Celebrity and Spectacle: Adolf von Guretzki's Influence on Berlin's Early Twentieth-Century Sports Writing

In a 1909 epistle bemoaning the use of alcohol in competitive strength sports, J. Petersen, an evangelical American reverend and author, cites a prolific assessment of the greatest continental wrestlers that had been compiled by Adolf von Guretzki, a Berlin sportswriter, two years prior. By the time of his citation by Petersen, von Guretzki was an established newspaper columnist and serialist. His detailed reports and occasional dramatic writings on strength sport and Germanness appeared in both leading national sporting weeklies and Berlin dailies throughout the 1890s and the first decade of the 1900s. His credibility as an author within the contemporaneous physical culture community around the turn of the twentieth century was cemented in his first book, Der Moderne Ringkampf, originally published in 1907. His overview of turn-of-the-century wrestling depicted the diets, habits, and training methods of the world’s biggest wrestling and strength stars. With characteristic analytical tone and straightforward delivery, von Guretzki summed up the training methods of the world’s most notable wrestlers, writing that “[they] owe their success to physical agility and muscular strength, regular exercise, and the most temperate living.”