Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink (Hardcover)

by David Margolick (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Fought with thunderclouds of war on the horizon, the 1938 heavyweight rematch between Detroit's Joe Louis and Germany's Max Schmeling qualifies as the sort of sporting event that coalesces into a symbolic moment with much larger themes. The African-American Louis's success and demeanor were an unsubtle rebuke to the Aryan theories of race; the affable Schmeling, for his part, would be shoehorned into the role of "Nazi Max," despite the uneasiness of the fit—later that year, on Kristallnacht, he would courageously protect two German Jews. Vanity Fair contributor Margolick (Strange Fruit) keeps his bold, colorful focus squarely on the hubbub leading up to the bout; the all-consuming welter of hype—almost every utterance in the book is tinged by race or geopolitics—makes for compelling reading. The fight pitted talent against tactics: Schmeling's previous defeat of the hitherto "unbeatable" Louis depended on Schmeling's shrewd perception of a flaw in Louis's technique. Louis was a critical transitional figure between the controversial first African-American champ, Jack Johnson, and the equally polarizing Muhammad Ali. Schmeling, in turn, was truly the antithesis of the thugs who were running his country. Every chapter in the company of such estimable and likable stalwarts is an unalloyed pleasure. Photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Television, videogames, DVDs and the movies haven't utterly doomed prizefighting the way they did vaudeville, roller derbies, six-day bicycle races and other mass-market spectacles of the early 20th century, but they have come close. Violence as a diversion is common now and far less circumscribed than it used to be. Why bother to watch boxers feint, jab and clinch for three-minute rounds when you can blow away ninja street fighters on a video screen?

The sport still has a following, but nothing like the one it had in the 1930s, the era of David Margolick's compelling new book about the legendary heavyweights Joe Louis and Max Schmeling. In those days, everyone knew the heavyweight champion in the way that he or she knew the president, and a knockout punch could resonate deep into society at large.

Indeed, few sporting events were ever freighted with as much meaning as the 1936 match and 1938 rematch between the black sharecropper's son from Alabama and the former heavyweight-title holder from Brandenburg. Schmeling won the first bout, leading Nazi Germany to embrace him as the embodiment of Aryan supremacy despite his dark hair and Asiatic features. But then, with the largest worldwide radio audience to date listening in, Louis stopped Schmeling inside of one round in their Yankee Stadium rematch, which has been called the undercard for World War II. By defending the heavyweight title he'd taken from James Braddock in the interim, Louis struck a symbolic blow for both freedom and his various cheering constituencies. "The happiest people I saw at this fight," one black writer observed, "were not the Negroes but the Jews."

A contributing editor for Vanity Fair and the author of three previous books, Margolick has brought these events to life. He deftly moves his characters on and off stage against a backdrop of increasing tension. The more repressive the Nazi regime became, the more the Nazis wanted Schmeling to succeed. One American writer described him as "the first nationally sponsored heavyweight." Hitler sent congratulatory telegrams, fixed Schmeling's currency violations and rewarded him with special hunting privileges. Schmeling's wife waited out the first Louis fight in the home of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, and the German newspapers imbued the hesitant Nazi slugger with all the supposed virtues of the fascist state.

In fact, Schmeling had a Jewish manager named Joe Jacobs and a fondness for Franklin D. Roosevelt. He seemed far more interested in money than in politics, but too many powerful people had a stake in his success for him to remain apolitical for long. "Every punch in the eye I give Schmeling is one for Adolf Hitler," said the American heavyweight Max Baer.

Although Schmeling served as a Nazi paratrooper and undertook secret missions at Hitler's behest, after the war the fighter's image was rehabilitated, thanks to public meetings with a forgiving Louis as well as three published autobiographies that were often more fiction than fact. Awarded a Coca-Cola dealership in northern Germany by former boxing commissioner (and Roosevelt confidant) James Farley, Schmeling died wealthy, with a burnished reputation as a free thinker and overall good fellow.

