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Following World War II, sport in West Germany faced the problem of disassociating itself from National Socialism. The Kölner Schule in particular sought to confront the Nazi past in the postwar present by challenging the mediums of literary form and language, eventually abandoned the pages of literature entirely in favor of cinema and radio-plays to establish true “critical realism.” In order to achieve this feat, authors like Ludwig Harig turned to football, allowing athletics to act as a tool to facilitate the desired change in literature after 1945. Influenced by Wellershoff’s Neuer Realismus, Ludwig Harig’s 1962 short story and subsequent Hörspiel “Das Fußballspiel” seek to reflect the chaotic and confusing incomprehensibility of postwar West Germany by turning to the realism of everyday experiences of the individual. Harig utilizes football in combination with radical literary form and language as the everyday where the violent fascist past of West German society can be accessed and confronted. “Das Fußballspiel” uses sport to question the indifference of society after 1945 and its inability to come to terms with its horrific past. By utilizing Adorno’s theories on sport and fascism in Prisms and “Education after Auschwitz,” this article elucidates how sport unveils the resistance of society in recognizing the ghosts of fascism still present in society, and subsequently how this reluctance reflects the refusal of West German society to reconcile with the horrific and violent recent past.

This dissertation investigates the political role ascribed to sport in German literature and mass media during three radically different periods of German history: the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich and the young Federal Republic of Germany. In this project, sport in literature and film is shown to play an integral role in communicating contemporary social critique and reinforcing cultural ideology. During each of these eras, sport figured into central cultural debates about the organization of German society. In Weimar Germany, sport became a medium through which to discuss problems of class stratification, while the Third Reich saw it play into ideologies about creating and upholding the ethical Aryan subject. In the FRG, sport became entrenched in debates about memories of these bygone German social experiments. By examining canonical and non-canonical literary texts and films, this project queries how sport has persisted as a constant topos in the German literary imagination. Examinations of Bertolt Brecht's \"Der Kinnhaken\" and Das Renommee and Melchior Vischer's Fußballspieler und Indianer reveal how commodified sport in Weimar literature engaged with the limits of class stratification. During the Hitler regime, Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia and Ludwig Barthel's Schinovelle employ sport to idealize German bodies and instill an embodied sense of Aryan morality. Emerging from the shadow of Nazism, sport in young West Germany—as evidenced by Siegfried Lenz's Brot und Spiele and Ludwig Harig's short story and Hörspiel \"Das Fußballspiel\"—filter out memories of fascism and therewith confront the latent ghosts of Germany's past. In order unlock the political logic of sport in German literature, I employ theories of sport from each respective period, including those of Brecht, Rosenberg and Adorno. What becomes clear through the analysis of these literary and cinematic discourses is the continuity of sport; just as German regimes and societies changed, so too did sport. And yet sport in all its manifestations persisted as a foil for German media's political and social imagination. This dissertation thus bridges a gap in the paucity of scholarship by identifying the politicized role German literature and film awarded sport throughout the most tumultuous years of Germany's twentieth century.