Kay Schiller and German Sport
German sport history in this week’s podcast brought to you by the British Society of Sport History in association with the Institute of Historical Research with Professor Kay Schiller of the University of Durham. It was a wide-ranging discussion in the rather noisy lobby of the British Library that acts as a preview to Kay’s rescheduled paper to be given at the IHR some time in 2020. Kay is one of the leading researchers on the history of sport in Germany in the twentieth century and we talk about his new research project into the remarkable life of Alex Natan, the ‘fastest Jew in Germany’. Natan was an élite runner whose ethnicity led him to seek refuge in Britain in the 1930s before being interned in Canada as an enemy alien on the outbreak of war. We also talk about Kay’s award-winning book, The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany, co-authored with Christopher Young, which won both the North American Society for Sport History Book Award and the Aberdare Prize from the British Society of Sports History for best sports history book published in 2010. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Sport in History, the BSSH’s journal and we talk about the recent special issues of Sport in History edited by Jean Williams on women’s football to the accompaniment of the BL’s in-house John Coltrane. There was also time to mention Jon Hughes’s excellent paper on the German boxer Walter Neusel, and also to hear about Kay’s experience of attending the 1972 Games as a child.