Dr. Gerry Neubeck is simply amazing, and a hero to many of us here in the Department. (See this previous post where I mention him.) Last week I watched Spielberg's Munich; Yesterday I read Jay Weiner's Strib piece of a connection, via Dr. Neubeck, I have with a German Olympics from a generation earlier than the one depicted in that film:
...Neubeck, 88, a retired University of Minnesota psychology professor*, sat in his wheelchair as we toured an extraordinary exhibit at the Minnesota History Center in downtown St. Paul.The collection of photos, videos, sound kiosks, posters, documents and artifacts was assembled 10 years ago by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The exhibit highlights the propaganda skills of Hitler and his henchmen. It details the unheeded calls by some American activists to boycott those Berlin Games. It notes the contradiction of an America in the 1930s in which racial segregation was the norm even while blacks representing the United States ran, jumped and won gold medals in Nazi Germany.
"Oh, my," Neubeck said, over and over again as I read the words on the walls to him.
Neubeck and I met 10 years ago. The 1996 Atlanta Olympics were approaching and Gretel Bergmann, a Jewish athlete who was barred from competing on the German Olympic team in 1936, was the focus of a New York Times article. The German champion, Bergmann would have been favored to win the women's high jump in Berlin.
Before the '36 Olympics, Bergmann and a small group of other Jewish athletes were sent to a training camp near Stuttgart, essentially as a ruse. The Nazis, concerned the International Olympic Committee would force them to put Jews on the German team, staged "tryouts" for Jews.
Gerhard Neubeck, then 17 and a top German 1,500- and 3,000-meter runner, was one of the supposed Jewish candidates for the Olympic team.
...I wrote a story that described Neubeck's experiences, of his and his father's beating on "Kristallnacht," when Nazi storm troopers went on a rampage against Jews, and his family's flight to Holland. I described the two items he'd kept from that period -- his brown running spikes and a running shirt with the letters "JSG" that stood for Jewish Sports Association in German.
"Somehow or other, they were dear to me, so I brought them over," he said of those possessions. "I cannot tell you, to be honest, what the rationale of it was. I must have had some foreboding that this was important"...
* I feel it my duty as a member of the FSoS community to note that Dr. Neubeck's affiliation while here at the University of Minnesota was with (what was at one time) the Family Study Center in the Sociology Department. He later was a faculty member in Family Social Science when it was instituted as a department, which was in what was then known as the College of Home Economics. That is also the affiliation on his Distinguished Teaching Award listing.