Football Nation: The Playing Fields of German Culture, History, and Society 9781800736825

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FOOTBALL NATION

SPEKTRUM: Publications of the German Studies Association

Series editor: David M. Luebke, University of Oregon

Published under the auspices of the German Studies Association, Spektrum offers current perspectives on culture, society, and political life in the German-speaking lands of central Europe—Austria, Switzerland, and the Federal Republic—from the late Middle Ages to the present day. Its titles and themes reflect the composition of the GSA and the work of its members within and across the disciplines to which they belong—literary criticism, history, cultural studies, political science, and anthropology. Recent volumes: Volume 25 Football Nation: The Playing Fields of German Culture, History, and Society Edited by Rebeccah Dawson, Bastian Heinsohn, Oliver Knabe, and Alan McDougall

Volume 19 Views of Violence Representing the Second World War in German and European Museums and Memorials Edited by Jörg Echternkamp and Stephan Jaeger

Volume 24 What Remains: Responses to the Legacy of Christa Wolf Edited by Gerald A. Fetz and Patricia Herminghouse

Volume 18 Dreams of Germany Musical Imaginaries from the Concert Hall to the Dance Floor Edited by Neil Gregor and Thomas Irvine

Volume 23 Minority Discourses in Germany since 1990 Edited by Ela Gezen, Priscilla Layne, and Jonathan Skolnik

Volume 17 Money in the German-Speaking Lands Edited by Mary Lindemann and Jared Poley

Volume 22 Beyond Posthumanism The German Humanist Tradition and the Future of the Humanities Alexander Mathäs Volume 21 Feelings Materialized Emotions, Bodies, and Things in Germany, 1500–1950 Edited by Derek Hillard, Heikki Lempa, and Russell Spinney Volume 20 Names and Naming in Early Modern Germany Edited by Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer and Joel F. Harrington

Volume 16 Archeologies of Confession Writing the German Reformation, 1517–2017 Edited by Carina L. Johnson, David M. Luebke, Marjorie E. Plummer, and Jesse Spohnholz Volume 15 Ruptures in the Everyday Views of Modern Germany from the Ground Andrew Bergerson, Leonard Schmieding, et al. Volume 14 Reluctant Skeptic Siegfried Kracauer and the Crises of Weimar Culture Harry T. Craver

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: http://berghahnbooks.com/series/spektrum

Football Nation The Playing Fields of German Culture, History, and Society

 Edited by REBECCAH DAWSON, BASTIAN HEINSOHN, OLIVER KNABE, and ALAN MCDOUGALL

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2023 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2023 Rebeccah Dawson, Bastian Heinsohn, Oliver Knabe, and Alan McDougall All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dawson, Rebeccah, editor. Title: Football nation : the playing fields of German culture, history, and society / edited by Rebeccah Dawson, Baston Heinsohn, Oliver Knabe, and Alan McDougall. Description: First Edition. | New York : Berghahn Books, 2023. | Series: SPEKTRUM: Publications of the German Studies Association; 25 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022018536 (print) | LCCN 2022018537 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800736818 (Hardback) | ISBN 9781800736825 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: Soccer—Germany—History. | Cultural relations—Germany. | Discrimination in sports—Germany. | Soccer—Germany—Social aspects. | Germany—Social life and customs. Classification: LCC GV944.G4 F66 2023 (print) | LCC GV944.G4 (ebook) | DDC 796.3340943—dc23/eng/20220801 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022018536 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022018537 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-80073-681-8 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-682-5 ebook https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800736818

 CONTENTS 

Introduction. Historical Perspectives on the German Football Nation Rebeccah Dawson, Bastian Heinsohn, Oliver Knabe, and Alan McDougall

1

Part I. A Border-Crossing Game: German Football and International Cultural Exchange Chapter 1. The Introduction and Integration of Football into a Divided Society: Conservative and Socialist Football in Germany from 1871 to 1933 Thomas Adam

23

Chapter 2. Fußball Internationale: Toward a Global History of GDR Football Alan McDougall

43

Chapter 3. Local Fans, Global Players: Contradictions in Postindustrial Football Stephan Schindler

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Part II: Race, Exclusion, and Otherness in German Football Chapter 4. Willy Meisl’s “German Football Nation”: Internationalism, Austrian Patriotism, and Jewish Pride in Interwar Sports Writing Kay Schiller Chapter 5. Commodified, Corrupted, and Capitalist: Combatting the Modern Athletic Machine in Melchior Vischer’s Fußballspieler und Indianer Rebeccah Dawson Chapter 6. Controlling Definitions: Racism and German Identity after Mesut Özil’s National Team Resignation Kate Zambon

83

102

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Part III: Forming Identities through Football: Class and Gender in German Culture Chapter 7. The Making of a Football Myth: Memory, Masculinity, and the Media Friederike B. Emonds

143

Chapter 8. A Gendered Network of Double Binds in Joachim Hasler’s Football Musical Don’t Cheat, Darling! 164 Kaleigh Bangor Chapter 9. From GDR-Emigrant to Third-Class Citizen: Football Stadiums, Social Divides, and East German Identities in Andreas Gläser’s BFC Is to Blame for the Wall Oliver Knabe

181

Part IV: The Politics Beyond the Pitch: German Fandom and Spectatorship Chapter 10. Educating the Spectator: Athlete-Fan Interplay in the Early German Football Film The Eleven Devils by Zoltan Korda Bastian Heinsohn

201

Chapter 11. Antisemitic Metaphors in German Football Fan Culture Directed at RB Leipzig Pavel Brunssen

218

Chapter 12. One Foot on the Ball and the Other Nearly in Jail? Analyzing the Role of Social Work in the Interaction of Supporters, Police, and the Media in Hamburg Football Fabian Fritz

240

Chapter 13. Countering Contingency: Aesthetics and Fan Codetermination in German Football Alex Holznienkemper

258

Conclusion. “Fußball ist alles!” Football’s Importance in German Society Timm Beichelt

276

Index

295

INTRODUCTION



Historical Perspectives on the German Football Nation REBECCAH DAWSON, BASTIAN HEINSOHN, OLIVER KNABE, and ALAN MCDOUGALL

According to the British Medical Journal, the chance of being killed playing football is eighteen times greater than if you go riding and twenty times greater than if you do gymnastics. . . .  And such a sport is supposed to be desirable, even necessary for our German people?1 —Karl Planck, Fußlümmelei: Über Stauchballspiel und englische Krankheit [Football loutishness: on the crush ball game and English disease], 1898 There is great enthusiasm for football in Germany and therefore your victory in Bern has made such a strong impression on us. We are not as rich as other nations in national symbols and events which provide a strong collective experience. Therefore, we are all the more grateful for every event that mediates such a real sense of community to us.2 —Interior Minister Gerhard Schröder’s address to the West German football team after the “Miracle of Bern,” 1954 Football currently rules in almost every corner of the country. It occupies heads and hearts, it turns Germany into another place, just as in a summer fairy tale, a spellbound, happy country under a black, red, and gold scarf. There has not been a party like this since November 1989. But at that time, the Germans celebrated with themselves and now they celebrate with the entire world.3 —Kurbjuweit et al.,“Deutschland, ein Sommermärchen” [Germany: A summer fairy tale], 2006

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Introduction

ootball nations, much like the societies in which they emerge and evolve, are never static entities. This is certainly true for the history of the world’s game in modern Germany. The quotations from Karl Planck, Gerhard Schröder, and Kurbjuweit et al. in the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel chart football’s fluctuating place in German culture and society, from skepticism and hostility in the Wilhelmine era to mass cultural and commercial power in the age of Angela Merkel. When the Stuttgart gymnastics teacher Karl Planck published his notorious essay on the “English disease” in 1898, football had only a shaky foothold in the sports landscape. The sport arrived in Germany as it had in many parts of the world in the final quarter of the nineteenth century: via a network of British expatriates and Anglophile Germans, many of whom were teachers, who extolled the virtues of the kicking game established by the English Football Association in 1863. The game, however, was not an overnight success and took time to grow out of its predominantly middle-class enclaves. Divisions emerged between football clubs associated with the country’s powerful socialist movement, Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD; Social Democratic Party of Germany), was Europe’s largest socialist party by the late nineteenth century and those associated with the conservative Turnen (gymnastics) movement, which originated in Prussia’s military conflicts against Napoleonic France in the early nineteenth century. It was through the Turnen movement, as Munich mayor Wilhelm Georg von Borscht claimed in 1910, that “a serious national tone was first sounded. Founded in a time of the deepest humiliation of our fatherland, it sought not only to build a new, warlike generation through physical training, but also to foster German morals and love of the fatherland.”4 In Wilhelmine Germany, gymnastics, not football, was the center of the German sports nation, as evidenced by its astounding eight hundred thousand members at the turn of the twentieth century. Many Turnen leaders, though not all, saw the ball-kicking English import as a feckless, rootless, and commercial activity. It was, as Planck argued, un-German. Football, however, was not to be denied in Germany, any more than it was in other parts of the world. Early advocates, such as the Braunschweig teacher Konrad Koch, pushed to Germanize the game. Koch complained in 1897 about players mimicking English manners on the field and the widespread use of English words to describe the game.5 In 1902 a list of terms drawn up by Koch for the Deutscher Fußball-Bund (DFB; German Football Association), founded two years earlier in Leipzig, replaced various Anglicisms with German words. The word “corner,” for example, became “Eckball,” “goal” became “Tor,” and “striker” became “Stürmer.”6 As Nils Havemann and other historians have shown, the DFB sought from the outset to showcase its nationalist credentials, and emerged as an ambitious competitor on the patriotic grounds that the Turnen had long claimed as its own. The DFB’s attempt to make football the idealized representative of the German nation was far from unproblematic, but

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the sport grew rapidly under its stewardship. DFB membership was just under 190,000 in 1914. By 1928 it was greater than 865,000. Two years earlier, DFB president Ferdinand Hueppe claimed with some justification that “football has become the German national game.”7 Though cultural critics such as Theodor Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, and Siegfried Kracauer wrote more frequently about music, boxing, and cinema, football was at the very least their equal at the heart of Weimar mass culture. By the time that the Christian Democrat Gerhard Schröder, interior minister of the recently formed Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD; Federal Republic of Germany), addressed the West German team that unexpectedly beat Hungary to win the 1954 World Cup, football’s position as Germany’s most popular sport was unassailable. As the train carrying the triumphant players, the Red Flash, returned from Switzerland to Germany, hundreds of thousands of people lined the route. At the final destination of Munich, more than five hundred thousand people were there to welcome them home.8 But this was no unalloyed moment of national jubilation. World War II, defeat, occupation, and the Iron Curtain of the Cold War had left Germany divided (there was no longer one football nation) and, as Schröder indicated, in search of usable national symbols. Here he referred, with an obliqueness typical of politicians in 1950s West Germany, to the twelve years of Nazi dictatorship, which had left its mark on football, just as it had on every other aspect of German culture and society. No period in the country’s football history has been written about more extensively. Verlag die Werkstatt has published a series of “under the swastika” club histories for teams including Borussia Dortmund, Eintracht Braunschweig, Kaiserslautern, and 1860 Munich; the histories are focused exclusively on their experiences in the Nazi era.9 The club histories inspired a sporting Historikerstreit (historians’ debate), following the 2005 publication of Nils Havemann’s Fußball unterm Hakenkreuz [Football under the swastika], a richly researched history of the DFB in the Third Reich that, some critics argued, downplayed the organization’s ideological commitment to Nazism. Indeed, the skeletons of the Nazi past still rattle around club cupboards. Germany’s richest and most successful team, football club (FC) Bayern Munich, has long traded on its anti-Nazi reputation. Recent research by Markwart Herzog has undercut this “heroic history,” suggesting that Bayern behaved no worse (but also no better) than most clubs in acquiescing to the Nazi Gleichschaltung (Nazification) of football.10 The shadows of the Nazi past explain the complex German response to the Miracle of Bern, which, in playing terms, marked the beginning of a transformation in the country’s international football reputation. The prevailing narrative today is that 4 July 1954 marked “the real birthday of the Federal Republic.”11 This was the moment when Germans, or West Germans at least, could show the world that—as the businessman in Günter Grass’s story for 1954 in Mein

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Introduction

Jahrhundert (My Century) boasts, —“We’re back, losers no more.”12 The sense of a national purpose rediscovered through sport carried uncomfortable echoes of the past. The DFB boss Peco Bauwens notoriously invoked the “Führer principle” in his victory speech to the team in Munich. As recent research attests, however, the nationalistic hubris of Bauwens was only one part of the story, considering that many newspapers voiced embarrassment at his speech. Moreover, Bavarian state radio broke off live transmission as gaffe followed gaffe. Rudolf Oswald has described the popular mood in 1954 as euphoric but almost “anti-national.”13 Like Schröder, other leading political figures—such as Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and President Theodor Heuss—offered muted responses to the heroics of captain Fritz Walter and his team. Such downplaying of national football triumphs arguably anticipated the public reaction to West Germany’s second World Cup win over the Netherlands twenty years later. This victory on home soil seemed to symbolize a certain denationalization of postwar football, a development that frustrated the DFB chair Hermann Neuberger. Why, he asked in October 1974, had Germans not taken that year’s win to their hearts as they had the victory in Switzerland? “The jubilant, almost exuberant joy that was felt in the days of the triumph in Bern was not felt everywhere—and certainly not for a long time. The question echoed on all sides about whether it’s possible any more here to feel or express heartfelt joy.”14 Theories abound as to why this result played out as it did—for example, the loss to East Germany in the first round may have put a damper on the joy of victory. In the end, the rather bloodless win in 1974, over a popular and talented Dutch team, helped to set the template for stereotypes about the (West) German national team that would last into the early twenty-first century, especially in the English-speaking world: remorseless, machine-like, highly successful, and deeply unlovable. As the England striker Gary Lineker famously lamented in 1990, “Football is a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win.”15 When Germany hosted the World Cup for the second time in 2006—and the first time as a unified nation—the national narrative had once more shifted, as had international perspectives about the national football team Die Mannschaft. Der Spiegel captured the feelgood mood of “partyotism” in its 18 June article on what they termed “Germany’s summer fairy tale,” which appeared only nine days into the tournament when it was still in the group stage of play. Reworking a strand of the usable national past, Heinrich Heine’s 1844 poem, “Germany: A Winter’s Tale,” the magazine provided the signature line for a happily renationalized football nation. The German team that reached the semifinals in 2006, like the team that won the World Cup in Brazil eight years later, was—so the popular line went—a product of, and reflection of, Germany’s new multicultural identity. Mainstays of the side that beat Argentina 1–0 in Rio’s Maracanã Stadium in July 2014 included attacking midfielder

Introduction



5

Mesut Özil, the grandson of a Turkish Gastarbeiter (guest worker), and Jérôme Boateng, a central defender with a German mother and a Ghanaian father. The national team coach Joachim Löw even praised Özil in 2010 as “a perfect example of integration.”16 This chimed with wider messaging from the DFB of the twenty-first century, which emphasized the organization’s antiracism initiatives and increased willingness to confront the Nazi past (hence its commissioning of Havemann’s Fußball unterm Hakenkreuz in 2005). And yet, shadows and questions remained. As Der Spiegel noted in its Sommermärchen (Summer fairy tale) essay, “In Germany, there’s always a big ‘but’ when it comes to Germany.”17 Part of the revival of nationalism in German football, as Kay Schiller and others have noted, had less to do with overcoming the Nazi past than it did with football’s increasingly modish place in German society (to be a football fan in the 2010s was very different from being a football supporter in the 1980s) and increased commercial value. It is no coincidence that the elevation of the miracle of Bern to a foundational moment in modern German history took root in the early 2000s, when 6 million Germans watched Sönke Wortmann’s sentimental film of the same name, including the then German chancellor, the SPD’s Gerhard Schröder, who was apparently moved to tears. Renationalization, as Christiane Eisenberg first suggested in the late 1990s, was more about commerce than about nationalism, as a network of media, political, and business interests combined to place and then keep football omnipresent in German life.18 The success of Wortmann’s 2003 film marked an exception in cinematic representations of football after several failed attempts to portray it accurately and prominently in feature films. While the first football film, Die elf Teufel (The Eleven Devils), was made as early as 1927 with Gustav Fröhlich starring as team captain, role model for the young, and hero for the masses in a sentimental love story including a happy ending both on the pitch and beyond, German film never truly succeeded in implementing football in fictional narratives. The discrepancy regarding performance, movements, and athleticism between professional football players and actors has consistently proven itself to be irreconcilable on the big screen as well as on the theater stage. That is not to say, however, that football disappeared from cultural production in Weimar Germany. The theater was also exposed to the game in 1927 with the staging of Melchior Vischer’s drama, Fußballspieler und Indianer (Football players and indians), originally published in 1924), a piece thought to have been inspired by canonical writer Bertolt Brecht and his love of sports. Though football did appear in the cinematic and literary landscape of the Weimar Republic, the years and decades thereafter saw relatively low production of films and plays based on football. In addition to modestly successful feature films such as Joachim Hasler’s 1973 Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA; East German state film studio) comedy Nicht schummeln, Liebling! (Don’t Cheat, Darling!),

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Introduction

Adolf Winkelmann’s 1993 Nordkurve (North Curve) and, more recently, Sebastian Grobler’s Der ganz große Traum (Lessons of a Dream) from 2011, several football documentaries were made through the decades, most notably Aysun Bademsoy’s football trilogy consisting of the short Mädchen am Ball (Girls on the Pitch, 1995), and the feature-length documentaries Nach dem Spiel (After the Game, 1997) and Ich geh jetzt rein (In the Game, 2008). Wigbert Wicker’s 1973 Libero (Sweeper) tried, quite unsuccessfully, to merge the real-life football career of Germany’s all-time best Libero (a now-defunct position in modern football akin to the sweeper) Franz Beckenbauer with an engaging fictional story in what today would be considered a mockumentary. Though production of football films and literature remained small, it was a consistent presence in cultural production in Germany throughout the twentieth century, becoming mainstream again with the success of Das Wunder von Bern (The Miracle of Bern) in 2003. Considering the overwhelming positive reception of the film, director Sönke Wortmann was the obvious choice to helm the documentary on the 2006 World Cup entitled Deutschland: Ein Sommermärchen (Germany: a summer fairy tale) which, once again, became a huge commercial success. The documentary reflects the zeitgeist of the early days of the Merkel chancellorship, when Germany began to actively promote a diverse, multiethnic, and polycultural Germany, perhaps best portrayed by Germany’s national team under the reign of Jürgen Klinsmann and assistant manager Joachim Löw. This new era of German football saw the implementation of radical changes, including changes in roster creation, a fresh and modern style of football play and tactics, as well as a total rebranding of the national team as Die Mannschaft. The year 2006 may well have been the pinnacle of football as a paradigmatic form of entertainment in Germany for what Gunter Gebauer calls a Gesellschaft des Spektakels (society of the spectacle), a reference to Guy Debord’s Société du spectacle (society of the spectacle). Gebauer approaches football, and sports in general, as fully intertwined with other forms of cultural aesthetics such as music, fashion, and art. Indeed, the zeitgeist of German football is utterly apparent in music like Beckenbauer’s infamous song “Gute Freunde kann niemand trennen” (No one can separate good friends) from 1966, and “Fußball ist unser Leben” (Football is our life), which accompanied the West German team in the 1974 World Cup and was sung solely by the players themselves. Songs also reflect political leanings or naivety, the latter as evidenced by Udo Jürgens’ “Buenos Dias Argentina” (Good day, Argentina) from 1978, which features the national team as background singers and highlights a painful moment of ignorance toward the political cruelty of the Argentinian dictatorship, with whom many governments, including Germany, secretly collaborated to fight communism and left-wing radicalism in the world. On the other hand, Schlager (pop) singer Peter Alexander perfectly embodied the conservative mindset that was prominent in West Germany under Chancellor Helmut Kohl and feigned

Introduction



7

multilingualism with “Mexico mi amor” (Mexico, my love) in 1986, long before Germany truly began to embrace diversity. The trend continues in 2006, when Xavier Naidoo’s motivational and feelgood song “Dieser Weg” (This path) became the unofficial tournament anthem, accompanying the German team from the locker room to the bus to the field, and likewise becoming a huge hit in Germany. Naidoo, born in Germany to South African parents, added to the positive image promoted at the time that Germany was a new, open, modern, and diverse society. The fact that Naidoo is known today more for spreading right-wing conspiracy theories during the Covid-19 pandemic and widely shunned speaks to the fact that public discourses on issues such as nation, migration, democracy, solidarity, and unity among an ever-increasingly diverse population have significantly changed in Germany since 2006. Debates about German identity and footballers with a migrant background, however, were never far from the surface. The recent decline of the German national team, and the roughly parallel rise of the anti-immigrant group Alternative für Deutschland (AfD; Alternative for Germany), have upset the “happy nationalist” narrative that led up to the 2014 World Cup victory. The once beloved faces of Germany’s multicultural team became the scapegoats for failure. Mesut Özil, once the face of diversity for German football, fell particularly hard: When he retired from international football after Germany’s first-round exit in the 2018 World Cup in Russia, Özil alleged that racial discrimination in the DFB had left him feeling unwanted: “I used to wear the German shirt with such pride and excitement, but now I don’t.”19 Two years earlier, the AfD politician Alexander Gauland said of Jérôme Boateng, “People like him as a football player. But they don’t want to have a Boateng as their neighbor.”20 Though Gauland’s comment was widely criticized, including by members of his right-wing populist party, it suggested that, among a growing minority of the population, older perceptions of German national identity—that is, those based on race rather than citizenship—still hold traction. As this historical overview suggests, football’s place in the German nation has not always been secure. Our understanding of Germany as a football nation must, then, be a fluid one, and must be conditioned by four factors that complicate the popular narrative. It is first worth emphasizing that the history of the German football nation is a classic game of two halves. For the first half of the twentieth century, Germany was not the football superpower that we know today. If one were to consider a successful German-speaking football nation before World War II—that is to say, one that had global influence on playing styles and football culture—it would more likely have been Austria rather than Germany. The German national team did defeat Austria to finish third at the 1934 World Cup in Italy, but it lost embarrassingly at the 1936 Berlin Olympics to Norway, the only time that Hitler ever attended a game. With the annexed Austrian team unhappily in tow following the Anschluß (Annexation

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Introduction

of Austria), it then lost equally embarrassingly to Switzerland in the first round of the 1938 World Cup in France. Many involved in football leagues throughout Europe, like Rapid Vienna’s Hans Pesser, subsequently dismissed the militaristically regimented “strength-through-kicking football” of the German team coached by Otto Nerz.21 Germany’s rise to stardom out of the middle ranks of European football began only after West Germany’s unexpected 1954 victory in Bern under Nerz’s successor Sepp Herberger. Shortly thereafter in 1963, the DFB introduced a professional league, the Bundesliga, in West Germany, the last major football nation to do so. By the 1970s West German football had entered its golden age. FC Bayern Munich, promoted to the Bundesliga only in 1965, won the continent’s premier competition, the European Cup, three years in succession (1974–76). West Germany, coached by Helmut Schön, won the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) European championship in 1972 in Belgium and the World Cup held on their home soil in 1974. Despite the occasional blip, Germany has dined at world football’s top table ever since. European champions in 1980 and 1996 and world champions in 1990 and 2014, the national team has been a perennial contender for major honors. The Bundesliga, meanwhile, enjoys a reputation as the most fan-friendly, cheapest, and authentic of the big five European leagues (compared to those in England, France, Italy, and Spain). Its leading teams, notably FC Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund, are among the world’s wealthiest and most successful clubs. From humble beginnings in Leipzig in 1900, the DFB—home in 2020 to almost twenty-five thousand clubs and 7.2 million members22—is today the largest sports association in the world. German football history is not only a story of two halves: it is also a story that can be told from multiple national perspectives. In the 1920s and 1930s, Vienna, not Berlin or Munich, was the center of the German-speaking football world. It was Austria’s Wunderteam (wonder team) that won international plaudits for its elegant short passing style (coined the Danubian whirl) rather than the more leaden play of the Germans. Football was no less popular in Germany than it was in Austria. It was arguably nationalized with greater success in first the Weimar Republic and then the Third Reich than in Austria, where the game’s mass appeal was disproportionately concentrated on Vienna. But it was only after the 1954 World Cup, where Germany thrashed Austria 6–1 en route to securing the title (“the most devastating defeat since Königgratz,” lamented one Austrian football writer23) that Austria took a backseat to its larger neighbor and adopted the underdog role. By this time, there was no longer a single German nation, whether greater or otherwise. When the European football association, UEFA, was founded just before the tournament in Switzerland in 1954, it featured—in addition to the Austrian and Swiss federations—three associations that represented post–World War II Germany.

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The DFB, tainted by Nazism and disbanded in 1945, was re-founded in 1950 to lead football in the newly formed Federal Republic of Germany. From 1950 to 1956, the French-occupied Saarland was run by a separate organization, the Saarländischer Fußball Bund (SFB; Saarland Football Association). On the eastern side of the Iron Curtain, the communist Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR or GDR; German Democratic Republic) was represented in UEFA conference rooms and executive committees by the Deutscher Fußball-Verband der DDR (DFV; East German Football Association), as the country’s football federation was officially called from 1958. The postwar history of football in Germany is often synonymous with the history of football in West Germany, leaving football of the DDR by the wayside. This is in part because of the international success of West German football and in part because sport in East Germany was primarily associated with the country’s Olympic “medal machine.” But football was the GDR’s number one sport and, contrary to stereotypes, East German football was far from terrible. It enjoyed a golden age of its own in the 1970s, beginning with a victory over West Germany in the 1972 Olympic games and attaining its peak in the annus mirabilis of 1974. FC Magdeburg, whose entire line-up was born within thirty kilometers of the club’s Ernst Grube Stadium, defeated Italian heavyweight Associazione Calcio Milan (AC Milan; Milan Football Association) to win the European Cup Winners’ Cup in May. Only a month later, the DDR-Auswahl (players selected to the GDR national team) defeated the heavily favored, and eventual champions, West Germany at the World Cup in the BRD. The “us vs. us” clash in Hamburg revealed the complexity of footballing nationalism, particularly in East Germany. Many GDR citizens took pride in giving their louder and larger neighbors “a bloody nose” in the group stage but happily supported West Germany in the final against the Netherlands.24 The German unification that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was meant to resolve split identities and usher in a new era of football dominance. After West Germany won Italia 1990, the team coach Franz Beckenbauer declared with characteristic confidence, “I’m sorry for the other countries, but now that we will be able to incorporate all the great players from the East, the German team will be unbeatable for a long time to come.”25 But national unity would prove no smoother in football than in other areas of post-Wende society.26 Though a united German team won the 1996 European championship, the squad included a mere three former GDR players. Only one of the three, the Borussia Dortmund star Matthias Sammer, played the entire tournament and was subsequently voted player of the tournament. The power imbalance between East and West only furthered the notion that East German football had been swallowed up by the DFB. Only two former GDR Oberliga (GDR first league) clubs qualified for the 1991–92 Bundesliga. With

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Introduction

odd exceptions, notably Hansa Rostock, Energie Cottbus, and Union Berlin, few have spent much time in the top division since. Many of the GDR’s best teams went bankrupt or fell down the football pyramid into semiprofessional anonymity. Author Frank Willmann declared Ostfußball (football in East Germany) dead in 2009.27 The post-unification German football nation retains a distinctly Western bias. The Mauer im Kopf (wall in the head) in contemporary football is part of a wider history that continues to make sportive nationalism, despite the patriotic glee of 2006 and 2014, a uniquely sensitive topic in Germany. Supporters of East Germany’s most successful, and most unpopular, club, Berliner FC Dynamo (BFC) challenged the post-Wende narrative of integration from both sides. At the club’s home ground, GDR flags and banners that honored the club’s former president, Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security, or Stasi) boss Erich Mielke, were displayed by a dwindling fan base with a reputation for far-right views and behavior, including an attack on an asylum shelter in Greifswald in 1991. While the media mainly focused on the links between neo-Nazism and football hooliganism in the five states of the former GDR, the connections also existed, albeit unilluminated, in the former West Germany. Even at organizations such as Borussia Dortmund, where many Ultras rejected the club’s neo-Nazi following, a minority continued to oppose Germany’s turn toward multiculturalism and football’s antiracist and antifascist initiatives. There was always the fear that, as a Swiss newspaper cautioned after Germany’s semifinal defeat to Italy in 2006, Germany’s new, celebratory, and inclusive nationalism “gradually reveals another face.”28 While many scholars either welcomed or downplayed the patriotic resurgence that bloomed in 2006, others remained skeptical. The social psychologist, Dagmar Schediwy, for example, did not view the “new patriotism” in relaxed terms, but as an alarming development “precisely in view of German history.”29 For all of late-modern Germany’s progress toward more acceptable or normal forms of sportive nationalism, the German football nation—as Mesut Özil might attest—remains a work in progress. It is worth iterating that, for all of the agonizing debates about sportive nationalism, the story of the German football nation is rich in international influences. British expatriate colonies in such cities as Dresden, Karlsruhe, and Stuttgart first brought football (and rugby) to Germany in the 1860s and 1870s. Though the kicking game was, to some degree, Germanized by the early twentieth century, the British influence remained significant, in everything from club names to coaching. It was only after World War I that the German game came into its own as a mass participatory and spectator sport. Despite the DFB’s apparent conservatism—it announced in 1925 a boycott of countries including Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary where professional football existed—outside influences remained strong. The coach who introduced the

Introduction



11

short-passing spinning top style of play to Germany’s most successful inter-war club, Schalke 04, was an Austrian, Gustav Wieser. The national team coach from 1926 to 1936, Otto Nerz, sought advice from Europe’s leading coaches and based German tactics at the 1934 World Cup on Arsenal’s innovative WM formation. Aside from Nerz, an antisemite, who acquiesced to the Nazi takeover of football, the key figures in the Weimar era did not conform to conservative or racialized ideas of German nationhood. The founder of what became Germany’s leading football magazine, kicker, was a Swiss-educated German Jew, Walther Bensemann. Germany’s leading sports journalist was an Austrian Jew, Willy Meisl, brother of Hugo, the coach of Austria’s Wunderteam. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, postwar German football developed a reputation for insularity that was not wholly undeserved. In West Germany the DFB opposed full-blown professionalism until the introduction of the Bundesliga in 1963. The GDR Oberliga was one of the world’s most closeted leagues. But neither half of the German football nation was shut off from the world entirely. Though overseas players were banned from the GDR’s top division, two of the national team’s earliest coaches were Hungarians. The DFV constantly sought administrative and coaching contacts with the outside world, both communist and capitalist. In West Germany, by the 1970s overseas players and coaches were common sights. Two of the key coaches in Bayern Munich’s rise to the top of German football were Croats: Zlatko Čajkovski (1963–68) and Branko Zebec (1968–70). Between 1972 and 1992, the Croatian club Hajduk Split alone exported twelve players to the Bundesliga.30 As happened in other leading football nations, German football became increasingly cosmopolitan from the 1990s onward. This was in part for external reasons: the 1995 Bosman Ruling, which allowed the free movement of European Union (EU) footballers once their contracts had expired; a sharp increase in the migration of footballers from the global South, especially from Africa; and the intense commercialization of the world game, driven above all by expanded television coverage. Internal factors also played their part. Following Germany’s embarrassing early exit from the 2000 European championship, the DFB looked to France—who won the 1998 World Cup with a multiethnic team—for inspiration in reconfiguring the country’s youth football structures. Reform to the German nationality law in 1999, meanwhile, moved the country away from the principle of jus sanguinis, making it easier for children born in Germany to immigrant families to claim citizenship—and to play football for Germany.31 Germany’s national team had always featured players with foreign backgrounds, from Camillo Ugi (the son of an Italian and Germany’s most capped footballer before World War I) to post-1945 players such as Jürgen Grabowski (1966–74) and Pierre Littbarski (1981–90), both of whom had Polish family roots. The difference after 2000, though, was twofold. The German national

