by Philipp Blom
Especially for younger Jews in Europe, involvement in Zionist youth organizations and sports clubs had been an effective way of countering their progressive exclusion in societies increasingly preoccupied by their own respective national myths. There were many different and often contradictory currents within Zionism, from a determinedly secular variant, whose aim was to eliminate anti-Semitism by making the Jews a “normal” people among other “normal” peoples, to Orthodox communities longing to return to the Promised Land in order to prepare themselves for the coming of the Messiah. There were pragmatic Socialists seeking to realize dreams of ideal communities in harmony with the local Arab population, and far-right nationalists determined to remove or eliminate anyone standing in the way of the establishment of a Jewish land. These last were a minority, however; most newcomers arrived with peaceful ideas.
The goal of Zionism was not only to establish a Jewish state in Palestine (indeed, there was a major, ongoing debate about both the necessity of a state and its possible location) but also to create a new kind of Jew. The pale, emaciated yeshive bokher (yeshiva student) was rejected as an archetypal victim image in a world of growing emphasis on militarism and masculinity—to the extent, in some places, of caricaturing the Nietzschean Übermensch. The old, effeminate image was to be supplanted by that of a new, muscular, tanned, proud, and self-reliant Jew, able to till the soil and to fight, a pioneer and a hero capable of meeting any physical challenge.
In practice, the experience of life in 1930s Palestine was less epic than imagined, though still fraught with practical challenges. Gaining a visa to the British Mandate area was not easy, but even for those who did arrive, life in an essentially Arab country required an enormous mental adjustment for men and women more used to the cafés and lecture halls of Lemberg, Vienna, London, Berlin, or Paris than to pioneer life in the Levant. The real pioneers, the settlers in the kibbutzim throughout the country, encountered among the local Arabs people tolerant of the apparently crazy Europeans keen to break their backs working the desert ground, but also many who were hostile to the intrusion, greeting the new arrivals with resentment or even violence.
In the cities, life was less conflicted, though no less strange. Jerusalem, still a picturesque place of legendary if mutually contradictory promises and squalid daily reality, carried too much historical baggage and too many expectations to be an attractive place to live. Apart from the Holy City and the port town of Haifa, German Jews preferred a newly founded settlement outside the old Arab town of Jaffa, a place with a more European character, including Bauhaus villas and large public buildings, poetically named Tel Aviv, which means “spring hill.”
Among those who had emigrated to build a future for themselves and for their people were many Jews from the former Habsburg lands of central Europe, and also many from the shattered Russian Empire. After centuries of oppression, they were determined to make a fresh start. Emblematic of this was their wish to communicate with one another not in one of their old languages and certainly not in Yiddish, the idiom of their humiliating ghetto lives. To achieve this, to carry them into the future, they revived and reconstructed the ancient Hebrew language and made it a living idiom, with new words invented to match realities unknown to Bible scribes. The philosopher Martin Buber, together with younger intellectuals such as the scholar Gershom Scholem from Berlin and the historian Hugo Bergmann from Prague, tried to fill the shell of the old Jewish cultural tradition with new values and even mystical meanings for an essentially secular context.
Other refugees who had arrived in Palestine out of sheer necessity, rather than any Zionist conviction, tried to ignore the fact that they were now walking down Sheinkin or King David Street rather than Unter den Linden. They continued to wear their three-piece suits even in the worst summer heat, reading German newspapers in cafés that did everything in their power to make their patrons forget that camels were still the preferred means of transportation on local streets. The bookshops of these people, and their shelves at home, were stacked with the works of Goethe and Schiller, Heinrich Heine and Thomas Mann. Not for them the dream of the new Jew—they simply mourned their old lives, trying to navigate the hot, deprived, provincial present as best they could.
According to emigrant legend, one German Jewish academic kept a portrait of Hitler on the desk of his Tel Aviv study. When a fellow émigré came to visit him and saw it, he was scandalized and began to remonstrate with his friend, asking him how he could have in his own home a picture of such a monster. “I need it,” the academic replied. “It reminds me not to feel homesick.”
·1936·
Beautiful Bodies
IT WAS A SUDDEN TURN OF EVENTS THAT CAUSED WOLFGANG FÜRSTNER to take his own life. A captain in the German army, his career had symbolized the virtues of the newly strengthened fatherland of which he had been so proud. His father a battleship commander, his mother a member of the aristocratic von Reventlow family, Fürstner had been personally connected with many of Germany’s most distinguished individuals—and one or two of the most bohemian. An officer and a fervent patriot, he had adored the former and looked down at the latter.
Having served with gallantry in the war, Fürstner had then embarked on a course of uncompromising right-wing activism. A portrait photo shows him looking straight into the camera, erect and proud, hair close-cropped, an Iron Cross from the Great War adorning his left breast pocket, the eagle and swastika of Hitler’s army on the right side of his chest. In the chaotic years leading up to 1921, he had commanded a section of the Freikorps, a fascist paramilitary unit, fighting communists in the streets of Berlin. Organizing and disciplining large crowds was his passion. While still a serving officer he had run the sports program of the Deutsche Offiziersbund, the German Officers’ Association. An early member of the Nazis’ NSDAP, he had risen to a high position in the German sports world, eventually being elected to the organizing committee of the 1936 Olympic Games.
