Beyond Glory Page 6
Perhaps because the boxing writers thought they were bidding him farewell, Schmeling got a rousing ovation at a lunch Jack Dempsey threw for him at Gallagher’s Steak House five days after the fight. Ring magazine even wrote a requiem for the Schmeling-Jacobs partnership. But when Schmeling returned to Hamburg on June 23, he insisted he would not retire. In any case, his relationship with Hitler was intact, possibly even enhanced by a new empathy, as a meeting Schmeling had subsequently with the Führer revealed. “He encouraged me, and told me that he, too, had suffered setbacks,” Schmeling later recalled.
The German reaction to Schmeling’s loss was overshadowed by something more dramatic: news of his engagement to an actress named Anny Ondra. Ondra, born in Poland to Czech parents, had won a bit of fame abroad: Alfred Hitchcock had given her a bit part in one of his early films, The Manxman, then a starring role in his first talkie, Blackmail. Blond and perky, she was better known in Germany as a comedienne; “the female Chaplin,” one newspaper called her. The pair put out several contradictory versions of their courtship; most stressed Schmeling’s infatuated diffidence and Ondra’s initial reluctance, usually attributed to her distaste for boxing. Some said they’d been introduced by the film director Karl Lamac; all neglected to mention that she’d been married to Lamac at the time. In the most credible version, Schmeling’s friend, the Jewish boxing promoter Paul Damski, played intermediary. The two were married in July 1933, as dozens of photographers hovered nearby. Hitler sent the newlyweds a Japanese maple. Ring lore had it that marriage was very bad for a boxer, and that it took some time to get over it; in any case, Schmeling had no fights that fall. Instead, he and Jacobs went to Rome in October to see Carnera defend his title against Paolino Uzcudun. From the ring, Schmeling gave the Hitler salute to Mussolini, then to the audience, while Jacobs sat with Josef Kirmeier, a Nazi official doubling as a sports-writer. “Yussel Jacobs will be ostracized when he gets back to Lindy’s,” Parker predicted.
The European trip marked Jacobs’s debut as Nazi Germany’s most improbable propagandist. When he left New York, the odds among boxing writers there were five to one that he would not dare set foot in Germany, and initially, Jacobs later recalled, he’d been reluctant to do so. But Schmeling had assured him that all this talk of Nazi anti-Semitism was a lot of hooey, and, as it turned out, Schmeling had been absolutely right. “I got to Berlin and when I entered the Bristol they treated me like a king,” Jacobs told the press when he returned. “I was treated everywhere with courtesy and consideration.” From what he observed, Jews were at all the cafés and restaurants; Jewish businesses were prospering; Jews still supervised various things at the Bristol; the Jewish owner of his favorite cabaret was still packing them in. Nowhere, Jacobs said, had he been embarrassed or humiliated, nor had he been afraid to tour the nightclubs by himself, now that Schmeling was a married man. “All any Nazi ever had to do was to take one look at me to know my name wasn’t Murphy,” he explained, “but I got along all right. Had a grand time in fact, and even closed up a couple of spots. … I suppose there have been tense times in Germany for the Jews, but I saw no evidence of it.”
One of Fleischer’s German sources speculated that the Nazis would not let Schmeling appear in the States again unless he severed his tie with Jacobs, and that he even risked losing his German property. But any hints of official unhappiness with Schmeling were quashed in late December, when, shortly before he was to leave for another trip to America, Schmeling and Ondra were invited for a “farewell tea” with Hitler in the Reich’s chancellory. “The chancellor took a lively interest in Schmeling’s plans,” said one report. Schmeling, in turn, glowed with enthusiasm when describing the encounter, telling an American correspondent that he had been “deeply stirred by Hitler’s personality.” Schmeling also discussed the meeting with the sports editor of the Angriff, Herbert Obscherningkat. As he described it, Schmeling’s audience with Hitler was an eye-opening experience for someone who had strayed too far from his homeland over the past few years and had therefore underestimated its new Führer, but who now saw the error of his ways. “Years ago, in America, [Schmeling] perhaps couldn’t understand why thousands of German national comrades were so given over to their Führer and fought for him,” wrote Obscherningkat, who himself would soon be described as the “führer” of the newly Nazified Berlin sports press. “He sees more clearly now that behind him stands Adolf Hitler and, with him, the German people.” “It was an experience, it was the most wonderful hour of my life!” Schmeling told him. Schmeling would soon return to America, Obscherningkat went on, but now, he would no longer be out only for himself, “but also for his nation, to which he now feels more bound than ever before.” And it was true that while so many of their friends and colleagues fled, Schmeling and Ondra sank their roots deeper into Germany. Exile is always a trauma, of course, but their livelihoods were uniquely mobile; Schmeling essentially made his living in the United States, while, with Hollywood filling up with émigrés, Ondra clearly could have found work there. But one more thing separated Schmeling from his departing friends: his life in Nazi Germany was actually getting better. Principles aside, there was no reason to leave.