Margolick rejects such revisionism in favor of a more nuanced portrait. His Schmeling was an opportunist from the start. "On the one hand, many of Schmeling's artist and intellectual friends were enemies of the new Reich, or Jews, or both," Margolick writes. "On the other hand, Hitler, unlike prior German leaders, loved boxing."

So Schmeling buttered his bread on both sides. He used the compliant Jacobs as a shield against criticism that he was anti-Semitic but gave Nazi salutes and offered up the occasional pro-Nazi statement at home. "Whenever the Nazis asked him to pitch in, he obliged," Margolick writes. When another high-profile German athlete, tennis star Gottfried von Cramm, was arrested as a homosexual after speaking out against Hitler, Schmeling shrugged, saying the police had no choice. Yet Schmeling kept two young Jewish boys safe from harm in his Berlin hotel room during the 1938 anti-Semitic rampage of Kristallnacht.

It is one of the story's more delicious ironies that Schmeling's career was managed by an observant Jew, who claimed to have carried a mezuzah (the small case affixed to the doorposts of Jewish homes, containing a scroll with verses from the Torah) in his mouth during the first Louis fight. Though the German press excised mentions of Jacobs out of nearly all its reports on Schmeling's successes, he was seen by Hitler and Schmeling as "the cost of doing business in New York." Caught between his financial interests and a genuine affection for Schmeling on one side and the increasingly inhumane treatment of German Jews on the other, Jacobs tried to manage one of the more skillful tightrope walks in sports history. When he traveled to Europe to talk up Schmeling's cause, he became, in Margolick's words, "Nazi Germany's most improbable propagandist." Returning home to New York, Jacobs gave his de facto sanction to the Reich, claiming that reports of Nazi anti-Semitism were overblown. If that didn't add weeks or months to America's appeasement of Hitler, it undoubtedly helped empower his many sympathizers.

Into this unsettled situation stepped Joe Louis. If Schmeling is the book's protagonist, Louis is its hero. When Louis lost his first bout with Schmeling, Margolick notes, many blacks saw their parents cry for the first time -- such was the effect that Louis had in the black community before Brown v. Board of Education, before Jackie Robinson, before the first stirrings of the civil rights movement. Louis embodied the achievement that an entire race was striving for: to compete on equal terms with whites and to succeed. And unlike Jack Johnson, his precursor as heavyweight champion, he managed to do it with dignity and grace.

As Louis's rematch with Schmeling nears, the alignment of the various camps -- blacks and Jews for Louis; Germans, some German-Americans and most anti-Semites for Schmeling -- makes for absorbing reading. Margolick's extensive research gives us a keen sense of what ordinary citizens were being told on both sides of the Atlantic. The claim made by the German magazine Box-Sport that American Southerners were refusing to recognize a black heavyweight champion, for example, is countered by a New York Daily News report. "For the first time in the history of the old South," the newspaper wrote, "a colored boy has become the fair-haired child of the masses."

Margolick provides a sense that by managing to unite disparate American interests behind a common cause and undermining the Aryan illusion of racial supremacy, Louis helped inspire a nation for the fight ahead "One hundred years from now," he quotes the sports commentator Heywood Hale Broun, "some historian may theorize . . . that the decline of Nazi prestige began with a left hook delivered by a former unskilled automobile worker who had never studied the policies of Neville Chamberlain and had no opinion whatsoever in regard to the situation in Czechoslovakia." That's a lot to put on the shoulders of an athlete, to be certain. But such was the weight that boxers were capable of carrying then.

Reviewed by Bruce Schoenfeld
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (September 27, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375411925
• ISBN-13: 978-0375411922
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #616,042 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beyond Glory : Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink, October 8, 2005

By	richard j shapiro (Bridgeport, CT United States) - See all my reviews

I write this review as a 50 year old baby boomer, who as a child lived in the South through the civil rights struggles of the 60s, having parents from New York City, having a father who trod across Europe in W.W.II, and having family lost and damaged by Nazi terror. Despite that, and despite knowing so much of that history, the doors to the past opened by David Margolick's Beyond Glory were wonderfully and surprisingly illuminating.

