Erziehung und Unterricht 2018/3+4

Propp, The Danube Maidens – Hakoah Vienna Girls’ Swim Team in the 1920s and 1930s 199 Erziehung und Unterricht • März/April 3-4|2018 More than the races, however, the Hakoans’ two weeks in Palestine deeply touched their sense of themselves as Jews. They boarded with pioneer families and celebrated Shabbat. They toured Palestine by motorbike, meeting Arabs and sampling the local cuisine. Wearing crisp white blouses, dark blue skirts, and matching straw hats, they led the parade through Tel Aviv. Over and over, the girls say they will never forget their experience in the second Maccabiah. Elisheva describes a profound sense of having come ‘home’, and how moved she was by the warmth and informality of the relationships between parents and children, relative to those existing in Vienna. 4 Lucie Goldner later wrote, about leaving Haifa to return to Europe: ‘One important part of our young lives, something that never could be repeated in its uniqueness, had come to a close.’ 5 Austria’s Golden Badge of Honor That spring and summer, after their return from Palestine, the team exploded with new- found speed and strength. Judith Deutsch, who had been feeling sick during the Macca- biah, broke twelve national records during the remainder of 1935. In June, Judith’s time in the 100-meter freestyle Olympic qualifying race was 1:19. At the Austrian State Champion- ships at Klagenfurt she won spectacularly, improving the Austrian 400-meter freestyle record by more than ten seconds. Later that month, Judith and Annemarie won a 200- meter meet in the Danube. Lucie Goldner won in the back crawl. Ruth Langer came in first for the breaststroke and second for the back crawl. In front of 15,000 people, Hakoah won almost all the prizes that day in the Danube. Judith, especially, was unstoppable. On August 4 th , she broke her own record for 100-meter freestyle, coming in at 1:16:2. On August 24 th , in an internal Hakoah meet, she came in well under the Austrian record. August 25 th , she won a Danube championship in Linz. On September 19 th , in the ‘Dianabad’, she set a 100-meter breaststroke record of 1:29:2. On October 20 th , she broke her record for the 500-meter free- style, beating her rival EWASK (Erster Wiener Amateur Sport-Klub) swimmer, Roma Wagner. On October 16 th , she finally reached the 100-meter freestyle at 1:16, although she would break that time, too, setting a record at 1:13:1. Early in 1936, Judith was awarded Austria’s Golden Badge of Honor, given to the country’s top three athletes. The 1936 Berlin Olympics Judith, Lucie, and Ruth were invited to compete at the Olympic Games to be held during the summer of 1936 in Berlin. This honor was bestowed during a heated international debate about the place of the games in Hitler’s Germany. In the United States, Jeremiah Mahoney, president of the Amateur Athletic Association, was one of the many who called for a boycott to protest Germany’s treatment of ‘non-Aryans’. But in 1934, Avery Brundage, head of the American Olympic Committee, was given ‘sanitized’ inspection of German sports facilities that hid both the deplorable conditions under which Jewish athletes trained and the extreme policing of Jewish people. Upon his return to the States, Brundage insisted that Jewish athletes were being treated fairly and that the Games should go on, as planned. Further- more, he argued that sports and politics should remain separate. He maneuvered the Amateur Athletic Union to a close vote in favor of sending an American team to Berlin. 6 Today, it’s undisputed that the Olympic Games afforded the Nazis a tremendous public re- lations opportunity to showcase a falsely benign state. Participation by the world’s leading nations was tantamount to an endorsement of the new German rule – shortly after the Games, Hitler accelerated his campaign against the Jews.