The Marathon Man
-
Thomas Elsaesser
Abstract
I have to admit I do not care for jogging. But I have always had an admiration for runners. “Nurmi Nurmi” were the first words I remember ever hearing on the radio. I had to ask what they meant, because – at that age – I had understood “nur mich, nur mich”. My first sporting hero was Emil Zatopek, maybe because I suspected him to be an outsider, on account of the ‘Z’ of his surname, the last letter of the alphabet. My father once tried to comfort me, by saying, after I told him that in the line-up in gym class I was always last, because of my height: “Mach dir nichts draus, die Letzten werden die Ersten sein”. Experience told me there was no reason to believe him, but Zatopek seemed to prove him right, and I still recall the Czech national anthem, played at the Helsinki Olympics in 1952. In November 2000, I chanced to read about Zatopek's death, and I suddenly had this image of a man running and running all these years, somewhere in the Moravian mountains, past Communists and Russian tanks, past the Velvet Revolution, past his country's partition and Vaclav Havel's presidency.
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Portrait of an Interdisciplinary Life. John Neubauer zum 70. Geburtstag
- Introduction
- Thought-Images: A Brief History of Time
- The Return of the Dinosaurs: About Scientific Imagination and its Affects
- Borders and Monuments: Goethe's Reconstruction of the World as Knowledge
- History, Theory and Abraham Gottlob Werner
- Mynheer Peeperkorn's Fever
- Introduction
- History, Empire, Opera
- Music Albums: A Tiny Gesamtkunstwerk?
- Listening to Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate. A Dadaistic-Romantic transposition d'arts?
- Introduction
- Reading Melling's Voyage pittoresque de Constantinople. Topography and Control
- Penumbra
- Bruno Freddi's Vissuto
- From Stony Facts to Paper Flowers
- Picturing It. The Issue of Visuality in the Classical Theory of Metaphor
- Introduction
- The Practical Use of Historiography: from Haffner to Herodotus
- The Gap between Hannah Arendt and Franz Kafka
- Literature and Art in History
- Cultural Memory, Cultural History and Cultural Canons in the Third Millennium
- Cross-border Histories
- Introduction
- The Intolerable
- History, Theory and the Middle Voice
- Sacred Memory or Relics: Should Holocaust Documents Be Altered?
- Blasting the Historical Continuum: Stories of my Grandmother
- Der Erlkönig in Sarajevo: Did the monument forecast the catastrophe?
- Introduction
- Hans Mayer – Ansichten eines komparatistischen Außenseiters
- Mastering Adolescence in the Age of Cultural Studies
- Bamboozled by Literature
- Arguments for a Cross-Cultural Literary History. Theoretical and Practical Implications
- Comparative Literary History, Theory and Practice: John Neubauer's Contribution
- “Rich Seeds We Must Sow … But If Only a Few Will Take”
- John Neubauer's Cultural Geographies
- The Marathon Man
- Embracing the Horizon
- Rezensionen
Articles in the same Issue
- Portrait of an Interdisciplinary Life. John Neubauer zum 70. Geburtstag
- Introduction
- Thought-Images: A Brief History of Time
- The Return of the Dinosaurs: About Scientific Imagination and its Affects
- Borders and Monuments: Goethe's Reconstruction of the World as Knowledge
- History, Theory and Abraham Gottlob Werner
- Mynheer Peeperkorn's Fever
- Introduction
- History, Empire, Opera
- Music Albums: A Tiny Gesamtkunstwerk?
- Listening to Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate. A Dadaistic-Romantic transposition d'arts?
- Introduction
- Reading Melling's Voyage pittoresque de Constantinople. Topography and Control
- Penumbra
- Bruno Freddi's Vissuto
- From Stony Facts to Paper Flowers
- Picturing It. The Issue of Visuality in the Classical Theory of Metaphor
- Introduction
- The Practical Use of Historiography: from Haffner to Herodotus
- The Gap between Hannah Arendt and Franz Kafka
- Literature and Art in History
- Cultural Memory, Cultural History and Cultural Canons in the Third Millennium
- Cross-border Histories
- Introduction
- The Intolerable
- History, Theory and the Middle Voice
- Sacred Memory or Relics: Should Holocaust Documents Be Altered?
- Blasting the Historical Continuum: Stories of my Grandmother
- Der Erlkönig in Sarajevo: Did the monument forecast the catastrophe?
- Introduction
- Hans Mayer – Ansichten eines komparatistischen Außenseiters
- Mastering Adolescence in the Age of Cultural Studies
- Bamboozled by Literature
- Arguments for a Cross-Cultural Literary History. Theoretical and Practical Implications
- Comparative Literary History, Theory and Practice: John Neubauer's Contribution
- “Rich Seeds We Must Sow … But If Only a Few Will Take”
- John Neubauer's Cultural Geographies
- The Marathon Man
- Embracing the Horizon
- Rezensionen