Margolick does this by not just retelling the wonderful story of these classic boxing matches, but by presenting much of the story through the words of the journalists of the day. In doing so, the book carefully chronicles the paths to and from these historic fights, and in doing so, not only tells the tale of wonderful boxing characters, but exposes both the pervasiveness of racism in America, and the astonishing face of anti-Semitism and racism that was the Third Reich. Even though it is recent history, which we think we know well, it is still surprising to see and understand the clarity and depth of these issues as reported in Beyond Glory, in part through the eyes and words of an earlier generation of newspaper reporters. (As newspapers today shrink and consolidate, the creativity and glory of those reporters is especially interesting.)

The magic of what Margolick has done is to present the history of the Louis-Schmeling fights by weaving the words of the journalists of the day, reporters long silent, who wrote in the style of the day--and with the prejudices of the day. Margolick does not spare us the ugly side of either American racism, or German repression. Mainstream American journalism bluntly writing about this "colored boy," northern cities (not just southern) with segregated fight attendance, German media bluntly assailing the evil Jewish control of all things American, the weakness of American reliance upon Louis, a man from an "inferior race".

We all know these things, but to read them in the day to day quotidian press of those times gives vivid life to those years. One can see the social struggle far beyond the ring where these fights were waged, and it is truly eye opening. As well, it is fascinating to see the frightening German press, and on the American side, two different press corps, the white press, and the black press. Amid the racism of the thirties, there stirred the growing civil rights movement in a vital black press (now largely forgotten) with its own distinct voice, again brought to life in Beyond Glory.

By not only reporting on the history of these famous fights, but fully immersing us literally in the words of the day, Margolick brings vivid life and reality to an extraordinarily important transition in history. By putting us back in those days, he not only well presents the course of these fights, the wonderfully colorful characters of the boxing game, the descent of the world into war, but gives a different understanding of our own history than might be expected. Beyond Glory does not just retell history, it puts the reader in the time, thereby creating something very vital and unexpected--a sometimes uncomfortable understanding of "a world on the brink".

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beyond Glory and Beyond Boxing, November 14, 2005

By	Randy Roberts - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

In Beyong Glory, his latest book, David Margolick has written an enthralling book about two boxers that captures not only the heart-stopping drama of the Louis-Schmeling fights but also American and German life in the 1930s. If you don't think that you care anything about boxing or even sports, this book will change your mind. I judge a great biography by not how well the central figures are presented but by how well the secondary personalities are realized. In Beyond Glory, Margolick surrounds Louis and Schmeling with flesh-and-blood characters. Nazi hacks, Runyonesque boxing sorts, famous wives--they make the Beyond Glory live. If you want to understand America in the 1930s, comprehening why Louis and Schmeling mattered would be a fine place to begin your study

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Joe Louis of America vs. Max Schmeling of Nazi Germany, September 30, 2005

By	C. Hutton "book maven" (East Coast, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Like Geoffrey Ward's account of the life of boxer Jack Johnson (in "Unforgivable Blackness" --2004) which was a cultural snapshot of racism and culture in the first third of the 20th century, Mr Margolick has written a boxing companion for the middle third of the 20th century. His tale of the bouts between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling in the 1930's offers another snapshot of racism and culture in American and Germany.

Max Schmeling was the Aryan champion for Hilter who had been humilated in his master race rantings by the four gold medals of Jesse Owens in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Though never a Nazi, Mr. Schmeling was part of the German propaganda machine with his 12th round knockout of Mr. Louis in 1936. Since their rematch was so anti-climatic in 1938 (Mr. Louis utterly dominated Mr. Schmeling in a first round TKO), Mr Margolick focuses on the politics of boxing, of America, and of Nazi Germany by contrasting their two very different careers and post-boxing lives. This will be considered the definitive story of their bouts and an excellent introduction to their lives.