Deutsche Kurorte als Schaubühnen für die „English sports“ Tennis und Golf

Against the backdrop of the introduction of “English sports” into 19th-century Germany, her famous spas played a significant role in making fashionable games such as lawn tennis and golf popular. These spas were the haunts of well-to-do English pensioners and tourists who became their first and almost exclusive patrons. Places like Bad Homburg were also the first to see first-class English players in action. The presence of these sportspeople, and of both English and German royalty at these spas added lustre to their sporting activities and soon attracted the attention of the German burgher. In addition the coverage these games received in high-class journals such as Sport im Bild, edited by the Rotterdam-born Scotsman Andrew Pitcairn-Knowles, and in the lawn tennis yearbooks by Robert Baron von Fichard of Baden-Baden, encouraged more people to adopt the sport of their social betters. The prestige of German spas radiated well beyond the 20th century. Only recently, their illustrious sporting history has been an asset in their applying for recognition as a UNESCO world cultural heritage site. Their golf clubs have been granted the right to add to their names the epithet “royal”, and one of them, Bad Homburg, will host a women’s tennis event in partnership with Wimbledon, immediately preceding The Championships, in the years to come. The present essay examines the historic part played by the German spas in the country’s sports scenario over the decades.