12



Introduction

team, in simple terms, began to look different, as second- and third-generation immigrants made their mark. Though the first black player, Erwin Kostedde, made his appearance for the national team against Malta in 1974, it was only in the twenty-first century that black players—Gerald Asamoah (born in Ghana), David Odonkor and Jérôme Boateng (born in Germany to Ghanaian fathers), Leroy Sané (son of Senegalese star and Bundesliga stalwart Souleymane Sané), and Antonio Rüdiger (whose mother was born in Sierra Leone)—featured regularly in national team selections. Not only did the German team look different, but the difference was also acknowledged and even celebrated, becoming a central part of the narratives around stars of the national team. People knew that Miroslav Klose, Germany’s record goal scorer, and the popular Lukas Podolski were born in Poland, or that Sami Khedira, a mainstay of the midfield for more than a decade, was born in Stuttgart to a Tunisian mother and German father. The increased diversity of the national team perfectly reflected the more open-minded and multicultural image of Germany that both the DFB and the governments of Chancellors Schröder and Merkel sought to project. It also complemented the increasing internationalism and diversity of the Bundesliga. Beginning in the 2006–7 season, the DFB and the Deutsche Fußball Liga (DFL; German Professional League) lifted all restrictions on foreign (i.e., non-EU) players. By the 2009–10 season, 45 percent of all players in Germany’s top division were non-Germans. Figures compiled by the Football Observatory in 2020 show that the top ten exporting countries brought a total of 168 players to the Bundesliga. France led the way with thirty-six players, followed by Austria with thirty-one, the Netherlands with twenty-three, and Switzerland with nineteen. Four countries, including Brazil and Spain, had eleven players on the books at Bundesliga clubs.32 German players, in return, looked abroad in larger numbers. In 2021, according to the Football Observatory, there were 442 expatriate German footballers playing in fifty-eight countries worldwide.33 German stars played for the world’s richest clubs in the world’s richest leagues: Toni Kroos, for example, at Real Madrid; or Antonio Rüdiger, Timo Werner, and Kai Havertz, who all played for the 2021 Champions League’s winners, Chelsea FC. The story of the German football nation is thus inextricably linked to football’s ever-shifting transnational flows and everexpanding paths of international exchange. The push toward a multicultural and multinational football community in Germany, as well as the changing dynamic of heritage among national players, has led to subsequent campaigns of open-mindedness and cultural diversity, which explicitly reject racism and xenophobia. These campaigns, however well-intended, have often been prescripted and orchestrated by organizations like the DFB (#WeRemember, “#Never again”), the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA; International Federation of Association Foot-

Introduction



13

ball) (“Stop Racism. Stop Violence”), and the UEFA (“No to racism”). Ultimately, such movements run the risk of turning athletes into PR mouthpieces, while calls for equality and social justice are transformed into publicity stunts. Yet, alongside the diversification of the German national team, some players like goalkeeper and captain Manuel Neuer believe a shift in political agency among players is in progress, as issues related to minority populations, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, have recently assumed a dominant discourse in the locker room. In 2021, during the UEFA Euro 2020 tournament,34 the German team, after deliberations among the players, decided to take a knee together with their English opponents before the round of sixteen match, a gesture not uncommon in the Bundesliga since 2018. Captain Manuel Neuer, who had previously argued against former teammate Özil in his own race debate, stated after the England game that a sociopolitical conscience within the national team has started to emerge. “In the past, we often did not take a political stance and instead, as it has always been, we followed directives. Now, each individual player has—also thanks to social media—more leverage to make a change. This has been developing for the past few years. We want to put a face to the national team and show people that there are important issues beyond football that we want to point out and that we support.”35 That the captain and one of the most recognizable players of the national team has voiced the intent to use their popularity for good signifies a symbolic transfer of power from football institutions to the players themselves. This sociopolitical consciousness is also mirrored in debates surrounding another social justice cause, which gained wide attention through Die Mannschaft in the 2020 European Championship: the struggle for equality for members of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer plus (LGBTQ+) communities. By wearing the rainbow flag as his captain’s armband, Neuer fueled ongoing debates about politics in football stadiums but also triggered an outpouring of public support in a nation that has yet to see the coming-out of an active player in any men’s professional league. The game against Hungary in particular, a country that had just days earlier passed an anti-LGBTQ+ bill under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, turned into a stage where progressive democratic ideals clashed with authoritarian conservatism. This historic fixture, associated predominantly with the 1954 World Cup final and its resulting, mythical founding of the Federal Republic, has now been charged further with the ideological fight for equality, human rights, and tolerance. While UEFA tried to uphold the myth of the game as a politically free zone by banning Munich from illuminating the match venue in rainbow colors, there were nationwide demonstrations of solidarity in the streets and across social media platforms. Even the conservative political party Christian Social Union (CSU) whose members had voted overwhelmingly against marriage equality legislation in 2017, proclaimed solidarity via Twitter by sharing a picture of its party chairman

14



Introduction

and general secretary with rainbow-colored Covid masks inside the arena right before kick-off.36 Similarly, then-chancellor Angela Merkel, who had also voted against same-sex-marriage in 2017, went public with her criticism of Orbán’s week-old bill just in time for the match to begin. As Germany’s football players discover the political potential of their bodies and the long reach of their messages, critical questions about the ultimate impact of such gestures and public campaigns remain. Will they be temporary phenomena, or can they extend to other social justice debates, such as equal rights for women and disability communities? Only time will tell if they can contribute to shifting sociopolitical discourses and achieve permanent changes or if they turn out to be solely performative moralism. What these moments of politicized football can provide us with today, however, are insights into the nation’s self-perception and its vision for the future: How does Germany imagine itself as a community?37 Or, to use Manuel Neuer’s words, what should the face of the team look like that represents the German nation? It will be fascinating to see how the developing diversification and multinational platforms play into the progression of the German football nation away from the past and into the future. Football Nation brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars to discuss how German football shapes, and is shaped by, German culture, history, and society. Part I of the book examines the tensions and convergences between nationalizing tendencies and international cultural exchange in the history of German football. It begins with Thomas Adam’s chapter (chapter 1) on the contested origins of football in the education system in Braunschweig, where Konrad Koch introduced the English game as an outdoor activity that would develop initiative and teamwork among his pupils. Subsequently, Adam shows how, from the very beginning, the German football nation was divided in two, between the conservative football movement tied to the Turnen and the socialist football movement linked to the powerful SPD. It was not until the Nazis came to power in 1933 that a single German football Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community) came into existence through a combination of repression and acquiescence. In the second chapter in this section, Alan McDougall (chapter 2) provides a revisionist history of East German football. Frequently dismissed as insular and unsuccessful, GDR football, McDougall argues, was in fact far more international, and somewhat more successful, than popular accounts dictate. Ultimately, however, McDougall reveals the insecurities that defined the socialist state and limited the GDR’s impact on the international stage. Finally, Stephan Schindler’s chapter (chapter 3) ushers the discussion about the German football nation into the twenty-first century. He examines the contradictions between local (fan) interests and transnational (player) identities in postindustrial German football, a process of “glocalization” that requires constant negotiations between local, national, and global identities.

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15

Part II of Football Nation uses race, exclusion, and otherness to examine cultural representations of football in identity formation, from theater in the Weimar Republic, via a memoir from post-Wende eastern Germany, to discourses on racism in the twenty-first century. It begins with Kay Schiller’s chapter (chapter 4), which progresses into Weimar Germany, where the Austrian Jew Willy Meisl forged a career as a star sports journalist. Highlighting the centrality of sports journalism to mass culture, Schiller illustrates the overlapping identities (Austrian patriot, Zionist, anti-Nazi, and liberal internationalist) that shaped Meisl’s writing and, consequently, his understanding of the Austrian and German football nations. Rebeccah Dawson’s (chapter 5) study of Fußballspieler und Indianer, a 1924 drama by Dada playwright Melchior Vischer, continues the discussion of culture during the Weimar era. Vischer’s play, Dawson argues, shows football as both a window into corrupt, modernist athletic society and as a possible (albeit difficult) means of returning to a primal, precapitalist order. A disillusioned sense of identity is also central to the section’s final chapter by Kate Zambon (chapter 6). It examines how Mesut Özil’s announcement of his retirement from international football in 2018—in an explosive series of Twitter posts written in English—disrupted national narratives of integration in German football and opened discussion on the struggle that athletes of color face in the public sphere. Turning the reader’s attention to two iconic events in German football history, Friederike Emonds (chapter 7) begins Part III by examining the social construction of the masculinity myth via the 1954 Miracle of Bern and the 2006 Sommermärchen, two seminal World Cup moments that reveal how deeply male social values are inscribed on German football discourses. Kaleigh Bangor’s chapter (chapter 8) shifts the ground from West to East and from men to women in her reading of Joachim Hasler’s 1972 football musical, Don’t Cheat, Darling! A commercial production from DEFA, the East German state film studio, the film, Bangor argues, exemplifies René Girard’s concept of the double bind. Her reading demonstrates how the film both supports and objectifies women footballers, a contradiction that undermines any progressive messages about gender equity. The section’s penultimate chapter continues the East German theme, with the focus moving to the post-Wende landscapes of the football stadium in Oliver Knabe’s analysis (chapter 9) of Andreas Gläser’s 2002 memoir, Der BFC war schuld am Mauerbau [BFC is to blame for the wall]. Knabe’s reading of the stadium as a multilayered metaphor for lost or reduced East German identities speaks powerfully to those on the losing end of Germany’s (football) unification. The fourth and final part of Football Nation focuses on fandom and spectators, ranging across the disciplines of film studies, sociology, and philosophy. It kicks off with Bastian Heinsohn’s chapter (chapter 10) on two early German football films, Zoltan Korda’s Die elf Teufel (1927) and Robert Stemmle’s Das

16



Introduction

große Spiel [The Big Game] (1942). Heinsohn’s comparative analysis shows how Die elf Teufel served an educational purpose for cinema audiences that foreshadowed the militarized emphasis on the heroic collective in Stemmle’s later blockbuster film, which featured the German national team coach, Sepp Herberger. Jumping to a more contemporary topic, Pavel Brunssen (chapter 11) next analyzes structural anti-Semitism in the widespread campaigns among German fans against the unpopular Bundesliga club RasenBallsport Leipzig (RB Leipzig). Looking at another strand of fan activism, Fabian Fritz (chapter 12) examines the interactions between football supporters and social workers in Hamburg’s two major clubs, Hamburger Sport-Verein (Hamburger SV; Hamburg Sports Club) and FC St. Pauli. Part IV next presents Alex Holznienkemper’s reflection (chapter 13) on football’s aesthetic appeal to supporters. It shows how contingency and unpredictability shape fans’ participation in football via an idea central to late-modern sentiments of German spectatorship and the late-modern distinctiveness of the German football nation. Mitbestimmung (codetermination) gives fans the right to participate in, as well as influence, football policies and discourses in ways that were not always possible in earlier periods of German history—and are not always possible elsewhere in the contemporary football world. The volume concludes with Timm Beichelt’s reflections (conclusion) on the meaning of football in contemporary Germany. In it, Beichelt introduces how a variety of factors—from the declining importance of church, family, and work to the increased acceptance of emotional display in public life—have combined to give football a unique cultural position in late-modern Germany, a cultural position that has been both challenged and reinforced by the Covid-19 pandemic. This collection, then, offers insight into how manifold academic disciplines approach and understand the complexities of football culture and football history, revealing how and why Germany has developed into the football nation known worldwide today.

Authors Rebeccah Dawson is associate professor of German studies, University of Kentucky. Dr. Dawson’s research focuses on sport in literature and cinema of twentieth-century Germany. In addition to presentations and lectures (both in the United States and abroad) on the role of sports in German literature and culture, she has published on a range of sport topics, such as the propaganda of aesthetic athletic beauty in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, twentieth-century German film, and the commodification of football in Melchior Vischer’s Fußballspieler und Indianer. Currently, she serves as coeditor for a Colloquia Germanica

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17

special issue on football in German literature and film, is the co-editor of Colloquia Germanica, and the editor of H:Sport—German Journal Watch. Bastian Heinsohn is associate professor of German, Bucknell University. Dr. Heinsohn’s research focuses on the representation of urban spaces in German cinema and literature and examines graffiti texts as key elements of linguistic landscapes. He has published on graffiti in Berlin, German cinema, and German literature. His most recent publications are “Cinematic Space and Set Design in Paul Leni’s The Last Warning (1929),” that appeared in a volume on German director Paul Leni by Edinburgh University Press (2021) and the forthcoming articles “Mapping Spaces Beyond the Football Pitch: Football Fandom and Coming of Age in Philipp Winkler’s novel Hool” in Colloquia Germanica’s special issue on football in German literature and film; and “Romy Schneider: Memories of Home and New Beginnings in Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Romy—Anatomy of a Face (Romy—Porträt eines Gesichts, 1967) to be published in a volume on German Stars in Camden House’s Screen Series, edited by Jaimey Fisher. Oliver Knabe is lecturer of German at the University of Dayton. Dr. Knabe specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century German literature and cinema, with a particular focus on politics and social justice. He teaches courses on both international and German football in English and German to undergraduates. He is the organizer of two consecutive football events at the German Studies Association convention (2018 and 2019) and is currently investigating East German football stadiums and their portrayal in German film and literature. His ongoing book project focuses on the game of football as a realm for social (in)justice. Alan McDougall is professor of history at the University of Guelph (Canada). Dr. McDougall is the author of The People’s Game: Football, State and Society in East Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Contested Fields: A Global History of Modern Football (University of Toronto Press, 2020).

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Planck, Fußlümmelei, 19. Quoted in Schiller, “Siegen für Deutschland?,” 181. Kurbjuweit et al., “Deutschland, ein Sommermärchen.” Quoted in Havemann, Fußball unterm Hakenkreuz, 32. Ibid., 34. Hesse-Lichtenberger, Tor!, 23. Havemann, Fußball unterm Hakenkreuz, 36, 62. Herzog, “Win Globally—Party Locally,” 127–29.

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9. See Kolbe, Der BVB in der NS-Zeit; Gizler,”Es ist für’s Vaterland”; Herzog, Der

“Betze” ; Löffelmeier, Die “Löwen.”

10. Herzog, “FC Bayern Munich,” 131–52. 11. A 2004 claim in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, quoted in Brüggemeier, “Das Wunder 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

von Bern,” 189. Grass, My Century, 192. Oswald, “Das Wunder von Bern,’” 88–101. Quoted in Schiller, WM 74, 188. Quoted in Moore, What You Think, 117. Quoted in Schiller, “‘Siegen für Deutschland?,’” 191. Kurbjuweit et al., “Deutschland, ein Sommermärchen.” Eisenberg, “Deutschland,” 94–129. In addition to Kate Zambon’s essay in this volume, see van Campenhout and van Houtum, “‘I Am German When We Win.” Oltermann, “German Rightwing.” Quoted in Hesse-Lichtenberger, Tor!, 70. “Mitglieder-Statistik 2020.” Horak, “Germany vs. Austria,” 30. On East German responses to the 1974 World Cup, see Schiller, WM 74, 134– 43; and McDougall, The People’s Game, 85–92. Quoted in Hesse, “Celebrating Germany’s Improbable Run.”

25. 26. The term Wende is used to describe the period of political change in the time proceeding and immediately following the reunification of East and West Germany. 27. Quoted in Raack, “Was hat euch bloß so ruiniert?,” 21. 28. Raithel, “The German Nation,” 366. 29. Raithel, “The German Nation,” 367. 30. Lanfranchi and Taylor, Moving with the Ball, 121–22. 31. Schiller, “‘Siegen für Deutschland?,’” 188. 32. CIES Football Observatory, “Football’s Major Migratory Routes Revealed.” 33. Association of Origin of Expatriate Players, “Atlas of Migration.” 34. The European Championship was initially scheduled for 2020 but was postponed

due to the Covid-19 pandemic by one year. Despite this delay, the UEFA kept the initial name of the tournament. 35. Hartmann, “Neuer über das Niederknien.” 36. Blume, “Gemeinsam Haltung.” 37. See Anderson, Imagined Communities.

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Association of Origin of Expatriate Players. “Atlas of Migration.” Football Observatory. Retrieved 11 June 2021, https://football-observatory.com/IMG/sites/atlasmigr/ Blume, Markus.“Gemeinsam Haltung zeigen gegen Diskriminierung. Freiheit und Toleranz sind schon jetzt die Gewinner [Taking a stand together against discrimination. Freedom and Tolerance are already the Winners].” Pic.twitter.com/LAiXk1vgZg. Twitter, 23 June 2021, 2:52 p.m. twitter.com/MarkusBlume/status/1407773580469878795

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19

Brüggemeier, Franz-Josef. “Das Wunder von Bern: The 1954 Football World Cup, the German Nation and Popular Histories.” In Popular Historiographies in the 19th and 20th Centuries: Cultural Meanings, Social Practices, edited by Sylvia Paletschek, 188–200. Oxford: Berghahn, 2011. CIES Football Observatory. “Football’s Major Migratory Routes Revealed.” Retrieved 11 June 2021, https://football-observatory.com/IMG/sites/b5wp/2020/wp314/en/ Eisenberg, Christiane, ed. “Deutschland” [Germany]. In Fußball, Soccer, Calcio: Ein englischer Sport auf seinem Weg um die Welt [Football, soccer, calcio: An English sport on its way around the world], 94–129. Munich: dtv, 1997. Gizler, Gerhard. “Es ist für’s Vaterland, wenn’s auch nur Spiel erscheint.” Studien zur Geschichte von Eintracht Braunschweig in der NS-Zeit [It’s for the fatherland, even if it’s only in the game]. Berlin: Die Werkstatt, 2015. Grass, Günter. My Century. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999. Hartmann, Oliver.“Neuer über das Niederknien:‘Wir sprechen in der Mannschaft darüber’” [Neuer on kneeling: “We discuss it as a team”], 2021. kicker. Retrieved 27 June 2021, https://www.kicker.de/neuer-ueber-das-niederknien-wir-sprechen-in-der-mann schaft-darueber-808434/artikel Havemann, Nils. Fußball unterm Hakenkreuz: Der DFB zwischen Sport, Politik und Kommerz [Football under the swastika. The DFB between sport, politics and commerce]. Frankfurt: Campus, 2005. Herzog, Markwart. Der “Betze” unterm Hakenkreuz: Der 1. FC Kaiserslautern in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus [The “Betze” under the swastika: 1. FC Kaiserslautern during the times of National Socialism]. Berlin: Werkstatt, 2009. ———. “FC Bayern Munich as a ‘Victim’ of National Socialism? Construction and Critique of a ‘Heroic Myth.’” Sport in History 41, no. 1 (2021): 131–52. ———. “Win Globally—Party Locally: The ‘Miracle of Berne’ and its Local Reception.” In The FIFA World Cup, 1930–2010: Politics, Commerce, Spectacle and Identities, edited by Stefan Rinke and Kay Schiller, 127–29. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2014. Hesse, Uli. “Celebrating Germany’s Improbable Run to Glory at Italia ’90.” ESPN.com. 7 July 2015. Retrieved 21 July 2021, https://www.espn.com/soccer/blog/espn-fcunited/68/post/2514094/celebrating-germanys-improbable-run-to-italia-90 Hesse-Lichtenberger, Ulrich. Tor! The Story of German Football. London: Gardners, 2002. Horak, Roman. “Germany vs. Austria: Football, Urbanism and National Identity.” In German Football: History, Culture, Society, edited by Alan Tomlinson and Christopher Young, 23–36. London: Routledge, 2006. Kolbe, Gerd. Der BVB in der NS-Zeit [The BVB in NS-Times]. Berlin: Die Werkstatt, 2005. Kurbjuweit, Dirk von, Kristina Allgöwer, Klaus Brinkbäumer, Uwe Buse, Markus Feldenkirchen, Jochen-Martin Gutsch, Barbara Hardinghaus, et al. “Deutschland, ein Sommermärchen” [Germany: A summer fairy tale]. Der Spiegel, no. 25, 2006. Retrieved 19 June 2006, https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland-ein-sommermaerchen-a-ce8 5474b-0002-0001-0000-000047282143 Lanfranchi, Pierre, and Matthew Taylor, Moving with the Ball: The Migration of Professional Footballers. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Löffelmeier, Anton. Die “Löwen” unterm Hakenkreuz: Der TSV München von 1860 im Nationalsozialismus [The “lions” under the swastika: The TSV Munich 1860 during National Socialism]. Berlin: Die Werkstatt, 2009. McDougall, Alan. The People’s Game: Football, State and Society in East Germany. Cambridge: University Press, 2014.

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“Mitglieder-Statistik 2020” [Membership statistics 2020]. 2020. Deutscher Fußball-Bund (DFB; German Football Association). dfb.de. Retrieved 14 June 2011, https://www .dfb.de/fileadmin/_dfbdam/223584-Mitgliederstatistik.pdf Moore, Kevin. What You Think You Know about Football is Wrong: The Global Game’s Greatest Myths and Untruth. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Oltermann, Philip. “German Rightwing Party Apologises for Jérôme Boateng Comments.” The Guardian, 29 May 2016. Retrieved 21 July 2021, https://www.theguardian .com/world/2016/may/29/german-far-right-party-row-jerome-boateng-neighbourcomments Oswald, Rudolf. “‘Das ‘Wunder von Bern’ und die deutsche Fußball-Volksgemeinschaft 1954“ [The “miracle of Bern” and the German National Football Community 1954]. In Auswärtige Repräsentationen: Deutsche Kulturdiplomatie nach 1945 [Foreign representations: German cultural diplomacy after 1945], edited by Johannes Paulmann, 88–101. Cologne: Böhlau, 2005. Planck, Karl. Fußlümmelei: Über Stauchballspiel und englische Krankheit [Football loutishness: on the crush ball game and English disease]. Stuttgart: Lit Verlag, 1898. Raack, Alex. “Was hat euch bloß so ruiniert? 20 Jahre nach dem Fall der Mauer, das Schicksal des Ostfußballs [What ruined you all so badly? 20 Years after the fall of the Wall, the fate of Eastern football].” 3 Ecken Ein Elfer [3 corners, one penalty kick] no. 6 (May 2009). Raithel, Thomas. “The German Nation and the 2006 FIFA World Cup.” In The FIFA World Cup, 1930–2010: Politics, Commerce, Spectacle and Identities, edited by Stefan Rinke and Kay Schiller, 353–71. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2014. Schiller, Kay. “‘Siegen für Deutschland?’ Patriotism, nationalism and the German national football team, 1954–2014” [“Victory for Germany?” Patriotism, nationalism and the German national football team, 1954–2014]. Historical Social Research vol. 40, no. 4 (2015): 176–96. ———. WM 74: Als der Fußball modern wurde [World Cup 74: When football became modern]. Berlin: Berliner Buchverlag, 2014. van Campenhout, Gijs, and Henk van Houtum. “‘I Am German When We Win, but I Am an Immigrant When We Lose’: Theorizing on the Deservedness of Migrants in International Football, Using the Case of Mesut Özil.” Sport in Society 24, no. 11 (2021): 1924–40.

PART I

 A Border-Crossing Game German Football and International Cultural Exchange

CHAPTER 1



The Introduction and Integration of Football into a Divided Society Conservative and Socialist Football in Germany from 1871 to 1933 THOMAS ADAM

Introduction

P

henomena such as football have received much attention by scholars in the context of nation building and the creation of national identity.1 While there is no doubt that football has become intertwined with nationalism, historians have largely failed to explore how the national variants of this sport came into existence and how and why it was introduced in specific local settings. The intercultural transfer and the global spread of football is only now becoming a topic of serious inquiry.2 The history of football was largely written by historians of sport who have focused on the history of the game but neglected to investigate the context—school reform and education—in which football was introduced in places such as Braunschweig, the German birthplace of modern football. Football found fertile soil in Braunschweig not because of the desire for a new sport but because of an institutional crisis of the city’s secondary school. It was this institutional crisis that provided an incentive for the introduction, institutionalization, and codification of football. In the first half of the nineteenth century the educational landscape of Braunschweig went through enormous transformations. The old humanistic education that was focused on the classic languages of Old Greek and Latin for future academics and civil servants fell out of favor with students and parents who sought what they called a “real” education that was focused on the natural sciences and modern languages for prospective factory managers and merchants. The traditional two high schools of the city received, furthermore,

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competition from the technical college of the town—the Collegium Carolinum3—as well as from a newly founded Realgymnasium (technical school) that quickly gained popularity. In 1828 the two established Gymnasia (high schools)—the Katharineum and the Martineum—were for financial reasons forcibly merged with the Realgymnasium into a new Gesamtgymnasium. This new institution was an umbrella organization that provided the space for the three different high schools that coexisted side by side and competed for students and teachers. Attempts to centralize and unify these three schools largely failed. Football was adopted by teachers of this umbrella institution in pursuit of creating a common identity among the students. That football and no other modern sport was adopted was simply due to the English students attending educational institutions in Braunschweig who had brought the game with them. Football was not as much sought out by the teachers in Braunschweig as it was laid in front of their feet by these English students. Teachers such as August Hermann and Konrad Koch recognized the potential of the game in creating a shared identity among the students of their high school, which was plagued by internal strife and conflicts between different traditions of and vision for secondary education.4 These teachers, further, recognized the value of this sport for pacifying and disciplining students through the rules of the game and, thereby, removing the teacher from the process of punishment. Football was born as an integral part of school reform that aimed at giving students greater freedom and developing alternative forms of discipline at English public schools such as Rugby School and Eton College in the middle of the nineteenth century. The sport appealed to students exactly because it removed teachers from the process. Students voluntarily surrendered to the rules of the game and accepted the behavioral norms established by these rules.5 English students who studied at German high schools and colleges, as well as German school teachers, introduced the game to their contemporaries in Germany. The success of this transfer was, however, for most of the nineteenth century very uncertain. Conservatives vehemently opposed football since they considered the game un-German. They favored German Turnen (gymnastics) over this English sport. In the context of increasing political and military tensions between Germany and the United Kingdom, football appeared as a game of the enemy. Socialists opposed the sport because it was too elitist since it was introduced to the exclusive Gymnasia, which were populated with the sons of well-off families who were prepared for leadership positions in state and society. Since nineteenth-century German society was characterized by a deep split into two major subcultures—conservative and socialist—football was introduced twice: first via the Gymnasium in Braunschweig into the conservative subculture; and second through contacts between English exchange laborers

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temporarily hired for German factories into the socialist subculture. Discussion of this twofold introduction of football, as well as the parallel existence of two football cultures in Germany (likewise conservative and socialist) between the 1870s until 1933, is absent from virtually every account of football written in the tradition of sport history. Most sport historians had no interest in exploring the larger social and political context in which football existed. And those historians who ventured to research the socialist and conservative subcultures did not concern themselves with the role of football therein.6 This chapter will in its first section introduce the reader to the emergence of football in the context of school reform at Rugby School and Eton College. Football appealed to educators such as Thomas Arnold because it offered opportunities of instilling discipline among students that did not require the intervention of the teacher.7 The second part of this chapter explores the complex reasons for the introduction of football in Braunschweig’s high school in the 1870s. This section is focused on the role of football as part of overcoming institutional crises and the building of institutional identity. The third section discusses the spread of football from Braunschweig to other German cities, and to Leipzig in particular, and the integration of football into the conservative and the socialist subculture. From the 1870s to 1933, two parallel football realms existed. There was no single German football nation but rather two football nations—a conservative football nation and a socialist football nation—that existed entirely separately from each other.

