Whether stones were thrown at her as they did at Lotte Specht? Hardly likely. History has also given the Munich athlete Maria Kießling a role as a pioneer of her sport, but she was neither hostile nor later elevated to the status of an icon of a movement. Maria Kießling, born in Munich in 1894, achieved something that no one else could have done before and no one will ever succeed again, exactly one hundred years ago in Dresden. After that time swallowed up many memories of her.
The most important figures have survived the years and a world war, they are recorded in statistics and even in a Wikipedia entry. “Marie Kießling”, it says (actually Maria Babette), “was the only German athlete who managed to win all competitions in a championship”.
26 she was there. For the first time, women were allowed to take part in German athletics championships in Dresden on August 14 and 15, 1920: in the 100-meter sprint, long jump, shot put and 4 × 100-meter relay, embedded in an opulent championship program 22 disciplines for men. Maria Kießling competed four times – and won gold four times for TSV 1860 Munich.
As amazing as that sounds, the surprise must have been limited. A preliminary report from Munich latest news At the time, it was clear: “This time the women’s championships should all go to southern Germany; Miss Kießling (1860 Munich), who has dominated the 100 m run, long jump and shot put so far with outstanding performances, is considered the best representative among the others Munich women … “- with whom she formed a” record relay “as the final runner. Obviously this Maria Kießling was in a class of her own.
Their medals are still there today. They are in a cardboard box in the attic of a Munich apartment building.
The thing with Lotte Specht was different. The butcher’s daughter from Frankfurt founded the first German women’s football club in 1930, much too early for the prejudices of her time. At that time, the German Football Association took the view that football was “incompatible with the dignity and nature of women” and received support from doctors who warned against masculinization of the female body. It was only 40 years later that the association was to move away from its ban on women’s football. And so the players of the 1st DDFC Frankfurt, which Specht founded for reasons of women’s rights (“I said what men can do, we can too”), not hearts, but stones from the audience – and malice the newspapers. After a year the club disbanded.
Football prizes, a support association, a podcast site and a green area are named after Specht, who later became a cabaret artist and convinced bachelorette. According to Maria Kießling, not even a pebble. She wasn’t a suffragette, had no message, she was just: good. That was enough for a box of medals, but it was obviously not enough to be remembered for so long.
Documents still bear witness to Maria Kießling’s achievements.
(Photo: oh)
How good it was is shown by the numbers, which on the one hand have the nice quality of being objective and comparable, but on the other hand belong in the context of their time. In a time of the ashes, without spikes, without performance diagnostics, without all the beautiful achievements of modern training science. In Dresden they were: 13.0 seconds in the sprint; 5.24 meters in the long jump; 8.31 meters in the shot put; 53.0 seconds in the relay. A photo of Miss Kiessling, as usual without a first name, adorned the cover of the Central German sports magazine struggle.
The newspaper people were nice to the “very honored, gracious Fraulein” Kießling. In a letter with this salutation, an editor of the Berliner Tageblatt she in 1922 for a “courtesy of a literary nature”, for a “little chat” on the subject of female runners, for a sports mirror “in which the capacities of all branches of sport are to have their say”. In the meantime, Miss Kießling had more or less repeated his feat and defended the sprint, long jump and relay titles in Hamburg in 1921, again at the side of club colleagues Zenta Bauer, Maria Rädler and Emma Heiß. She did not compete in the shot put. She was undoubtedly a capacity. However, at the time of this request, she must have already ended her career.
It’s hard to find out why. In 1925 Maria Kießling married the architect Hans Döllgast. The man of whom there are plenty of video and audio recordings, who lectured at the Technical University of Munich, who created the Neuhausen settlement, the parish church of the Holy Blood in Bogenhausen – and who was also considered a pioneer after the Second World War: for creative restoration historical buildings such as the Munich Residenz or the Alte Pinakothek; who left a kind of memoir, the “Journal Retour”, in four volumes; and from his pen, incidentally, also the title lettering of Süddeutsche Zeitung originates in its original form. So Miss Kießling became Frau Döllgast. The marriage of the two remained childless.
.
