Àngel Ferrero watches a boxing match in Neukölln and reflects on the immigrant experience…
Cigarette smoke snuck into clothes and wreathed tables, chairs, and walls of the bar in Neukölln, Berlin’s old working-class neighbourhood, now home to many of the city’s Turkish and Lebanese immigrants who are being pushed further and further south, north and west as expanding gentrification annexes their former territory.
There was a rebroadcast of the boxing match between Wladimir Klitschko and Jean-Marc Mormeck that night and this was the best place to be. Surprise: boxing’s still a popular sport in Germany. Maybe the name Klitschko has something to do with it. Or maybe not.
Boxing was a sport much loved by workers before corruption, doping and flouted rules relegated it to the category of blood sport for the lumpenproletariat with cable TV, thereby giving it its present bad name. It was not always thus. In the first half of the twentieth century even the vanguard movements of Dadaism and Futurism were attracted to boxing because of the sculptural qualities of the crude physical clash–which leaves little room for intellectual frivolity—and its indisputably popular character.
Arthur Cravan, Francis Picabia and Sergei Eisenstein were keen on the sport and, in 1925, Brecht began to work on a never-finished biography of the boxer Paul Samson-Körner (also painted by Jakob Steinhardt), which was to be titled Die menschliche Kampfmaschine (“The Human Fighting Machine”). He also wrote a short story which he called Der Kinnhaken (“The Uppercut”). Suhrkamp published these works in 1995 with the title Der Kinnhaken und andere Box- und Sportgeschichten. I discovered all this when I was working on a thesis about Brecht, which is of absolutely no interest to anyone: “too historical”, “too political”. I’ll probably have to submit it to the gnawing criticism of the rodent family. That is if Spanish universities still exist in three years’ time.
Wladimir Klitschko is an interesting guy. His story is told in a recent documentary by Sebastian Dehnhardt (2011), simply titled Klitschko. Born in 1976 in Semipalatinsk, a port city of the then Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan where his father—a Soviet Air Force officer who later took part in the cleaning operations after the Chernobyl disaster—had been posted, Wladimir Klitschko is fluent in four languages (Ukrainian, Russian, German and English), an avowed chess enthusiast and, since 2001, holder of a PhD from the University of Kiev. Indeed, many boxers wonder why the Klitschko brothers—Wladimir’s brother Vitali is also a successful boxer—get into the ring when they could choose from many other careers.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, when many elite sportsmen and members of the armed forces slid easily into the ranks of the mafia, the Klitschkos emigrated to Germany. In Hamburg they faced the whole range of stumbling blocks that any immigrant has to battle with but resumed their sporting careers. In the heavyweight division, the Ukrainian Volodymyr Volodymyrovych Klychko who thenceforth used the German version of his name, has been one of the most successful pros in the history of boxing. The night I was watching, Wladimir Klitschko had entered the ring sixty times and won fifty-six matches, forty-nine by knockout. He’d promised to beat Mormeck and notch up the fiftieth knockout of his career.
For all his undeniable achievements, the word is that the style of the Ukrainian—reputed to be one of the last representat…