Schmeling’s next scheduled fight, a bout in February 1934 against a Jewish boxer named Kingfish Levinsky in Chicago, had been called off the previous month, ostensibly because, according to the local boxing promoter, Hitler either objected to Schmeling fighting or to his being managed by a Jew. The Kingfish, another of the vaguely (and sometimes deliberately) ridiculous figures who populated prizefighting, had waxed indignant. “Say, wasn’t there a lot of Jewish boys in the German army and wasn’t there quite a few Jewish fellows who wrote some of those big thick books for the Germans and gave them the big high brow tone?” he asked. Levinsky even offered to fight Schmeling for nothing. Jacobs, too, was indignant. “Hitler may not want Schmeling to fight a Jew,” he said, “but Hitler isn’t Schmeling’s manager and he isn’t dictator of the boxing business.” “Herr Hitler does not care who Max fights,” he added, sounding, oddly, like the Führer’s official spokesman. “He does not have the time or inclination to bother in such things.” In Berlin, Schmeling called reports of the Führer’s interference “absurd.” “Herr Hitler advised against any break with my manager, Joe Jacobs, who is Jewish,” he said. “So why should he object to Levinsky?” (“It was evident,” the reporter noted, that Anny Ondra was “quite in accord” with her husband’s “admiration of the chancellor.” “Herr Hitler is charming,” she said. “He complimented my films in the nicest way imaginable.”) The more Jews he fought, “the better Hitler will like it,” Schmeling told the Chicago Tribune’s Sigrid Schultz. Jacobs quickly signed up Schmeling to fight a promising young New Jersey heavyweight named Steve Hamas (pronounced HAY-mess), in Philadelphia on February 13. The 12 Uhr-Blatt accused Jacobs of making the match because he was broke; it dismissed Hamas as a second-rater unworthy of Schmeling. But the Völkischer Beobachter warned Schmeling not to underestimate Hamas, a former star athlete at Penn State. “He is a football player, and what American football is, we know from the list of the dead this sport is blamed for every year,” it stated.
Defying the odds, Hamas bloodied up an overconfident Schmeling and won a twelve-round decision. Once again there were the instant obituaries for Schmeling, but this time, they were especially harsh. “The Schmeling we saw last night would have been a set-up for any fast moving heavyweight,” wrote Ike Gellis of the New York Evening Post. “His timing gone, his style a memory—really, it was pathetic.” Even the loyal Gallico, who had shouted advice to Schmeling throughout a fight he was ostensibly covering, conceded his man was through. And in America, that appeared to be the case; if Schmeling were to make a comeback now, it would have to be in Europe, something for which the Nazis had been pushing anyway. Even on his home turf, however, Schmeling’s prospects appeared bleak. “Yesterday Max Schmeling was crossed off the list of leading heavyweights in the world,” pronounced the 12 Uhr-Blatt. Again, it bl
amed the Jew Jacobs; meeting him, it said, had been “Schmeling’s great misfortune.” Der Deutsche, the paper of the Nazis’ pseudo-labor union, expressed schadenfreude over Schmeling’s loss. Schmeling had turned his back on German boxing when he’d first gone to America, it said, leaving behind the “international Jewish swamp” that it had become, and hadn’t returned home to help revive the sport once the Nazis had deloused it. The Angriff, though, praised Schmeling’s fighting spirit. When he landed at Bremerhaven, only two press people showed up to greet him. Before the Nazis came to power, Box-Sport lamented how Germany always lost boxers like Schmeling to America. Now, Germany had him back.