The Birth of Football as Part of School Reform The development of modern football was from the beginning directly linked to school reform. When Thomas Arnold was appointed head of the Public School at Rugby in 1828, he had faced the challenge of having to regulate the leisure activities of his students (i.e., hunting) because of numerous complaints from farmers in the surroundings of the school. He also faced an entrenched system of hazing and informal self-government of students that could not be overcome by teacher intervention. Arnold, therefore, introduced football at his school to offer students an appealing leisure activity that was to replace hunting and would also contribute to disciplining students without direct teacher involvement.8 Since football was a new and undeveloped game, Arnold was given the opportunity to define it, including its governing rules. Teachers and students at Rugby created a form of football that was distinct from older forms played on the streets of English towns and villages for centuries. They embraced the oval ball and H-shaped goals. In 1845 The Laws of Football as Played at Rugby School, which emphasized carrying and handling the ball, provided the first

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codified rules. These rules stipulated that all students had to participate in the game. They, further, ruled out the use of bats and sticks. Players could propel the ball only with their body.9 Rugby School was not the only public school that sought to introduce football as part of school reform. Eton College also embarked on using ball games as part of the curriculum. However, public schools were driven by the desire to develop distinct traditions and in this case, distinct forms of physical exercise. Therefore, the Public School at Eton did not follow in the footsteps of Rugby. Instead, it developed a ball game with rules that stipulated that hands were allowed to touch the ball only “to stop the ball, or touch it when behind. The ball must not be carried, thrown or struck by the hand.”10 Rugby (at Rugby) and association football (at Eton) were, thus, born in the context of English school reform and the desire to create distinct ball games at England’s prestigious and elitist public schools. The invention of football and its integration into the school curriculum at English schools was observed by J. A. Voigt, Karl Hillebrand, and Ludwig Wiese; these German educators traveled to England in the period from the 1850s to the 1870s and produced lengthy reports about the English school system.11 All three authors were unified in their rejection of football as a useful tool of teaching. While their books did not provide a positive image of football, it was left to the 1867 German translation of Thomas Hughes’s book Tom Brown’s Schooldays to give Germans a glance at this new game. However, even this German translation came with an excessively long framing footnote, which stretched over three pages, in which the game was explained (although with major mistakes) and belittled. The translator of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Ernst Wagner, inserted in the chapter that provided the famous description of a football game at Rugby a footnote explaining the rules of football as it was presumably played at Rugby. In this footnote, Wagner incorrectly insisted that players at Rugby could use only their Füße (feet) to kick the ball. Because of that rule, Wagner wrongfully argued the game was called Fußball. Wagner, furthermore, insisted that players were not allowed to use their hands for propelling the ball.12 Since such books did not provide a positive and encouraging image of football, it was left to English high school students who came to cities such as Stuttgart and Braunschweig for their education to introduce the game to an audience of German high school students. In the 1860s and 1870s ball games were played in Germany by English high school students such as William Cail, who attended high schools in Southern Germany. These games showed little structure and limited regulation. It was played by English and German high school students who were fascinated by the fast pace and the competitive nature of this ballgame. It appealed to German high school students who were restricted in their physical education to the gymnastics of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn and Adolf Spiess, which stressed harmony, conformity, and subordina-

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tion. High school–level gymnastics of the 1860s was focused on marching exercises and was run in a quasi-military style. There was no space for individual agency, spontaneity, and competition.13

The Introduction of Football at the Martino-Katharineum Gymnasium in Braunschweig Even though there were multiple points of entry for football into German society since English high school and college students could be found in great numbers at many high schools, colleges, and universities,14 it fell to the MartinoKatharineum Gymnasium in Braunschweig, which did not enroll any English students, to establish football as a popular game in Germany. The reasons for this high school to play a major role in the transfer of football from English public schools to German Gymnasia had little to do with the sport and much with the internal strife at this institution. This strife began in 1828 when three local institutions of higher education—the two traditional Gymnasia of the Martineum and Katharineum and the Realgymnasium—were forcibly merged into the Gesamtgymnasium of that city. The Martineum and the Katharineum had followed the traditional humanistic curriculum that focused on the classical languages of Latin and Old Greek, literature, and philosophy. Both high schools saw, because of their orientation toward a classical education, a significant decline in student enrollment after 1800. They had to fear for their survival. To make things worse, the Collegium Carolinum, which was founded in 1745 to prepare students for civil service careers and university education, competed with these two traditional Gymnasia for students.15 The greatest competition came from the new Realgymnasium that offered a curriculum focused on modern languages such as French and English and, more importantly, education in natural sciences, which was not offered at the Martineum or the Katharineum. This Realgymnasium attracted more and more students and threatened the very existence of the Martineum and the Katharineum. In response to these developments, the local school authorities decided in 1828 to merge the Martineum and the Katharineum with the Realgymnasium into the Martino-Katharineum Gesamtgymnasium. This merger did not come with an internal reorganization but left the three original schools intact. They even remained in their traditional buildings and students and teachers from each school did not initially encounter students and teachers from one of the other schools.16 The continued growth of the student population of the Realgymnasium put stress on the Martino-Katharineum Gesamtgymnasium. The Realgymnasium did not have enough teachers and more importantly it did not have sufficient space in its original building to accommodate the growing student numbers. Therefore, the Realgymnasium was moved into the building of the

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Martineum. Both high schools that were officially part of the same Gesamtgymnasium did not, however, have much in common. Their curriculums were very different, with the Martineum embracing the humanistic education and the Realgymnasium embracing the natural scientific education. The teachers at both schools did not see eye to eye and the student population of each school came from very different social backgrounds. The Martineum and the Katharineum were frequented by the sons of conservative and monarchist families who wanted a classical education for their sons. The education of these two schools was meant to prepare students for academic and civil service careers. The Realgymnasium, by contrast, was frequented by the sons of entrepreneurs and industrialists who sought for their sons an education that prepared them for professions and positions in industry and trade. Teachers of the Martineum consistently complained about the unruly students of the Realgymnasium who lacked discipline and respect for the teachers of the Martineum.17 Among the students who experienced these conflicts firsthand was Konrad Koch. While his father Johann Konrad Koch served as teacher of modern languages (French and English) at the Realgymnasium in Braunschweig, Koch attended the Martineum and the Katharineum from 1856 to 1864 before he left to study at the universities of Göttingen, Berlin, and Leipzig. After he had finished his university training and obtained a PhD from the University of Leipzig in 1867, he returned to Braunschweig to take up a position as instructor in Old Greek and Latin at the Katharineum. He had, thus, experienced the conflicts and problems of the Gesamtgymnasium from both sides—the side of the student and the side of the teacher.18 Tensions between students and teachers further increased in 1869 when a new school building was opened that was to provide space for all three high schools—the Martineum, the Katharineum, and the Realgymnasium—under one roof. Teachers and students from these three distinct schools could no longer avoid one another and faced each other every single day. The students from the Katharineum engaged in brawls with students from the Realgymnasium and teachers saw their control over the diverse student population slipping away. The students and the Gesamtgymnasium simply lacked a center and an identity. In their search to find an appealing activity that could contribute to the integration of students from all three schools and their pacification, August Hermann and Konrad Koch came across football, which had arrived in their city in the 1860s.19 With the opening of the new centralized school building, the Gesamtgymnasium also received a new gymnasium for physical exercises. This new gymnasium was another factor in the introduction of football at this school. Up until this new gymnasium was opened, the students of the Martineum, the Katharineum, and the Realgymnasium had practiced gymnastics outside of town on meadows and grassland. These exercises, which increasingly lost appeal for

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high school students, included traditional gymnastics and some games such as Räuber und Soldaten (a hide-and-seek game that pitted two teams against each other). The team of the Räuber was charged with finding and arresting the Soldaten, who were to be locked away in the castle guarded by the Räuber. The practice of physical exercises that included games played in nature ended when the new school building with its own gymnasium was opened. Moving exercises from outdoors to indoors severely restricted the students’ physical activities. Games and exercises in nature were replaced with marching drills in a very confined and closed space. Physical education turned into premilitary training and eliminated the opportunity to enjoy fresh air and sunshine.20 Konrad Koch, who was also actively involved in gymnastics and who was a member of the local Turnergemeinde (Gymnastics Community), considered the relocation of physical activities from outdoors to indoors as detrimental to the students’ health. Children spent more and more time inside and were subjected to training exercises that furthered obedience and subjugation. Traditional gymnastic workouts were exposed to further conformity. They did not encourage students to think for themselves and to take initiative. And even though these exercises were group activities, they did not create a group identity. They did not require students to work together or even to help each other. They just had to follow the orders of the gymnastics teacher.21 Football appealed to Koch because it offered an opportunity to teach students teamwork, initiative, and responsibility. This game offered to the Gesamtgymnasium in Braunschweig, which was plagued by rivalries and conflicts, an opportunity to bring all students together in the pursuit of a common goal. Teammates had to work together if they wanted to win over the opposing team. And while each team was hierarchically organized, such hierarchies were fluid. The player in the best position to score a goal needed the support of the players who could pass the ball to him. Players were, therefore, expected to subordinate their behavior under the common goal of victory and not under the authority of the teacher. Such teamwork created group identities that extended far beyond the game. It also gave the players/students space to exercise their own judgement and take initiative.22 The movement to introduce football at the Gesamtgymnasium originated with Koch’s colleague August Herrmann, who was hired as a physical education teacher at this high school in 1864. Hermann was not only confronted with the conflict over the orientation of this high school and its diverse student population, but he also faced students who were accustomed to enjoying gymnastics and games outdoors. In this context, Hermann experimented with ball games, which he moved outside of buildings. The inspiration for this change came from his contact with English college students who lived in his home. He provided room and board to several English students who came to Braunschweig for their education. In an 1895 article for the Zeitschrift für Turnen

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und Jugendspiel (Magazine for Gymnastics and Youth Play) Hermann reported that he had received instructions in the game’s rules from one of these students living in his house. It was also Hermann who had ordered a ball from London and tossed it onto the playground for his students to play with.23 In contrast to Hermann, Koch had no direct contact with English students, and he was also far removed from the teaching of physical education. However, he was concerned with the organizational chaos at the high school in Braunschweig and the lack of discipline among his students. Encouraged by his fatherin-law Friedrich Reck, who was a military physician and social reformer who had traveled extensively in England and witnessed the playing of football, Koch began to read about this new game. It is, however, not clear what Koch read and what became inspiration and source for his knowledge of English football. From his school education—Koch was trained at the Martineum and Katharineum and, thus, attended high schools that did not offer modern languages—it is not even clear whether he was able to read English sources. He might have received private lessons in English from his father who taught the language at the Realgymnasium. German reports about ballgames at English public schools that were available to Koch provided an unanimously negative image of football.24 Koch quickly assumed, nevertheless, a leading role in the introduction of football into the curriculum of his high school. To this end, he translated and shaped the rules of the game. Koch initially favored, according to his colleague August Hermann, rules that allowed the use of hands to propel the ball. This referred to the rules of the game developed at the Public School at Rugby. Since his colleagues preferred the version of the game that favored kicking rather than throwing the ball, because it seemed to provide less physical contact and a more orderly game, Koch developed rules that prohibited the use of hands in the game.25 However, instead of choosing the Eton rules that limited the contact with the ball to the hands, Koch settled for the rules developed at the Public School at Marlborough, which represented a combination of the football played at Rugby (shape of goals) and the football played at Eton (kicking of the ball).26 In 1875 Koch published his first set of rules for playing football at the high school in Braunschweig. The game was, according to these rules, created as a winter game (played from Michaelis on September 29 until the first snow fell). During the winter season, students met for biweekly games. The playing field had two goals on opposite sides, and the objective was for each team to hit the ball above the goal line (which was 3.5 meters above the ground). The players were permitted to use only their feet to hit the ball; the ball could be handled only if it was thrown back to the goal of the defending team. Koch introduced the Abseits (offside) rule according to which all players of one team had to be between their goal line and the ball. No player was permitted to be in front of

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the ball. And Koch insisted on fair play. All beating and tripping was banned. Games lasted for one hour with a change of sides after thirty minutes. The team with the highest number of points was declared as victor. Twenty points were given for hitting the ball over the goal line between the two supporting pillars. Five points were awarded for each attempted goal.27 Football appealed especially to the students in Braunschweig who came from entrepreneurial families and were expected to take up careers in industry and trade. The game introduced students to competition, teamwork, selfdetermination, and quick decision-making. And it was mostly self-regulated. Students accepted the rules and learned to work within their framework. Rules were simple, logical, and easy to comprehend. It was important that the players were not overburdened with too many complicated rules, since the game was to allow for the easy integration of players and freedom in decision-making during the game.28 Koch insisted that all students at his high school had to participate in football. This game was more than just a physical exercise for him. It was intended to bring together students from all social backgrounds and from all three high schools within the Gesamtgymnasium. The game was intended to provide an identity to the diverse student population and to unify the students through the common interest in the game. Football appealed to teachers such as Hermann and Koch because it offered ways for students to self-discipline. The discipline of the game was imposed not by arbitrary decisions of the teacher but resulted from the impersonal rules of the game and the necessity to work together in achieving victory over the opposing team. Students were not forced to work together to strike a goal; instead, they chose to work together to achieve victory.29

The Arrival of Football in a Divided German Society Football spread slowly from the Gymnasium in Braunschweig to other high schools, first within the Duchy of Braunschweig and later to high schools in neighboring Saxony. The high schools in Leipzig were among the first schools at which the game was introduced in Saxony. And Leipzig developed into a center of football in the early twentieth century. In 1921 the city was the home to about fifty football associations with a combined membership of 25,000 men and women. About 5,500 of these 25,000 football players were organized within the socialist Arbeiterturnerbund (Workers’ Gymnastics Association) while the remaining 19,500 players were members of the conservative Deutsche Turnerschaft (German Gymnastics Association). In a city population of about 600,000 people, about 4 percent were actively involved in football.30

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Initially, the new ball game received overwhelming opposition among conservatives, who believed that only gymnastics was an appropriate physical exercise for German students and adults. They also considered the game as un-German because of its origins in English public schools. They further suggested that the game would create monstrous humans since it required the use of certain muscles such as the leg muscles over others. Contemporary antifootball propaganda published posters that showed footballers with disproportionately large leg muscles, suggesting that these games would result in enormous damage to the physical stature of its players. Anti-football propaganda, further, posited that this was an accident-prone game and would, therefore, result in large numbers of physical injuries. Such public sentiment did not, however, stop young boys from conservative and from socialist families from participating in ballgames.31

The Conservative Subculture The conservative gymnastics organization Deutsche Turnerschaft, which had been founded in 1868 with the mandate to popularize gymnastics, vehemently opposed football and threatened each member with expulsion if he engaged in this game. The organization’s leaders also banned it from being played in their facilities. The ball game, therefore, developed outside of the organized physical exercise movement that dominated German society before 1900. It was high school teachers who, despite this strong opposition, continued to press for its inclusion into school curricula. In the early 1880s, football was integrated into the high school curriculum at Leipzig’s Bürgerschulen. However, Leipzig’s school authorities experienced significant opposition from the local chapter of the Deutsche Turnerschaft, which considered the ball game to be an attack on the values espoused by German gymnastics. They were forced to impose restrictive rules that outlawed the formation of football teams, the playing of football outside of schools, and the organization of football matches between school teams.32 Such policies did not diminish the appeal of football among the students at Leipzig’s high schools. They continued to play outside of school on fields and in public places without supervision and rules. These football enthusiasts who came from conservative families and who were expected to join the Deutsche Turnerschaft sought to establish football teams within that organization. They petitioned the local chapter of the Deutsche Turnerschaft and finally succeeded in bringing football into the fold of this organization. The very existence of the Deutsche Turnerschaft (and to a lesser extent also the Arbeiterturnerbund) as a national organization helps us understand why football developed in Germany not as a game institutionally connected to high schools and universities, but rather to local chapters of the Deutsche Turnerschaft. Even though the Deutsche Turnerschaft initially op-

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posed the acceptance of football, high school and university students successfully pursued the creation of teams within the organization. The existence of the Deutsche Turnerschaft and the established custom of organizing gymnastics therein, rather than attaching it to a high school or a university, explains the emergence of the distinct German pattern of institutionalized sports, which is distinctly different from the college-focused American sporting world. In 1888 a Leipzig football team performed a public match in the town of Colditz at a meeting of conservative gymnast associations from across the Kingdom of Saxony. The purpose of this public match was to introduce the game to members of the Deutsche Turnerschaft and to further the acceptance of football among conservatives. The twenty players involved in this staged match officially formed a football team upon their return to Leipzig within the local branch of the Deutsche Turnerschaft.33 In 1889, this team introduced the members of the Deutsche Turnerschaft from across Germany to the new game by playing a match against the London football team Orion at the annual meeting of German gymnast associations in Munich.34 This 1889 match helped in popularizing football within conservative circles and caused gymnasts in other local branches to allow for the creation of football teams. The leaders of the Leipzig chapter of the Deutsche Turnerschaft insisted, however, that the members of this team could not refer to themselves as football players, but instead had to accept the traditional designation of gymnasts. It took until 1893 before the first football team within the Deutsche Turnerschaft—the football club Lipsia—was founded. It was the very first organization that dedicated itself exclusively to the playing of football.35 Football clubs like Lipsia stayed for only a short time within the Deutsche Turnerschaft before they created their own national sport organization, the Deutscher Fußball-Bund (DFB; German Football Association), which was founded by representatives of conservative football clubs in Leipzig in 1900. From 1900 to 1933 the DFB provided, however, an umbrella only for conservative football clubs and excluded socialist football clubs. Below this national organization, there were also regional groups for conservative football clubs, such as the Verband Mitteldeutscher Ballspielvereine (Association of Central German Ball-Game Clubs), which was founded in Leipzig in 1900 as an umbrella organization for conservative football clubs active in Central Germany. The acceptance of football among conservatives was further enhanced when students from the University of Leipzig who had formed a football team were invited to play football as part of the annual Sedan Day celebrations in 1891, held on September 2 to commemorate the German victory over the French in the Battle of Sedan (1870). These annual festivities brought together the organizations of the conservative subculture of Wilhelmine Germany. The inclusion of football into such events paved the way for its acceptance into the conservative subculture.36

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The Socialist Subculture Since football was introduced to Germany by teachers at elite high schools, and played by high school and university students, it became, from a socialist perspective, a deeply elitist sport considered taboo for the sons of workingclass families. The socialist gymnast association—the Arbeiterturnerbund (founded in 1893)—opposed the integration of football and the creation of football teams into the canon of physical exercises. The Arbeiterturnerbund opposed the game as vehemently as the Deutsche Turnerschaft had opposed it. But while the Deutsche Turnerschaft was opposed to football because of the game’s English roots, the Arbeiterturnerbund opposed the game as an elitist and capitalist game that was geared toward competition and victory. It was this competitive nature of the game that caused leaders of the Arbeiterturnerbund to suggest that it contributed to the lack of order, discipline, and subordination among the young generation of laborers. Football, in contrast to gymnastics, furthered, in the eyes of socialists, disorder and disunity. Leaders of the socialist gymnast association did not share Koch’s vision of football as a game that could produce unity and identity. The Arbeiterturnerbund, therefore, prohibited the playing of football in its facilities and threatened members who played football with expulsion.37 Sons of working-class families did not learn about football in school. The Volksschulen (elementary schools) these children attended did not offer football as part of their curricula. These students learned about football outside of school and played it on fields outside the city. It is not clear how football was introduced to the sons of working-class families in Leipzig. Either English laborers who came to Leipzig in the process of the transfer of industrial technology brought the ball game with them, or these children observed students from the elitist Bürgerschulen playing it. In contrast to the sons in upper-class families, children from working-class families had little introduction to the rules of the game and little supervision by adults who could have enforced the rules of the football game. However, these youngsters also formed football clubs, including the very first socialist club in Leipzig, the Schönefelder Fußball Club 03, which was founded in 1903 by twenty-one youngsters who worked in the factories of the graphic industries that dominated the eastern section of Leipzig and its eastern suburbs.38 While the Deutsche Turnerschaft gave into the desires of young conservative football enthusiasts and opened this organization to the game that was once considered un-German in the 1890s, socialist leaders of the Arbeiterturnerbund showed in the 1890s little willingness to give in to the demands for including football into the canon of socialist physical exercises. It took more than twenty years before football teams such as the Schönefelder Fußball Club 03

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were admitted into the Arbeiterturnerbund, which renamed itself as Arbeiter Turn- und Sportbund (Workers’ Gymnastics and Sports Federation) to reflect the transformation of the organization because of the acceptance of football and other games at the end of the 1920s. From the 1890s to 1933 cities such as Leipzig saw a steady increase in the number of football teams—both conservative and socialist—and the number of football players. Football further evolved in the 1920s from a participants’ game to a spectators’ game that attracted more and more people who wanted to watch these games. Playing fields and stadiums were needed to accommodate paying spectators. Local chapters of the Arbeiterturnerbund, such as the Verein für Leibesübungen Leipzig-Südost (South-East Leipzig Association for Physical Education), embarked on extensive building projects, which included a football stadium that opened in 1927.39 Even though the game relied on competition between opposing teams, socialist and conservative football teams did not play against each other, since the Arbeiterturnerbund outlawed the cooperation with local chapters of the Deutsche Turnerschaft.40 The coexistence of a socialist and a conservative football culture ended only in 1933 with the destruction of the socialist subculture in the aftermath of Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in January 1933. In the summer of 1933, all socialist organizations, including political organizations and leisure time associations, were closed by the Nazis. Socialist football clubs were in this context banned and socialist football came to an end. The clubs of the Deutsche Turnerschaft, by contrast, continued to operate. The destruction of socialist football had made way for the establishment of one single national football culture.41

Conclusion Traditional accounts of either sports history or national (German) history have largely ignored the context in which football was introduced into Germany and the ways in which it was integrated into the two competing socialist and conservative subcultures. The institutional problems that had emerged at Braunschweig’s Gesamtgymnasium from the failed combination of three high schools into one provided fertile ground for the introduction of football into this school’s curriculum. The need to bring high schools together and to integrate a socially and intellectually diverse student population caused August Hermann and Konrad Koch to search for inspiration abroad. The introduction of football games to Germany by English students who finished their education at German high schools and colleges piqued Hermann’s interest. From

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there, it was not a small step to making football first into a school sport and later into a sport enjoyed by many adults. Football was not only met with significant stereotypes among Germany’s leaders in the world of physical education, but it also necessitated acceptance into both the socialist and conservative subcultures, a deep division likewise ignored by sport historians. Studies such as the history of football in Leipzig authored by Horst Sachse do not mention the existence of two football cultures. Yet, for more than half a century, there existed two competing football cultures and players involved in either subculture refrained from contact with players involved in the other subculture. Socialist football teams did not play conservative football teams. The case of football presents a paradigmatic example for the advantages of exploring history not from the perspective of specialized and limiting approaches such as national history and sports history but rather from an interdisciplinary and transnational perspective. Such a perspective helps us understand the reasons for the introduction of football in Braunschweig in the 1870s and it reminds us that the transfer of products such as football from one culture to another always comes with transformations of the product transferred and that such transfers were often met with great resistance. In the process of transfer, football was Germanized through Konrad Koch’s production of football rules and his production of a history of football, in which he argued that football could not be considered an English game but that it had roots in medieval continental Europe. Such arguments were not based in historical facts but rather were of a strategic nature to give German nationalists a reason for accepting football into German conservative culture.42

Author Thomas Adam is professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Arkansas. Dr. Adam is the author of books such as Approaches to the Study of Intercultural Transfers (Anthem, 2019), Intercultural Transfer and the Making of the Modern World (Palgrave, 2012) and Philanthropy, Civil Society, and the State in German History (Camden House, 2016). His publishing record includes English and German articles as well as book chapters on football. His most recent manuscript, “The Intercultural Transfer of Football: The Contexts of Germany and Argentina,” was published in Sports in Society (2017). He is the editor of the Yearbook of Transnational History (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press) as well as the editor of the book series on Intercultural Transfer Studies published with Anthem Press.

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Notes 1. See, for instance, Eisenberg, Fußball, Soccer, Calcio. 2. Adam, “The Intercultural Transfer of Football,” 1371–89; Cleveland, Following the 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

Ball. For the concept of intercultural transfer, see Adam, Approaches to the Study; Lingelbach, “Comparative History,” 1–19. Albrecht, Technische Bildung zwischen; Albrecht, “Zwischen Traditionalismus,” 53–88; Antrick, “Das Collegium Carolinum.” Schönemann, Das braunschweigische Gymnasium, 86–97. A very fragmentary and therefore quite disappointing account of the introduction of football in Braunschweig is given in Hock, “The Beginnings of Football in Germany,” 26–45. Much more detailed and helpful is Oberschelp, “Konrad Koch und England,” 150–67. Dunning and Sheard, Barbarians, Gentlemen and Players, 40–86; Dishon, “Games of Character,” 364–80. Adam, Arbeitermilieu und Arbeiterbewegung, 121–42; Adam, “Sport und Politik,” 275–92. Copley, Black Tom; McCrum, Thomas Arnold; Bamford, Thomas Arnold; Wymer, Dr. Arnold of Rugby; Strachey, Eminent Victorians, 201–35; Stanley, The Life and Correspondence. Dunning and Sheard, Barbarians, Gentlemen, and Players, 40–53, 62–68; Archer, Secondary Education, 52–81. For a survey of the origins debate of football, see Curry, “Introduction,” 1–14. Terence Copley, by contrast, argued that Arnold played no role in the introduction of football at Rugby. See Copley, Black Tom, 150–51. Arnold, Shirley, and Hutchins, “The Laws of Football”; Newmarch, Recollections of Rugby, 130–34. Curry, “Football,” 12. Voigt, Mittheilungen; Hillebrand, Aus und über England; Wiese, Deutsche Briefe. Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schuljahre, 98–101. Oberschelp, Der Fußball-Lehrer, 18–19; Eisenberg, “English Sports” und deutsche Bürger, 143; Hesse-Lichtenberger, Tor!, 16–18. Adam, Transnational Philanthropy, 134–38, 147–49. Albrecht, “Zwischen Traditionalismus.” G.T.A. Krüger, “Rückblick auf die Geschichte,” 4–6. Ibid., 22–23; Beste, “Das Gymnasium Martino-Katharineum,” 62–63. Hoffmeister, Der Wegbereiter des Fußballspiels, 9. Beste, “Das Gymnasium Martino-Katharineum,” 67–68. Koch, “Der erziehliche Werth,” 15–16; Sander, “Zur Geschichte der Leibesübungen,” 87–140. Koch, “Der erziehliche Werth,” 21. Ibid., 27; Koch, Die Erziehung zum Mute, 80. Hermann, “Ergänzende und berichtigende,” 132. Hoffmeister, Der Wegbereiter des Fußballspiels, 27–29; Koch, Die Geschichte des Fußballs, 3; Blasius, “Friedrich Reck,” 127; Koch, “August Friedrich Reck, Dr. med. †,” 132. Hermann, “Ergänzende und berichtigende Bemerkungen,” 132. Koch, Die Geschichte des Fußballs, 41.

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27. Koch, Fußball; Hoffmeister, Zeitreise durch die Braunschweiger Sportgeschichte, 18–

19; Oberschelp, Der Fußball-Lehrer, 87–100.

28. Koch, Die Erziehung zum Mute, 82. 29. Hopf, “Wie der Fußball,” 49–53. 30. Adam, Arbeitermilieu und Arbeiterbewegung, 131. See also Adam, “Sport und

Politik.”

31. Planck, Fusslümmelei; Hoffmeister, Der Wegbereiter des Fußballspiels, 66–68. 32. Hamer, Die Anfänge der “Spielbewegung”; A. Krüger, “Gesinnungsbildung,” 102–

22; Sachse, Fußball in und um Leipzig, 7–26; Steins, Spielbewegung-Bewegungsspiel.

33. Adam, Arbeitermilieu und Arbeiterbewegung, 123–24; Gasch, Festschrift zur fünfzig-

jährigen, 38; Wortmann, “Die Spielvereinigung,” 121–22.

34. Fuge, Ein Jahrhundert, 7–9; Gasch, Festschrift zur fünfzigjährigen, 39; Koch, Die Ge-

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

schichte des Fußballs, 42; Oberschelp, Der Fußball-Lehrer, 101–14; Sachse, Fußball in und um Leipzig, 10–12; Wortmann, “Die Spielvereinigung Allgemeinen Turnvereine zu Leipzig,”122. Sachse, Fußball in und um Leipzig, 21–25. Ibid., 13; Wortmann, “Die Spielvereinigung,” 123. For the Sedanfeiern see Graf, “Leipzig und die Sedanfeier,” 150–61. Stiller, Jugend im Arbeitersport, 69–73; Hauk, “Fußball,” 160–69; Nitsch and Pfeiffer, Die Roten Turnbrüder; Sachse, Fußball in und um Leipzig, 27–31; Schröder, “90 Jahre Fußball in Deutschland,” 952; Teichler, “‘Frisch, frei, stark und tre,’” 100–107. 25 Jahre Schönefelder Fußball Vereinigung 03. This copy is available only in the library of the University of Leipzig. Adam, Arbeitermilieu und Arbeiterbewegung in Leipzig, 131. Ibid., 128–30, 132–38. Adam, Arbeitermilieu und Arbeiterbewegung in Leipzig, 141–42; Kupfer, “Arbeitersportler gegen den Faschismus,” 31–37. Koch, Die Geschichte des Fußballs, 7.

Bibliography 25 Jahre Schönefelder Fußball Vereinigung 03. 1903/1928; eingetragener Verein; Mitglied des Arbeiter- Turn- und Sportbundes; 4. Kreis; 1. Bezirk ( Jubelfeier vom 17. bis 26. August 1928) [25 years of Schönefelder Football Club 03: 1903/1928; registered association; member of the Workers’ Gymnastics and Sports Federation; 4th circle; 1st district, Celebration from 17 to 26 August 1928]. Leipzig, 1928. Adam, Thomas. Arbeitermilieu und Arbeiterbewegung in Leipzig 1871–1933 [Working class and worker movement in Leipzig 1871–1933]. Cologne: Böhlau, 1999. ———. Approaches to the Study of Intercultural Transfer. New York: Anthem, 2019. ———. “The Intercultural Transfer of Football: The Contexts of Germany and Argentina.” Sport in Society 20, no. 10 (2017): 1371–89. ———. “Sport und Politik in einer deutschen Grossstadt. Sozialdemokratischer und konservativer Fußball in Leipzig vom Kaiserreich bis zur nationalsozialistischen Machtergreifung [Sport and politics in a German metropolis. Socialist and conservative football in Leipzig from the German Empire until the rise of National Socialism].” In Kulturpolitik und Stadtkultur in Leipzig und Lyon, edited by Thomas Höpel and Stef-

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fen Sammler (18–20 Jahrhundert) [Cultural politics and city culture in Leipzig and Lyon (18th–20th centuries)] , 275–92. Leipzig: Leipziger Uni Verlag, 2004. ———. Transnational Philanthropy: The Mond Family’s Support for Public Institutions in Western Europe from 1890 to 1938. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Albrecht, Helmuth. Technische Bildung zwischen Wissenschaft und Praxis: Die Technische Hochschule Braunschweig 1862–1914 [Technical education between science and practice. The Technical University Braunschweig, 1862–1914]. Hildesheim: Olms Weidmann, 1987. ———. “Zwischen Traditionalismus und Neuorientierung: Der Weg des Braunschweiger Collegium Carolinum zur Polytechnischen Schule (1814–1862)” [Between traditionalism and new orientation: The path of the Braunschweig from Collegium Carolinum to Polytechnical School (1814–1862)]. Braunschweigisches Jahrbuch [Braunschweiger yearbook] 63 (1982): 53–88. Antrick, Otto. “Das Collegium Carolinum und seine Studierenden, 1745–1862“ [The Collegium Carolinum and its students, 1745–1862]. PhD thesis, Technische Universität Braunschweig, 1951. Archer, R. L. Secondary Education in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921. Arnold, William Delafield, W. W. Shirley, and Frederick Hutchins. 1845. “The Laws of Football as Played at Rugby School.” Retrieved 3 March 2020, https://en.wikisource .org/wiki/Laws_of_Football_as_played_at_Rugby_School_(1845) Bamford, T. W. Thomas Arnold. London: Cresset Press, 1960. Beste, Johannes, “Das Gymnasium Martio-Katharineum von 1828 bis 1915” [The Gymnasium Martio-Katharineum from 1828–1915]. In Gymnasium Martino- Katharineum Braunschweig: Festschrift zur 500-Jahr-Feier am 17. und 18. März 1926 [Gymnasium Katharineum Braunschweig: Festschrift in honor of the 500 year celebration on 17th and 18th of March 1926], edited by Richard Elster, 55–79. Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1926. Blasius, Wilhelm. “Friedrich Reck. Nekrolog [Friedrich Reck. Obituary].” In 5. Jahresbericht des Vereins für Naturwissenschaft zu Braunschweig für das Vereinsjahr 1886 bis 1887 [5th annual report of the Association for Natural Sciences in Braunschweig for the Association Year 1886–1887], 126–31. Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn, 1887. Cleveland, Todd. Following the Ball: The Migration of African Soccer Players across the Portuguese Colonial Empire. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2017. Copley, Terence. Black Tom: Arnold of Rugby: The Myth and the Man. London: Routledge, 2002. Curry, Graham. “Football: A Study in Diffusion.” PhD thesis, University of Leicester (2001). ———, ed. “Introduction.” In Graham Curry, the Early Development of Football: Contemporary Debates, 1–14. London: Routledge, 2019. Dishon, Gideon. “Games of Character: Team Sports, Games, and Character Development in Victorian Public Schools, 1850–1900.” Paedagogica Historica 53, no. 4 (2017): 364–80. Dunning, Eric, and Kenneth Sheard. Barbarians, Gentlemen and Players, 2nd edition, A Sociological Study of the Development of Rugby Football. London: Routledge, 2005. Eisenberg, Christiane. “English Sports” und deutsche Bürger. Eine Gesellschaftsgeschichte 1800–1939 [“English Sports” and German Citizens. A Societal History 1800–1939]. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1999.

