
  14. ^ Friedrich Torberg