Willy Meisl, “King of the Sports Journalists”

Willy Meisl was an Austrian-Jewish sports journalist who dominated the field during the Weimar Republic. A son of Viennese coffee houses, Meisl intellectualised sports writing in the interwar years, covering themes like professionalism, tactics and sporting antiquity for wide audiences, in styles more commonly found in the newspapers’ culture sections. Contemporaries called him the King of the Sports Journalists. But his work was affected profoundly by the Nazis’ rise to power, whereupon he began to write about Nazism’s roots, the terror it unleashed, and about the Jews and Jewish identity; exposing the fallacies of the racial theories that forced him into exile. This volume presents his most searing writings on these themes. Presented in their original German, but with introductory material in English, the texts show Meisl to be one of the interwar period’s foremost chroniclers of change, and will reintroduce readers to a now largely forgotten pioneer of journalism between the wars.