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———, ed. Fußball, Soccer, Calcio: Ein englischer Sport auf seinem Weg um die Welt [Football, soccer, calcio: An English sport on its way around the world], 94–129. Munich: dtv, 1997. Fuge, Jens. Ein Jahrhundert Leipziger Fußball. Die Jahre 1883–1945 [A century of Leipzig football. The years 1883–1945]. Leipzig: Connewitzer Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1996. Gasch, Rudolf. Festschrift zur fünfzigjährigen Jubelfeier des Allgemeinen Turnvereins zu Leipzig 1845–1895 [Festschrift for the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the General Gymnastics Club in Leipzig 1845–1895]. Leipzig: Verl. des Allgemeinen Turnveins, 1895. Graf, Gerhard. “Leipzig und die Sedanfeier: Ein eher frömmigkeitsgeschichtlicher Exkurs” [Leipzig and the sedan celebration: A more piety-historical digression]. In Feste und Feiern: Zum Wandel städtischer Festkultur in Leipzig [Feasts and celebrations: On the development of urban culture of celebration], edited by Kathrin Keller, 150–61. Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1994. Hamer, Eerke U. Die Anfänge der “Spielbewegung” in Deutschland [The beginnings of the “sport movement” in Germany]. London: Arena, 1989. Hauk, Gerhard. “Fußball—eine ‘proletarische Sportart’ im Arbeiter-Turn-und Sportbund?” [Football—a “proletariat style sport” in worker gymnastic and sporting associations]. In Illustrierte Geschichte des Arbeitersports [Illustrated history of working-class sports], edited by Hans Joachim Teichler and Gerhard Hauk, 160–69. Berlin: Dietz, 1987. Hermann, August. “Ergänzende und berichtigende Bemerkungen” [“Supplementary and corrective remarks”]. Zeitschrift für Turnen und Jugendspiel [ Journal for gymnastic and youth sport] no. 4 (1895/96): 132–33. Hesse-Lichtenberger, Ulrich. Tor! The Story of German Football. London: WSC Books, 2003. Hillebrand, Karl. Aus und über England [Out and around England]. Berlin: Berlin Robert Oppenheim, 1876. Hock, Hans-Peter. “The Beginnings of Football in Germany in Light of Contemporary Sources.” In The Early Development of Football: Contemporary Debates, edited by Graham Curry, 26–45. London: Routledge, 2019. Hoffmeister, Kurt. Der Wegbereiter des Fußballspiels in Deutschland: Prof. Dr. Konrad Koch 1846–1911 Eine Biografie [The pioneer of the game of football in Germany: Prof. Dr. Konrad Koch 1846–1911. A biography]. Braunschweig: Books on Demand, 2001. ———. Zeitreise durch die Braunschweiger Sportgeschichte: 180 Jahre Turnen und Sport in Braunschweig [ Journey through time in the Braunschweiger sport history: 180 years of gymnastics and sport in Braunschweig]. Braunschweig: Books on Demand, 2010. Hopf, Wilhelm. “Wie der Fußball nach Deutschland kam” [How football came to Germany]. In Die Geschichte des Fußballs im Altertum und in der Neuzeit [The history of football in antiquity and in modern times], edited by Konrad Koch, 19–53. Berlin: R. Gaertners Verlagsbuchhandlung 1895 (reprint; Münster: Lit Verlag, 1983). Hughes, Thomas. Tom Brown’s Schuljahre. Von einem alten Rugby-Jungen. Zur Darlegung des gegenwärtigen Standes der Erziehung in den oberen Classen Englands [Tom Brown’s school years. From an old rugby youth to the demonstration of the contemporary state of education in the upper classes of England], edited by Ernst Wagner. Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1867. Koch, Konrad. “August Friedrich Reck, Dr. med. †.” Braunschweiger Tageblatt [Braunschweiger Daily Newspaper]. 9 November 1878. ———. “Der erziehliche Werth der Schulspiele” [The educational value of school games]. In Programm des Gymnasiums Martino-Katharineum zu Braunschweig [Program of

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the Gymnasium Martino-Katharineum in Braunschweig], 15–29. Braunschweig: Johannes Heinrich Meher, 1878. ———. Die Erziehung zum Mute durch Turnen, Spiel und Sport [The education of courage through gymnastics, games and sport]. Berlin: R. Gaertners Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1900. ———. Die Geschichte des Fußballs im Altertum und in der Neuzeit [The history of football from antiquity to modern times]. Berlin: R. Gaertners Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1895. ———. Fußball. Regeln des Fußball-Vereins der mittleren Classen des Martino-Catharineums zu Braunschweig [Football. Rules of the football club of the middle classes of MatinoCatharineums in Braunschweig]. Braunschweig: Verlag Von O Häring, 1875. Krüger, Arnd. “Gesinnungsbildung durch Turnunterricht oder ‘Pro patria est dum ludere videmur’” [Attitude formation through physical education classes or “it’s for our country while we play”]. In Schule zwischen Kaiserreich und Faschismus [School between the German Empire and fascism], edited by R. Dithmar and J. Willer, 102–22. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981. Krüger, G.T.A. “Rückblick auf die Geschichte des Gesamtgymnasiums, insonderheit des Ober- und Progymnasiums, von seiner ersten Einrichtung im Jahre 1828 an bis auf die Gegenwart” [Reflections on the history of comprehensive high schools, particularly the upper and progymnasiums, from conception in 1828 up until the present]. In Programm des Ober- und Progymnasiums, am Schlusse des Schuljahres Ostern 1866 [Program of the upper and progymnasium at the conclusion of the school year, Easter 1866], 3–30. Braunschweig: Julius Krampe, 1866. Kupfer, Torsten. “Arbeitersportler gegen den Faschismus: Die Kampfgemeinschaft für rote Sporteinheit in Leipzig 1933 bis 1935” [Worker athletes against fascism: The action group for red sport unity in Leipzig 1933 to 1935]. MA thesis, University of Leipzig, 1988. Lingelbach, Gabriele. “Comparative History, Intercultural Transfer Studies, and Global History: Three Modes of Conceptualizing History beyond the Nation State.” Yearbook of Transnational History 2 (2019): 1–19. McCrum, Michael. Thomas Arnold Headmaster: A Reassessment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Newmarch, Charles Henry. Recollections of Rugby, by an old Rugbæan. London: Hamilton & Adams, 1848. Nitsch, Franz, and Lorenz Pfeiffer, eds. Die Roten Turnbrüder: 100 Jahre Arbeitersport [The red gymnastics brothers: 100 years of worker sports]. Marburg: Schüren, 1987. Oberschelp, Malte. Der Fußball-Lehrer: Wie Konrad Koch im Kaiserreich den Ball ins Spiel brachte [The football teacher: How Konrad Koch brought the ball into the game in the German Empire]. Göttingen: Verlag die Werkstatt, 2010. ———. “Konrad Koch und England: Die Geschichte einer ambivalenten Beziehung” [Konrad Koch and England: The history of an ambivalent relationship]. In „Als der Sport nach Hannover kam” Geschichte und Rezeption eines Kulturtransfers zwischen England und Norddeutschland vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert [When sport came to Hanover: History and reception of culture transfers between England and Northern Germany from the 18th to the 20th century], edited by Christian Becker, Cornelia Regin, and Anton Weise, 150–67. Berlin: Lit, 2015. Planck, Karl. Fusslümmelei: Über Stauchballspiel und englische Krankheit [Footloose: On press stroke and the English Disease]. Münster: Lit, 2004. Sachse, Horst. Fußball in und um Leipzig von den Anfängen bis 1945 [Football in and around Leipzig from the beginning until 1945]. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2000.

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Sander, Otto. “Zur Geschichte der Leibesübungen von ihren Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart” [The history of physical exercise from its beginnings to the present]. In Gymnasium Martino-Katharineum Braunschweig: Festschrift zur 500-Jahr-Feier am 17. und 18. März 1926 [Gymnasium Katharineum Braunschweig: Festschrift in honor of the 500 year celebration on 17th and 18th of March 1926], edited by Richard Elster, 87–140. Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1926. Schönemann, Bernd. Das braunschweigische Gymnasium in Staat und Gesellschaft: Ein Beitrag zur Schulgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts [The Braunschweig Gymnasium in state and society: A contribution to the school history of the 19th century]. Cologne: In Kommission bei Böhlau, 1983. Schröder, Christian. “90 Jahre Fußball in Deutschland” [90 years of football in Germany], Theorie und Praxis der Körperkultur [Theory and practice of body culture] no. 11 (1964): 948–55. Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn. The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold. Vol 1 & 2. London: Ward, Lock and Co, 1877. Steins, Gerd, ed. Spielbewegung-Bewegungsspiel: 100 Jahre Gossler’scher Spielerlass [Game movement—Movement game: 100 years of Gossler’s game decree]. Berlin: Forum für Sportgeschichte 1982. Stiller, Eike. Jugend im Arbeitersport: Lebenswelten im Spannungsfeld von Verbandskultur und Sozialmilieu 1893–1933 [Youth in worker sport: Environments in areas of conflict from association culture and social milieu 1893–1933]. Münster: Lit, 1991. Strachey, Lytton. Eminent Victorians. New York: G.P. PUTNAM’S SONS, 1918. Teichler, Hans Joachim. “‘Frisch, frei, stark und treu.’ Vom Arbeiterturnerbund zum Arbeiter-, Turn- und Sportbund” [“Fresh, free, strong and true.” From worker gymnastics associations to worker, gymnastic and sport federations]. In 200 Jahre Turnbewegung. 200 Jahre soziale Verantwortung [200 years of gymnastic movements. 200 years of social responsibility], edited by Annette Ruth Hofmann, 100–7. Frankfurt: Deutscher Turner-Bund, 2011. Voigt, J. A. Mittheilungen über das Unterrichtswesen Englands und Schottlands [Notes on the education of England and Scotland]. Halle: Eduard Anton, 1857. Wiese, Ludwig Adolf. Deutsche Briefe über Englische Erziehung [German letters about English education], vol 1 & 2. Berlin: Kessinger Publishing, 1852. Wortmann, J. H. “Die Spielvereinigung im Allgemeinen Turnvereine zu Leipzig” [The game association in gymnastics clubs in Leipzig]. Jahrbuch für Jugend- und Volksspiele [Yearbook for youth and folk games], no. 3 (1894), 121–22. Wymer, Norman. Dr. Arnold of Rugby. London: Robert Hale Limited, 1953.

CHAPTER 2



Fußball Internationale

Toward a Global History of GDR Football ALAN MCDOUGALL

I

n October 1977, Dynamo Dresden traveled to England to play Liverpool Football Club in the second round of European football’s premier club competition, the European Cup. The East German champions were thrashed 5–1. They had no answer to Liverpool’s pace and physicality and struggled to cope with the height of Welsh striker John Toshack. The English tabloid newspaper the Daily Mirror reported that Dynamo played “football based on defensive fear,” notwithstanding Reinhard Häfner’s brilliant consolation goal. Liverpool manager Bob Paisley said of the visitors, “They are so disciplined [that] they tend to panic when presented with a new problem.”1 His assessment echoed West German midfielder Günter Netzer’s recent, and misleadingly reductive, description of “East German robot football.”2 Both manifested Cold War stereotypes about the machine-like athletes and sports systems behind the Iron Curtain. On the pitch, the trip was a chastening experience. Off it, the Dresden players encountered a new problem even more panic-inducing than the defending European champions: During a visit to a Liverpool cinema, a Dynamo official noticed several players leaving the movie theater. Were they treasonously attempting to flee the socialist republic for the capitalist West? The answer was more prosaic: the cinema was screening Steven Spielberg’s 1975 blockbuster Jaws, and several Dynamo players left the theater because they could not stomach the film’s gorier scenes.3 Apocryphal or not, the Jaws story demonstrates the tensions, and occasional absurdities, that shaped football’s role as a vehicle for international cultural and political exchange in the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (GDR; German Democratic Republic), the self-described Sportland (land of sport).4 The world’s game framed new horizons, on and off the pitch, even within the constraints of East German socialism. Dynamo Dresden captain Klaus Sammer

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recalled how he and his teammates first watched a James Bond film during their trip to Scotland to play Rangers in the 1967–68 Inter-Cities Fairs’ Cup.5 Sammer was part of the Dynamo team that first encountered the total football of Ajax in front of sixty thousand supporters at Amsterdam’s Olympiastadion (Olympic Stadium) in September 1971. The result of this meeting, with what one Dynamo official called “football of the most modern style,” was a 2–0 defeat in the European Cup.6 For the return leg in Dresden, which ended in a 0–0 draw, the club received ticket requests from socialist Czechoslovakia, including one from forty miners in northern Bohemia.7 The requests were turned down, since the match was already sold out. Behind the Iron Curtain, as in the western half of the continent, football’s cross-border appeal was unmistakable. New experiences sometimes came on overnight trips to iconic cities and stadiums in the West. On other occasions, they resulted from longer stays abroad. GDR football tours did not make headlines, or carry political weight, like the Basque tour of the Soviet Union (and elsewhere) in 1936, the tours of Hajduk Split (the team of Tito’s partisans during World War II), or the tours of the Algerian national team in support of the National Liberation Front (FLN) in the late 1950s and early 1960s.8 But they took place regularly throughout the country’s forty-year existence and involved everyone from die Auswahl (the national team) and elite Oberliga (first division) sides to humble amateur clubs. Tours encompassed large parts of the non-communist world, from Austria and West Germany to Sweden and Argentina, and many countries in postcolonial Africa. This chapter discusses football’s role as fraught, complex means of exchange between the GDR and the outside world. The East German leadership feared the contaminating influence of capitalist sport. But it wanted to improve the GDR’s standing in the global game and to spread the twin messages of socialist internationalism and anti-imperial solidarity. The dilemma between Weltoffenheit (cosmopolitanism) and Abgrenzung (separation) was central to the overlapping identities and sense of fragility that defined the East German football nation. The dilemma was played out publicly and sometimes very dramatically on and off the pitch. Examining select tours and tournaments in Africa and Europe, this chapter reassesses the GDR’s place in football’s global history. It shows how the game’s fluid international parameters influenced East German sport and East German society. It reveals how football served, albeit unevenly, as an expression of GDR soft power, especially in the non-European world.

Football and the Myth of a Closed Society Hidebound Cold War images of the East German state survived long after the Wende (peaceful revolution) of 1989–90. Chief among them was the idea of the GDR as a closed society, sealed off from the poisonous influence of the

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45

West after the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Football was part of this image. Christoph Dieckmann described the East German Oberliga as “the most conservative league in the world.”9 East German players could not play abroad. Overseas players were barred from elite domestic competition. Guinean striker Souleymane Chérif came to the GDR in 1962 to study structural mechanics and helped Sport Club (SC) Brandenburg to achieve promotion to the Oberliga two years later. Despite the GDR’s commitment to socialist development assistance, Chérif was not allowed to play in the GDR’s top league. After a short spell at Empor Neustrelitz, he returned home to a glittering career with Hafia FC in the Guinean capital Conakry and became the 1972 African Footballer of the Year.10 The Oberliga opened up in its final season (1990–91), when new arrivals included an American (Paul Caligiuri at Hansa Rostock), a Hungarian (Péter Distzl at Rot-Weiß Erfurt), and a black West German (Sachsen Leipzig coach Jimmy Hartwig). Before then, Wismut Aue’s Bernhard Konik—who was born in 1960 in Piekary Śląskie, Poland, and who became a GDR citizen in 1970—was about as foreign as the GDR’s premier division got.11 Insularity at home was paralleled by paranoia abroad. When East German teams traveled outside the country’s borders, they were accompanied by lengthy Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED; Socialist Unity Party of Germany) protocols and a retinue of Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security, or Stasi) officers. Surveillance also came from within. Eighteen of the seventy-two players who played for Dynamo Dresden between 1978 and 1989 were at the very least registered as Stasi informants.12 In midfielder Reinhard Häfner’s words, “You were under observation the whole day long, regardless of whether you were in the stadium or the disco.”13 Particularly on trips to the West, as one Dynamo Dresden supporter recalled, “Players were not free in the head.”14 Yet, as recent research has demonstrated, neither the GDR nor its football was as blinkered as legend would have it.15 Citizens wrote letters demanding the release from prison of black American activist Angela Davis and publicly mourned the deaths of revolutionary anticolonial leaders such as Patrice Lumumba and Ho Chi Minh.16 They encountered the world through West German television, Soviet space exploration, British music, Czechoslovakian tourists, workers and students from Algeria, Cuba, Mozambique, or Vietnam—and Hungarian football. Reflecting the brilliant reputation of Hungary’s golden squad, two of the GDR’s earliest national team coaches were Hungarians: János Gyarmati (1955–57) and Károly Soós (1961–67). Hungary’s long unbeaten run between 1950 and 1954, most notably its 6–3 win over England at London’s Wembley Stadium in November 1953, made it the role model for GDR football: “The nearest country where the best football is being played and where the best coaches are to be found.”17 The agenda for a meeting of the State Committee of Physical Culture in March 1954 included approaching the

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Hungarian FA (Football Association) about rehiring Gyarmati for the 1954– 55 season (he had worked in the GDR since 1953 and wanted his family to join him there) and plans to send a forty-strong East German delegation to Budapest to watch the return match between Hungary and England in May—a match that the Hungarians would win 7–1.18 To a greater degree than many other cultural activities, GDR football was embedded in international and transnational practices—in other words, practices that moved between nation-states and practices that transcended national borders. The East German FA—known initially as the Sektion Fußball (football section) and, from 1957, as the Deutscher Fußball-Verband der DDR (DFV)—joined the world governing body, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA; International Federation of Association Football), in 1952. Two years later, it was a founder member of the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA). East Germany hosted the 1969 and 1980 UEFA Youth Tournaments. It sought to share resources and expertise with developing football nations. Vietnam’s national team, for example, was invited to train in the GDR after Vietnam became a unified socialist republic in 1975.19 Coaches and players drew inspiration from, and exchanged ideas with, peers from around the world. The DFV expressed frustration when opportunities to compete with the world’s leading football nations were stymied. In 1964, for example, it noted the huge wages and bonuses given to players at Europe’s elite clubs such as Real Madrid, Inter Milan, and Benfica, and cast envious glances at the facilities at the North London club Arsenal, which included a state-ofthe-art treatment room and indoor pitches.20 Eleven years later, the football authorities repeated a request that GDR coaches should be allowed to study abroad, in Poland and the Soviet Union (predictably) and, more riskily, in capitalist football hotbeds, the Netherlands and England.21 Despite travel restrictions, spectators too were part of what Vladimir Nabokov called “the portable world” of football.22 They ranged from the ideologically hand-picked “tourists” at the 1974 World Cup in West Germany to the approximately five thousand GDR citizens who traveled across the Soviet bloc between 1979 and 1981 to watch West German teams such as Bayern Munich and Hertha Berlin play against socialist opposition.23 By the 1970s and 1980s, new generations of supporters, like their counterparts in Poland, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia, were Creolizing the terrace subcultures of England, West Germany, and (to a lesser extent) Italy. Anglophilia was expressed in everything from the names of supporters’ clubs to dress codes, hair styles, and music taste.24 Football kept the GDR in touch with the world beyond its borders. In the early years of UEFA competition, GDR clubs faced opponents from Austria, England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and Wales. In the same period, the national team played against West European and South American opposition. It toured North Africa (1960), West

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Africa (1962), and Southeast Asia (1963–64). Football contacts with the outside world were strictly monitored. One of the paradoxes of GDR socialism, like its counterparts in China and Cuba, was that it promoted and policed cross-border exchange. Visiting parties, and hosts, were meant to follow detailed protocols, especially in the Honecker era (1971–89), when the GDR’s surveillance state mushroomed in all areas, including sport. But external football connections existed, at all levels and in all periods. Sometimes they went according to plan. But sometimes they had unintended consequences.

Tourism and Cultural Exchange In modern sport, as in such areas as cinema, food, music, and science, national cultures were not static or homogenous. Rather, they were subject to outside (foreign) influences and connections that “encouraged constant and mutual adaptation.”25 Though historians have largely studied football within the confines of the nation-state, and as part of the story of emerging national cultures and identities, the transnational process of “intercultural transfer,” involving associations, clubs, players, referees, coaches, and supporters, is central to the story of the world game.26 The early years of GDR sport coincided with the postwar Europeanization of football, as symbolized by the founding of UEFA (1954); the introduction of UEFA’s three club competitions, the European Cup, the Fairs’ (later UEFA) Cup, and the Cup Winners’ Cup (1955–60); and the inaugural European Championship (1960). New organizations and competitions facilitated exchanges that, however mutually suspicious, transcended the Cold War divide. Football, like other sports such as cycling, built what the journalist Peter Berlin termed a “European familiarity” more inclusive than anything created by the nascent (and exclusively West European) European Economic Community (EEC).27 To borrow from the Polish poet Agnieszka Osiecka, sport behind the Iron Curtain was part of both “the prescribed Europe” and “the permitted Europe.”28 It was the Europe of friendly matches with fraternal socialist states such as Bulgaria and Poland (countries that the GDR played a combined thirty-seven times) and the Europe of glamorous stars and teams from England, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain. The 16 December 1969 issue of the GDR’s weekly football magazine, Die Neue Fußballwoche, included an in-depth profile of Hungarian club Ujpest Dozsa; an interview with Ernst Happel, the Austrian coach of Dutch champions, Feyenoord; a round-up of weekend action in West Germany’s Bundesliga; and a short report on solidarity with Vietnam fundraisers organized by East German clubs such as Stahl Helbra and Stahl Hettstedt.29 International consciousness was an essential feature of GDR football, just as it was integral to the GDR’s self-image and image(s) of the outside world.

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What happened when GDR football took socialism on the road? The ideal, from an SED perspective, was to enter a contaminated zone without picking up infections. The bland report on a trip to the West German city of Saarbrücken for an indoor tournament by veteran players of FC Magdeburg (FCM) in 1987 was just what the party ordered. All protocols were followed. The players behaved in a manner worthy of the socialist state. There were television and radio interviews with Jürgen Sparwasser and Joachim Streich, two stars of Magdeburg’s great team of the mid-1970s. At the tournament dinner, the FCM delegation sat at a separate table from their Western competitors. When conversation with outsiders became unavoidable, it was mostly about football, with brief bromides about maintaining peace and the forthcoming West German elections. There were no “provocative or discriminatory” comments about the GDR.30 This kind of killjoy atmosphere pervaded many visits to the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD or FRG; Federal Republic of Germany) in the 1980s. Sachsenring Zwickau’s 1987 trip to party leader Erich Honecker’s hometown of Neunkirchen was one such example. The Zwickau players received Puma sports bags from their hosts, Borussia Neunkirchen, but were not allowed to keep them. Zwickau tour managers turned down the chance to visit the local brewery that sponsored the Neunkirchen team (citing the need to prepare for a forthcoming Oberliga game) and cancelled a shopping trip in town, due to the high volume of Western reporters on the ground.31 On the GDR side, Abgrenzungshysterie (separation hysteria) was so deeply embedded that West German players—like the amateurs of TuS Dornberg, who were prevented from exchanging shirts with their GDR opponents, Turn- und Sportgemeinschaft (TSG) Wismar, in 1982—began to wonder whether East-West encounters had any purpose.32 Suspicion and cultural separation, though, was only part of the GDR’s football exchanges. Tours of fraternal states in Eastern Europe were less securitized than those of West Germany. East Berlin amateur team Rotation Prenzlauer Berg’s international encounters were confined to neighboring Poland. One strategy against a strong team from Warsaw in the 1980s was to level the playing field by getting drunk together the night before the game. The result was a narrow defeat rather than a blowout.33 What such exchanges meant for socialist internationalism warrants further exploration. It can certainly be said of GDR football, as of Soviet and Yugoslavian football, that local, national, and international influences coexisted, often quite happily. Who benefited from these tours? Measuring the impact of cultural exchange is difficult. On the GDR side, players who traveled to the Nichtsozialistisches Ausland (NSA; non-socialist abroad) were part of a gilded minority. They experienced things that few of their travel-starved fellow citizens experienced, albeit under the watchful eye of the Stasi. This might be a James Bond or Jaws

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film, or the chance to load up on champagne from the Crimea, as Dynamo Dresden players did after defeating Torpedo Moscow in the UEFA Cup in 1975.34 It might be exchanges with players from the West. Reinhard Häfner’s friendship with Ajax star Johan Neeskens was not without its eye-opening comparisons. While the Dutch midfielder owned a new red Porsche, his Dynamo Dresden counterpart earned 561 Ostmarks per month as a member of the People’s Police.35 Very few East Germans made it to Rio’s iconic Copacabana Beach. National team footballers such as Roland Ducke and Jürgen Noldner did during a trip to Brazil in the mid-1960s.36 An equally interesting, and less discussed, angle of the story is what opponents took from touring East German teams. Archives and player recollections rarely dwell on this subject. In playing terms, many would argue that the masters from the West had little to learn from the pupils of the East. GDR teams lost thirteen of sixteen encounters with West German teams in UEFA competitions. Yet GDR teams variously recorded wins over Juventus, Leeds, Inter Milan, Porto, and Barcelona. After the two great successes of GDR football’s annus mirabilis, 1974—FC Magdeburg’s shock 2–0 win over AC Milan in the European Cup Winners’ Cup final in May and East Germany’s equally unexpected 1–0 victory over West Germany at the World Cup a month later—East German football attracted international plaudits. Walter Winterbottom, former coach of the England team, for example, praised the “tactically outstanding” work of national team coach Georg Buschner and his players in the us against us match against West Germany in Hamburg on 22 June.37 One Dynamo Dresden supporter and club historian has claimed that Ajax, the model European football club of the 1970s, drew inspiration from Dynamo Dresden’s sophisticated scouting and coaching structures.38 Perhaps more plausibly, and certainly more consistently, the GDR was a role model for aspiring football nations from outside the game’s strongholds in Western Europe and South America. In December 1969 the GDR national team toured Iraq, playing three matches: a 1–1 draw with the Iraqi national team (the only official game), a 2–0 victory over an Iraqi army team, and an embarrassing 3–0 defeat to Iraq’s junior side. East German journalists grumbled about the poor performances, while noting marked improvements in Iraqi football under the tutelage of Russian national team coach, Yuri Illichev. They also spoke to eight Iraqi coaches who had recently spent eight months at the GDR’s national sports school, the Deutsche Hochschule für Körperkultur (DHfK; German University for Physical Culture) in Leipzig. One recalled attending the Oberliga matches of local side Chemie Leipzig and doing coaching units on shooting techniques and feints. Curiosity about GDR football was widespread, as the Iraqi FA sought to extend its ties to the DFV.39 Lower down the pyramid, not everyone felt as if they had as much to learn. When Mozambican workers at the Ernst Thälmann Vehicle and Hunting Weapons Factory

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(FAJAS) in Suhl started a football team in the early 1980s, factory officials appointed a team coach. None of the Mozambican players showed up for his training sessions.40

Diplomats in Football Boots? The GDR’s chief diplomats in tracksuits were the representatives of the hugely successful Olympic teams. These teams forged the GDR sports miracle, winning 519 medals at the summer and winter games between 1968 and 1988. Despite success at the Olympic Games (the national team were Olympic champions in Montreal in 1976 and won the bronze medal in Moscow four years later), football was not central to this story. But football exchanges with the outside world happened far more regularly than the quadrennial global showpiece. They did more than the Olympics to shape the GDR’s sporting and political image abroad. Socialist internationalism was a key element of the GDR’s self-image. So, from the 1960s onward, was anti-imperialist solidarity. The former referred to a complex range of formal and informal relations with other socialist states. The latter sought to promote economic, military, political, and cultural bonds with the developing or postcolonial world—and in the process to escape international isolation in the era of the Hallstein Doctrine (1955–70), when West Germany cut diplomatic ties with countries that recognized the GDR. In both cases, football built bridges. In September 1952 the GDR visited Poland for the country’s first official international match. The GDR linesman on duty during the 3–0 defeat in Warsaw apparently took his commitment to socialist internationalism too seriously, constantly raising his flag to the disadvantage of the visitors (he was told to stop doing this at halftime!) The team’s closely managed schedule included visits to a Polish first division match, a chocolate factory, the Warsaw Ghetto, and a Soviet war memorial. Even the cinema entertainment reinforced the notion of socialist fraternity. The players watched a film of the 1952 Friedensfahrt (Peace Race), the international cycling competition (founded in 1948) around the GDR, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.41 Africa and Asia were featured regularly on the GDR’s global football itinerary, in part because, under the terms of the Hallstein Doctrine, matches against Western opposition were hard to organize and in part because the SED regime stood in ideological solidarity with postcolonial regimes, many of whose leaders were interested in socialism. The GDR national team toured Nasser’s Egypt between December 1956 and January 1957, shortly after the Suez Crisis had made the country a Cold War flashpoint. An aggregate crowd of sixty-five thousand people, including high-ranking state officials, watched the visitors in six unbeaten friendly matches.42 The successful tour laid the foundations for a lasting if one-sided football relationship. Representing Germany, an East

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German team defeated Egypt 3–1 to claim the bronze medal in football at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. The GDR played Egypt five times between 1966 and 1990, winning all five games by a combined score of twenty-two goals to one. In parallel with the penultimate encounter, a 4–0 win for the visitors in Cairo in February 1989, defending Oberliga champions Dynamo Dresden also played four friendly matches in the Egyptian capital.43 The GDR’s sporting links to Ghana were less extensive, but the SED leadership regarded the West African country, like Guinea and Mali, as friendly and sympathetic to socialism. Ghana led the development of African football in the postcolonial era. A founding member of the Confederation of African Football (CAF) in 1957, it hosted and won the Africa Cup of Nations tournament in 1963. In February 1964, in front of thirty thousand fans at Accra’s Ohene Djan Stadium, Ghana inflicted a 3–0 defeat on the GDR. The visitors fielded a strong team that included Peter Ducke, Dieter Erler, Manfred Kaiser, and Klaus Urbanczyk, all of whom featured in the GDR’s all-time greatest side (as voted for by readers of Die Neue Fußballwoche in 1989). The party newspaper Neues Deutschland claimed hot weather as a mitigating circumstance (the match was played in temperatures of 45 degrees Celsius) but conceded that the Black Stars “fully deserved” their win.44 Die Neue Fußballwoche likewise drew attention to the heat. It also highlighted the GDR’s poor tactics and, less sportingly, disputed the match’s official (i.e., FIFA-recognized) status.45 Leading clubs traveled to Africa. Ahead of the 1981–82 season, for example, defending Oberliga champions Berliner FC Dynamo (BFC) took a sixteen-man squad on a preseason tour of Mozambique and Tanzania. In Mozambique, BFC were in such demand that an extra match had to be arranged. Forty thousand people watched its 5–0 win over national champions Simba in the Tanzanian capital Dar-es-Salaam. BFC played (and won) a total of five matches in Maputo, Dar-es-Salaam, and Zanzibar by a combined score of twenty-one to two. Perhaps damning with faint praise, coach Jürgen Bogs insisted that BFC played worthy opponents (“quick off the mark and springy . . . very talented technically”). For the BFC players, the football was probably less memorable than the off-field experiences, which included a tour of the elephants, lions, and giraffes in Mikumi National Park in Tanzania.46 Assessing the political impact of such tours—beyond parsing the usual rhetoric about socialist internationalism—remains difficult. Alongside official encounters with the global South, individual GDR citizens also made connections. Dieter Hebestreit, who worked as a translator on a railway reconstruction project in Mozambique in 1983, recalled football and volleyball games between East Germans and locals in the town of Dondo where the visitors lived. Each side “had its strengths and weaknesses.” The East Germans tended to win the football matches, which were played on a roller hockey field, but regularly lost at volleyball.47 Party member Ernst Henschel recalled in 1984 how he formed a football team during his time in Conakry,