He returned to a country transformed. His friends from the Weimar days, with whom he’d spent time at the Roxy-Bar, had disappeared, to exile, concentration camps, or suicide. The same was true of Ondra’s associates in the film industry, so many of whom were Jews. But boxing was more entrenched, and important, than ever. In early 1934, it had become compulsory for all boys from the ninth grade up, and younger boys were encouraged to learn it, too. And if boxing had come to permeate German life, German life (as defined by the Nazis) had continued to permeate boxing. Box-Sport now ventured into eugenics, lamenting the deterioration, physical and mental, of German stock, and complaining of a society encumbered by the weak and the sick. It urged the end of all state-financed medical support and aid for the “inferior”—that is, the blind, the retarded, the mentally unstable, and other incurables. Though he would normally have praised the growth of boxing anywhere, Fleischer castigated the “Mad Monkey of Germany” and his “outrageous, lunatic government.” But Fleischer distanced Schmeling from all that: “Herr Hitler, the Jew Hater, can take a few lessons in true red-blooded sportsmanship” from Schmeling, he wrote.
Schmeling’s climb back got off to a bad start. In April 1934, after another meeting with Hitler—this one lasting at least four hours—he left for Spain to fight Paolino Uzcudun on May 13. He’d beaten Uzcudun five years earlier, but this time he could only manage a draw, even though neutral observers had Schmeling winning overwhelmingly. But Schmeling was still Germany’s best boxer, its most promising hope in the international arena, and he remained in Hitler’s good graces; shortly after returning to Germany, he was invited to see the Führer again. When, a bit later, he was charged with a currency violation, Schmeling asked for and received yet another audience with Hitler, who fixed things for his friend.
The next stop on Schmeling’s comeback trail was in Hamburg, for a fight on August 29 against Walter Neusel, who by now had returned from his brief exile. More than just a contest between Germany’s two top heavyweights, this would be a celebration of the new Germany and an audition for what Germany really coveted: a heavyweight title fight. The setting would be rudimentary: a dirt track normally used for motorcycle races. But what the event lacked in elegance it would make up for in enormousness and efficiency. The Völkischer Beobachter bestowed upon the spectacle what was, in its eyes, the ultimate accolade: “American.”
In one sense, though, the Nazis were determined to differentiate themselves from the Yankees. Sports was serious business in the new Germany, and the Nazi sports commissar, Hans von Tschammer und Osten, believed German writers weren’t according it due solemnity. Or, to put it another way, they were covering it with the usual propaganda and trivia, hero worshipping and hyperbole, that American sportswriters favored. This was undignified and useless, and had to change. “Sensationalism and star worship are not befitting the National Socialist Man!” the Angriff exhorted. Coverage of athletes should not include “how they cleared their throats and how they spat, what they ate, the manner in which they deigned to go walking, what kind of family life they led, all… treated in epic breadth such that a sports report became nothing more than a primitive piece of gossip.” The Völkischer Beobachter urged that all talk of matchmakers, managers, promoters, and camps be eliminated; coverage should focus on the athletes themselves, “who through their honorable striving and struggle are in reality the carriers of the movement.”
The new “stadium”—really just some seats in the open air—was completed just before the fight, and was lavishly praised in the cheerleading German press. It spouted off the statistics: with 51,000 seats and standing room for 60,000 more it was an awe-inspiring sight, unlike anything else in Europe, with parking for 20,000 cars and 20,000 bicycles. One could even make long-distance calls from special ringside phones. Some 29,000 visitors were expected for the fight; at least 21 special trains were due from all over Germany, 5 from Berlin alone, carrying 7,000 Berliners belonging to Kraft durch Freude (“Strength through Joy”), the official recreational association of Nazi Germany’s sole “labor union.” The fight would be a great populist celebration, with plenty of cheap seats for the working class; scalpers were to be arrested. The entire undertaking was suffused with an upstart’s insecurity and boosterism. A cartoon in a Hamburg newspaper showed two skyscrapers, one with MADISON SQ. GARDEN on its marquee, the other with HAMBURGER PUNCHING. The promoter of the Hamburg fight, Walter “Wero” Rothenburg, was shown pasting a “Schmeling-Neusel” poster on the front of the second, as an envious Uncle Sam watched from the balcony of “Madison Square Garden.” “Now you’re speechless!” Rothenburg tells his counterpart. “We build our ‘skyscrapers’ by ourselves now!”*
To secure such a fight, and fighter—that is, to have enticed the great Schmeling to fight on his native soil—was deemed an important tribute to the new order, “eloquent testimony to the success of National Socialist leadership,” declared the Völkischer Beobachter, which also moved to build up Schmeling by denigrating his Jewish biographer. “A man capable of arousing so much true Jewish hate must certainly have character!” it said. Schmeling never disowned that sentiment, nor anything else the Nazis said about him. And this was easily understood, because most of what they now said was positive, even heroic: he was being recast into a Nazi hero—“a model of professionalism, sporting decency, and fairness,” as the Völkischer Beobachter put it. But the Nazi newspaper also gave Schmeling some tactical advice, urging him not to fight Neusel in his typical plodding, methodical fashion. Many people who were not traditional fans were digging deeply into their pockets to attend the fight, it explained, and it would be disastrous if their first encounter with boxing, newly exalted in Nazi culture, was a dull fight. In other words, it was Schmeling’s patriotic duty to change his style.
