American Views Abroad

 
What makes a legend? More to the point, Saturday's Sueddeutsche Zeitung asks what makes a German legend in its remembrance of Max Schmeling. Be the underdog and outsider, albeit with talent, and have a public convinced of who the victor will be and then overturn it all in 12 rounds. Two years later lose spectacularly within 124 seconds to the same opponent, the great Joe Lewis who proudly announced how he beat the shit out of the arier. Schmeling, the paper added, was a political figure who never wanted to be one. He wasn't a Nazi, but a man of the Nazis. Did he sympathize with them or did he fight them? He gave the answer in one of his books: I was so caught up in my own private joys and problems I hardly noticed the winds of change Hitler's coming to power would bring. Even legends, the article noted, can sometimes be out of their depths when it comes to the larger picture.

What is so distrubing reading the NYT/IHT obit on him was the frenzy, the madness of a public sitting on the sidelines, giddily, almost panting, putting far too much on the backs of both boxers in the ring at those two fights. Two men struggling to make it with the talent they had, but forced to represent far more. It doesn't surprise me he lost so fast the second time. You would have to be superhuman to face such a hostile audience and not let it get to you. Nor, considering this, can you doubt he wouldn't take in those two Jewish sons of his tailor on Reichskristallnacht. He understood there is no controlling a public in frenzy. Ditto how he later befriended and helped out Joe Lewis after the war and in fact paid for his funeral. The public is notorious for having a short term memory when it wants to.

One interesting point in his story is how two German papers I read claimed no one here had any knowledge of his helping out those two Jewish boys . One paper stated it was known first a few weeks before his death; the other claims the fact he kept this a secret speaks about the heart he had and the kind of person he was. My husband, who is German, has another explanation. Schmeling recognized the acute danger they were in. Others in Germany either didn't recognize it or didn't want to. It would diminish the arguments of those who claimed not to know what was going on around them. Schmeling was honored at a dinner at the Sands Hotel in 1989 by Henri Lewin, the owner and one of the boys protected by him that night. Yet no one in Germany knew about this till he died?

- posted by Gloria @ 3:33 PM