The Berlin Boxing Club

The Berlin Boxing Club is the second novel by Robert Sharenow, also the author of My Mother the Cheerleader. It was published in 2011 and won the Association of Jewish Libraries Sidney Taylor Award.

While a work of fiction, The Berlin Boxing Clubis based on a true story: that of the German boxing champion Max Schmeling, who sheltered two Jewish children during Kristallnacht—the night of Nazi-sponsored rioting against Jews that many see as the beginning of the Holocaust. At the same time, the Nazis revered Schmeling, as he was seen to embody the Aryan ideal of strength, forcefulness, and discipline.

The novel takes place from 1934 to 1938, the years leading up to the Holocaust and World War II. It is told from the point of view of Karl Stern, a teenage Jewish boy. Karl lives in Berlin with his mother, father, and his younger sister, Hildy. Adolf Hitler has recently been appointed chancellor of Germany, and open violence and bigotry against Jews have become commonplace. The novel opens with Karl getting attacked by some anti-Semitic classmates of his, a gang of boys who call themselves the Wolf Pack. Karl is leaving his classroom late one afternoon, on the last day of school before summer vacation, when the Wolf Pack surprise him in the hallway. Determined to expose him as a Jew, they pull his pants down to reveal his circumcised penis, then beat him up so that his face swells.

That evening, Karl must work at his parents’ art gallery, along with his sister, Hildy. The gallery is doing poorly, in large part because of the Nazi-era prohibition against the “decadent” expressionist art that his father most values and likes to display. He now must hide these paintings and instead display bland and inoffensive paintings of majestic Alpine landscapes. These types of paintings, by an artist named Gustav Hartzel, are on display the night Karl meets Max Schmeling. Schmeling has come to the opening—along with his wife, the Czech actress Anny Ondra, another real-life character in the novel—and Karl is surprised to see him there; his father has often boasted of knowing Schmeling, along with other artists and celebrities, but Karl has not believed him up until now. Karl’s father is a prickly and mysterious character to Karl in many ways.That same evening, when Karl is sent down to the printing press in the gallery basement, he finds a strange flyer. His parents have a separate business printing flyers for private clients, and the flyer Karl discovers is for a decadent-sounding private party; it concerns the Countess, a transvestite acquaintance of his father.

Schmeling desires to buy a George Grosz portrait of himself from Karl’s father, and his father maintains that it is a rare piece of art that he cannot afford to give up. Schmeling then says that he will give Karl boxing lessons in exchange for the portrait; gesturing at Karl’s swollen face, he observes that it looks as if Karl needs to learn how to defend himself. He tells Karl that he will be back at the Berlin Boxing Club in a couple of months and, in the meantime, gives Karl a strict training regime to follow.

Up until now, Karl has most desired to be a cartoonist, and the novel is interspersed with his portraits of different people—both boxing celebrities and people he knows—and with excerpts from Winzig und Spatz, a popular German comic book. Karl makes up his own strips from this comic book to entertain Hildy. Karl’s two enthusiasms, boxing and comic strips, are both American, new-world enthusiasms: the United States is where Karl and Hildy will end up traveling alone, in the novel’s final chapter, their father having been taken prisoner by the Gestapo (the German secret police) and their mother engaged in looking for him.   

The two main threads of the novel’s plot are Karl’s growing mastery of boxing, along with the increasing power of the Nazis. As he grows stronger both physically and mentally, his life grows more and more constricted. He must cope with losing his girlfriend, Greta, his spot in school (once Jews are no longer allowed in Aryan schools) and his beloved uncle,Jakob, who is also taken prisoner by the Gestapo for subversive communist activities. Karl also loses his boxing community after being exposed as a Jew during a tournament. Max Schmeling, like Karl’s father, is both a central and an elusive figure. Though he brought Karl into the world of boxing, he is frequently absent from his life, being busy lobbying in the States and advancing his own career. He redeems himself at the novel’s end by sheltering Karl and Hildy in his grand hotel during the aftermath of Kristallnacht, and Karl comes to understand Schmeling as a flawed, self-preserving, but well-meaning person. Similarly, Karl comes to appreciate his own father as a complicated man who was doing his best to hold on to his individuality in totalitarian times.