Remarkably, over 100,000 people attended, the largest fight crowd in Germany or Europe before or since, and a number that outstripped all American boxing crowds except those for the two Dempsey-Tunney bouts. The Angriff proclaimed “a frenzy of boxing enthusiasm, the likes of which one never imagined was possible for us.” In so supercharged a setting, it would have been anticlimactic if Schmeling, too, had not been reborn, and in the ninth round he scored a technical knockout. His comeback had begun. As Schmeling left the ring, fans chanted his name. The Berliner Zeitung am Mittag devoted more of its front page to the fight the next day than to Hitler’s speech in the Saarland.
Both boxers had Jewish managers (Neusel’s was Paul Damski), and neither could work in his man’s corner that night. But while Damski, who had once done business in Germany, had been banned from the country, Jacobs was at least let in, again suggesting the special treatment he enjoyed. Fearing the Nazis would subject him to the kind of terror he’d once suffered at the hands of the Klan, Jacobs had reportedly agonized over whether to go. But he was not about to pass up the chance to bask in Schmeling’s glory, no matter the humiliation or risk. And besides, the free-spending Jacobs always welcomed the chance to escape from his creditors, even—it seemed—if it meant going to Nazi Germany. Not since the days of Dempsey, he wrote upon returning to New York, had he seen such excitement over boxing: riding with Schmeling through the teeming streets of Hamburg afterward, Jacobs said that every window in their car was smashed by the adoring crowds. He also marveled at German orderliness. “I expected Max to win decisively, but I did
n’t expect 100,000 people to respect authority to the point where they needed no official to keep them in their proper seats,” he wrote. (The crowd’s docility was all the more noteworthy because the seats were rock hard, and many offered only an obscured view of the action.)
Once more, Jacobs insisted he’d been treated well in Germany. So extravagant was his praise, in fact, that it even prompted the German press to belatedly acknowledge he’d been there. In his memoirs, Schmeling wrote that he stood publicly by Jacobs and that when the Hotel Bristol in Berlin refused to give Yussel a room, he threatened to go public with its bad behavior. (Why that would have alarmed the hotel, given official attitudes toward the Jews, is unclear.) Whatever induced Schmeling to keep Jacobs on impressed people like Kurt Tucholsky, the anti-Nazi writer who was to commit suicide in Swedish exile a year later; he described Schmeling’s treatment of Jacobs as “very decent indeed.” But Tucholsky probably did not know that Jacobs no longer represented Schmeling in Germany and collected nothing from his fights there.
That the Neusel fight had come off so beautifully was, to the Nazi press, proof positive that Germany now counted, in boxing and beyond. But if the Germans had pulled off something of American proportions, they had done so without all that American vulgarity or sensationalism; while the American fight mob was a mob, the German one was a community of patriots. Schmeling basked in the adulation; a week later he was in Nuremberg for the annual Nazi Party congress, and he was greeted warmly wherever he appeared. While never mouthing explicitly Nazi rhetoric, he participated in other rituals: as newsreel cameras filmed the scene, Schmeling, along with Ondra, Leni Riefenstahl, and others, collected funds for one of the Nazis’ favorite charities, the Winterhilfswerk, or Winter Relief Fund. So close did Hitler become to Ondra that his mistress, Eva Braun, apparently grew jealous; once, according to Braun’s diary, the Führer kept her waiting three hours outside a hotel while taking Ondra flowers and inviting her to supper.