The Berlin Boxing Club

“The feint” is a boxing move that Max Schmeling explains to Karl. It involves confusing an opponent by continually throwing him off-balance, leading him to believe that you are doing one thing while you are in fact doing another: “‘Whenever you fake a punch or try to give your opponent the impression that you’ve been punched or hurt so that you can mount your own attack’” (371). Schmeling explains this move to Karl by way of justifying his own placating approach to the Nazi regime: his failure to act and to take a stand. He is attempting to frame his inaction as acanny survival strategy, as it certainly is.

However, for Karl, survival is more of a literal matter than for Schmeling, and Schmeling’s explanation makes no sense to him in his particular circumstances. His home has just been destroyed, and he is no longer certain where his parents are in the aftermath of Kristallnacht; diplomacy and passivity are luxuries that he can no longer afford. Schmeling’s self-serving explanation not only diminishes Schmeling in Karl’s eyes, but makes him think of “every other German who thought they were feinting through the rise of Hitler and the Nazis” (371). It makes Schmeling seem suddenly ordinary to Karl, and both complacent and self-deluding.

Schmeling’s explanation about “the feint” also shows the limits of applying boxing strategies to real life. It is a clever short-term strategy, but Schmeling presents it as a long-term solution. It is one thing to throw off your opponent in a short match; it is another thing to appease an evil regime over a period of years, while devastation mounts all around you. Even so, as Karl must acknowledge later in the book, when his family is questioned by Gestapo police on the train from Berlin to Hamburg and Schmeling steps in and covers for them, the feint can be a very useful tactic. It is just not one that should be mistaken for a philosophy, noris it one that should be used all the time.