Hermann Goerner

13 April 1891 – 29 June 1956 · Leipzig, Germany

Hermann Goerner was the most accomplished one-handed deadlifter in the history of the Iron Game. The figures recorded for him in Leipzig in the 1920s — particularly the 727-pound one-arm deadlift of 1920 — have never been clearly equalled, and remain the standard against which serious one-handed lifting is measured.

Origins

Goerner was born in Leipzig in April 1891 into a working-class family. He took up lifting in his teens, was already strong enough by his late teens to compete at amateur level, and served in the German army through the First World War, where he lost the sight of his right eye. He returned to lifting after the war and turned professional shortly afterwards, performing in German and Austrian variety theatres and joining Pagel's Circus in 1924 for a tour of South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand that lasted five years.

The work

Goerner's act was unusual in the German tradition for its emphasis on the deadlift and its variants — one-arm, two-arm, dumbbell, and "Jefferson" or straddle lifts — at a time when the continental lifting scene was overwhelmingly oriented toward the overhead lifts. He was a large man, at his peak around 250 lb (113 kg) and over 6 ft (183 cm), with hands large enough to grip a heavy thick-handled bar without straps. Most of his record-setting was done at the Pagel circus venue and at the Atlas-Sportclub in Leipzig, with weights certified by the German federation.

Notable feats

Goerner's documented figures, recorded across multiple German and British sources, include:

• One-hand deadlift of 727 lb (330 kg), Leipzig, 8 October 1920. Bar lifted from the floor with the right hand to the locked-out position.
• Two-hands deadlift (with a one-inch unloaded bar) of 793 lb (360 kg), Leipzig, 1920.
• One-hand snatch of 175 lb (79 kg).
• "Jefferson" (straddle) deadlift of 600 lb (272 kg) for repetitions.
• Right-hand bent press of approximately 287 lb (130 kg).
• Lifting two adult women, one in each hand, by their belts — a stage feat regularly performed during the Pagel tour.

The 727-pound one-arm deadlift is the single figure that anchors Goerner's reputation. It was performed under German amateur federation observation in the Leipzig Athletic Club, with a one-inch bar and standard plate loading, and was reported in Kraftsport and Athletik-Sport-Magazin at the time. It has not, in roughly a century, been clearly bettered: the closest modern attempts, with straps and modified bars, have approached the figure but the unaided, no-straps lift Goerner is credited with remains effectively his.

"He took the bar in one hand as another man takes a glass of water — without consideration, and without effort that the room could see."

Method

Goerner left no published training book, but his methods were documented in detail by Edgar Mueller, a German lifting writer who knew him personally; Mueller's Goerner the Mighty (1951) is the principal source. Goerner trained heavy and infrequently — typically three full sessions a week, with the deadlift as the central exercise — and spent considerable time on grip work with thick handles. Mueller emphasises Goerner's avoidance of light "developmental" exercises and his preference for testing the actual lifts at near-maximum weights.

Legacy

Goerner is the central figure in the heritage of grip and pulling strength. His one-arm deadlift figure is cited as the historical benchmark in modern strongman, and the implements named for him — the Goerner Hold-out, the Goerner-style straddle deadlift — preserve his name in current training vocabulary. He returned to Leipzig after the Pagel tour and remained there for the rest of his life, surviving the Second World War in the city and giving occasional exhibitions until his early sixties. He died in Leipzig in 1956.

Disputed and unresolved

The 727-pound figure has been subject to scrutiny for over a century. The principal questions are: the precise diameter of the bar (a thinner bar makes the lift easier), whether straps were used (Mueller and the contemporary German press say no), and whether the bar was raised to a fully locked-out position rather than partially. Joe Roark and Terry Todd, in their assessments for Iron Game History, find the lift well-documented within the standards of the period and reasonable to credit, while noting that the bar, like all bars of the time, was thinner than the modern Olympic bar.

Some Goerner figures sometimes seen — a 290-lb bent press, a 415-lb continental clean — are not in Mueller's contemporary records and should be treated as later embellishments. The figures Mueller records, particularly the deadlift series, are the well-attested ones.