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the capital of Guinea (one of the GDR’s key African allies), between 1967 and 1970. Later, while working at a textile factory in the Saxon town of Großenhain, Hentschel coached a team of visiting workers from Algeria.48 Little research has been done about the sporting activities of African and Asian visitors to the GDR, but such activities undoubtedly took place. Algerian workers in Bischofswerda formed factory teams that finished first and fourth, respectively, in a 1981 football tournament against teams featuring their East German coworkers.49 The GDR’s Schule der Freundschaft (SdF; School of Friendship)—an educational institution for almost nine hundred Mozambican students, which opened in Staßfurt in 1982—contained athletic facilities. Sports such as basketball, handball, and football were popular. Pupils competed in sports competitions in Staßfurt and beyond, building contacts with GDR citizens and thereby breaking free from the isolation and regimentation that often characterized school life.50 Football, at both the elite and the amateur levels, served to forge dialogues of socialist internationalism. It helped to manifest GDR soft power in and to the non-Western world. These dialogues had their limits. The Algerian football team at the vast Schwarze Pumpe factory near Spremberg was barred from official competitions.51 Teams of Algerian, Cuban, Mozambican, or Vietnamese workers could not compete any higher than the Bezirksliga (third tier) of the football pyramid, just as Souleymane Chérif was unable to play alongside his SC Brandenburg teammates in the Oberliga in 1964. Football internationalism clearly had a grass ceiling in the GDR, where socialist solidarity did not prevent incidents of racism on public transport, in bars, and on the street. Despite the parochialism, football broadened horizons on both sides. Chérif, known as the Pelé of Neubrandenburg, became a cult hero for his twelve goals in SC Brandenburg’s promotion season. A photograph shows him being joyfully thrown into the air on the day that promotion was clinched. “It was fantastic,” Chérif recollected in 2019, “as if the people in Neubrandenburg had at that moment adopted me.”52 African ties to Germany outlived the East German state that had made them possible. When the sociologist Tanja Müller watched the 2008 European Football Championship with former SdF students in Mozambique, a “large majority” of them supported the German national team, a team whose star player, Michael Ballack, grew up in Görlitz and played as a junior for nearby FC Karl-Marx-Stadt.53

Contested Fields From the SED’s perspective, any football match abroad, and certainly any encounter with teams from the NSA, posed a security risk. Little could be done to guard against Republikflucht (flight from the Republic) in the pre–Berlin

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Wall era. The open border in Berlin allowed easy traffic to the West—witness, for example, the 1959 defection of two players from champions Vorwärts Berlin, Horst Assmy and Rolf Fritzsche.54 Once that border had been closed in August 1961, the regular East-West movement of players was halted. Between 1961 and 1989 approximately twenty footballers, plus coach Jörg Berger, illegally left the GDR for the West. Many departed in the autumn of 1989. The numbers were small, but the political embarrassment was not. This made visits to the West, whether for tournaments or individual games, fraught and heavily policed affairs, especially in the 1970s and 1980s. As the Stasi became the largest per capita secret police organization in the world, the GDR honed the world’s most strictly monitored sports system. Aktion Vorstoß (Operation Advance), the Stasi operation for Dynamo Dresden’s 1973 clash with Bayern Munich in the European Cup, covered everything from the screening of “tourists” for the trip to Munich on 24 October to match-day security for the return leg in Dresden on 7 November. More than three thousand Stasi officers were on duty in and around Dresden’s Rudolf Harbig Stadium. Others policed the hotel where four hundred locals excitedly awaited Bayern’s arrival.55 Such paranoia was ubiquitous, but not always warranted. The false alarm surrounding national team goalkeeper René Müller’s alleged plans to flee the GDR during a tour of Sweden in 1984 was one such embarrassing misjudgment.56 For the small number determined to quit the GDR for good, trips outside the Soviet bloc offered the best, and usually the only, means of escape. Points of departure varied. In the case of Under-21 coach Jörg Berger, it happened in 1979 during an international youth tournament in Subotica in Yugoslavia—a socialist republic, but not a member of the Warsaw Pact. Berger left his hotel room in the middle of the night and took a train to Belgrade, from where he claimed asylum in the West. Berger had been banned from travel to the NSA in 1976 (his then-wife had an aunt in West Germany) and only regained his Reisekader (travel cadre) privileges in 1978. The two most powerful men in GDR sport, Rudi Hellmann, head of the SED Central Committee’s sports department; and Deutscher Turn-und Sportbund (DTSB; German Gymnastics and Sports Federation) boss Manfred Ewald, were furious with the DFV’s “frivolous” treatment of Berger’s disappearance. Their mood was not helped by the fact that Under-21 players Norbert Nachtweih and Jürgen Pahl, who defected during a trip to the Turkish city of Bursa in November 1976, had played for Hallescher FC Chemie when Berger was a junior coach there. No direct contacts between Berger and the two earlier “traitors” were proven.57 There was not much to do in such cases but offer the usual hand-wringing responses: calls for tighter security and better “political-ideological education.” The most damaging defections occurred on West German soil. We saw earlier the uneventful report on FC Magdeburg veterans’ trip to Saarbrücken

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in 1987. A year later, things were different: in a department store in the city center, Jürgen Sparwasser—scorer of East Germany’s most famous goal, the 1974 winner against West Germany in Hamburg—lost sight of his minders and committed Republikflucht, joining his wife Christa who was already in the FRG. A damage limitation exercise began immediately. The FCM team competed as planned in the tournament. Delegation leaders answered media questions about Sparwasser’s “staying behind.” Sparwasser’s note to his teammates asked for forgiveness: “It is difficult for us to separate from you, but there was no other possibility.”58 Fissures in the system of sporting surveillance were few in number, but large in impact. This was most infamously the case with Lutz Eigendorf ’s defection in 1979. The BFC star disappeared at a rest stop in Gießen on the way back from a game in Kaiserslautern. Four years later, he was killed in a car accident. Though it was never proven, some suspected foul play: Stasi revenge for betrayal of the socialist fatherland.59 Eigendorf and Sparwasser, it should be emphasized, were outliers. Most players made their peace with constrained travel freedoms. They respected the socialist rules of engagement and always came home. The ill-starred careers of most ex-Oberliga players in West Germany suggest that, at least in playing terms, they might have been right. On the contested fields of East-West sporting relations, cracks in the socialist façade were usually less gaping, and less permanent, than the sensational defection of star players. But smaller transgressions were, arguably, more important in showing how GDR football persistently refused to dance to the SED’s tune. Because of the numbers involved—and the range of direct and indirect contacts with the class enemy—the policing of fans was more difficult than the policing of elite players. The Stasi did its best. Officers were present in Warsaw when Poland played West Germany in 1971. They reported—perhaps with unerring accuracy, perhaps with wild guesswork—that 204 of 1,303 East Germans in attendance cheered the visitors. Banners posted around the ground included “Leipzig greets Kaiser Franz and Co” (a reference to West Germany’s captain, the Bayern Munich star Franz Beckenbauer) and “Guben greets the German eleven.”60 Seventeen years later, two hundred GDR citizens traveled to Budapest to watch West Germany play Hungary. They took photographs with West German players outside the team hotel. West German officials gave them signed posters and match tickets. Banners displayed at the stadium included “Cottbus greets the 1988 European champions” (inaccurate, as it turned out) and “Weimar welcomes Beckenbauer” (Beckenbauer was now the West German team coach). The Stasi confiscated a German flag bearing the insignia of the DFV’s rival football association, West Germany’s Deutscher Fußball-Bund (DFB; German Football Association).61 On fan trips to Hungary or Poland, the secret police were never far away. Back home, the organization kept tabs on the Fanfreundschaft (fan friendship)

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that developed in the 1970s and 1980s between West Berlin’s Bundesliga club, Hertha BSC, and the underdog club from the east, Union Berlin. Stasi officers were out in force in Dresden in 1978, when Dynamo Dresden hosted Hertha. Around 120 Union supporters attended the game, many of whom brought Hertha shirts, flags, and badges. Five Union fans watched with Hertha fans from West Berlin, the kind of informal cross-border exchange that made the communist authorities very nervous. The report of the Dresden Stasi on the game, at which twelve youths were arrested, concluded that Union Berlin was a gathering point for oppositional (i.e., antisocialist) forces.62 Despite attempts to disrupt ties between East and West Berlin, the fan friendship survived into the 1980s. Hertha fans crossed into East Berlin to watch Union games at the ramshackle An der Alten Försterei stadium in Köpenick. Denied reciprocal travel, Union fans joined illegal Hertha fan clubs. In the mid-1980s a pub landlord in East Berlin was jailed for two years for secretly hosting a Christmas party for Hertha and Union fans.63 Fan contacts with the West were not always direct or obviously subversive. In 1972, BFC played Liverpool FC in the UEFA Cup. Ahead of the return leg at Anfield, Liverpool’s secretary reported in the match program that the club had been “inundated with letters from . . . East Berlin asking for photographs and autographs—requests have been arriving with every mail.”64 A few months later, the club and a local travel agency organized an airlift of seventy supporters to the GDR for Liverpool’s next UEFA Cup tie against another East German side, Dynamo Dresden. Travelers on the two-day trip were informed that “quite a lot of night life is springing up in East Germany.”65 East Germans could not travel to Liverpool to experience an Anfield European night (or indeed to watch Jaws), but they could still make connections across the Cold War divide. For one young Wismut Aue fan, Steffen Köhler, the encounters of the 1970s—Dynamo Dresden played Liverpool three times, twice in the UEFA Cup (1972–73 and 1975–76) and once in the European Cup (1977–78)— helped to form the basis for lifelong support of the Reds. Meetings with West European sides helped to ensure that cosmopolitanism invariably defeated, or at least found ways around, separation in GDR fan culture. When the Zentralinstitut für Jugendforschung (ZIJ; Central Institute for Youth Research) conducted a survey of young football supporters in 1987, the international results were striking. Among even the most ideologically loyal youth, favorite national teams came from the West (Brazil, Denmark, and West Germany) rather than from the Soviet bloc. Clubs from capitalist countries—Bayern Munich led the way—were likewise more popular than clubs from socialist countries. Only Dynamo Kiev warranted a mention. Such findings, the ZIJ concluded, reflected football’s role as a Ventil (outlet) for dissatisfied sections of the GDR’s youth population. They also reflected the poor performances of the GDR national team and the “frequency and attractiveness”

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with which teams such as Bayern appeared on the “electronic stadium.”66 In East Germany in the 1980s, television was the easiest ticket to a match in the “golden West.”

Conclusion In a sport as transnational as football, where borders have been crossed for more than 150 years, no national story can be told without international context. This was true even for the supposedly inward-looking GDR. In Germany’s first socialist state, there was an unresolved tension between inclusiveness and isolation. Football was a vital form of cultural exchange, one that took somewhat different forms with socialist allies (where the playing field was relatively level and political capital could be made) and with Western nations, where SED claims about the superiority of socialism fell on stonier ground, both on and off the field. The sport’s popularity granted it greater latitude from socialist norms than many other sports or cultural activities. Football allowed for transnational comparisons, often—as players, coaches, fans, and administrators openly and frequently remarked—to the detriment of the GDR. As one disgruntled Lokomotive Leipzig supporter told the DFV in 1986, “I too see how football can look at Bayern Munich.”67 Football facilitated dialogues and memorable experiences, from Ajax’s “total football” to an Anfield European night. It provided travel freedoms that few GDR citizens enjoyed. Even for those stuck at home, extensive media coverage, as well as occasional visits from NSA teams, ensured that East German football retained an international outlook. The 30 November 1976 issue of Die Neue Fußballwoche featured transcontinental coverage of qualification matches for the 1978 World Cup, a report on Torpedo Moscow’s strong start to the Soviet league season, a story about Halmstads BK’s rise from near-relegation to the Swedish league title, and a short feature on Malta’s player of the year, John Holland.68 The internationalism of the GDR football nation was, of course, circumscribed. Football tourism was not the enjoyable jaunt featured in the sporting tour narratives of British and Irish players in the early twentieth century.69 Touring East German-style was, to borrow from Bob Edelman, “serious fun.”70 Footballers were meant to represent the GDR abroad, to carry messages of socialist internationalism and anti-imperial solidarity to allies around the globe. Most importantly, they were meant to represent the GDR against the class enemy in the capitalist West. In football, as in many areas of GDR life, the gap between state wishes and societal reality was significant. Most players toed the party line on trips abroad. GDR teams, contrary to popular myth, often performed quite well. At the same time, the specter of defection and the stifling presence of the Stasi overshadowed every visit to the West. By the 1970s and

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1980s, travel-starved football supporters began to venture abroad, albeit only to socialist countries, further muddying the waters of sporting Abgrenzung. An atmosphere of fear and suspicion, however vague or unspoken, hung over the GDR football nation. This atmosphere made West European football attractive to many citizens and could undermine players and teams alike. As players, fans, and administrators recognized, there was a fragile sense of self-identity at the heart of East German football. Never fully open to global influences, it rarely rose above respectable mediocrity.

Author Alan McDougall is professor of history, University of Guelph (Canada). Dr. McDougall is the author of The People’s Game: Football, State and Society in East Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Contested Fields: A Global History of Modern Football (University of Toronto Press, 2020).

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

“Toshack terrifies Dresden,” 30. Quoted in Gröschner, Sieben Tränen, 89. Hesse-Lichtenberger, Tor!, 231. Sportland DDR was the title of Dieter Rauge’s 1979 DEFA documentary film about mass sport activity among East German citizens. Genschmar, Mit Dynamo, 11. McDougall, The People’s Game, 115, 121. Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR im Bundesarchiv (SAPMO-BArch), DO 101/079, UEFA-Cup—1971: SG Dyn. Dresden. Ajax Amsterdam, n.d. See, respectively, Edelman, Spartak Moscow, 104–13; Mills, The Politics of Football, 52–67; Dubois, Soccer Empire, 194–97. Quoted in McDougall, The People’s Game, 332. Chérif ’s GDR career is outlined (under the misspelled entry Cheref ) in Leske, Enzyklopädie, 98. SAPMO-BArch, DR 509/2281, Büro der Förderung des Sports in den Betrieben: Bernhard Konik. Pleil, Mielke, Macht und Meisterschaft, 280. Quoted in Pleil, Mielke, Macht und Meisterschaft, 28. Genschmar, Interview by the author, Dresden, 18 May 2011. On football, see, e.g., McDougall, “East Germany,” 550–66. See the collection of essays in Slobodian, Comrades of Color. SAPMO-BArch, DY 12/281, 1. Trainerausbildung mit Hilfe der Sowjetunion und Ungarn, 1 August 1950, fo. 36. SAPMO-BArch, DR 5/97, Protokoll der 9. Sitzung des Sekretariats des Staatlichen Komitees für Körperkultur und Sport am 5, March 1954.

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19. Schaefer, “Socialist Modernization,” 101. 20. Archivgut des Deutschen Fußballverbandes der DDR (DFV), I/1, Analyse über

den Stand der leistungsbestimmenden Faktoren im Fußball, 19 August 1964.

21. SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV 2/2.036/25, Beschluß über Maßnahmen zur weite22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

ren Leistungsentwicklung im Fußballsport der DDR, n.d, fo. 17–25. Nabokov, Pnin, 99. McDougall, The People’s Game, 177. On fan culture in the Honecker era, see ibid., chap. 8. Taylor, “Football’s Engineers?,”140–41. On football and transnational history, see, e.g., Adam, Approaches to the Study of Intercultural Transfer, chap. 4; Taylor, “Sport, Transnationalism,” 199–208. Quoted in Holt, Tomlinson, and Young, Sport and the Transformation, 1–2. Quoted in Babiracki and Jersild, Socialist Internationalism in the Cold War, 5. “Rhythmus bleibt erhalten,” 7; “Lajos Baroti schuf ein perfektes Ensemble!” 8–9; “Mönchengladbachs Erfolgsserie hält an,” 15; “Solidarität mit Vietnam,” 16. SAPMO-BArch, DY 12/2500, Gesamtbericht über die Reise der Alt-Repräsentativ-Mannschaft des 1. FCM nach Saarbrücken, 6 January 1987. SAPMO-BArch, DY 12/2500, Anlage zum Kurzbericht—internat. Fußballvergleich in der BRD, 3 September 1987. Braun and Wiese, “DDR-Fußball,” 204. McDougall, The People’s Game, 252. Genschmar, Mit Dynamo durch Europa, 79. Ibid., 51. See the undated photograph in Horn and Weise, Das große Lexikon, 60. “Buschners Taktik paßte wie ein Maßanzug,” 4–5. Genschmar, interview by the author, Dresden, 18 May 2011. Schlegel, “Wißbegieriger Gastgeber!,” 5. Mac Con Uladh, “Guests of the Socialist Nation,” 110. SAPMO-BArch, DR 5/19, Bericht über die Delegation zum Fußball-Länderspiel Volkspolen-DDR am 21.9.1952 in Warschau. SAPMO-BArch, DR 5/207, Bericht zum Stand der Vorbereitung der Auswahlmannschaft der DDR auf die Qualifikationsspiele zur Weltmeisterschaft, 27 March 1957. “In Kairo nur ein Tor zugelassen,” 5. “45 Grad Hitze in Accra,” 6. “Es gelang uns nur unzureichend,” 8–9. “Eine Zugabe des BFC auf der Afrika-Reise,” 7. Hebestreit, “Als DDR-Student in Mosambik,” 228. SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/4982, Petition from Ernst Hentschel to Rudi Hellmann, 27 July 1984. Mac Con Uladh, “Guests of the Socialist Nation,” 110. Kruse, “Die ‘Schule der Freundschaft,’ ” 210. Mac Con Uladh, “Guests of the Socialist Nation,” 209. Bellinger, “Souleymane Chérif.” Müller, Legacies of Socialist Solidarity, 138. Leske, Erich Mielke, 264–68. McDougall, The People’s Game, 116–18. See ibid., 140–42.

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57. SAPMO-BArch, DY 30/IV B 2/18/5, Information über die Republikflucht des 58. 59. 60. 61.

62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

ehemaligen Verbandstrainer Berger, 4 April 1979; letter from Rudi Hellmann to Paul Verner, 30 March 1979. Quoted in McDougall, The People’s Game, 88. On the murder theory, see Schwan, “Tod dem Verräter!” Blees, 90 Minuten Klassenkampf, 38–39. Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (BStU), MfS ZOS/1342, Information über politisch-operative Sicherungsmaßnahmen und deren Ergebnisse im Zusammenhang mit dem Fußball-Länderspiel UVR-BRD am 18. November 1987 in Budapest, n.d., fo. 1–2. BStU, MfS HA XX/AKG/6684, Gesellschaftswidriges Verhalten vorwiegend dem Anhang des 1. FC Union Berlin angehörender negativ-dekadenter Jugendlicher im Zusammenhang mit dem Fußballspiel der SG Dynamo Dresden gegen Hertha BSC Westberlin am 26.4.1978, n.d, fo. 73–74. McDougall, The People’s Game, 176. “In a Word, You’re Just Fan-Tastic!,” 2. “Anfield Fans Get Set for Trip,” 11. SAPMO-BArch, DC 4/721, Neuere Ergebnisse zum Verhältnis Jugendlicher zum Fußball (Fanverhalten)—Expertise des ZIJ zur Untersuchung “Sport ‘87.” Quoted in McDougall, The People’s Game, 233. “19 Monate vor dem XI. WM,” 6; “Der dritte gute Herbst für Torpedo,” 13; “Im Vorjahr fast Absteiger, diesmal nun Landesmeister,” 13; “Malta kürte John Holland,” 16. See, e.g., Huggins, “Sport, Tourism and History,” 107–30. Edelman, Serious Fun.

Bibliography “45 Grad Hitze in Accra” [45 degrees heat in Accra], Neues Deutschland, February 25, 1964: 6. “19 Monate vor dem XI. WM” [19 months until the 11th World Cup], Die Neue Fußballwoche 48, November 30, 1976: 6. Adam, Thomas. Approaches to the Study of Intercultural Transfer. London: Anthem, 2020. “Anfield Fans Get Set for Trip to Dresden.” Anfield Review, February 24, 1973, 11. Babiracki, Patryk, and Austin Jersild, eds. Socialist Internationalism in the Cold War: Exploring the Second World. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016. Bellinger, Andreas, “Souleymane Chérif: Der Pelé aus Neubrandenburg” [Souleymane Chérif: The Pelé from New Brandenburg], NDR.de. Retrieved 26 April 2021, https://www.ndr.de/sport/fussball/Souleymane-Cherif-Der-Pele-aus-Neubrandenburg-,cherif100.html Blees, Thomas. 90 Minuten Klassenkampf: Das Länderspiel BRD-DDR 1974 [90 minutes of class battle: The national game FRG-GDR 1974]. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1999. Braun, Jutta, and René Wiese. “DDR-Fußball und gesamtdeutsche Identität im Kalten Krieg” [GDR-football and United German identity in the Cold War”]. Historische Sozialforschung [Historical social research] 30, no. 4 (2005), 191–210.

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“Buschners Taktik paßte wie ein Maßanzug” [Buschner’s tactics fit like a tailored suit], Die Neue Fußballwoche 12, June 25, 1974: 4-5. “Der dritte gute Herbst für Torpedo” [The third good autumn for Torpedo], Die Neue Fußballwoche 48, November 30, 1976: 13. Dubois, Laurent, Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Edelman, Robert. Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sports in the USSR. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. ———. Spartak Moscow: A History of the People’s Team in the Workers’ State. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. “Es gelang uns nur unzureichend,” [We didn’t succeed very well], Die Neue Fußballwoche 9, March 3, 1964: 8–9. “Eine Zugabe des BFC auf der Afrika-Reise,” [An encore from BFC on the Africa trip], Die Neue Fußballwoche 32, August 11, 1981: 7. Genschmar, Jens. Mit Dynamo durch Europa: Die Europapokalspiele der SG Dynamo Dresden 1967–1991 [With Dynamo through Europe: The European tournament games of SG Dynamo Dresden 1967–1991]. Dresden: DDV Sächsische Schweiz Osterzgebirge GmbH, 2011. Gröschner, Annett. Sieben Tränen muß ein Clubfan weinen: 1. FC Magdeburg—eine Fußballegende [A club fan must cry seven tears: 1. FC Magdeburg—A football legend]. Leipzig: Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1999. Hebestreit, Dieter. “Als DDR-Student in Mosambik” [As a GDR student in Mozambique]. In Engagiert für Afrika: Die DDR und Afrika II [Committed to Africa: The GDR and Africa II], edited by Ulrich van der Heyden, Ilona Schleicher, and Hans-Georg Schleicher, 226–29. Münster: Lit, 1994. Hesse-Lichtenberger, Ulrich. Tor! The Story of German Football. London: Gardners, 2003. Holt, Richard, Alan Tomlinson, and Christopher Young, eds. Sport and the Transformation of Modern Europe: States, Media and Markets, 1950–2010. New York: Routledge, 2011. Horn, Michael, and Gottfried Weise. Das große Lexikon des DDR-Fußballs [The lexicon of GDR football]. Berlin: Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, 2004. Huggins, Mike. “Sport, Tourism and History: Current Historiography and Future Prospects.” Journal of Tourism History 5, no. 2 (2013): 107–30. “Im Vorjahr fast Absteiger, diesmal nun Landesmeister” [Last year nearly relegated, this time now champions], Die Neue Fußballwoche 48, November 30, 1976: 13. “In a Word, You’re Just Fan-Tastic!” Anfield Review, 13 December 1972, 2. “In Kairo nur ein Tor zugelassen” [Only one goal conceded in Cairo], Die Neue Fußballwoche 7, February 14, 1989: 5. Kruse, Uta. “Die ‘Schule der Freundschaft’ in Staßfurt” [The “School of Friendship” in Staßfurt]. In Engagiert für Afrika: Die DDR und Afrika II [Committed to Africa: the GDR and Africa II], edited by Ulrich van der Heyden, Ilona Schleicher, and Hans-Georg Schleicher, 196–214. Münster: Lit, 1994. “Lajos Baroti schuf ein perfektes Ensemble!” [Lajos Boroti created a perfect ensemble!] Die Neue Fußballwoche 50, December 16, 1969: 8–9. Leske, Hanns. Enzyklopädie des DDR-Fußballs [Encyclopedia of GDR football]. Göttingen: Verlag die Werkstatt, 2007. ———. Erich Mielke, die Stasi und das runde Leder: Der Einfluß der SED und des Ministeriums für Staatssicherheit auf dem Fußballsport in der DDR [Erich Mielke, the Stasi and

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the round leather: The influence of the SED and the ministry of state security on the world of football in the GDR]. Göttingen: Verlag die Werkstatt, 2004. Mac Con Uladh, Damian. “Guests of the socialist nation? Foreign students and workers in the GDR, 1949-1990,” Ph.D. thesis, University College London, 2005. McDougall, Alan. “East Germany and the Europeanisation of Football.” Sport in History 35, no. 4 (2015): 550–66. ———. The People’s Game: Football, State and Society in East Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. “Malta kürte John Holland” [Malta chooses John Holland], Die Neue Fußballwoche 48, November 30, 1976: 16. Mills, Richard. The Politics of Football in Yugoslavia: Sport, Nationalism and the State. London: I.B. Tauris, 2018. “Mönchengladbachs Erfolgsserie hält an” [Mönchengladbach’s winning streak ends], Die Neue Fußballwoche 50, December 16, 1969: 15. Müller, Tanja R. Legacies of Socialist Solidarity: East Germany in Mozambique. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014. Nabokov, Vladimir. Pnin. New York: Vintage, 1989. Pleil, Ingolf. Mielke, Macht und Meisterschaft: Die “Bearbeitung” der Sportgemeinschaft Dynamo Dresden durch das MfS 1978–1989 [Mielke, power and championship: The “development” of the sport club Dynamo Dresden through the MfS 1978–1989]. Berlin: Links, 2001. “Rhythmus bleibt erhalten” [Rhythm is maintained], Die Neue Fußballwoche 50, December 16, 1969: 7. Schlegel, Klaus. “Wißbegieriger Gastgeber!” [Inquisitive hosts], Die Neue Fußballwoche 50, December 16, 1969: 5. Schwan, Heribert. “Tod dem Verräter!” Der lange Arm der Stasi und der Fall Lutz Eigendorf [“Kill the traitor!” The long arm of the Stasi and the case of Lutz Eigendorf ]. Munich: Droemer Knaur, 2000. Schaefer, Bernd. “Socialist Modernization in Vietnam: The East German Approach, 1976– 1989.” In Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World, edited by Quinn Slobodian, 95–113. New York: Berghahn, 2015. Slobodian, Quinn, ed. Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World. New York: Berghahn, 2015. “Solidarität mit Vietnam” [Solidarity with Vietnam], Die Neue Fußballwoche 50, December 16, 1969: 16. Taylor, Matthew. “Football’s Engineers? British Football Coaches, Migration and Intercultural Transfer, c. 1910–1950s.” Sport in History 30, no. 1 (2010): 138–63. ———. “Sport, Transnationalism, and Global History.” Journal of Global History 8, no. 2 (2013): 199–208. “Toshack Terrifies Dresden.” Daily Mirror, October 20, 1977: 30.

CHAPTER 3



Local Fans, Global Players

Contradictions in Postindustrial Football STEPHAN SCHINDLER

Introduction

D

uring the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the game of football, or soccer, has dramatically increased its global appeal. Its international association, Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA; International Federation of Association Football), boasts more members than the United Nations (UN), with 211 and 193 members, respectively;1 all national football federations as well as all regional football clubs observe its regulations (the rules of the game); and FIFA’s tournaments have become a billion-dollar entertainment industry. During international football events, such as the FIFA World Cup or the championship of the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), the so-called Euro, watching football becomes a transnational cultural activity that connects millions of people around the globe simultaneously. The European club competitions (Champions League and Europa League) are distributed via live TV and streaming media channels worldwide, as are the individual national club leagues of the Big Five (England, Spain, Germany, Italy, France). In Germany, for example, streaming and TV providers broadcast, in addition to the Bundesliga, games from the Premier League (England), La Liga (Spain), Serie A (Italy), and Ligue 1 (France). In tandem with the globalization of politics, economics, and culture in general, “soccer follows globalization trends,” which have led to a kind of “McDonaldization—or universal standardization—of soccer,”2 such as uniformity of style of play, brand sponsorship of football mega events, the FIFA video game franchise, global dissemination of local fan behavior (e.g., Liverpool’s chant “You never walk alone” or the Icelandic choral gestures), or the staffing of local club teams with foreign players. While football is probably the most global of sports, its origin and cultural practices are bound to the region and locales, such as hometown, community,

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and neighborhood. In the local, the interpretations and practices of the global sport, the so-called glocalization3 of football, reveal certain paradoxes emerging in the postindustrial era of the sport, most apparent in the antagonism between local fans and global players. In what follows, I analyze the construction of local identity through the fans’ and the clubs’ self-presentation and how this reveals the difficulties that global players might encounter vis-à-vis a particular culture that can seem alien to anyone but the locals. Despite the global marketing strategies of individual clubs, the cultural production of the club’s identity is grounded in regional dialects, local histories, and traditional customs and is aligned with the identity of the fan who may be bound to the confines of the local geography and its parochialism. The player, on the other hand, enjoys a kind of cosmopolitan freedom and mobility enhanced by income and wealth. Although somewhat restricted by contractual obligations, players can move from team to team, city to city, country to country, continent to continent, and can develop changing identities that might even include national belonging. The brothers Boateng are a good example of this mobility: although both were born in Germany and grew up there, Jérôme chose to play for the German national team and Kevin-Prince for Ghana.4 This contrast between being bound by local restrictions and enjoying global freedoms manifests not only the contradictions inherent in the sport, but also those of today’s Western societies struggling to defend individual local, regional, or national identities against the onslaught of global homogeneity, interdependencies, and transformations. Each football season sees local fans and global players engage anew in re-defining these identities, negotiating their particular place in the national and international football landscape, and participating in the global dissemination of re-generated identities via social media.

