Jewish Sports Officials in Interwar Vienna

The proposed project uses the example of Jewish sports officials to reconstruct the social field of sport as a site of identity politics in Vienna during the interwar period. It will compare the possibilities and limits of Jewish participation in various social fields, and examine the interactions and networks that may have linked these fields. First, a demographic overview of Jewish sports officials will be created; second, using a collective biography approach, the possible similarities and differences will be analyzed. Besides their activities in and for sport, a priority will be placed on the professional activities of the persons under examination, as well as their activities in the media and in politics. Additionally, individual biographies will be traced as case studies. In this way, the project seeks to make visible the role of a buried tradition of Viennese sport and popular culture in the first half of the twentieth century. The biographies of the circle of people under investigation raise questions of Jewish identity, which especially before 1938 was dominated by the tension between religion, Zionism and "assimilation". At the center are the strategic aspects of the construction of social identities: how could varying "Jewish identities" be implemented, how could a "non-Jewish society" be positioned on the basis of what ascriptions of the "Jewish" as the other, and in which interactions could these respective constructions be found? This will be linked to the question of whether for a specific period of time a concrete engagement with Jewishness was a genuine part of specific Central European sport cultures. The involvement with popular cultural practices forms the decisive criterion for the selection of a particular sport for our investigation. Where sport functions as a popular (mass) culture, paradigmatic social self and public positioning can be analyzed; only there could public discussion processes about Jewishness take place. Our research focus is on football, but swimming, figure skating, boxing, skiing and workers` sport are also important components of the investigation. The different perspectives on sport, Jewishness, and especially on the synopsis of both levels in addition to individual self and external assessments, self and public attributions draw primarily on the media. In the media, the struggle for the production of hegemonic or minority discourses and arguments was raised, strengthened or challenged and meanings are constructed. The symbols of sportiness were transferred into the `community`, examined for ciphers of the "Jewish" and tested for their usefulness or their feasibility. The media are therefore not only used among our research sources, but are also understood as the starting point of contemporary discourse.

Jews in Vienna were active in modern, urban sports in quantitatively significant proportions this is a central result of the research project Jewish sports officials in interwar Vienna. The project could trace the names of about 650 Jewish sports officials, which were active between 1918 and 1938 in Vienna in sports clubs and associations. Although most of these officials worked for Jewish clubs or clubs connoted as Jewish, Jewish officials were also present at clubs which were commonly described as non-Jewish. For example, with one exception, all main football clubs had Jewish officials. This does not mean, we are talking about an open social field. The activities of a sports official were obviously only open to a small segment of society: in the interwar period, they were largely linked to masculinity, middle age and middle class. Personal contacts established in this field were important for the formation of networks. In some cases, old personal, family and professional networks are transferred to sport.For the interwar period, sporting officials who were public figures featured in sports and daily papers. They represent figures in a new field, which became important for broad parts of the society. Therefore, their self-portraying and external attributions are of a cultural significance, which far exceeded the field of sport. This can be seen in another aspect: The strict regulations of sports in some respects challenged the categories of nation and citizenships, especially when it came to a Jewish nation an idea which was widely accepted in Viennese sports of the interwar period.The combination of different fields of research, primarily sports and cultural history, with Jewish studies led to specific new insights, particularly regarding the mechanisms of the construction of the Jew as the other. Especially the precise view of the construction of the other and the important role of popular culture in this context has provided insights which could be useful for the analysis of contemporary discourses for example on migration.