The History and Historiography of Sport in Germany: Social, Cultural and Political Perspectives

‘Maybe sports history needs an essay such as Joan Scott's “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Knowledge”’. This was the view expressed by one participant in the closing discussion of a recent conference on sports history at the German Historical Institute in Washington DC.1 Born of several days’ vigorous and fruitful exchange, this spontaneous comment is symptomatic of the self-perception of sports scholars within the world of professional history: aware both of the richness of their subject and the frequent condescension of less convinced colleagues, they are, typically, ambitious and anxious in equal measure.2 Scott's seminal article of 1986 is a hard act to follow, and this introduction makes no claim to do so. Via the development of gender as ‘a category of analysis’, Scott galvanized feminist historians’ efforts to establish their role alongside specialists in class and race in the study of oppression and inequity and held out the—now largely realized—promise of ‘fundamentally transform[ing] disciplinary paradigms’.3 Sports history, by contrast, can harbour few such pretensions: a bodily practice rather than a category of analysis, it focuses as much on success and social mobility as it does on repression and restriction, is forced by dint of its material to talk predominantly about men,4 and has no reason to believe it will ever change the face of the discipline.