Local Fans and Global Players Since the Bundesliga was established in 1963 as Germany’s top football division, the sport has, arguably, become the nation’s most important cultural enterprise in the twenty-first century. Over the past fifty-five years, the Bundesliga has more than doubled its audience numbers from 6  million in the 1963–64 season to more than 13  million in 2018–19, while the Deutscher Fußball-Bund (DFB; German Football Association), with its 7 million members, has become one of the largest football organizations in the world.5 One reason for this impressive growth is, of course, the sport’s commercialization and hyper-capitalization that differs significantly from the social-market system of professional sport in the United States. Compared to the American model of capital restraint, with the existence of salary caps, revenue sharing, and the draft system, the European football market is driven by the free cir-

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culation of capital and agents (i.e., players and coaching staff ), which has led to astronomical salaries and transfer fees, the corporatization of the local club (e.g., Borussia Dortmund is a GmbH & Co KGaA, a type of corporation, and the BVB-Aktie [BVB:GR] is traded on the stock exchange),6 and the increased attention on fans as consumers and customers (ticket and jersey sales, pay TV, paraphernalia). A simple equation seems to drive this boundless market: the more you invest the higher your return. Buying the best players might translate to higher league and international rankings, which means more financial returns from television and advertising markets.7 Despite the UEFA’s financial fair play rules, wealthy clubs are rarely investigated and almost never penalized for not adhering to these regulations.8 This opulent football market has attracted players from around the world since the Bosman ruling in 1995 introduced the concept of free agency into European professional football.9 Local fans, however, have tried to offset this commercialization by emphasizing standing football traditions. In Germany, for example, fans insist on members owning the majority rights in a club (the so-called 50+1 rule),10 they successfully protested against Bundesliga games being scheduled for commercial reasons on Mondays,11 and object to the traditional stadium name being replaced by a sponsor. In the city of Bremen, for example, the fans want to keep the traditional name Weserstadion, which highlights the regional topography of the location, with the stadium being next to the river Weser.12 The majority of German fans rebuke teams that are not rooted in regional traditions and are creations of capital investments. In reference to one of the most prestigious football derbies in the world, the El Clásico between Real Madrid and FC Barcelona (Barcelona Football Club), German fans have disparagingly nicknamed the matches between RasenBallsport Leipzig (RB Leipzig) and TSG (gymnastics and sports community) Hoffenheim El Plastico, to articulate their disgust with the entrepreneurial shaping of German football.13 In a recent rare showing of solidarity, global players and local fans stood up to the next level in the commercialization of club football: in April 2021 they objected to the plan of the owners of Europe’s top club teams to create a Super League following the American National Football League (NFL) model without relegation and promotion.14 Surprised by the vigor of fan protests, and likely worried about the image of their clubs’ brand, the owners discarded their plans. Recently, players for the national teams in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway staged protests against the human rights abuses in Qatar, host of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, while the fans in these countries went one step farther and demanded a boycott of the entire tournament.15 Club football fandom in Germany has undergone significant changes over the past fifty years. These changes are recognizable in the names the fans have given themselves. I concentrate on club football fans here because fans of the national team are quite different in terms of identity, forms of celebration, and

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organization. While the postwar term Schlachtenbummler (away supporter who goes to battle) points to an era when football was linguistically associated with warfare (as evident in the terms Angriff [attack], Verteidigung [defense], and the labeling of Gerd Müller as Bomber der Nation [bomber of the nation), the terms Kuttenfans (fans organized in fan clubs and wearing the team’s logo on their jean jackets) and hooligans (fans who are willing to engage in violent actions) marked the influence of Anglo-American pop culture on German football in the 1970s and 1980s.16 Furthermore, since the mid-1990s German football fans have embraced the model of the Italian ultra movement, the organization of fans in specific groups defined by regional, political, or cultural identifications. The majority of German Ultras want to preserve football traditions in opposition to the sport’s radical commercialization that started in the late 1980.17 During football matches, these fans express their solidarity with or their criticism of the team, the club’s management, or the league through the display of diverse performances. On the one hand, to show their support, the fans wear their teams’ colors (e.g., jerseys, caps, scarves), wave their teams’ flags, sing chants for ninety minutes, or display giant banners that often celebrate historical moments of success or former club heroes. On the other hand, to express their displeasure the fans illegally engage in pyrotechnics, rebel against decisions of the club’s leadership, or mock the league’s rules and regulations.18 The fans’ theatrical performances also serve their own communities, confirming community bonds and identification, celebrating distinctive features of the local, or reassuring the unique difference from the Other (i.e., the opposing team or derby rival). Some fans even engage in left-wing sociopolitical projects, most prominently the 350 autonomous fan clubs from FC St. Pauli who have engaged in community matters and projects with participatory democratic actions.19 Organizing national political fan clubs such as the Bündnis antifaschistischer Fußballfans (BAFF; Association of Antifascist Football Fans), the fans from FC St. Pauli have become an icon in the politicizing fan club activities.20 While fan clubs of FC St. Pauli compete to advance a leftist agenda, other fan clubs, such as the followers of some clubs located in the former East Germany, have embraced neo-Nazi ideologies and display right-wing sentiments in the stadium.21 Football fans in Germany develop these types of identities through differentiation, deviant behavior, and violence against rivals.22 Today’s fans are organized in fan clubs that often collaborate with the football club through a fan umbrella organization. The largest German football club, FC Bayern Munich (291,000 members) has 4,433 fan clubs with a total of 350,920 members,23 which includes 140 fan clubs in Canada and the United States.24 Whereas many prestigious clubs (e.g., Bayern and Dortmund) engage in global markets (with activities such as playing exhibition games abroad, supporting fan clubs in different countries, setting up marketing offices abroad, creating an online presence in club homepages and social media outlets in dif-

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ferent languages, or participating in TV series productions such as Amazon’s Inside Borussia Dortmund), most fans ultimately celebrate the uniqueness of the local: the neighborhood of the club’s origin, the region’s language (dialect), and the area-specific customs and culture. Being grounded in the local can be reflected in the team’s name that represents a district or neighborhood rather than a city; examples are FC St. Pauli, a quarter in Hamburg; Schalke 04, a district in Gelsenkirchen; KFC Uerdingen, originally a city but since 1929 part of Krefeld; or Meidericher Sport-Verein (Meidericher SV; Meiderich sports club), referencing a district in Duisburg. The branding of a team as being local and regional also appears in a team’s nickname; an example is Borussia Mönchengladbach which is called the Fohlenelf vom Niederrhein (The Eleven Colts from the Lower Rhine Region). Despite the official naming of stadiums after their sponsor, many grounds are addressed in local parlance as a specific location, such as the Bökelberg in Mönchengladbach, or the Bielefelder Alm, where fans announce on placards and in songs “Niemand erobert den Teutoburger Wald” (nobody conquers the Teutoburg Forest), in reference to the Roman defeat against Arminius in AD 9.25 As a particularly rich illustration of the many ways football fans are bound to the local, I will map out, in what follows, the identification, organization, and performances of the fans of the 1. FC Köln (Cologne), the Effzeh, as its supporters reductively call it. Founded in 1948, the club has a relatively short existence, at least in comparison to other Bundesliga teams, but club and fans identify with a much longer history, one that reaches back centuries and taps into the surrounding region, the Rhineland, which has been a culturally significant area in Germany for centuries. Club and fans celebrate several spatially grounded traditions: the reign of the Catholic Church in Cologne, the medieval carnival celebrations, and the beer and dialect sharing the name Kölsch. The club’s logo contains the silhouette of the iconic Cologne Cathedral, and each new season starts with fans, players, and club officials attending a prayer service in the cathedral dedicated to the team’s success. Moreover, during carnival season the players wear a special jersey that pays homage to the tradition of wearing a carnival costume, the nickname of the club is spelled in spoken dialect as Effzeh; and the only beer served in the stadium is the local Kölsch. Using modern social media to reach fans, the club’s homepage includes trilingual features, in German, English, and expressions in the local dialect Kölsch (such as FC-Jeföhl or Zesamme, which are sentimental expressions for belonging together).26 The club also entertains a novelty in German football: the Cheerleader des 1. FC Köln e.V. (FC cheerleaders). While the female dance group seems to be an adaptation of the American football and basketball cheerleaders, it is more specifically a merging of this US dance and acrobatic squad with a traditional and iconic figure of the Cologne carnival, the Tanzmariechen or Funkenmariechen (a female dancer in militaristic uniform). It is no coincidence that the cheerleaders participate in the carnival

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and have even won traditional carnival dance prizes.27 Using the English term “cheerleaders,” but also referencing the carnival, manifests a dimension of the glocal (i.e., an instance when the global and the local interact). The fans’ identification with the local is also multifaceted. The more than a hundred thousand FC fans are organized in eight hundred regional and international clubs.28 While most fan clubs are located in Cologne and its vicinities, the club also enjoys a substantial group of followers along the Rheinischer Fächer (the area of the Cologne Bay in which people speak either the rural dialect Landkölsch or the regiolect Rheinisch).29 Surprisingly, there are even five fan clubs in Düsseldorf, Cologne’s archrival. Since Cologne is surrounded by rural areas (Niederrhein, Eifel, Bergisches Land, Sauerland, Westerwald, and Hunsrück),30 it attracts many fans from these areas since they lack a local Bundesliga football club in their proximity. These followers have a double local identification: with the city of the team and with the location of the fan club, which is often displayed in the fan club’s name, such as Geißbockgarde Mönchengladbach. The fans’ identification with the local also embraces the use of dialect by adopting a song from the local pop band Die Höhner as the club’s hymn. “Mer stonn zo dir FC Kölle” (“We have your back”) is an interesting choice since the song mentions all the different Veedels (neighborhoods in Cologne such as Nippes or Kalk) as the core of local belonging and equates them with Rio and Rome where expatriates have founded fan clubs.31 Likewise, the goal song that is sung in the stadium when the team scores is an adaptation of the carnival song “Denn wenn et Trömmelche jeht” (“When the drum starts”) by De Räuber, a song that incorporates the traditional greeting “Kölle Alaaf,” used during carnival season.32 In the stadium, the fans display the deeply religious coat of arms of the city of Cologne: three crowns referencing the Holy Three Kings whose remains are supposedly interred in the cathedral, and eleven black tears memorializing the death of Saint Ursula, a Catholic martyr. Besides dressing up in the club’s colors, displaying flags and symbols of the city, the fans also perform choreographies. These, at times quite elaborate, performances vary in thematic and aesthetic composition. They often contain the active physical participation of the entire home block (in Cologne it is the Südkurve) when the spectators wave flags or hold posters in specific colors in order to create, in unison, an almost impressionistic painting. Alternatively, the audience assists in rolling out giant banners with images and text proclaiming the theme of the day. With their performances, the fans celebrate famous former players, specific events or legends in the club’s history, or local city events (such as carnival). They can also mourn the tragic deaths of fellow fans, or feature provocations directed at opponents, especially during derby games. (For 1. FC Köln this applies to the games against Borussia Mönchengladbach, Bayer Leverkusen, and, most especially, Fortuna Düsseldorf.) The fans, being entrenched in the local through language, customs, and spatially rooted idiosyncrasies, as well as by their public display of belonging

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to the club and the neighborhood, could be seen as a sign of local patriotism or provincialism (i.e., as a stubborn reaction against the ostensibly unstoppable impact of global processes). Conversely, a sense of belonging to something that Germans might call Heimat would concomitantly exclude the Other: the uniquely German concept of Heimat, referring to home, homeland, native region, or a general feeling of belonging, is making a comeback in today’s context of global migration.33 Heimat, as a Romantic notion, has long been associated with conservatism, and can be attached to provincial landscapes and customs (e.g., Oktoberfest), the linguistic confines of dialect, or the völkisch (ethnonationalist) ideology of the Nazis. By adding the term Heimat to his office in 2018, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer has reactivated a nostalgic sentiment of belonging that has also crept into the football discourse. When, for example, Fortuna Düsseldorf launched its “F95—Heimat” campaign, it also evoked particulars of a controversial past. As part of this campaign the club used a quote by the famous local poet Heinrich Heine in the inseam of the team’s away jersey:34 “The city of Düsseldorf is very beautiful, and when I think of her from afar as my accidental birthplace, I feel whimsical.”35 The use of this citation is at first glance problematic, because it equates Heimat with birthplace, and might prevent the city’s immigrants (20 percent of the total population) from identifying with the team. Moreover, it neglects the historical and political context in which it was articulated. Heine was forced into exile for his political views and his Jewish background, and his legacy in Düsseldorf was long repressed. The students at the local university fought a two-decades-long battle for the university to bear Heine’s name. In 1998 they were finally successful.36 At the same time, however, the club signals with its use of the Heine quote that it sees itself in a long tradition of leftist embrace of the controversial poet and his ideas. This also means embracing a concept of Heimat that includes otherness and difference, both concepts traditionally celebrated in cities such as Cologne and Düsseldorf, or the Rhineland in general. The Rhineland is steeped in a long history of antagonism against concepts of a homogeneous community, and the region has favored separatism from national entities and demonstrated tolerance and inclusiveness in several ways. In the Rhenish Constitution (2001), a declaration of the spirit of the region of sorts, one of the stated articles demands tolerance vis-à-vis the Other: “Jede Jeck is anders” (every fool [meaning Cologne resident and a reference to its carnival] is different).37 In recent discussions concerning refugees, welcoming others through football was also a major theme for fan clubs nationwide, and not just in Cologne. During the refugee crisis in 2015, the ensuing discourse about immigration and asylum served as a major catalyst for the election success of the ultra-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD; Alternative for Germany) in the East. Many football fan clubs (including from Cologne) entered this public discourse and displayed, through staged actions that welcomed refugees in their stadi-

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ums, their allegiances to a more liberal view of the place of Others in German society.38 Local fan clubs used attending a football match as an integrative tool for migrants to identify with a new home, for example displaying banners announcing “refugees welcome.” Almost all the Bundesliga clubs also offered free admission and free paraphernalia to refugees.39 Political stands within fan groups can also influence personnel decisions made by the club: 1. FC Köln was forced to sever ties with former BILD journalist Fritz Esser, who was supposed to become their communications director, in response to the fans’ criticism of his right-wing positions and racist utterances.40 While the fans themselves are deeply rooted in the local (through language, traditions, and culture), fan performances happen during a game, and address their team and the eleven players on the pitch, who, in many cases, might not understand the cultural references or might not even speak the fans’ native language. Representing the opposite of the culturally rooted fan, the football player has become a commodity that is marked by global mobility similar to the flow of financial capital, IT-enabled service outsourcing, or internet retail. In the 2020–21 season, 60 percent of all players representing their respective teams in the Bundesliga were foreigners: RB Leipzig, which used 88.5 percent foreign players in their matches, leads the foreign-to-German ratio player chart while the promoted team Union Berlin (30 percent) and the traditional club 1. FC Köln (40 percent) have substantially fewer foreign players on any given matchday.41 Although the league requires that twelve players of the team’s roster of twenty-four to thirty-six be German citizens, how many ultimately end up playing on the pitch is a different story.42 On November 11, 2020, the starting line-up of RB Leipzig in their match against the Freiburg Soccer Club (SC) did not include a single German player.43 The traditional practice of using players hailing from the team’s surrounding area, which was customary in the early years of the sport’s history, has been replaced by an immense mobility on the football market. During two transfer periods in summer and winter, football players are sold, traded, or loaned out in a global football market without any barriers such as tariffs or spending caps.44 It has likely been a boost to football’s popularity that the teams, with their increasing numbers of foreign players, now more closely resemble the multicultural and multiethnic society that Germany has become after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a reality that has led to a growing diversity of identities but that has also triggered sociopolitical conflicts.45 While a player nominally is the property of one club, he can end up playing several seasons in a row on loan for different teams, if his club does not want to sell him but has no place for him in the team. Very few players remain with the same club for the duration of their playing career. Thomas Müller, forward at Bayern Munich, is a notable exception; he resembles the traditional German player born in the region where he plays football, speaking the local dialect, and strongly identifying with regional

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traditions, such as wearing the Tracht (traditional Bavarian garb). Müller began playing at the age of ten for Bayern and has played there continuously since then, for more than twenty years.46 For most football players, the volatility of the global transfers market has the opposite effect: it makes them quite mobile. In the Bundesliga a good example is the German-born Italian Vincenzo Grifo who played for eight different German teams between 2012 and 2019. Although he was on contract with TSG Hoffenheim in 2014, he was loaned out to two different clubs that same year (Dynamo Dresden and FSV Frankfurt), which would affect any sense of belonging to a team and region negatively.47 Many international players in Germany might enter the German football world at an early age when they join one of the many academies run by individual football clubs. The linguistic and cultural challenges these migrant players face in the acculturation process are multifold and include, among others, the impossibility to “integrate fully because of [the] lack of German language skills” which, in turn, might lead to “developing homesickness.”48 Acculturation processes are difficult and might present insurmountable obstacles for young players who are confronted with foreign languages, customs, and cuisine, as well as different climates and generational behavior expectations. A case in point of how impactful such challenges can be, at least on performance, is Ciro Immobile who left Borussia Dortmund after only one season, in which his achievements on the pitch were mostly underwhelming, to later return to Italy’s Serie A, where he was the top scorer in two subsequent years. Immobile blamed Borussia Dortmund’s lacking efforts to aid his integration into German life, but was, simultaneously, also accused by the club of resisting integration, as evidenced by his refusal to learn German.49 Potential relocation issues for Legionäre (legionaries), as they are sometimes called, might even influence how clubs act on the transfers market, showing preference for players who are more familiar with the language, culture, climate, or social environment of the host club.50 It comes as no surprise, then, that Bundesliga clubs seem to favor international players from their direct neighbors: Austria, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.51 While international players easily obtain the financial capital to support their mobility, cultural competencies are much more difficult to attain, especially when adjusting to a new cultural environment is further complicated by the specific cultural idiosyncrasies of the local. One of the most idiosyncratic local contexts in which football plays a significant role is arguably the state of Bavaria, in the south of Germany. In a photo published in September 2018, the players of the FC Bayern Munich are presented with the caption, “Ready for the Oktoberfest: Lederhosen photo shoot with the stars of FC Bayern Munich.”52 This photo represents part of an advertisement campaign of one of the club’s main local sponsors, the Paulaner Brewery, and reiterates the club’s projected self-image as a regional club rooted in Bavarian and, more specifically, Munich traditions, such as the Oktoberfest.

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Although Bayern has become Germany’s only club that has an international appeal and outreach on par with FC Liverpool, Real Madrid, or Juventus, it presents itself as an iconic representative of the local. The club’s famous brand slogan Mia san mia (We are who we are), in Bavarian dialect, might be seen as a signpost of the club’s provocative arrogance and narcissism, but it is above all an expression that cherishes regional belonging. To confirm the club’s identity, all players in the photo, including the many internationals, wear traditional Bavarian Tracht (the regional garb) including the obligatory lederhosen and are cheering into the camera with a raised glass of Hefeweizen beer, another mainstay of Bavarian tradition. However, this staged harmony among local and international players, coach, club, and sponsor also includes Franck Ribéry, known to be a teetotaler for religious reasons.53 Ribéry is the only one not holding a glass of beer and seemingly has an irritated facial expression signaling a feeling of unease, presumably owing to his awkward placement. This photo illustrates that the club’s identity supersedes the identity of the player who has to subject himself to the former, at least to some degree. While football as sport can be seen as a transnational cultural activity on the pitch, for players and audiences the cultural practices surrounding the game are undoubtedly rooted in regional and local traditions that are projected on to the players, who become tradition keepers.54 Mandatory participation in the Munich Oktoberfest celebrations or the Rhenish carnival (for teams such as 1. FC Köln, Fortuna Düsseldorf, and Mainz 05), being exposed to the obligatory Bierdusche (beer shower) after having won a title, as well as representing a different profession (the coal miner in Schalke) are just a few of the regional cultural idiosyncrasies to which international players are exposed and in which they must, at times, become participants. Muslim players, especially, face challenges due to their religious beliefs, since football-related activities are often not in accord with their belief system. Examples for this include fasting at Ramadan, nudity in communal showers, drinking alcohol, wearing jerseys with offensive advertising (gambling, alcohol, pork brands), being paid for playing football, cheating, foul language, and more. Legal and practical conflicts between Islamic law, football regulations, and practices have led to the formation of amateur Islamic teams in Germany, but contextualized interpretations of the Prophetic tradition have also allowed for some accommodations for professional football players of the Islamic faith.55 In general, clubs are not known for catering to the religious convictions and practices of their players. However, in the city of Liverpool the fans have demonstrated that a player’s identity may have considerable influence on the spectator. They paid tribute to the faith of one of their players by adding this line to the “Mo Salah song”: “If he scores another few, then I’ll be Muslim too.”56 Although this is likely proclaimed in jest, it does indicate that football can also have a mitigating effect on Islamophobia.

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In times of renewed scrutiny of community self-identification, the question of who has a right to belong to a given community has become more and more contested. Some communities try to surround themselves with walls, literally and figuratively, and some define belonging, in a reactionary turn to the past, as based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity. The rise of global neo-Nazism and racism, the spread of xenophobia and Islamophobia, as well as the attempt to institutionalize the categorization of people into first- and second-class citizens also affects migrant football players. Their privileged position in society (due to their global mobility, extraordinary salaries, etc.) comes at a high price. Not only does the loss of family and community (especially for athletes from other continents) distress the players, but many are also exposed to blatant racism in the stadium.57 Post–Berlin Wall anxieties concerning an ethnically changing society, expressed, for example, in the Leitkultur (dominant culture) debate in Germany, also influences the field of football. On the one hand, German football players with ethnically diverse backgrounds have been confronted with racist insults on and off the pitch (e.g., Gerald Asamoah, Jérôme Boateng, or Mesut Özil). On the other hand, the multiethnic national team was celebrated as a success story for integration.58 The players’ identification process, however, can completely derail when the athlete chooses an allegiance with which the public disagrees. Mesut Özil’s story is a case in point. A truly global German player with Turkish roots who has played for Schalke 04, Werder Bremen, Real Madrid, and Arsenal FC, Özil was celebrated as a role model for integration representing Germans with so-called migration background culminating in receiving the Bambi Award for Integration.59 However, after posing with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, he unleashed a storm of insults from the public, which ultimately led him to resign from the German national team. Suddenly, the project of integration through football was declared a failure, and unconcealed racism evident in comments of officials in sports and politics followed.60 But the case also revealed identity power dynamics in German football. However ideologically naïve Özil’s private engagement with Turkey’s authoritarian leader might have been, it demonstrated that football players have very little influence over the identity that is bestowed on them by the public. While former president of FC Bayern Munich, Uli Hoeness, has been successful in trivializing his criminal past as a convicted tax evader, all of Özil’s attempts to explain his photoshoot to the German public as a tribute to his family’s cultural heritage ultimately failed. Fellow Turkish-German player Ilkay Gündoğan, who also posed with Erdoğan, was less affected by the media frenzy, maybe because he did not defend his action or maybe because he has been seen as the better player of the two Turkish-German members of the world champion team.61 On the club level, the global player is subject to the identification that clubs and fans impart on him by placing the player within the club’s tradition and

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history—even if this tradition is only part of the past. In Gelsenkirchen, for example, fans mourned the closure of the last coal mines in the Ruhr valley,62 while the players of Schalke 04 continue to be seen as Knappen (a nickname for miners) who attend the team’s academy, the Knappenschmiede (miner’s smithy), where they are “forged” into successful players.63 By continuing to hold on to the coal and steel tradition of the Ruhr Valley in postindustrial football, the fans and the players are reminded that football in England and Germany eventually developed as a sport for the working class. Many of the recent young players raised in the Knappenschmiede did not, of course, go on to become Schalke “miners” but rather global players at clubs with completely different local identities: Mesut Özil at Arsenal FC, Julian Draxler at Paris St Germain, Ilkay Gündoğan at Manchester City FC, Leroy Sané at Bayern Munich, or Joël Matip at FC Liverpool. The fans, however, continue to embrace an imagined identity that romanticizes the connection to a past, which includes the mining industry, as does the club that has purposefully styled the walkway to the pitch to resemble a mine shaft. This nostalgic projection of an identity based on local heritage, reinforced by the continued use of the miners’ greeting Glückauf in the stadium, collides with the commercial branding of today’s football. In the Veltins Arena (Schalke 04’s stadium named after its beer sponsor) you can join the Glückauf-Club in the GAZPROM-Zone of the stadium. The name of Schalke’s main sponsor, the Russian provider of natural gas, signals the historic change in energy consumption in the region (gas instead of coal); at the same time, the brand GAZPROM, prominently displayed on Schalke’s jersey, expresses the global sponsorship of the team, contradicting its regional groundedness. While the Schalke fans and the club relive and restage the past, as evidenced in their performances commemorating former club players and coaches or in their celebration of past victories, the international players have to become adopted locals who symbolically represent the local blue-collar worker, the miner, while simultaneously wearing the marker of the demise of the traditional regional industries on their jersey. In the age of global neoliberal football economics, local traditions are of course part of the commodification of football; they have become objects of identification with which the fan imagines protecting local particularities from a global take-over that has, however, already happened. Interestingly, professional football clubs try to capitalize on both modalities, and strive to be both local and global.

Conclusion The contradictions and tensions between the local and the global, described in this chapter, are part and parcel of football culture in today’s Germany and elsewhere. While the players are no longer members of the working class but rather

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are millionaires with considerable mobility, the fans continue to be rooted in the local confines. The fans reproduce a cultural identity that, in most cases, they were not able to choose for themselves. As is the case for one’s nationality, gender, or ethnicity, the fans’ allegiance to a particular team might just be defined by the accident of being born into a particular community. This may well mean being destined to follow an underperforming football team all one’s life. There are, of course, moments when the global and the local seem to come together in harmony, as was the case when the French player Anthony Modeste chose to leave China, where he had transferred in a previous season, to come “home” to his elective “Heimat” Cologne. He underscored this identification by participating, visibly moved to tears by the fans’ ecstatic reception, in the carnival. The local press announced his return as “Hier kommt der König von Kölle” (Here comes the king of Cologne). But it should also be noted that the fans welcoming him back added, “Schieß uns zurück in die Bundesliga” (Kick us back into the Bundesliga) making his title of regional king contingent on his performance on the pitch.64 Modeste did not disappoint the members of his Wahlheimat (elected home) and his performance after his return helped elevate the club to the first division of the Bundesliga. As evident in the case of Modeste as well as in the myriad situations and considerations described in this chapter, the local and the global in the context of football are inextricably linked and concomitantly deeply mired in contradictions. Perhaps it is precisely the constant negotiation of frictions inherent in the glocal that make football, at least in part, such an attractive game.

Author Stephan Schindler is professor of German, University of South Florida. Dr. Schindler’s research areas include eighteenth- and twentieth-century German literature and film, Holocaust studies, critical theory, psychoanalysis, and football. In addition to invited lectures on German football culture, he has given numerous presentations on the subject at national conferences. Schindler has taught both graduate and undergraduate courses on football at Washington University as well as at the University of South Florida.

Notes 1. Soccer nations are differently defined than sovereign nation states; for exam-

ple, Great Britain comprises four soccer nations: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. 2. Waalkes, “Does Soccer Explain the World or Does the World Explain Soccer?,” 175–76.

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3. Giulianotti and Robertson, “Glocalization, Globalization and Migration,” 171–98. 4. In the FIFA Weekly magazine, Boateng is quoted as saying, “I feel increasingly

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

Ghanaian. I’m discovering that side of me, but I’ve definitely still got a lot to learn about the country and its culture.” He also added that he had not been to Ghana before 2010 and did not speak any of the languages spoken there. Schweingruber, “Ghana’s Prince on the Right Track.” All figures retrieved on 11 May 2022 from www.dfb.de/bundesliga/statistik/ zuschauerzahlen/ and https://www.dfb.de/verbandsstruktur/mitglieder/aktuellestatistik/ “BVB Aktie.” See Kuper and Szymanski, Soccernomics, 47–50. “ManCity and Paris Saint-Germain.” See Waalkes, “Does Soccer Explain the World or Does the World Explain Soccer?,” 171. See Adam, Bauers, and Hovemann, “Inevitable Need for Change,” 938–58. Ford, “Bundesliga Monday Games to Be Discontinued.” “Werder Bremen Demonstration.” RB Leipzig is tied to the energy drink Red Bull, and TSG Hoffenheim’s meteoric rise has been shaped by the SAP founder Dietmar Hopp. For examples of fan responses to these clubs, see “30.000 Zuschauer als Sitzschalen verkleidet.” Smith, “Manchester United Fans Protest Postponement”; “14 players to speak out about against the Super League.” Sinram, “Norwegen und die WM 2022 in Katar.” See Langer, Faszination Ultras, 21–37. See Merkel, “Football Fans and Clubs in Germany.” For examples of the Ultra’s actions, see Gabler, Die Ultras, 83–162. See Totten, “Football and Community Empowerment.” See Kuhn, Soccer vs. the State, 136–40. See Gabler, Die Ultras, 163–82. See Winands, Grau, and Zick, “Sources of Identity and Community,” 216–31. “Bayern München: Zuschauer und Fankultur.” “FC Bayern München Fan Club.” “Niemand erobert den Teutoburger Wald.” For more information, visit the club’s home page: https://fc.de/de/fc-info/start seite/ Gonscherowski. “Anfeuern bis zum Anpfiff.” “Der 1. FC Köln ist nicht irgendein Club.” “Fanclubliste.” The fan clubs even go beyond state lines: there are more than fifty registered fan clubs for the FC in the Rhineland-Palatinate ; see FC-FANCLUBS Bereich. For details of the song, see “Lieder und Töne” for the foreign fan club list see FC-FANCLUBS Ausland (both accessed 24 May 2021). Wünsch. “Elf kölsche Lieder.” See, e.g., the recent edition of the journal Kursbuch 198 ( June 2019), entitled “Heimat.” “Fortuna präsentiert Auswärtstrikot.” Heine, Ideen, 168. “Heinrich Heine: Germany’s Wronged Genius.”

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37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

“Das Rheinische Grundgesetz?” Schmidt, “Flüchtlinge zum Spiel eingeladen.” Uersfeld, “Bayern, Dortmund, Bundesliga Fans.” Schmitz, “Nach Protest von Fans.” For all figures, see www.transfermarkt.de and www.transfermarkt.us. Kunzmann, “Zu wenig deutsche.” “Leipzig gegen Freiburg.” See, e.g., the market movements on the most comprehensive website transfers markt.de See, e.g., the interview collection Blecking and Dembowski, Der Ball ist bunt. “Thomas Müller.” “Vincenzo Grifo.” Naglo, “The Social World,” 12. Winkelhagen, “Das Jammern des Ciro Immobile”; Kubach, “Ex-BVB-Stürmer.” See Kuper and Szymanski, Soccernomics, 59–64. “Ausländische Spieler.” “Bereit für die Wiesn.” England’s Daily Mail tabloid ran a story suggesting that Ribéry was insulted by his teammate Boateng, who drenched him in a customary beer bath as a celebration for winning the Bundesliga title. However, on Twitter, Boateng later revealed that this was inaccurate as he used non-alcoholic beer in the drenching. Quinn, “Franck Ribéry Is Not Mad.” See Gómez-Bantel, “Football Clubs as Symbols,” 692–702. See Shavit, “Being a Muslim Football Player,” 271–87. “Liverpool Fans Embrace Mohamed Salah.” See Kassimeris, “Deutschland über Alles,” 754–65. See Schindler, “Local, National, Global,” 157–67. “Mesut Özil bekommt den Bambi.” “Er hat seit Jahren.” Mittmann, “Überraschter Gündogan.” “FC Schalke 04 Bids.” “Exploring Schalke.” Bauer, “Beim Karnevalszug in Köln.”