An officer from top to toe: Wolfgang Fürstner chose to commit suicide after having attended an official dinner.
The games had been awarded to Germany in 1931 as a gesture of postwar reconciliation, effectively readmitting Germany to the family of nations. For Hitler’s government, the event was challenge and opportunity in equal measure. Finally the country would be able to show to the world that the new Germany under its great leader was as peaceful as it was powerful. Preparations on a gigantic scale were undertaken; no plan was too great, no detail too small to be considered. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, regarded the Games as a massive public relations exercise for the Nazi regime. In early 1934, as part of his ambitious scheme, he named Fürstner, a decorated soldier and trusted ally, as commander of the Olympic Village. The well-being of all the athletes, as well as a great number of the impressions they would take home with them, were to be his responsibility.
Fürstner threw himself into the task of converting a former military barracks into an Olympic village, with 160 individual houses as well as meeting halls, common spaces, doctors’ offices, and more. The newly appointed commander took into account the needs and habits of athletes from different disciplines and nations. Weightlifters were fed on beefsteak tartare and chopped raw liver. Indian athletes were provided with a vegetarian diet. The British delegation found Horlick’s malted milk and cooked vegetables. The regulations stipulated that athletes from the United States received steak for lunch and “no kippered herrings.” The Chileans were noted for their fondness of “large quantities of jam,” just as the Finns could feast on blueberries. While Fürstner left nothing to chance as far as the athletes’ accommodation was concerned, police officers took to “beautifying” the streets of Berlin by arresting hundreds of vagrants and “Gypsies” and imprisoning them in an internment camp on the outskirts of the city, far from the gaze of potential tourists.
As the preparations for the Games reached their final phase, Fürstner was commended for his good work. His village was now looking like a pic
ture postcard and functioning like clockwork, dentist and barbers and international newspapers included. He knew how much was depending on his skill in providing a perfect Olympic Village, as Germany wanted to gain the goodwill of all visiting nations. But the buildup to the event had been marred by controversy. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) had insisted that there must be no discrimination against Jewish athletes during the Games, and that Jewish athletes must be allowed to compete on the German teams themselves.
Several Jewish organizations had demanded a general boycott of the event, left-wing organizations had organized a rival Workers’ Olympiad to be held in Barcelona, and for several months it had been unclear whether the Games would take place at all. From his exile in Paris, the German writer Heinrich Mann had declared, “A regime that is founded on forced labour and mass slavery, a regime that is preparing for war and only exists due to mendacious propaganda, how could such a regime respect peaceful sports and peace-loving athletes? Believe me, the international athletes who will go to Berlin will be nothing else there than gladiators, prisoners and court jesters of a dictator who already thinks of himself as master of the world.”1
Only a compromise had secured the Games for Berlin. There would be Jewish athletes, the Reich had assured the IOC, and there would be no discrimination against Jews during the game. Quietly the Party leadership also gave the order to remove anti-Jewish street signs and public messages for the duration.
Germany was consequently obliged to produce at least one Jewish athlete for the national team. The choice fell on the half-Jewish Helene Mayer, a blond, blue-eyed fencer who had already fled discrimination at home and was by now living in Los Angeles. Mayer was an exceptional athlete and a strong hope for Olympic gold. In 1924, at age thirteen, she had won the German national championships, and four years later a gold medal at the Amsterdam Olympics. None of this, however, had protected her from being expelled from her fencing club in 1933, and she had fled to the United States. Now the Nazi authorities contacted her, inviting her to participate and giving her to understand not only that her participation would be welcome but also that her refusal would certainly not make things easier for her remaining family in Germany.
Believing herself in a good bargaining position, Mayer had demanded her German citizenship back, but had finally had to resign herself to returning home without any guarantee of this. Newspapers were instructed not to write about her arrival, and under no circumstances to mention her Jewish ancestry. In the event, she received only a silver medal; on the rostrum she gave a Nazi salute, not out of pride in her homeland but to protect her family.
Very public gestures as a disguise for private fear were commonplace during the Olympics, particularly for Jews, who lived through a bizarre “holiday” from daily abuse while Germany stood in the international spotlight. The linguist Victor Klemperer, who had lost his university post, kept a sad diary about the developments in his country. A deeply cultured man in the old German tradition, he regarded all Olympics—not just those now under way—as an undignified feast of hysterical nationalism in which a nation’s culture was equated not with high intellectual or artistic achievements, nor less with its humane treatment of its citizens, but simply with how fast an individual could run. The present Olympics, however, were “a political enterprise through and through,” he wrote. “Natives and foreigners are constantly having it drummed into them that what they are seeing is the upswing, blossoming, new spirit, unity, solidity and splendor, naturally also the peaceful and lovingly world-embracing spirit of the Third Reich.”2
In May, five months before the official opening of the Games, Wolfgang Fürstner was suddenly and summarily dismissed from his position as commander of the Olympic Village. The official reason was that during an open day at the village some careless local visitors had caused damage to the structures, but the real reason soon emerged. Eight months previously, at their annual rally in Nuremberg, the Nazis had announced the introduction of new Race Laws, under which, among other things, Jews were to be deprived of their German citizenship and forbidden to marry or have sexual relations with Gentiles. Thorough as ever, the Reich’s genealogists determined that Fürstner had a Jewish grandfather and was therefore classed as a “quarter-Jew.” The officer, who may not have known about this detail of his ancestry, was dumbstruck. He was demoted to vice commander and supplanted by a junior, “Aryan” officer, who was now to reap the rewards of Fürstner’s painstaking preparations.
