Erziehung und Unterricht 2018/3+4

Propp, The Danube Maidens – Hakoah Vienna Girls’ Swim Team in the 1920s and 1930s 197 Erziehung und Unterricht • März/April 3-4|2018 Karen Propp The Danube Maidens Hakoah Vienna Girls’ Swim Team in the 1920s and 1930s Summary: Dieser Beitrag erzählt die Geschichte jüdischer Schwimmerinnen der Hakoah und beschreibt deren Protest gegen den Nationalsozialismus. Schon in den 1920er-Jahren können Hedy Bienenfeld und Fritzi Löwy Erfolge für sich verzeichnen. Später ist Judith Deutsch eine der erfolgreichsten Athletinnen des Damen-Schwimmteams der Hakoah und wird 1935 zur österreichischen Sportlerin des Jahres gewählt. Zusammen mit ihren Kolleginnen Ruth Langer und Lucie Goldner verweigert sie im darauffolgenden Jahr die Teilnahme an den Olympischen Sommerspielen in Berlin. The Across-Vienna Swim Race Their story begins in 1924, when fifteen-year-old Hedy Bienenfeld, one of a throng of swimmers, dove from the Nußdorf canal gate. Half a million spectators crowded the banks of the Danube for the annual swimming competition ‘Quer durch Wien’ (‘Across-Vienna’); the men and women in formal dress lounging on the grass, the children playing. Exercise – for amusement and for the sake of one’s health – had become fashionable. Next to soccer, swimming was Austria’s favorite sport. Vienna was dotted with open air bathing pools, up and down the Danube, and during the winter months there were indoor pools aplenty. The race was 7.5 kilometers long. The river was cold. The swimmers wore rubber caps and wool suits that hung heavy with water. Small boats patrolled the water, many skip- pered by coaches who leaned over the sides to call out encouragement to their trainees. Swimming into the wind, some athletes tired and quit part way. Not Hedy Bienenfeld. Her steady and relaxed breaststroke made it look easy. At four o’clock in the afternoon, she was first to cross the finish line at the Rotunden Bridge. I see her startled into momentary silence, amazed at her triumph. She looked downstream at the swimmers straggling in, and upstream as the river moved out of view. She peeled off her white rubber cap, shook out her short, black hair, and let loose a full-bodied laugh. It’s not clear if Fritzy Löwy competed in the 1924 ‘Quer durch Wien’, but the following year, 1925, she took first place, as a freestyler. Hedy, whose stroke was the slower breast, came in second. And that – along with Alfred Guth’s win on the men’s team – allowed the Hakoah swim club to stake its claim in the close, competitive world of Viennese sports. For some Austrians, the Hakoah triumph was a threat. The German nationalist newspaper Deutschösterreichische Tages-Zeitung commented: ‘About 400 swimmers participated in the river competition … We regret to say – and it sheds a telling light on the state of af- fairs in our swim sports – that nine out of ten participants were Jews.’ 1 Foreign Accents Viewing the documentary ‘Watermarks’ by Yaron Zilberman at the Boston Jewish Film Festival was what first prompted my years-long research into the Hakoah swim club, a passion that has frankly surprised me in its tenacity and depth.