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

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“Ausländische Spieler” [Foreign players]. Transfermarkt. Retrieved 27 May 2021, https:// www.transfermarkt.de/1-bundesliga/gastarbeiter/wettbewerb/L1 Bauer, Ulrich. “Beim Karnevalszug in Köln. Modeste kämpft mit den Tränen” [At the carnival parade in Cologne. Modeste fights back tears]. Bild. 4 March 2019. Retrieved 30 May 2021, https://www.bild.de/sport/fussball/fussball/triumph-zug-durch-diestadt-modeste-der-koenig-von-koeln-60474200.bild.html “Bayern München: Zuschauer und Fankultur” [Bayern Munich: Spectators and fan culture]. Wikipedia. Retrieved 25 May 2021, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/FC_Bayern_ M&C3&BCnchen#Zuschauer_und_Fankultur “Bereit für die Wiesn: Lederhosen-Shooting mit den Stars des FC Bayern München” [Ready for the Wiesn: Lederhosen-Shooting with the stars of FC Bayern München]. München TV. Retrieved 30 May 2021, https://www.muenchen.tv/bereit-fuer-diewiesn-lederhosen-shooting-mit-den-stars-des-fc-bayern-muenchen-281778/ Blecking, Diethelm, Gerd Dembowski. Der Ball ist bunt. Fußball, Migration und die Vielfalt der Identitäten in Deutschland [The ball is colorful. Football, migration and the diversity of identity in Germany]. Frankfurt: Brandes & Apsel, 2010. “BVB Aktie” [BVB stock]. Retrieved 24 May 2021, https://aktie.bvb.de/ “Das Rheinische Grundgesetz” [Basic law for the Rhineland]. Wikipedia. Retrieved 27 May 2021, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Rheinische Grundgesetz “Der 1. FC Köln ist nicht irgendein Club. Er ist besonders” [1. FC Köln is not just any Club. It’s special]. 1. FC Köln. Retrieved 24 May 2021, https://fc.de/fc-info/club/ ueber-den-fc/der-fc/ Deutscher Fussball-Bund [DFB; German Football Association]. Retrieved 24 May 2021, www.dfb.de “Er hat seit Jahren einen Dreck gespielt” [He has played like shit for years]. Die Zeit. 23 July 2018. Retrieved 30 May 2021, https://www.zeit.de/sport/2018-07/mesutoezil-reaktionen-ruecktritt “Exploring Schalke.” Bundesliga. 2014 Retrieved 30 May 2021, https://www.bundesliga .com/en/news/Bundesliga/0000297907.jsp “Fanclubliste” [Fanclub list]. 1. FC Köln. 18 November 2020. Retrieved 24 May 2021, https://fc.de/uploads/pics/Fanclubliste_PLZ-Bereich_4_2020-11-18_02.pdf “FC Bayern München Fan Club” [FC Bayern München Fan Club]. FC Bayern München. Retrieved 25 May 2021, https://fcbayern.com/us/fans FC-FANCLUBS: Bereich. Available at https://fc.de/uploads/pics/Fanclubliste_PLZBereich_5_2020-11-18_02.pdf FC-FANCLUBS: Ausland. Available at https://fc.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Fans/Fan clubliste_Ausland.pdf “FC Schalke 04 Bids Emotional Adieu to the Coal Miners.” FC Schalke 04. 18 December 2018. Retrieved 30 May 2021, https://schalke04.de/en/inside-en/fc-schalke04-bids-emotional-adieu-to-the-coal-miners Ford, Matt. “Bundesliga Monday Games to Be Discontinued as Fan Protests Persist.” Deutsche Welle. 21 November 2018. Retrieved 25 May 2021, https://www.dw.com/ en/bundesliga-monday-games-to-be-discontinued-as-fan-protests-persist/a46390559 “Fortuna präsentiert Auswärtstrikot auf der Rheinkirmes” [Fortuna presents away jersey at the Rheinkirmes]. RP News. 20 July 2018. Retrieved 27 May 2021, https://rp-online.de/sport/fussball/fortuna/fortuna-duesseldorf-praesentiert-auswaertstrikot2018-auf-der-kirmes_aid-24016741

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Gabler, Jonas. Die Ultras. Fußballfans und Fußballkulturen in Deutschland [Ultras. Football fans and football culture in Germany]. Köln: Papy Rossa Verlag, 2013. Giulianotti, Richard, and Roland Robertson. “Glocalization, Globalization and Migration: The Case of Scottish Football Supporters in North America.” International Sociology 21, no. 2 (2006): 171–98. Gómez-Bantel, Adriano. “Football Clubs as Symbols of Regional Identities.” Soccer & Society 17, no. 5 (2016): 692–702. Gonscherowski, Tobias. “Anfeuern bis zum Anpfiff ” [Cheer to the final whistle]. Bundesliga. Retrieved 24 May 2021, https://www.bundesliga.com/de/bundesliga/news/an feuern-bis-zum-anpfiff_0000143517.jsp Heine, Heinrich, Ideen. Das Buch Le Grand [Ideas. The book Le Grand]. Faksimile 1827. Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1972. “Heinrich Heine: Germany’s Wronged Genius.” Deutsche Welle. 17 February 2006. Retrieved 27 May 2021, https://www.dw.com/en/heinrich-heine-germanys-wrongedliterary-genius/a-1904824 Kassimeris, Christos. “Deutschland über Alles: Discrimination in German Football.” Soccer & Society 10, no. 6 (2009): 754–65. Kubach, Bob-Linus. “Ex-BVB-Stürmer plötzlich besser als Ronaldo” [Ex-BVB striker suddenly better than Ronaldo]. Focus. 24 January 2020. Retrieved 27 May 2021, https:// www.focus.de/sport/fussball/ciro-immobile-ex-bvb-stuermer-ploetzlich-besser-alsronaldo_id_11583958.html Kuhn, Gabriel. Soccer vs. the State: Tackling Football and Radical Politics. Oakland: PM Press, 2011. Kunzmann, Victoria. “Zu wenig deutsche Spieler bei Eintracht Frankfurt: Ausländerregelungen in den europäischen Top-5-Ligen” [Too few German players at Eintracht Frankfurt: Foreign regulation in the top 5 European leagues]. Ran International. 31 July 2018. Retrieved 27 May 2021, https://www.ran.de/fussball/international/news/ auslaenderregelungen-in-den-europaeischen-top-5-ligen-1058482 Kuper, Simon, and Stefan Szymanski. Soccernomics. New York: Nation Books, 2009. Kursbuch 198 (2019). Langer, Daniel. Faszination Ultras: Aspekte und Erklärungsansätze zur Fußballfan- und Jugendkultur [Fascination ultras: Aspects and explanations of football fan and youth culture]. Bonn: Scientia Bonnensis, 2010. “Leipzig gegen Freiburg” [Leipzig verses Freiburg]. kicker. 2020. Retrieved 27 May 2021, https://www.kicker.de/leipzig-gegen-freiburg-2020-bundesliga-4667112/aufstellung “Lieder und Töne” [Songs and sounds]. 1. FC Köln. Retrieved 24 May 2021, https://fc.de/ fc-info/fans/fc-jefoehl/lieder-und-toene/ “Liverpool Fans Embrace Mohamed Salah with Muslim Chant.” Aljazeera. 2018. Retrieved 30 May 2021, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/02/liverpool-fans-embracemohamed-salah-muslim-chant-180216105515770.html “ManCity and Paris Saint-Germain: How Oil Money Distorts Global Football.” Der Spiegel. 2 November 2018. Retrieved 25 May 2021, https://www.spiegel.de/ international/world/financial-fair-play-manchester-city-and-psg-pact-with-thesheikhs-a-1236414.html Merkel, Udo. “Football Fans and Clubs in Germany: Conflicts, Crises and Compromises.” Soccer & Society 13, no. 3 (2012): 359–76. “Mesut Özil bekommt den Bambi für Integration” [Mesut Özil awarded a Bambi for integration]. Die Welt. 11 November 2010. Retrieved 30 May 2020, https://www.welt

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.de/vermischtes/prominente/article10870046/Mesut-Oezil-bekommt-den-Bam bi-fuer-Integration.html Mittmann, Ralf. “Überraschter Gündogan trägt stolz die Kapitänsbinde, Özil steht wegen weiterem Erdogan-Treffen in der Kritik: Wie unterschiedlich sich Dinge entwickeln können” [Surprised Gündogan proudly wears the captain’s armband, Özil continues to be criticized for his Erdogan meeting: How differently things can develop]. Südkurier. 21 March 2019. Retrieved 30 May 2021, https://www.suedkurier.de/ueberregional/ sport/UEberraschter-Guendogan-traegt-stolz-die-Kapitaensbinde-OEzil-stehtwegen-weiterem-Erdogan-Treffen-in-der-Kritik-Wie-unterschiedlich-sich-Dinge-en twickeln-koennen;art410965,10090046 Naglo, Kristian. “The Social World of Elite Youth Football in Germany: Crisis, Reinvention, Optimization Strategies, and the Role of Schools.” Sport in Society 23, no. 8 (2020): 1405–19. “Niemand erobert den Teutoburger Wald” [No one conquers the Teutoburg Forest]. Youtube. Retrieved 24 May 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlCppftdXAk Quinn, Phillip. “Franck Ribéry Is Not Mad at Jerome Boateng over the Beer.” Bavarian Footballworks. 15 May 2013. Retrieved 30 May 2021, https://www.bavarian footballworks.com/2013/5/15/4332140/franck-ribery-is-not-mad-at-jerome-boa teng-over-the-beer Schindler, Stephan. “Local, National, Global? Migration and Identities in German Soccer” In Essays in World Languages and Cultures, edited by Yves-Antoine Clemmen, et. al, 157–67. Irvine & Boca Raton: Brown Walker Press, 2018. Schmidt, Joachim. “Flüchtlinge zum Spiel eingeladen. 1. FC Köln heißt Flüchtlinge willkommen” [Refugees invited to the game. 1. FC Köln welcomes refugees]. Kölnische Rundschau. 24 September 2015. Retrieved 27 May 2021, https://www.rundschau-on line.de/sport/1-fc-koeln/fluechtlinge-zum-spiel-eingeladen-1—fc-koeln-heisst-fluecht linge-willkommen-22636360 Schmitz, David. “Nach Protest von Fans: 1. FC Köln und Fritz Esser verzichten auf Zusammenarbeit” [After protest from fans: 1. FC Köln and Fritz Esser forgo working together]. EFFZEH.com. 4 February 2021. Retrieved 27 May 2021, https://effzeh.com/ nach-protest-von-fans-1-fc-koeln-und-fritz-esser-verzichten-auf-zusammenarbeit/ Schweingruber, Alan. “Ghana’s Prince on the Right Track.” The Fifa Weekly. 21 March 2014. Retrieved 24 May 2021, https://resources.fifa.com/image/upload/issue-march-20 14-2301031.pdf?cloudid=omhz3rlaz08k6zvnlhni Shavit, Uriya “Being a Muslim Football Player in Europe.” Soccer & Society 20, no. 2 (2019): 271–87. Sinram, Jana. “Norwegen und die WM 2022 in Katar. Erst T-Shirt-Protest, dann Boykott?” [Norway and the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. First t-shirt protest, then boycott?]. 2021. Deutschlandfunk. 4 April 2021. Retrieved 24 May 2021, https://www.deutsch landfunk.de/norwegen-und-die-wm-2022-in-katar-erst-t-shirt-protest-dann.1346 .de.html?dram:articleid=495206 Smith, Rory. “Manchester United Fans Protest Postponement.” New York Times. 1 May 2021. Retrieved 24 May 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/02/sports/man chester-united-fans-protest-postponement.html?referringSource=articleShare “Thomas Müller.” Wikipedia. Retrieved 27 May 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Thomas_M&C3&BCller Totten, Mick. “Football and Community Empowerment: How FC Sankt Pauli Fans Organize to Influence.” Soccer & Society 17 no. 5 (2016): 703–20. Transfermarkt. Re-

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trieved 27 May 2021, https://www.transfermarkt.us/bundesliga/legionaereeinsaetze/ wettbewerb/L1 “Transfermarkt.” Retrieved 27 May 2021, https://www.transfermarkt.us. https://www .transfermarkt.de Uersfeld, Stephan. “Bayern, Dortmund, Bundesliga Fans Welcome Refugees amid EU Crisis.” Retrieved 27. May 2021, https://www.espn.com/soccer/german-bundesliga/ story/2591971/bundesliga-clubs-including-bayern-and-bvb-welcome-refugees? device=featurephone “Vincenzo Grifo.” Wikipedia. Retrieved 27 May 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Vincenzo_Grifo Waalkes, Scott. “Does Soccer Explain the World or Does the World explain Soccer? Soccer and Globalization.” Soccer & Society 18, no. 2–3 (2017): 166–80. “Werder Bremen Demonstration: Fans verkaufen Namensrecht am Weserstadion” [Werder Bremen demonstration: Fans sell the naming rights for Weserstadion]. Retrieved 25 May 2021, https://www.deichstube.de/news/werder-bremen-demonstra tion-fans-verkauf-namensrecht-am-weserstadion-wohninvest-12355462 Winands, Martin, Andreas Grau and Andreas Zick. “Sources of Identity and Community Among Highly Identified Football Fans in Germany.” Soccer & Society 20, no. 2 (2019): 216–31. Winkelhagen, André. “Das Jammern des Ciro Immobile” [The lament of Ciro Immobile]. Bwin News. 18 July 2015. Retrieved 27 May 2021, https://sports.bwin.de/de/news/ fussball/das-jammern-des-ciro-immobile Wünsch, Silke. “Elf kölsche Lieder, die man kennen muss” [Eleven songs from Cologne that you must learn]. Deutsche Welle. 19 February 2020. Retrieved 24 May 2021, https:// www.dw.com/de/elf-k&C3&B6lsche-lieder-die-man-kennen-muss/a-18996159

PART II

 Race, Exclusion, and Otherness in German Football

CHAPTER 4



Willy Meisl’s German Football Nation

Internationalism, Austrian Patriotism, and Jewish Pride in Interwar Sports Writing KAY SCHILLER

Introduction

T

his chapter deals with the sports and football journalism of the VienneseJewish writer Willy Meisl (1895–1968). It focuses particularly on how Meisl’s writings both represented and articulated an Austrian patriotism and a predominantly cultural rather than political Zionism, as well as how he used his journalism to fight an aggressive German nationalism, antisemitism, and Jew-hatred more generally. I argue that, while Meisl would have preferred if nationalism and politics more generally could have been kept out of sport, some of his writings can indeed be read as articulations of an incipient Austrian patriotism during the First Republic (1918–38) and of pride in his Jewish identity. Meisl expressed his dual identity as an Austrian and a Jew through an identification with the technical refinement and sheer beauty of Austrian football in comparison to what he considered less-accomplished national styles of the sport, including English and German football. Indeed, one might say that for Meisl the German football nation of the first decades of the twentieth century was Austria rather than Germany. This football nation was embodied in an ideal manner in the Austrian national team of the 1930s, the Wunderteam (wonder team), which his brother Hugo Meisl (1881–1937) coached. Moreover, Meisl was proud that Jewish players, coaches, and administrators played a singular role in interwar Austrian football, both at club and national levels, which bore no relation to their small numbers in the population. Famously, the Zionist club Hakoah Vienna, five of whose players made it into the Austrian

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national team between 1923 and 1926, was the first continental team to beat top-level English opposition, defeating West Ham United 5–0 in 1923. At the same time, Meisl deplored the role of body culture in the rise of German National Socialism, in whose seizure of power, he thought, German Turnen (gymnastics) had played a major role. This was the subject of his never published book manuscript Sie turnten zur Macht (They seized power through gymnastics), which he wrote during exile in London. In that manuscript Meisl laid most of the responsibility for the rise of the Nazis at the gymnasts’ feet. While as a prominent sportswriter Meisl was one of the strongest advocates of sports internationalism in the Weimar Republic, with the rise of the Nazis he believed that Germany had become a nation of ultra-nationalist Turner rather than of internationalist athletes. One key ingredient to German nationalism and National Socialism was antisemitism and Meisl saw it as his task to debunk negative representations of Jews through his writings. He did so from early on in his career as a journalist, standing up specifically against the antisemitic stereotype of the male Jew as being corporally deficient and physically less capable than his non-Jewish counterpart. The negative representation of the circumcised, long-nosed, flatfooted, bodily feeble and “degenerate” male Jew was a longstanding motif in European culture.1 Although Meisl was too assimilated into Austrian-German culture to actively propagate a Muskeljudentum (muscular Judaism) in relation to a Jewish state in Palestine, he was a cultural Zionist who agreed with Max Nordau, who had coined the term in 1898, that Jews were as physically capable as any other ethnic group. Nazi antisemitism pushed Meisl to support political Zionism somewhat more actively after going into exile in Britain, though he apparently never contemplated emigrating to Palestine himself. In addition to being an Austrian patriot, an assimilated Austrian-German Jew and cultural Zionist, Meisl belonged to an international elite of sports functionaries, coaches, sports writers, and editors in the interwar years—men like the Arsenal coach Herbert Chapman, the French football administrator Henri Delaunay, the Italian national coach Vittorio Pozzo, and Willy’s brother Hugo Meisl. These men shared the conviction that sport’s main appeals lay in its ability to transcend traditional national boundaries and to allow for fair and rulebound competition rather than forcing opponents from different national backgrounds into a fight to the death as in war. To substantiate my argument about the relationship between national identity and sport in Meisl’s writing, I explore some of his journalism from the early 1930s for the broadsheet Vossische Zeitung, also known as the Voss, which was published by Ullstein. Ullstein, a Jewish-German, family-owned publishing empire, shared the political center-ground of the Berlin and German press market with the equally left-liberal Jewish-German publishing house Mosse and the right-wing nationalist Hugenberg press, the latter helping to pave Hit-

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ler’s way to power in the early 1930s. In this chapter, I interpret a selection of Meisl’s articles on football, especially his coverage of a famous international friendly match between England and Austria in December 1932. Moreover, to explain Meisl’s view of sports journalism and his attitude toward sport more generally, his first book on the 1924 Paris Summer Olympic Games and his 1928 Der Sport am Scheidewege (Sport at the crossroads) are also worth a closer look. The latter, his best-known publication from the prewar period, examines a whole range of issues, from the amateurism-professionalism dichotomy to the commercialization of sports and the role of sports in public health. This chapter ends with a cursory analysis of the already mentioned manuscript on German gymnastics, Sie turnten zur Macht.

Biographical Sketch The youngest son of a family of merchants, Meisl was born into a family of the Viennese Jewish educated bourgeoisie, whose intellectual members were often fascinated by the new mass culture of sport, and of football especially. Willy and his fifteen-year-older brother Hugo, a football player, referee, sportswriter, and editor, as well as the future manager of the Austrian national team, were such bourgeois intellectuals infatuated with football. Hugo, along with Chapman; Jimmy Hogan, the inventor of the “Vienna School” of football; the Hungarian Béla Guttmann; and the Italian Pozzo, became one of the most influential coaches of the interwar period.2 He rose to international prominence when the Wunderteam strung together an unbeaten run of fourteen consecutive matches against high-class opposition between April 1931 and December 1932. The team’s victories included thrashings of Scotland (5–0 at home), Germany (6–0 away), Switzerland (8–1 away), and Hungary (8–2 at home). Like Hugo, Willy was interested in all matters of sport from an early age. Of the two, however, he was the more talented all-around athlete. He played tennis, boxed, was a champion backstroke swimmer, played in goal for both the Austrian national water polo team and the football team of Wiener Amateure (later renamed FK Austria Wien), a team coached by his brother.3 The two Meisl brothers, along with the oldest sibling Leopold, who was also a successful swimmer, were called up early in World War I and served as officers in the Austro-Hungarian army. On 16 April 1915 the Vienna Illustriertes Sportblatt (Illustrated Sports Paper) wrote that all three “stehen im Felde” (were at the theatre of war).4 Contradicting the antisemitic stereotype of the Jews as congenitally unable to properly serve the nation, an accusation which in the German Empire led to their vicious portrayal as war profiteers and shirkers during World War I, the Meisl brothers came back highly decorated for their achievements as soldiers.5

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Once organized football resumed after the war, Willy returned to playing in goal for Austria Vienna and when Hugo took control of the Austrian national team, Willy was even once selected as goalkeeper for an international game against Hungary in 1920. In 1923, after ending his active career, he was hired to coach the Swedish first-division football club Hammarby IF. He coached there for two seasons. However, more than for his achievements as a player and coach, Willy Meisl is known for his sports and football journalism. Meisl first wrote for the Viennese Sport-Tagblatt (Sports Daily Newspaper ), his brother’s Neues Wiener Sportblatt (New Vienna Sports Paper), for Der Kicker that had been founded in 1920 by the Jewish-German journalist and football pioneer Walther Bensemann, and for Sweden and Scandinavia’s biggest paper Dagens Nyheter (Today’s News). Following his coverage of the 1924 Paris Summer Olympics, he was hired by Ullstein to write for the Voss and other Ullstein publications, and he and his wife Rose moved to Berlin. In early 1934 he and Rose left Germany for exile in England where he had many friends. These included the Anglo-Jewish BBC radio journalist Harold Abrahams, who won the hundred-meters at the 1924 Paris Olympics; Chapman; Hogan; and the football referee, administrator, and later the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA; International Federation of Association Football) president Stanley Rous. Although many specific details about the first years of his exile are unknown, the London Jewish Chronicle provides evidence that, during the 1930s, Meisl supported Zionist causes in the realm of sport and probably also beyond. He joined the London Maccabi Swimming Club and became goalkeeper of its water polo team, trained the club’s competitive swimmers, and served as club chair.6 He took on an important role in the Maccabi World Union and assisted with moving its headquarters from Nazi Berlin to the British capital. As secretary of the Maccabi World Union, the main organization of the Zionist sport movement, he provided continuity to this organization and acted as liaison between its former functionaries before these were able to emigrate to Israel.7 His membership in the British Zionist Federation, the original addressee of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, suggests that Meisl’s Zionism extended beyond the realm of culture and sport.8 When war broke out, Meisl avoided internment by the British authorities and remained at liberty. In 1940 he volunteered to join the British Army and became involved in the war effort against Germany. Although he was in his mid-forties and so was considered too old to see active service in the theater of war, he used his journalistic talents on behalf of psychological warfare operations. Meisl joined the radio and newspaper “black” propaganda unit of the Political Warfare Executive of the British Foreign Office. This office was led by the well-known journalist and Germany specialist Sefton Delmer who also ran the Allies’ Soldatensender Calais (Soldiers’ station Calais). From early 1944, he dedicated most of his efforts to writing the sports column for Nachrichten für

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die Truppe (News for the troops), Delmer’s propaganda paper directed at German soldiers. With Abrahams and Rous, Meisl also contributed to radio programs on sport for the BBC Home Service and the General Forces Programme to entertain the home front and English-speaking Allied troops.9 Following the war, and with Meisl and his wife having become British citizens in 1947, he remained in London. While he reestablished friendly relations with the German world of sports and some of its leading figures, like Carl Diem, the organizer of the 1936 “Nazi” Olympics, he apparently felt no great desire to return to live in either Germany or Austria.10 He resumed his activities as a sportswriter and served as the London sports correspondent for newspapers in Austria, Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland. Having become completely fluent in English, in 1948 he was involved in the writing of the official report of the London Summer Olympics for the British Olympic Committee (BOC). His main occupation was as writer and editor for the BOC’s magazine, World Sports: The International Sports Magazine, which in 1954 accorded him the title “World’s No. 1 Football Critic.” His final book, the 1956 Soccer Revolution, explained to British readers the rise of Brazil and the decline of England, respectively, as football powers, the latter a topic that had occupied him since the early 1930s.11 Having moved to Switzerland for the last decade of his life due to his poor health, Meisl died in Lugano in 1968.

The Flourishing of Sports Journalism Erik Eggers has suggested that during the Weimar Republic there was a symbiotic relationship between the rise of sports as a form of mass culture—what Meisl called the “springflutartige Ausbreitung der Sportbewegung” (springtide-like spread of the sports movement)—and the concurrent growth of German sports journalism.12 Indeed, the ascendance of sport as a mass-participation amateur activity, as well as a commercial enterprise directed at a paying mass audience, and the rise of sports writing went hand in hand. In the process, the public’s newly found fascination with sports revived the press by helping to improve previously weak circulation figures after World War I, while the development of mass sports strongly benefitted from the intensified coverage in newspapers and sports-specific publications.13 As a consequence, much like the writing on cinema, the other leading form of mass culture in the Weimar Republic, sports writing flourished to an unprecedented degree from the 1920s. Kurt Doerry, one of the pioneers of German sports journalism—he was the erstwhile editor-in-chief of the popular weekly Sport im Bild (Sport in the Picture), one of the earliest sports magazines of the country, founded in 1895—estimated that the sports press could count on an audience of circa 20 million German readers in 1930, a figure not far off

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a third of the country’s total population of 67 million.14 In 1925 Meisl could claim that “hardly any paper could do without a sports section, whatever its size.”15 Moreover, a foundation frenzy for sports publications took hold of the German press in the 1920s. As early as 1920, there were 160 specific sports papers and magazines. By 1928 that figure had risen to 360 publications, including 69 local, regional, and national newspapers.16 The sports sections of the national newspapers often served as a training ground and springboard for younger journalists aiming to write for one of the papers’ “important” sections. Many of these struggled to avoid bankruptcy in the troubled economic waters of the 1920s. Even Mosse’s Berliner Tageblatt (Berlin Daily News) and Ullstein’s Voss faced problems, with the latter incurring seven-figure losses each year and only surviving due to cross-subsidization from the publisher’s yellow press paper BZ am Mittag (BZ at Noon).17 The greatest competition for the readership existed on the booming football market. Here the most prominent publications were Bensemann’s Kicker, for which Meisl wrote at the beginning of his career, and the other football weeklies— Ernst Werner’s Fußball-Woche (Football Weekly) (founded in Berlin in 1924) and Eugen Seybold’s Fußball (founded in Munich in 1911). To write about Meisl means to write about the very top of the profession of sports and football journalism in the Weimar Republic. Indicative of his status is that he was thought of by many of his colleagues as the “father of sports journalism” or the “king of sports journalists.” This was not least because after 1928 he held a position of remarkable power and influence as main sports editor for Ullstein and made the decisions about the sports coverage in the Voss, the BZ am Mittag, and a plethora of other Ullstein publications, to many of which he also provided articles himself. In a period when sports writing was often either unsigned or signed with letter abbreviations, which makes the identification of authors nowadays sometimes a difficult task, Dr. Willy Meisl enjoyed the privilege of a named weekly column in the Voss. From 1926 to early 1934 this column appeared mostly on Sundays and meant that he was also known at least by name to readers of this Intelligenzblatt (intellectual paper) who had little or no interest in sports. There he reported and reflected on events in the world of sports under the heading “Was die Woche brachte” (The tidings of the week). That Meisl used his academic title—he held a doctorate in law—was probably not a coincidence but rather was intended to confer respectability to sports journalism. A closer look at his column reveals that it was remarkably international in orientation throughout the eight years of its existence. While the Voss was a paper for the national market, Meisl’s pieces were never Germanocentric but rather provided snippets of sporting information from all over the globe. And when he covered national sports performances, he could do so rather critically. A good example was how he commented on the German 6–0 defeat at the hand of the Wunderteam in Berlin on 24 May 1931 under the

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heading “Schablonen-Fußball oder Intelligenz-Spiel?” (Template football or intelligence game?). Of course, that he used the pronoun “we” on such occasions was purely pragmatic and did not mean that he saw himself as a member of the German national community: “The [German] template switches off the mind, smothers the game. The body takes center-stage. Toughness counts for more than artistry, power for more than ability. Suddenly one notices with horror that our football culture falls apart and that we play awfully primitively.”18 Football’s international character as well as its class and nation-transcending appeal not only allowed Meisl to rise to prominence as an Austrian sportswriter in Germany in the 1920s who wrote for both high-brow publications and the yellow press, but also illustrated magazines with no apparent or exclusive focus on sport. For example, he explained the techniques of playing the ball with the feet to the readership of the satirical UHU and commented on heavyweight Max Schmeling’s style of boxing for the arts magazine Der Querschnitt (The Cross Section).19 His breadth of experience as a writer also made it possible for him to continue his career in London exile after the Nazi regime had excluded him from his profession with the Reichsschriftleitergesetz (Reich editors’ law), which from 1934 banned Jews from writing for German papers. We do not know whether Meisl had the foresight to anticipate the Anschluss (union) of 1938 and for that reason did not return to live in Austria, after the Nazis made it impossible for him to make a living in Germany. Instead, he chose England, the “motherland” of sports and football, where he was also well-connected, as his country of exile, though for the time being he wrote for Austrian papers.

