The Berlin Boxing Club

Karl is paired with Franz, the smallest and the least imposing of the three bullies. Even so, Karl hates the idea of fighting. He can tell that Franz is also afraid to fight: “A coward knows another coward when he sees one” (11). Yet Franz still manages to land several wounding blows, and the more that Karl weakens, the more taunting and courageous Franz becomes.

The boys suddenly hear Herr Boch high up on the stairwell, calling out to them and wondering what the matter is. Gertz, the tallest of the boys, pushes Karl down the stairwell, instructing him to tell Herr Boch that he fell down the stairs. The three boys then flee. Herr Boch finds Karl. His face is swollen, and he stinks of urine; he has also had a tooth knocked out, which he manages to hide from Boch. Boch does not wholly believe Karl’s explanation about having fallen down the stairs and gently presses him to tell the truth about what happened, but Karl demurs. He knows thatbecause of his high marks in history, he is one of Herr Boch’s favorite students; still, he fears that if Boch knows he is Jewish, he will give him failing grades. He eventually manages to escape Boch’s solicitous attentions and make his way home. 

Karl returns home, where he must help Hildy, his younger sister, prepare for an opening at their parents’ gallery. The gallery has not been bringing in very much business lately, and Hildy and Karl have been enlisted to help. They must dress in white and act as servers during the opening; they must also water the wine down beforehand and cut mold off the cheap cheese their father has brought from the market, in order to hold down costs.

Karl fails to keep his appearance a secret from his sister and from Frau Kressel, the trusted family housekeeper. However, he tells neither one of them the truth about having been beaten up. He allows Frau Kressel to clean him up, as she has been tending to him since he was a baby and he feels no shame around her. He reflects that from now on, he will no longer be able to hide his Jewish identity, and Adolf Hitler will be his main problem, rather than a secondary problem. (His previous concerns have been his acne; his skinniness; his crush on Greta Hauser, a girl in his building; and his parents’ failing business.)

Hildy is more Semitic-looking than he is: she is small, pale, and near-sighted, with curly, dark hair and a large, hooked nose. She looks up to her older brother as a hero, and Winzig und Spatz is her favorite cartoon. Winzig (Karl’s nickname for her) is a mouse, and Spatz (her nickname for Karl) is a sparrow. Both characters dress in traditional German garb—Spatz wears a feathered hat, Winzig a pair of lederhosen—and their adventures consist of trying to sneak food and to get around Herr Fefelfarve, the stationmaster at the train station where they live. Karl wants to be a cartoonist, and he draws Hildy his own original strips of this cartoon. The chapter includes one such strip, in which Winzig and Spatz steal some bratwurst from a napping Herr Fefelfarve and replace it with a pinecone. 

The Stern gallery opening that night is for a local artist named Gustav Hartzel, who paints pretty and inoffensive landscapes. Although Karl’s father opened the gallery in order to feature subversive art by abstract expressionists, these artists have lately fallen out of favor for being decadent and unpatriotic. This is more than a professional disappointment for Karl’s father, who served in World War I and believes that art should portray the horrors of war and other difficult realities: “‘The time for pretty pictures of flowers and kings has passed […]Art needs to show life, real life, in all its wonders and horrors’” (27).

Karl’s father is so preoccupied and irritated by the opening’s lack of success that he fails to pay much mind to Karl’s bruised and swollen face, other than to remark, “We’ve got an important opening and you look like Frankenstein’s monster” (29). He sends Karl down to the gallery basement, where the printer is kept, to fetch some printed biographical materials for Hartzel. Karl is surprised not to see his mother in the basement, as she often works down there. On the floor, he finds a strange and lurid flyer concerning someone called “the Countess”; the flyer states, “Berlin is still hot, ladies—you just have to look in the right cracks” (30). On an impulse, Karl puts the flyer in his pocket.

When he returns upstairs, Hildy excitedly points out an important and unexpected new guest at the opening; Karl turns and sees“the imposing figure of Max Schmeling standing by the door” (31). 

Max Schmeling is a former heavyweight champion and a revered figure in Germany. He is known in the United States as the “Black Uhlan of the Rhine” and is married to a famous and beautiful Czech actress named Anny Ondra. Karl’s father has often claimed to be friends with Schmeling, but Karl has never believed that a macho celebrity like Schmeling would be friends with an intellectual aesthete like his father.

Schmeling immediately asks Karl what happened to his face, and Karl gives him the line about falling down the stairs. Schmeling nevertheless guesses that Karl got beaten up, because of the marks on his face: “I know a bruise from a punch when I see one” (36). He sympathizes with Karl and tells him that there is “no shame in taking a beating” (36). 