Facing not only demotion but also dismissal from the army, Fürstner appeared stoic. He saw the Games through, and even attended the dinner given on August 19, in honor of his successor. During the meal he excused himself. He went home to the army barracks, took his pistol from its leather holster, aimed it at his head, and pulled the trigger. He was forty years old.
The German press was instructed to report the death as a tragic car accident. Fürstner was buried with military honors at the Berlin Invalidenfriedhof, a military cemetery where national heroes such as the flying ace Manfred von Richthofen, “the Red Baron,” were buried. The reputation of the Reich was thus protected, and Fürstner took his secret and his despair with him to the grave.
The Color of Gold
ONLY A FEW PEOPLE in the barracks heard the shot fired by Captain Fürstner. A fortnight earlier, on August 3, 1936, the sound of a different shot had reverberated around the world. It was the short, dry report of the starting pistol for the men’s 100-meter sprint, perhaps the most prestigious event of the entire Games. Hitler himself was present when the sprinters went to their positions at the starting line. Germany’s great white hope was Erich Borchmeyer, already a veteran at thirty-one. Close by him stood a student from the United States, who was ten years Borchmeyer’s junior. “I looked down that field to the finish 109 yards and 2 feet away and then began to think in terms of what it had taken for me to get there,” the younger man later reflected. “And as I looked down at the uniform of the country that I represented and realized that after all I was just a man like any other man, I felt suddenly as if my legs could not carry even the weight of my body.”3
Jesse Owens sprang out of the starting blocks and into sporting history, posting a time of 10.3 seconds. Footage from the event shows a stony-faced Hitler, an animated spectator during most other events, turning around in disgust. Owens was African American, as was the winner of the silver medal, Ralph Metcalfe. Though scheduled to congratulate the victor in person, Hitler left the stadium before the awards ceremony could take place.
The Führer’s snub meant little to Owens, though newspapers in the United States were full of disgusted comments about the insult. But the media outrage at home revolted him. The same people who were now clamoring for the fair treatment of an American athlete in Germany had always treated him as a second-class citizen at home. The youngest of nine children, he had been born into poverty to a sharecropper in Alabama. As a boy, Jesse had often hidden from the local girls, because he did not have enough clothes to cover himself decently. During the First World War, the Owens family had moved to Cleveland, Ohio, one of hundreds of thousands of southern black families to seek a better life in the states further north.
At school, the boy’s prowess as a runner had soon attracted attention, and he was entered into competitions from which he reliably emerged the winner. In 1932, at sixteen, he was selected for the US Olympic team. The following year, he matched the world record of 9.4 seconds over 100 yards. Despite the fact that he had never learned to read fluently, he was awarded a place at the predominantly white Ohio State University, where he could concentrate on his running.
Even as a student with a special scholarship as a gifted athlete, Owens was not allowed to sleep in one of the men’s dormitories at the university. Local restaurants refused to serve him, and he had to use the back entrance to stadiums in order to get in to run in many of the events he eventually won. His financial situation was precarious: while training, he earned a living as an elevator operator and as a janitor
at the university cafeteria. After taking part in a competition in a different city, he and his fellow black athletes would frequently have to eat in their car and sleep at the local flophouse, the only place open to them. Once, in Kokomo, Indiana, they narrowly escaped being lynched.
Owens went on to win three further gold medals at the 1936 Olympics, a historic achievement in itself. But when he returned to the United States, America’s most outstanding athlete did not receive so much as a telegram of congratulations from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Elections were imminent, and the president could not afford to be seen cozying up to blacks. Owens was later to say that this snub stung him far more than Hitler’s petty irritation at his victory.
Creating the New Man
DESPITE THE FACT that Germany had fielded the largest Olympic team and harvested the greatest number of medals (89 out of a total of 388), the Nazi hierarchy had every reason to be dismayed about the strong performance of blacks and Asians, as well as Jews, during the Games. It had been the intention of the regime not only to show the world the generosity and openness of the German people and their new government but also, and equally important, to display “Aryan” Germany’s superiority of mind and body over all other nations, especially those of “inferior” racial stock. Jesse Owens had punctured these Nazi pretensions, and though Hitler was overheard by his architect, Albert Speer, to mutter something along the lines of blacks being “closer to animals” than whites and therefore presumably able to run faster than men, the propaganda of the master race had been shown up for what it was.
