#max schmeling

[electronicsquid]

Max Schmeling makes a comeback at 41

(Walter Sanders. 1947)

[mote-historie]

Anny Ondra, 1920s.

Anny Ondra (1903-1987) was a Czech film actress. She was married to German boxing great Max Schmeling. She acted in Czech, Austrian, and German comedies in the 1920s; and in some British dramas, most notably Alfred Hitchcock's The Manxman and Blackmail (both 1929). Ondra formed a production company, Ondra-Lamac-Films, with her boyfriend, director Karel Lamač. Lamac directed her in several silent films, acted with her in films directed by other filmmakers, and continued to work together after her marriage with Max. However, when Blackmail was remade with sound, Ondra's thick accent was considered unacceptable, so her dialogue was recorded by actress Joan Barry. Anny Ondra made some 40 more films in the sound era, the last in 1957, and in total over 90 films. 

[guy60660]

Max Schmeling | British Vintage Boxing 

[theanticool]

Joe Louis KOs Max Schmeling in rematch - 6/22/1938

[filmicgreyscale]

Conrad Veidt and German heavy-weight boxer Max Schmeling

[the-history-of-fighting]

Joe Louis squaring up to his German foe Max Schmeling in 1938 in preparation for their fight. It took Louis a little over two minutes to win the match which many see as the first time white America rooted for a black person over a white one. This was due to tensions between the United States and the German Nazi Party. Years later, Louis would state:

“White Americans, even while some of them were lynching black people in the South, were depending on me to K.O. a German … the whole damned country was depending on me.”

[countess--olenska]

Conrad Veidt with Max Schmeling, 1929

[seeselfblack]

On This Day: Joe Louis Knocks Out Max Schmeling

Joe Louis avenged the first loss of his career with a first round knockout of German Max Schmeling in a fight billed as a battle between America and Nazi Germany.

The “Brown Bomber” Is Victorious Joe Louis, a 22-year-old son of Alabama sharecroppers, had won his first 23 career fights when he stepped into the ring against 30-year-old German Max Schmeling on June 19, 1936. Schmeling was the clear underdog, but he had detected a flaw in Louis’ form while studying film: Louis tended to drop his left hand after a left jab, a weakness that Schmeling exploited in a shocking 12-round knockout victory. Schmeling was greeted as a hero in Germany and portrayed by the Nazi regime as a symbol of Aryan superiority. “Schmeling's victory was not only sport,” wrote a Nazi journal. “It was a question of prestige for our race.” Louis, meanwhile, was humiliated. Though he went on to win the heavyweight title when he beat James Braddock in 1937, he said, “I don't want nobody to call me champ until I beat Schmeling.” Louis got his chance a year later, when he faced Schmeling in a rematch at Yankee Stadium. The fight took on a fiercely political tone; Franklin D. Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler had each openly visited his respective countryman before the fight, and a worldwide audience viewed the bout as a symbolic battle between America and Nazi Germany. “It had tremendous political implications in the battle of democracy against fascism,” says Lewis Erenberg, author of “The Greatest Fight of Our Generation, Louis vs. Schmeling.” “And it had tremendous implications about race and racial ideology.”  Over 70,000 fans were in attendance for the fight, while millions listened on radio. The Nazi government lifted its 3:00 a.m. curfew so that Germans could listen to the fight in bars. Having repaired the faulty post-jab, left-hand drop that Schmeling had exploited in their first meeting, Louis quickly laid into his stunned opponent with a barrage of quick, close jabs. Clearly outmatched, Schmeling was unable to connect more than two punches in the entire fight, falling to the mat four times... 

...Celebrations erupted throughout the U.S., especially in black neighborhoods such as nearby Harlem. Louis was revered as a national hero by both blacks and whites. “The vertebrae that were cracked in Schmeling's spine and that kept him in the hospital afterward represented a warning to the rest of the world of America's might and its will,” says boxing historian William Dettloff. “On that night, Joe Louis was America, whether or not he saw it that way or saw himself as the icon he was. All that mattered was the way America saw him. It's how history sees him...” Continue reading Here