ABSTRACT
And yet his work has still managed to reach out and seize a few Anglophone scholars in the most surprising of ways. Allen Guttmann became acquainted with Eichberg’s early work while teaching in Tübingen in 19778. Der Weg des Sports and two essays were a key source of inspiration for From Ritual to Record. The Nature of Modern Sports (Guttmann, 1978), but Guttmann had not read Leistung, Spannung, Geschwindigkeit at this time
because it had not yet appeared in print (Guttmann, personal communication, 1995). Richard Mandell, who did research for Sport. A Cultural History (Mandell, 1984) at the Sport Science Institute of the University of Bonn and at the German Institute of Sport Science in Cologne, also acknowledges his intellectual debt to Eichberg. Like Guttmann, Mandell calls Eichberg ‘brilliant’ and ‘original’ (Mandell, 1984, pp. 281, 309). Independently of these two, I became acquainted with Eichberg’s work at the German Institute of Sport Science in 1988, when Dr Dietrich Quanz kindly gave me copies of several key articles and loaned me Der Weg des Sports and Leistung, Spannung, Geschwindigkeit. Despite coming from a different disciplinary backgroundcultural anthropology, not history-I, like Guttmann and Mandell, was immediately struck by the brilliance and originality of Eichberg’s work. My book, Training the Body for China. Sports in the Moral Order of the People’s Republic (1995), also owes an intellectual debt to Eichberg. We three American scholars were all enthralled by Eichberg’s early works in sports history, which we had to read in German. John Bale, by contrast, became intrigued by the smattering of available English translations of Eichberg’s later works that reflected his turn to spatial and ecological studies (and is reflected in the choices of essays to reproduce in this volume).
