#30: ‘Hook to the Chin’ by Bertolt Brecht

‘Hook to the Chin’ is a short story by Bertolt Brecht, written between 1924-1933.

‘Hook to the Chin’ is a story about four men attending an evening of boxing at the Berlin Sportpalast. In a bar before the event one of the men shares a tale about a bantamweight named Freddy ‘The Hook’ Meinke. I think this might be a mis-translation, as there was a boxer at this time called Freddy Meinke, but his nickname was ‘The Uppercut’. I’m going to need to do some more research here though.

Anyway, the story revolves around Freddy’s training techniques and is more about the way sports fans will sit together and gossip about the matches and the participants. The story also contains one of my favourite lines (though, as I’ve already suggested, this may have been mis-translated) … suddenly he would move fast as a propeller and he would go in with the power of fifty horses, until finally the man was just one big hook to the jaw.

I found ‘Hook to the Chin’ in a collection of Brecht’s short stories, published by Bloomsbury, which also contains an extract of a portrait Brecht was writing about the German boxer Paul Samson-Körner. This biography was originally to be serialised over four monthly issues in Die Arena, but due to Brecht’s theatre projects taking up so much of his time, there was no follow-up after the first instalment. While there is an interesting reference to Samson-Körner’s first bout at a boxing event in Cardiff, which he entered to impress a girl (boys, eh?!?), there is no real boxing content except for the tantalising final line: It was he that first showed me how to box.