Schmeling buys a Hartzel painting at the gallery and then tells Karl’s father that he would like to buy a Grosz portrait of himself that he knows to be down in the basement. Grosz is one of the abstract expressionists who have fallen out of favor in Germany’s new nationalist climate. Karl’s father demurs on selling the painting to Schmeling, telling him that it is the only Grosz painting he owns. Karl knows this is a lie; his father still has a number of Grosz paintings and is just trying to establish a better bargaining position. Karl is also familiar with the portrait in question because he has copied it. (His copy is shown in the text in an illustration.)

Schmeling then makes Karl’s father a surprising offer: if Karl’s father gives him the painting, he will give his son free boxing lessons at the Berlin Boxing Club, his training gym. To Karl’s embarrassment (especially since all of the guests at the opening are watching this transaction), Schmeling observes: “Every boy should learn to defend himself. Looks like he could use a few lessons” (43). 

As Karl and Hildy wrap up Max Schmeling’s two paintings—the only paintings sold at the gallery that night—Hildy confides in Karl that she wishes Anny Ondra could give her “beauty lessons” as part of the barter (45). Karl realizes that his sister is, at age 8, already highly conscious of her appearance, and that she considers herself ugly. 

Back upstairs in the gallery, Schmeling tests Karl’s reflexes by throwing a rubber ball at him. He then tells him to keep the ball and to periodically squeeze it in his hands to strengthen his muscles. Karl’s pre-boxing club training also consists of shoveling coal for his building’s superintendent and performing the daily “three hundred”: one hundred push-ups, one hundred sit-ups, fifty pull-ups, and fifty minutes of running (47). Schmeling tells Karl that he will be back in Berlin in two months, at which point they will begin training at the club together. 

Karl’s mother turns out to be in their apartment kitchen, tending to her younger brother, Jakob, who has a bullet lodged in his buttock. Although Jakob insists at first that Karl should know the reason he was shot, Karl’s parents believe that Karl is too young to be told. Jakob therefore jokes with Karl: “‘One of my girlfriends found out about another one of my girlfriends, and the next thing I knew I had a hole in my Hintern’” (54). Karl is then sent off to his room. 

Karl eavesdrops on his parents in their bedroom, hoping that he will get some more insight into what might have happened to Uncle Jakob. He suspects that Uncle Jakob’s wound has to do with his belonging to an underground Communist anti-Nazi group, and speculates that perhaps the Gestapo broke up the group’s most recent meeting.

While Karl’s parents do nottalk about Uncle Jakob, they do discuss the barter with Max Schmeling. Karl is surprised that his father defends, over his mother’s objections, Karl’s right to take boxing lessons: “With the way things are right now, it couldn’t hurt for Karl to use his fists” (58). He is also surprised to realize that his father has known all along that Karl has been beaten up. 

While art is in Karl’s family—his grandfather was a well-known portrait painter, and his mother also once aspired to be an artist, before giving up her ambitions for her family—his parents disapprove of his dream of becoming a cartoonist. They consider cartoons a lowbrow form of art and would prefer that Karl be a painter or an architect.

Since Karl cannot sleep after his eventful evening, he relaxes by drawing a portrait of Max Schmeling. In doing so, he realizes that Schmeling’s features are more Semitic than Aryan. He then squeezes the rubber ball that Schmeling gave him, regards his fists and the stretch of his arms in the darkening room, and fantasizes about boxing Franz, Gertz, and Julius. 

Karl begins his training regimen and is disheartened by the results. He then approaches Herr Koplek, his building’s superintendent, to ask him if he can load coal into the furnace for him. Koplek is a Nazi sympathizer who has a swastika flag on his front door and reads Der Stürmer, a virulent, anti-Semitic magazine. Karl has swiped old copies of this magazine from Koplek “because of the pin-ups, not because of the Nazi propaganda” (64).

Koplek is grudging about allowing Karl to take over one of his duties, even when Karl explains his training program. Koplek clearly knows Karl to be a Jew, as is seen by his skepticism that Sigmund Stern would be friends with Max Schmeling: “‘Why would a good German like Schmeling be friends with someone like your father?’” (67).

However, he eventually allows Karl to do one of his jobs for him. Karl finds that shoveling coal is, like the rest of his training regimen, far more difficult than he had imagined. As he is in the middle of doing so, he is surprised by Greta Hauser, the object of his affections, who lives in his building. She has come down to the basement to fetch something from her family’s storage bin. She asks him teasingly if he is Vulcan, and Karl admits to not knowing who this is.Greta explains Vulcan is the Roman god of fire, and the two of them have a playful and flirtatious exchange, although—to Karl’s disappointment—Greta asks him nothing about why he is shoveling coal in the first place. She then goes back up the stairs, and he watches her disappear from view. 

