51 pages • 1 hour read
Robert SharenowThe Berlin Boxing Club
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Art in a Totalitarian Regime
In the Berlin where this novel takes place, art has been put into the service of politics—that is, of the Nazi regime. Karl’s father is no longer allowed to show paintings that are deemed by the Nazis to show decadent, daring subjects or that are simply by non-Aryan artists. Rather, he must display pretty, inoffensive art that glorifies the German landscape and identity. It is a difficult situation for him both morally and financially, as these new paintings that he is obliged to show do not sell well, and it reinforces his own tendency toward rigidity and didacticism. He frequently lectures Karl on the obligation of art to disturb and to show the world in a nuanced, complicated light, rather than a simple one; gazing at the Picasso painting that he is about to sell to a wily art dealer, he muses, “‘So many ideas in one painting. It’s no wonder those savages have banned art like this’” (304). He also exercises his own sort of censorship, in dismissing Karl’s ambitions to be a comic-book artist.
What Karl’s father does not see about Karl’s comic book hobby—both his reading and his drawing of comic strips—is that it is Karl’s way of coping with totalitarianism and thought control. Karl’s own versions of the popular German comic strip Winzig und Spatz put a distinctly sinister and contemporary slant on a harmless, silly children’s tale. In Karl’s rewriting of the story, the German stationmaster is not merely a lazy, bossy man but a Nazi, while Winzig and Spatz—a mouse and a sparrow who wear traditional German garb—are his subjects and enemies. In portraying their struggle to outwit Fefalfarve, Karl is documenting his own struggles as a Jew in 1930s Berlin. Similarly, he is drawn to the new American comic book hero Superman, not only because of his powers but because of his status as an outsider. To Karl, he is a cartoon version of one of his real-life heroes, the American Jewish boxer Barney Ross. He is a “mongrel” who has triumphed not in spite of his difference but because of it, and is an inspiration for Karl’s own invented superhero, the Mongrel, as well as for Karl himself.
The difficult political climate gives a special pressure and intensity to the underground argument Karl and his father have about what does and does not constitute “real” art. Their art would be important to them both in any circumstances, but in these circumstances, it has become tied up with their very identities. They live in a time when art has been censored and politicized, and this has made them both think hard about what their art—what art in general—means to them. Their situation shows how, in attempting to diminish the role of art and to drive art underground, a totalitarian regime tends only to confirm and to concentrate the power of art.
The Dangers of Conformity and Social Pressure
While this novel is full of overtly-evil characters, perhaps the more disturbing characters are those who are passive and acquiescent in the face of evil. These characters show how easily wrongness can be normalized and accepted as part of the background fabric of one’s life. Unlike vicious bullies such as Gertz Diener of the Wolf Pack—or, for that matter, Adolf Hitler or Paul Joseph Goebbels—they are not inherently bad people; they are just conventional people and are motivated by a combination of dutifulness and selfishness.
Karl’s school friends, Hans and Kurt, are both examples of this type of character, and the way that they transform over the course of the novel is instructive. The fact that they are peripheral characters in the book, moreover, makes this transformation starker. They are not intimates of Karl’s, and he seems not to see them very much outside school.But each timehe sees them againat the start of a new school year, they have altered and acceded a little more to the Hitler regime in a way that is more obvious to Karl than to them. At the beginning of the novel, they are casual but reliable friends who flank Karl in a way that seems protective during school assemblies. They are gentiles, and as such, they lend Karl a sort of cloak of acceptability. Although neither boy has yet joined the Hitler Youth, they are also not nearly as disturbed as Karl is by the content of these assemblies; to them, they are just boring school assemblies to be endured but not taken seriously.
It is this same shrugging half-heartedness—more than any sort of virulent anti-Semitism—that motivates the boys to eventually join Hitler Youth. They tell Karl it is like joining the Boy Scouts; that is, it is more of a social than a political thing to do. They continue to sit next to him during school assemblies, even while wearing their Hitler Youth insignia. They are sitting next to him during Karl’s final school assembly, when he is exposed as a Jew and kicked out of the school; they do not cheer and jeer at Karl, as many of the other students do, but they do not stand up for him, either. Much as Karl’s onetime girlfriend Greta does during Karl’s final confrontation with her in the ice cream shop, they just look away and refuse to engage. Karl last sees Kurt walking down the street and carrying a looted pair of Sabbath candles during Kristallnacht; Kurt recognizes Karl as well, but again says nothing. It is a bit of residual humanity and decency on his part that only emphasizes how far away from decency he has drifted otherwise. Something in Kurt knows that he is taking part in wrongdoing, but still he will not stick his neck out or actively help his friend.
A more central example of this sort of passivity lies in the character of Max Schmeling. While Schmeling does not go so far as to take part in street riots against Jews, he does allow members of the Nazi regime to wine and dine him; he even writes an introduction to a book on a racialized theory of boxing. He does so out of the same impulse that motivates Kurt and Hans: that of self-preservation. Like Kurt and Hans, he is not without decency, and he eventually does two very good things: sheltering Karl and his sister during Kristallnacht and then providing them passage on a boat to the United States. However, these are not exactly acts of heroism. They cost Schmeling little, as a wealthy and influential man, and he acts only under duress and with extreme caginess and reluctance. The disturbing thing about his generosity is how circumstantial it is: how linked it is not only to his prior connection with Karl but to Karl finding and confronting him (at great risk to himself). In helping Karl and his family, Schmeling is not acting out of conviction, but rather because he has been pressured to do so, much as he has been pressured by the Nazis.
Tradition Versus Modernity
At the end of this novel, Karl reflects that his father and Max Schmeling, while opposites in many ways, have one important trait in common: “[…] they were both what my father would call moderns, men who didn’t want to be encumbered by old traditions and labels. They each strove to define themselves as individuals, and each failed because of the Nazis” (398). Karl and Hildy are on their way to the United States, and Karl is breaking with traditions and labels in more ways than one. The task and the opportunity ahead of him is to become the fully-modern man that neither his father nor Schmeling were completely able to be.
The break that Karl wants to make is not only with Nazi Germany, although that is obviously the most immediate threat to him. Like his father, he does not want to be defined as a Jew first and foremost; in confronting the brownshirts in his living room during Kristallnacht, his father declares, “I am a German!” (339). It is not only the fact thatthat these men have broken into his house that makes him so angry; it is that they have decided for him what he is and have put his racial identity ahead of his private one. To Karl’s father, this is the very opposite of living in a civilized society and of everything that he has valued about Berlin. He has handed these values of individuality and cosmopolitanism down to Karl, to the point where Karl does not feel any special bond with the orthodox Jewish students at the Talmudic school that he must attend, after he has been thrown out of his regular public school. He and these students have their Jewishness in common and nothing else:
In general there were two types of students at the school: the old students who came from more observant families and we new ones who were forced to attend because we had been kicked out of our secular schools. I felt no connection to the religious Jews and didn’t believe in any of their traditions (197).
At the same time, Karl’s father embodies certain traditional Jewish stereotypes that Karl wishes to escape, namely that Jewish people tend to be artistic and intellectual, rather than athletic. In explaining his own lack of interest in sports to Karl, his father states, “We are people of the mind. Our brains don’t belong in our feet” (35). Karl is angry that, even while purporting to believe in individuality, his father is putting the two of them in the same broad category. He wishes to prove his father wrong, and the American Jewish boxer Barney Ross is important to him for this reason. Ross shows Karl that not only is it possible to be Jewish and athletic, but that it is possible to have a public identity that is combative and fierce, rather than placating and diplomatic. In this way, a figure like Ross is a corrective not only to Karl’s father, but also to Max Schmeling.
