Max Schmeling

Book excerpt: Schmeling's heavyweight championship bouts with Joe Louis in the late 1930s were great fights, but they were also political events--Louis, an American black, versus the German Schmeling, a representative of Hitler's master race. At 92, Schmeling may be the last living person to have conversed with Franklin Roosevelt, Hitler, Pope Pious XII, and Marlene Dietrich. It's all here, in this detailed account of the boxer's life through the end of World War II. Perhaps the most interesting part of the story is the way time has altered the boxer's point of view. When he lost the second Louis fight, he thought it was the most devastating event of his life. But now he realizes that, had he won that fight, he would have become the paramount symbol of Hitler's Third Reich. Though he was a patriot, Schmeling could not reconcile himself to Hitler's racial and religious persecution. This is a fascinating, humble autobiography, of interest as much for the times in which the subject lived--and the people he knew-as for the subject himself.