Karl makes slow but steady progress at his training while waiting to hear from Max Schmeling, who is still traveling elsewhere in Europe and in the States.

It is meanwhile time for Karl to return to school, where he is wary of reencountering his assailants from the past summer. At school, he and the other students are made to attend an assembly; looking around the room, Karl notes that many of the students—including the ones who beat him up last summer—are wearing some form of Hitler Youth insignia. The assembly itself is also a disturbing surprise. Herr Munter, the man giving the speech, is the new, Nazi-affiliated principal of the school. He has convened the students to announce that the school has some new rules, including the removal of all works by “Jews and radicals” from the library shelves; further, each student is also required to join Hitler Youth and to “avoid corrupting influences” (75). All of the students—including Karl, so as not to stand out—give Munter a Nazi salute. Munter ends his speech by making pointed, threatening eye contact with all of the known Jewish students in the room, and his eyes eventually land on Karl.

At the speech, Karl is flanked by his friends Kurt and Hans, who are German but whose parents are not Nazi-affiliated. While they are not a part of the virulence in the room, neither do they understand Karl’s anxiety; to them, it is just another boring assembly speech. 

Karl must navigate his new and more overtly hostile environment at school. While other teachers are now teaching propaganda about the purity of Aryan blood, Herr Boch—who is once again Karl’s teacher—sticks to neutral science. One day, as he is teaching a class about Karl Landsteiner’s discovery of A, B, and O blood types, a student raises his hand to ask if it is true that all Jews and gypsies have “rat blood” in their veins, as he has read in Der Stürmer. Boch dismisses both this fact and the magazine, which provides a clue as to where his sympathies lie, saying, “‘All human blood is basically the same’” (78).

For a time, Karl manages to avoid the Wolf Pack, although he receives Der Stürmer extracts, “like vicious little valentines,” in his locker (79). One day, though, the bullies push him into a bathroom. The gang has grown to include four new members, and while Karl is stronger than he was last summer, he can defend himself for only so long. Eventually the boys humiliate him by “baptizing” him in a urine-filled toilet; as Gertz tells him, this is an initiation rite for new Wolf Pack members (80).

The attack leaves Karl as furious with Max Schmeling as he is with the Wolf Pack. He wonders why Schmeling has still not been in contact and speculates that “[j]ust like Gertz and the others, he had probably decided that my father and I were dirty Jews” (80). 

Frau Kessel must leave the Stern household, as they can no longer afford to keep her. She prepares the family one final meal of dumplings and tells Karl to be strong and to look after his fragile mother: “‘She has a hard time but she loves you’” (83).

From the local paper, Karl learns that Max Schmeling is back in Berlin. Angry that Schmeling has still not gotten in touch, Karl trains even harder, fantasizing about one day beating his former mentor at a match.

Frau Kessel’s departure causes Karl’s mother to slip into one of the depressions she is prone to, and she retreats to a hot bath. Karl and Hildy have been instructed by their father to check in on her every ten minutes when she is in one of her hermetic “moods,” to make sure that she is still alive and well. When the children dutifully check in on her this time, they find her to be listless and unresponsive. Panicked, they haul her out of the bathtub, and together manage to towel her dry, dress her ina robe, and walk her to the bedroom.

As they are tucking her into bed, their father returns home. He is upset to see his wife in this state, partly because it has disrupted his evening plans.He must take care of her, while sending his son in his stead to deliver a mysterious package to the “Countess.” 

On his way to the address that his father has given him, Karl speculates about what exactly he is delivering. His parents have been printing materials for mysterious clients for some time now, but they have always hidden this side of their business from their children. Since the gallery is no longer bringing in money, they have been increasingly relying on these transactions, as well as on wealthy Jews who wish to liquidate their art collections before fleeing the country.

Karl eventually gives in to his curiosity and carefully opens the package to take a peek at its contents. He finds flyers advertising a ball for “the beautiful boys of Berlin” and showing a picture of two men in tuxedos, dancing. He realizes that his parents are doing business with homosexuals, who are even more loathed in Germany than Jews.

The Countess is (as Karl gradually realizes) a transvestite. She is at first arch and flirtatious toward Karl, but her manner turns simple and warm. She caresses Karl’s face and tells him that he has his father’s expression: “Sig and I go a long way back” (93). This causes Karl to wonder if his father might himself be gay; this would perhaps explain his father’s flamboyant style of dress, including the dark-blue scarf he wears to gallery openings, and his mother’s sadness.

Once home, Karl is surprised to find Max Schmeling in his kitchen, chatting with his father. Schmeling apologizes to Karl for his absence and tells him that his wife reminded him of the deal when the two of them recently hung up his bartered portrait.