Ihr Kampf

This is a journalistic work: it's very thoroughly researched, contains little generalizations and even less analysis, focuses on specific organizations and people. This means that it will be outdated in a few years (the book is from 2020). But for now, this is a well made deep dive into the connections between fascist organizations and combat sports in Germany and internationally. The book is well written, the structure makes sense and no time is wasted. I found the guest-authored chapters on other countries (Italy, Poland, Russia, France and Greece) especially interesting. The only aspect I didn't like is where the author tries to draw some extremely thin connection between neoliberalism and fascist ideology. I think this is an analysis that can make sense in some very specific contexts, but here it's not well made. The observation (made by the author) that both ideologies value individualistic self-improvement doesn't justify the claim that fascism follows from neoliberalism in some fundamental way. For one, fascism predates neoliberalism by half a century! A better conclusion from that observation could be that the specific strain of fascism that the book describes (self disciplined, ascetic and macho) combines the fascist hero ethos with neoliberal ideology in a way that's unique for our neoliberal era. That's not what the author is saying though. But this was just a few paragraphs out of an otherwise excellent book.