"Death Is More Heroic on the Soccer Field ...": the Cult of Athletics in Melchior Vischer's Soccer Players and Indians (Critical Essay‪)‬

During the 1920s, German writers struggled to create a new artistic vision representative of the destruction left behind by World War I. Sport played a crucial role in this creative process, providing both the sporting star as well as the individual German an outlet through which to experience success once more. In order to understand its role fully, however, one must look to the cultural apparatus of which sport was an integral part. To this end, the increasing importance of the influence of Neue Sachlichkeit on art and popular culture will first be discussed to reveal their interconnectivity with the development of sport as a significant cultural force in the Weimar period. Subsequently, to highlight the fusing of the theory of sport with the literature of the period, I will initially elaborate on the theoretical approach grounded in Brecht's articles on sport, which, in turn, will elucidate the metamorphosis of the sport star as a cultural icon in the drama of Melchior Vischer. Emerging in disarray from the close of the First World War, German intellectuals embarked on a new type of battle, namely that of defining a form of art appropriate for the fractured mindset that developed because of the shock of the Great War. Neue Sachlichkeit, or "New Objectivity," established itself with the start of the Weimar Republic and sought to create art in realistic and somber forms. Rejecting the emotionally charged vision of previous eras defined by Expressionism and Romanticism, John Willett notes in The New Sobriety 1917-1933 that the artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit were born out of Dada and the disillusionments of the war and the German Revolution; it is in effect cooler and more skeptical" (11) than the previous artistic inclinations. This new "objectivity," according to Fritz Schmalenbach was set to fill the void of the bankruptcy left by Expressionism and renew it "in a less utopian, and so to speak more sachlich expressionism, an expressionism which has become more objective in its artistic production (163). The movement sought to highlight a crude reality in art, rather than the optimistic possibilities life could hold. In order to accommodate this abrupt change in literary discourse, the material incorporated into literary musings likewise expanded.