“A Mixture of Statistics, Epic and Poetry” Meisl had first risen to prominence with a book on the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris that revolutionized German sports journalism. In it, he described the writing technique he used, which set a broader trend, in the following manner: “It is eine Mischung aus Statistik, Epik und Lyrik [a mixture of statistics, epic and poetry], a sports mixture of course.  . . . The contrast injects life. The naked number is boring and kills the lived experience, whereas the epic narrative and the poetic element by themselves do not create a lasting sports document.”20 Along with textual elements that provided his audience with important factual and numerical information about the outcome of sports competitions, Meisl’s style playfully incorporated and combined reportage, the arts Feuilleton, elements from poetry, epic narratives of sport heroism, and travel writing.21 Examples of the latter are his still highly readable impressionistic descriptions of his journey to the 1932 Olympics by ocean liner and rail across North America, as well as of the host city Los Angeles, the Olympic venues, and sports stadia.22

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But there was more to this self-characterization. The insistence on the combination of these factors can be interpreted as a metaphor for Meisl’s understanding of sport more generally. It reflected his romanticizing outlook on sport that its very essence could be found in the enjoyment it provided through the unconstrained movement of the body in nature: “Sport is the joy in oneself, one’s body and its play in the sun, the light and air, to stretch oneself in sport. Sport is the storing up of energy and its waste in a blazing performance. It’s delight and joy, fresh pleasure.”23 Sentences like these disclose Meisl’s closeness to ideas of the turn-of-the-century German life reform movement; with its emphasis on body-consciousness, health, and beauty, this movement reflected both the anxieties and the opportunities of the inhabitants of a country undergoing rapid industrialization and modernization.24 Meisl’s view contrasted starkly with a Fordist and Taylorist interpretation of sport and the human body, which primarily valorized measurable and quantifiable performance. This interpretation, which was equally widespread and popular, linked sport to visions of United States–style rationalization, assembly line production, and mass consumption.25 This machine-age interpretation, usually associated with the beginnings of Americanization in Germany after World War I, also harmonized with the aesthetics of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). This, in turn, made sport an important topic of interest for artists and literary authors like Bertolt Brecht, who wrote a short chapter for Meisl’s Der Sport am Scheidewege; and fellow Austrians Joseph Roth and Robert Musil, who all saw sport’s rise as indicative, and not always in a good way, of the spirit of the age.26 Meisl’s deep skepticism of this view of sport is particularly evident in his critique of the omnipresent striving for records. As he put it in Der Sport am Scheidewege, “The record should not be achieved for its own sake, and attempting to set a record is damaging, a blasphemy against the idea of sport.”27 His discussion of this problem on the radio in July 1929 with Alex Natan, a prominent Jewish-German sprinter, who with Berlin’s Sport Club (SC) Charlottenburg 4x100-meter relay squad had just equaled the world-record, was summarized by the Voss: “Dr Meisl, who took on the mantle of the prosecutor, attacked the type of record and record mania that results from the abstract joy of the technical functioning of the body machine and the fight for every tenth of a second and centimeter. Beauty, however, could be found in the record which came about by accident and “freely” in competition. For the defense, Natan emphasized the invigorating and energizing effect of every peak performance, even if achieved ‘against the clock.’”28

Another area that is illustrative of Meisl’s thinking on sport concerns the question of amateurism. Along with many of his generation, he was a defender of the amateur principle in football and sport more generally. After all, he himself

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had played football for an amateur club. Whereas professional football had already existed for half a century on the British Isles, it received a boost on the continent only in the 1920s, though not in Germany where it was denounced by the football association DFB, and the “selfless amateur” was glorified like a war hero.29 Interestingly, it was Willy’s brother Hugo who was the driving force behind the first Austrian professional league in Vienna in 1924. On the occasion of the FIFA congress in 1928, this led the Fußball-Woche to conflate the professionalization of football with “the Geschmeidigkeit [slyness] of [Hugo Meisl’s Jewish] race and its zersetzend [degenerate] spirit.”30 Notwithstanding such antisemitic statements, Willy Meisl wrote rather apodictically in Der Sport am Scheidewege that “if sport becomes a profession . . . it stops being sport.”31 That said, he could not avoid being realistic either. He therefore never elevated amateurism to an absolute principle and pointed out that it was extremely difficult to draw a clear line between amateur and professional sport.32 For Meisl, the age of pure amateurism had come to an end at the very moment “when for the first time an entry fee was charged at a sports ground.”33 Moreover, he strongly sympathized with working-class athletes who made a living from sports, as, of course, he also did as a sportswriter. Along those lines he coined the ironic epigram, “The best amateurism is a rich father.”34

Football and Austrian Patriotism On 7 December 1932, one of the most famous international football friendlies ever took place at Chelsea FC’s home ground in West London in front of some sixty thousand spectators. The match, for which Stanley Rous acted as a linesman, pitted England against Austria. After an overall balanced performance from both teams, the Austrians lost narrowly, after having been down by two goals from the twenty-seventh minute. As the London Times wrote about the English 4–3 victory, “It was by no means easily earned.  . . . With a little luck [the Austrians] might have  .  .  .  made a draw of the match.”35 The crowd at Stamford Bridge included thousands of Austrian fans in red-white-red colors who had traveled to London for the occasion. The live radio broadcast by the Austrian radio corporation RAVAG, which for the first time was transmitted by undersea cable between Britain and the continent, was followed all over Central and East-Central Europe, including by a huge local audience on Vienna’s Heldenplatz. The match marked the climax of the Wunderteam and ended its unbeaten run. The invitation to play in London was testament to the esteem in which the Austrian team was held at the time. It was only the third team to have been invited to play England at home, with the highly rated Spain suffering a 7–1 hammering in 1931. This meant that the pressure on the Austrian players was

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quite high, since there was a good chance the encounter might end with an embarrassing defeat. Previous matches had overall been clearly won by England: 6–1 and 11–1 in 1908, 8–1 in 1909; there was also a goalless draw in 1930. The match was built up by the continental press as the Jahrhundertspiel (match of the century), as the best continental team challenged the originators of the sport. Paradoxically, the Austrian defeat was celebrated as if it was a victory. This was because the narrow outcome could be interpreted as continental football having finally succeeded in emancipating itself from its original model and offering a new model for imitation.36 The match pitted two football styles and philosophies against each other: the patient, fluid, technically refined, and short-passing combination game of Hogan’s 2-3-5 Vienna school formation, versus the physically more robust and quicker long-range kick-and-rush game of Herbert Chapman’s 3-2-2-3 (W-M) formation with an extra defender. With it, Chapman led Arsenal to its first silverware with the FA Cup in 1930 and two league titles in 1931 and 1933. In essence, this was a battle between offensive elegance and defensive pragmatism.37 Like other experts, Meisl understood the outcome of the match to mean that continental football had caught up with the English game, if not overtaken it. He covered it in the Voss in a text that is exemplary of his highly rhetorical style. Here, he contrasted England’s “spiritless” “football routine” style of playing with the “dancelike and gracious” Austrian way of play: “The creatively assembled orchestra trumped the great concert machine. The English football ‘gramophone’ plays many records beautifully, but the Austrian football collective can play without rehearsing and improvise random variations.”38 These were not the lines of a dispassionate observer but rather an expression of Meisl’s Austrian patriotism and pride in his Jewish identity. Not only did he root for an Austrian team for which he had once played and that his brother, a Viennese Jew, coached, but he also identified with the nation that the Wunderteam represented. The historian Eric Hobsbawm, another Viennese Jew, some twenty years younger than Meisl, beautifully summarized football’s ability to create a sense of national belonging when reflecting on the previous 1930 England versus Austria encounter: “What has made football so uniquely effective a medium for inculcating national feelings, at all events for males, is that the . . . imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of 11 named people.”39 Not surprisingly, the memory of the match stayed with Meisl until the end of his life. He was not alone in this. Matthias Marschik accords this Austrian defeat in 1932 a similar importance as a formative moment for Austrian national identity in the First Republic to the West German victory over Hungary some two decades later in the 1954 World Cup final for the young Federal Republic.40 The reception both teams received upon their return was certainly strikingly similar, with thousands accompanying their train journey back from

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the Austrian and German borders and hundreds of thousands celebrating their arrival in Vienna and Munich, respectively.41 Eleven years later, Meisl thought the match important enough to use its memory on behalf of the British war effort. In a radio propaganda address written for the Political Warfare Executive and directed “To the Austrians,” he prompted his audience on 8 December 1943 to remember the First Republic before Austria had become a “Nazi arsenal,” “Prussian barracks,” and “colony of the Reich,” and of the day when “eleven Austrians took England by storm and created mutual appreciation, closer relations and friendship” between the two nations.42 In a 1941 article for the antifascist Free Austria magazine he also reminded the thirty thousand strong exile community of his countrymen in the United Kingdom of the Wunderteam and expressed his “hope that Austria will again be able to lead or at least to march with the vanguard” in football after the war.43 Austria, of course, never again became the football power it had been in the 1920s and 1930s, in part because it was annexed, and then overshadowed. With the Anschluss, Austria had lost its status as the premier German football nation to the later developing but much larger (West) Germany.

Assimilationism and Zionism Given the size and importance of Viennese Jewry and the fact that Theodor Herzl, the “father of Zionism,” spent most of his career as a journalist, writer, and political activist in the Austrian capital, it is unsurprising that several Jewish sports clubs existed in interwar Vienna and that these held differing views on Jewish assimilation and separateness. Two of them shared a strong mutual dislike that occasionally even spilled over into street brawls. Hugo and Willy Meisl belonged to Wiener Amateure/Austria Wien, which was the club of the assimilated bourgeois Viennese Jewry. It could rely on support and sponsorship from the local wealthy Jewish middle class, but its membership was also open to non-Jews. The other club, Hakoah Vienna, brought together the Viennese Zionists and accepted only Jews as members, except coaching staff.44 Founded only in 1909, Hakoah grew rapidly in size and stature in the interwar years and won Austrian national titles in a variety of sports, from wrestling to swimming to water polo and athletics. As mentioned above, in 1923, it convincingly beat West Ham United, and in 1925 the club famously took the Austrian football league title with an all-Jewish team.45 The Hakoah athlete and writer Friedrich Torberg (1908–79), like Meisl a decade or so earlier a part of the Austrian national water polo team, articulated his pride in having been a member of the club with its blue and white colors and the Star of David on its kit, at the time when Hakoah asserted itself in Austrian sports: “I had the

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invaluable luck of having never—not even a second—been ‘ashamed’ of being Jewish. What should I have been ashamed of? That Jews scored more goals, swam faster and boxed better than others?”46 Willy Meisl shared Torberg’s pride in his Jewish background and in contrast to his brother Hugo he also showed an appreciation of Hakoah’s successes and once called the club “the greatest creative achievement of Viennese Jewry.”47 This explains why he never hesitated to combat the antisemitic stereotype of the physically deficient Jews. In 1925, for example, he wrote an article entitled “Jüdische Champions” ( Jewish champions) for the magazine Der Schild (The Shield) of the patriotic Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten (German Reich Federation of Jewish Front Soldiers), of which he may have been a member himself.48 It emphasized the historic achievements of Jewish athletes. That the article was published in Der Schild is testament to the fact that, while Meisl shared some of Zionism’s ideas, he saw himself predominantly as a member of the bürgerlich (bourgeois) sports movement. While his Jewish readers might not have needed such reminders, the same did not necessarily apply to the readership of the Voss. There he stood up twice in 1933 against antisemitism. With the Nazi stormtroopers arbitrarily beating up and arresting political opponents after 30 January 1933, he no doubt took a significant risk to his own personal safety on both occasions. In June 1933 the veteran sportswriter Walther Bensemann was pushed out as editor of Der Kicker because he was a Jew, even though he had already announced his retirement from the magazine for shortly afterward.49 From 1920 onward he had toiled tirelessly to make Der Kicker the most important football magazine in Germany, arguably also making it the most important in Europe at the time, if not the world. After having dedicated his entire life and personal fortune to football, Bensemann was made to die penniless as a broken man in Swiss exile in Montreux in November 1934 less than a year-and-a-half later. Not holding back but choosing his words wisely, Meisl used his weekly column in the Voss to comment and deplore his forced retirement, while praising Bensemann’s life-long efforts on behalf of the sport: “Bigger things are moving the world, more important things are decided in and about Germany. The individual though needs to act in their circle to vouch for honesty and purity, decency, and gratefulness. In this circle Walther Bensemann’s exit from his magazine ‘Der Kicker’ will be noted with painful regret.”50 In another article in the Voss in April 1933, which repeated the main points of his contributions for Der Schild, Meisl illuminated flaws in Nazi racial ideology by emphasizing Jewish prowess in all kinds of sports from boxing to athletics to tennis and ice hockey. Meisl’s “Von ‘Danny’ Mendoza zu Carr” (From ‘Danny’ Mendoza to Carr) started with the ironically understated, laconic sentence, “Perhaps the history of Jewish sports is of particular interest to wider sports circles today.”51 In what followed, Meisl provided a tour de force in examples of Jewish athletic achievements through the ages, including the

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late-eighteenth-century Anglo-Jewish Sephardic heavyweight prize fighter, and leading up to his own present, as represented by the Jewish-American runner Bill Carr, the four-hundred-meter gold medalist at the 1932 Olympics. To emphasize the relevance of his argument for contemporary Germany, he also included references to prominent contemporary Jewish-German athletes like the tennis players Daniel Prenn and Ilse Friedleben; the boxers Harry Stein, Felix Friedemann, and Erich Selig; and the sprinters Alex Natan, Fritz Gerber, Georg Kurz, and Oskar Kurz. While as a Jew Meisl himself was primarily an exponent of Austrian-German culture, it appears that he left behind his belief in Jewish assimilation when in exile. Not that the difference between assimilationism and Zionism had been so dramatic in the interwar years to begin with, but with the Nazi seizure of power it had become obsolete. It is therefore unsurprising that Meisl collaborated from London several times with the Zionist journalist and author Felix Daniel Pinczower (1901–93). Pinczower is best known for his 1937 Der jüdische Läufer (The Jewish runner), which he wrote in response to the exclusion of German Jews from the 1936 Berlin Olympics. In it, he presented the reader somewhat anachronistically and uncritically with numerous examples of runners from the Hebrew Bible and the Mishnah.52 Pinczower and Meisl jointly published several newspaper articles in Zionist papers and contributed the chapter on sport to Siegmund Kaznelson’s encyclopedic study, Juden im deutschen Kulturbereich ( Jews in the German cultural orbit).53 The book was commissioned to Kaznelson by Leopold Ullstein, one of the scions of the eponymous publishing family, for whose papers Meisl had worked. With more than forty chapters covering the Jewish contributions to every conceivable aspect of German culture from literature to nuclear physics, it was intended as a “response to the Nazi attempt to discredit the Jews and cast them as a parasitic alien people.”54 Because the Nazi authorities banned its publication after seeing the proofs, its first edition saw the light of day only in 1959.

“They Seized Power through Gymnastics” While embracing Austrian patriotism and Zionism, Meisl was extremely critical of German aggressive nationalism. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, he thought that the rise of Hitler was to a large extent due to German Turnen (gymnastics) and dedicated an entire book entitled Sie turnten zur Macht (They seized power through gymnastics) to the relationship between this system of bodily practices and German nationalism.55 For Meisl, German gymnastics was the “crèche of the hardest nationalism, the primary school of chauvinism,” due to the “German negation of the individual and their freedom,” which was exemplified in the “emphasis of the group and annulment of the

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individual ‘on behalf ’ of the community” that German Turnen had advocated from the early nineteenth century.56 Turnen—the word itself was a German neologism by its creator Friedrich Jahn intended to replace the Greek term gymnastics—was different from sport in that its original emphasis was not on individual bodily improvement and competition but rather on the collective achievement of the Turnriege (gymnastics squad), which was meant to represent the nation in its entirety. With the concurrent rise of English sports in the nineteenth century, this led to a split between the Turner movement and the German advocates of “English sports” who were part of international developments like the Olympic movement. That said, German sports functionaries, such as, most prominently, Diem were not necessarily significantly less nationalistic than the Turner, a fact that Meisl tended to forgive and forget. However, he certainly had a point in that Turnen was closely associated with the birth of the German nationalist movement against a French enemy during the Napoleonic Wars. Svenja Goltermann has shown how the nineteenthcentury German Turner movement used bodily exercise as a tool for national improvement and means to incorporate and embody German national identity.57 Meisl was also right in likewise pointing his finger at the Deutsche Turnerschaft (German Gymnastics Association), the main organization of the movement, because its leader in the interwar period, Edmund Neuendorff, was a convinced Nazi and led many of its members to support National Socialism.58 However, the monocausal explanation “Sie turnten zur Macht” (They seized power through gymnastics) offered for the rise of Nazism carried with it the deficits of all histories that reduce complex historical processes to a single factor. This probably explains why the book never saw the light of day and only small parts of it ever came out as newspaper articles.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have sought to show how, through his journalism, Willy Meisl not only played an important part in satisfying the German public’s insatiable appetite for press coverage of international sports events, but also expressed his Austrian patriotism and Jewish pride alongside articulating his basic understanding of sport. Moreover, Meisl occasionally used the genre of sports journalism, of which he was one of the most creative exponents, to fight aggressive German nationalism and antisemitism through an emphasis on sports internationalism and by defending the Jews against accusations of physical deficiency. The chapter’s most important point, however, is less direct. The example of the Austrian “father of (German) sports journalism” shows how “the German football nation” has always been a contested notion. In fact, throughout

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the history of the sport in the German-speaking world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, one really needs to speak about “German football nations.” For Meisl, it was Austria, not Germany that was at the center of the German-speaking football world until after World War II, promoting tactical innovations, professionalism, Jewish players, internationalism, and, probably including himself, innovative sports writing. In this context, his identification with the Austrian Wunderteam is a vivid testament to the many ways in which football nations might be constructed and at times mythologized.

Author Kay Schiller is professor of modern European history, Durham University (England). Dr. Schiller is a cultural historian of twentieth-century Europe whose publishing record includes coedited volumes on German sports history and the history of the FIFA World Cup, an award-winning coauthored monograph on the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, and a monograph on the 1974 FIFA World Cup in West Germany. His latest book is a biography of Alex Natan (1906-1971), a queer Jewish-German world-class sprinter, antifascist, émigré to Britain and prominent post-war journalist (Wallstein, 2022). In addition, he serves as the editor-in-chief of the journal Sport in History (Taylor & Francis).

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

See Gilman, The Jew’s Body. Koller, “Transnationalität: Netzwerke, Wettbewerbe, Migration,” 60–63. Eggers, “Revolutionär und Prophet,” 180. Quoted in A. Hafer and W. Hafer, Hugo Meisl, 70. All translations are by the author. On the different treatment of Jews in the German and Habsburg imperial armies, see Berger, Eisernes Kreuz. The Jewish Chronicle, 25 October 1935, 42; 15 September 1939, 29; and 21 June 1968, 47. The Jewish Chronicle, 4 December 1936. The Jewish Chronicle, 18 February 1949. See the radio manuscripts “Under Nazi Rule” for the BBC Home Service (10 March 1940) and “Sportsmen’s Corner” for the General Forces Programme (21 June 1944) at Deutsche Sporthochschule Köln (DSHS Cologne; German Sport University Cologne), Olympic Studies Center, Willy Meisl Collection. These files form part of a very small number of surviving Meisl papers, with the rest considered lost. See the voluminous exchange of letters between Meisl and Diem from the 1920s onward in DSHS Cologne, Carl und Liselott Diem Archiv, Diem Korrespondenz, Meisl, Willy.

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11. Meisl, Soccer Revolution. 12. Meisl, Der Sport am Scheidewege, 20; see Eggers, “Die Geschichte der Sportpubli13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

zistik,“ Teil 1 (bis 1945), 10–24. Eggers, “‘Deutsch wie der Sport, so auch das Wort!,’” 162. Doerry, “Sportpresse und Sportberichterstattung,” 577. Quoted in Eggers, “Deutsch wie der Sport,” 162. Ibid., 162–63. Fulda, Press and Politics, 30. Meisl, “Schablonen-Fußball oder Intelligenz-Spiel?” Meisl, “Der UHU-Sport des Monats: Fußball,” 68–70; Meisl, “Schmelings Knockout-Rezept,” 122–24. Meisl, Die Olympischen Spiele 1924, 5. Eggers, “Deutsch wie der Sport,” 162. Meisl, “Auf dem Weg zu Olympia”; Meisl, “Amerikanische Eindrücke”; Meisl, “Rund um Olympia.” Meisl, Der Sport am Scheidewege, 131. Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty, 3. Becker, “Der Sportler als ‘moderner Menschentyp,” 225. See Brecht, “Die Krise des Sports,” 144–46; and Fleig, Körperkultur und Moderne. Meisl, Der Sport am Scheidewege, 75. “Rundfunk: Rekord”; on Natan, see Schiller, “Der schnellste Jude Deutschlands,” 185–218. Eisenberg, “English Sports,”, 337. Quoted in Havemann, Fußball unterm Hakenkreuz, 161. Meisl, Der Sport am Scheidewege, 56. Ibid., 62. Ibid., 64. Ibid., 131. The Times (London), 8 December 1932. Hafer, Hugo Meisl, 249. Ibid., 195. Meisl, “Fußball ohne Geist.” Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalisms Since 1780, 143. Marschik, “Wiener Melange,” 258. A. Hafer and W. Hafer, Hugo Meisl, 250; see Herzog, “Win Globally—Party Locally,” 125–41. Meisl, “An die Österreicher.” Meisl, “The ‘Wonder’ Team,” 9. Hachleitner, Marschik, and Spitaler, Sportfunktionäre und jüdische Differenz, 246. See Bunzl, “Hakoah Vienna,” 106–15; and Bowman, “Hakoah Vienna,” 642–68. Quoted in A. Hafer and W. Hafer, Hugo Meisl, 32. Quoted in Bernett, “Der Aufstieg der jüdischen Sportbewegung,” 79. Meisl, “Jüdische Champions,” 436; see also Meisl, “Die Juden im Sport,” 213–18. Beyer, Der Mann, 398. Meisl, “Was die Woche brachte”; emphasis in original. Meisl, “Von ‘Danny’ Mendoza bis Carr.”. Ashkenazi, “German Jewish Athletes,” 134; Zimmermann, “Die Antike als Erinnerungsarsenal, 38–39.

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Meisl and Pinczower, “Sport,” 926–36. Mendes-Flohr, “Jews within German Culture,”193. Meisl, Sie turnten zur Macht. Meisl, “Politisches Ethos im Sport.” See Goltermann, Körper der Nation; and Goltermann, “Exercise and Perfection,” 333–46. 58. Ueberhorst, Edmund Neuendorff, 7. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

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The everyday, media, arts, and stars], edited by Markwart Herzog, 161–81. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2008. ———. “Die Geschichte der Sportpublizistik in Deutschland, Teil 1 (bis 1945): Von der Turnpresse im 19. Jahrhundert zur gleichgeschalteten Sportpresse im ‘Dritten Reich’” [The history of sport journalism in Germany, Part 1 (until 1945): From the gymnastics press in the 19th century to synchronized sport journalism in the “Third Reich”]. In Handbuch Medien, Kommunikation und Sport [Handbook of media, communications and sport], edited by Thomas Schierl, 10–24. Schorndorf: Hofmann, 2006. ———. “Revolutionär und Prophet. Willy Meisl (1895–1968)” [Revolutionary and prophet. Willy Meisl (1895–1968”]. In “Sind’s froh, dass Sie zu Hause geblieben sind”: Die Mediatisierung des Sports in Österreich [“You should be happy that you stayed at home”: The mediatization of sport in Austria], edited by Matthias Marschik and Rudolf Müllner, 179–88. Göttingen: Verlag die Werkstatt, 2010. Eisenberg, Christiane. “English Sports” und deutsche Bürger: Eine Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 1800–1939 [“English sports” and German citizens: A societal history 1800–1939]. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1999. Fleig, Anne. Körperkultur und Moderne: Robert Musils Ästhetik des Sports [Body culture and modernity: Robert Musil’s aesthetic of sport]. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008. Fulda, Bernhard. Press and Politics in the Weimar Republic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Gilman, Sander. The Jew’s Body. New York: Routledge, 1992. Goltermann, Svenja. “Exercise and Perfection: Embodying the Nation in NineteenthCentury Germany.” European Review of History: Revue Européenne d’Histoire 11, no. 3 (2004): 333–46. ———. Körper der Nation. Habitusformierung und die Politik des Turnens 1860–1890 [Body of a nation. Habitus formation and the politics of gymnastics 1860–1890]. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998. Hachleitner, Bernhard, Matthias Marschik, and Georg Spitaler. Sportfunktionäre und jüdische Differenz: Zwischen Anerkennung und Antisemitismus—Wien 1918 bis 1938 [Sports officials and Jewish difference: Between recognition and antisemitism]. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018. Hafer, Andreas, and Wolfgang Hafer. Hugo Meisl oder: die Erfindung des modernen Fußballs [Hugo Meisl or: The invention of modern football]. Göttingen: Verlag die Werkstatt, 2007. Hau, Michael. The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany. A Social History, 1890–1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Havemann, Nils. Fußball unterm Hakenkreuz. Der DFB zwischen Sport, Politik und Kommerz [Football under the swastika. The DFB between sport, politics and commerce]. Frankfurt: Campus, 2005. Herzog, Markwart. “Win Globally—Party Locally: The ‘Miracle of Berne’ and Its Local Reception.” In The FIFA World Cup 1930–2010. Politics, Commerce, Spectacle, and Identities, edited by Stefan Rinke and Kay Schiller, 125–41. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2014. Hobsbawm, Eric. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Koller, Christian. “Transnationalität: Netzwerke, Wettbewerbe, Migration” [Transnationalism: networks, competition, migration]. In Fußball zwischen den Kriegen. Europa 1918–1939 [Football between the wars. Europe 1918–1939], edited by Christian Koller and Fabian Brändle, 37–63. Münster: Lit, 2010.

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Meisl, Willy. “Amerikanische Eindrücke.” Vossische Zeitung, 7 August 1932. ———. “Auf dem Weg zu Olympia.” Vossische Zeitung, 17 July 1932. ———, ed. Der Sport am Scheidewege [Sports at the crossroads]. Heidelberg: Iris, 1928. ———. “Die Juden im Sport.” Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin [Community bulletin of the Jewish community in Berlin] 18, no. 5 (May 1928): 127–130 and 23 no. 7 ( July 1933): 213–218. ———. Die Olympischen Spiele 1924. In Wort, Bild, Statistik [The Olympic Games 1924. in word, picture and statistics]. Oldenburg: AGON SportsWorld, 1924. ———. “Jüdische Champions,” Der Schild. Zeitschrift des Reichsbundes jüdischer Frontsoldaten e.V. 4, no. 34, 27 November 1925. ———. “Politisches Ethos im Sport.” Deutsche Teilnahme an den Olympischen Spielen,” Göttinger Universitäts-Zeitung [Göttingen University Newspaper] 2, no. 10, 25 April 1947. ———. “Rund um Olympia.” Vossische Zeitung, 14 August 1932. ———. Sie turnten zur Macht, DSHS Köln, Olympic Studies Center, Willy Meisl Collection. ———. Soccer Revolution. Great Britain Taught the World How to Play and Enjoy Association Football—Later to Be Taught Many a Hard Lesson by Former Pupils. London: Sportsmans Book Club, 1956. ———. “The ‘Wonder’ Team.” Free Austria. Monthly Review of the Austria Office 2.1, October 1941, 8–9. ———. “Von ‘Danny’ Mendoza bis Carr” (From “Danny” Mendoza to Carr) Vossische Zeitung, 16 April 1933. ———. “Was die Woche brachte” Vossische Zeitung, 4 June 1933. Meisl, Willy, and Felix Daniel Pinczower, “Sport.” In Juden im deutschen Kulturbereich: Ein Sammelwerk [ Jews in the cultural realm: A collection], edited by Siegmund Kaznelson, 926–36. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1959. Mendes-Flohr, Paul. “Jews within German Culture.” In German-Jewish History in Modern Times Volume 4: Renewal and Destruction 1918–1945, edited by Michael Brenner and Michael Meyer, 170–94. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. “Rundfunk: Rekord.” Vossische Zeitung, 24 July 1929. Schiller, Kay. “Der schnellste Jude Deutschlands”—Sport, Moderne und (Körper-)politik im bewegten Leben Alex Natans (1906–1971)” [The fastest Jew in Germany—sport, modernity and (body-)politics in the momentous life of Alex Natan (1906–1971)]. Stadion. International Journal of the History of Sport 43, no. 2 (2019): 185–218. Ueberhorst, Horst. Edmund Neuendorff. Turnführer ins Dritte Reich [Edmund Neuendorff. Gymnastics leader into the Third Reich]. Berlin: Bartels u. Wernitz, 1970. Zimmermann, Moshe. “Die Antike als Erinnerungsarsenal. Vorbilder des jüdischen Sports” [Antiquity as an arsenal of memories. Role models in German Judaism and after emigration]. In Populäre Konstruktionen von Erinnerung im deutschen Judentum und nach der Emigration. [Popular constructions of memory in German Judaism and after emigration], edited by Yotam Hotam and Joachim Jacob, 33–51. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004.

CHAPTER 5



Commodified, Corrupted, and Capitalist

Combatting the Modern Athletic Machine in Melchior Vischer’s Fußballspieler und Indianer REBECCAH DAWSON

I

n 1928, journalist Willy Meisl declared athletics as key in understanding German zeitgeist, proclaiming that the essence of the times can be felt in sport.1 Whether in print or on the field, sport has consistently mirrored German culture and society, most notably throughout the ever-changing societal norms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and Meisl’s quote rings just as true today as it did in 1928. The 1920s saw the popularity of sport begin to intersect with cultural production of the age, influencing the lives and works of Weimar artists. Football, in particular, rose to the forefront of popularity during the golden twenties, both in the stadium and in the artistic realm. Indeed, respected Dada and avant-garde artist Melchior Vischer (born Emil Fischer) combined his own two passions, literature and football, in his 1924 play Fußballspieler und Indianer: Für die alte Welt eine Tragödie, für die neue Welt eine Komödie und umgekehrt (Football players and indians: a tragedy for the old world, a comedy for the new world and vice versa).2 Vischer, who had already dabbled with football in literature in his debut Sekunde durch Hirn (Second through Brain, 1920), whose protagonist was briefly a professional footballer, composed Fußballspieler3 during the rise of the professionalization of football during the 1920s, undoubtedly due in large part to the massive increase in both popularity as well as the high number of both amateur and professional teams throughout the German-speaking world. However, rather than laud the upward trajectory of football, Vischer’s drama poses a searing critique on the rise of professional football stardom and its resulting commodification in modern society. This chapter will first explore

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the growth of football as a mass phenomenon in German culture and the crossroads at which the sport found itself during the Weimar period. Subsequently, the chapter will examine Vischer’s drama Fußballspieler in light of the commodified corruption rampant in and symbolic of modernity of Weimar society. Vischer’s drama posits the corrupted, commodified, and capitalistic nature of sport, where the true nature of sport and its inherent fun is entirely engulfed by the upper echelons of modern athletic society. However, Fußballspieler offers a feasible solution to the modernity sport encounters in literature, albeit a difficult one to achieve. Vischer does not look to the future to relieve sport from the corruption and influence of the modern elite but rather imagines that the tentative rescue of sport from its commodified state can occur only if it is removed from the civilized, cooperate, modern urban landscape entirely. Vischer implements sport as a lens through which to reveal the path to overcoming a capitalistic and corrupted society by returning to what he deems the raw, primitive, and primal state of sport before such modern and elitist corruption ever occurred. While Vischer imagines the solution as a return to an untarnished, pre-commercialized sport away from the metropolitan cityscape, his work culminates with its failure and the impossibility of such success, given the unchanging and corrosive state society has already achieved. Vischer’s play, then, ultimately reveals the explicit danger and continued corruption of a sporting society ruled by the capitalistic elite. However, though Vischer poses a viable solution to the problem, the corrosive influence of the metropolitan elite grows so strong that it engulfs any attempt at escape and foretells, via the literary sporting world, the forthcoming perilous state of German society yet to come. In order to understand Vischer’s play with the interlocutors of the time, it is important to situate his work within the state of the German football world, as well as within his own literary oeuvre, at the time of its conception. Though a football fan himself, his venture into football in literature did not jumpstart his career. To be sure, he was already a respected avant-garde and Dada artist, propelled by his first novel Second through Brain, considered to be the first and only Dada novel,4 by the time the drama debuted on stage in Darmstadt in 1926. As a critic for the Prager Presse (Prague Press) after World War I, Vischer was exposed to the newest theater productions and film releases as well as to the novel and most popular art and literature of the time.5 By 1923 Vischer had left Prague for Germany, where he worked as a dramatic advisor and director in the theaters in Würzburg, Bamberg, Baden-Baden, and Frankfurt am Main. It is during this time that his drama Fußballspieler was conceived, with publication in 1924 and premiere in 1926, only months before Vischer left the theater world entirely for Berlin. While Vischer was a recognized name in Expressionism and Dada during the 1920s, this drama rarely appears on a list of his works and there are significantly fewer references to it in secondary literature. While there has been a surge of sorts in recent years with the rediscovery of this “tragic-

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grotesque” drama,6 it is an unusually limited scope in comparison to his other works.7 Scholars such as Andreas Kramer discuss Vischer’s drama as a prime example of the athletic embodiment of Expressionism in German literature, owing in large part to the structure of the play itself.8 As Kramer rightly notes, the play can be viewed as “one of the earliest reactions to professional football in German literature.”9 Though perhaps too quickly overlooked, this drama shines light on the darker, negative influence of professionalization on the massively popular sport and the power it wielded in modern German society. As aforementioned, football was not an entirely new theme for Vischer in his literary endeavors, considering its brief appearance in Second through Brain. In fact, Vischer refers to himself as a footballer in an article for Die Szene (The Scene) in 1926, citing it as source for his athletic literary endeavors.10 This comes, perhaps, as no surprise when one considers the popularity of football and the rise in professionalism at play in Prague, which was comparable to that of neighboring Germany and Austria, in the early 1920s when Vischer was reporting for the Prager Presse. It seems nearly impossible to have escaped the cultural production of football at the time. Vischer, like many of his contemporaries in the German literary realm, was openly intrigued by the combination of sport and the so-called high arts. The canonical author most associated with sport in German literature is arguably Bertolt Brecht, whose path Vischer would cross when both lived in Berlin at the end of the 1920s.11 While Brecht’s theories on sport would develop steadily throughout the decade, his initial thoughts and arguments were sketched out in “Das Theater als Sport” (“Theater as Sport”), which would be published as small newspaper pieces throughout the 1920s. Like Vischer, Brecht began voicing his distrust of the seizure of sport by the upper classes yet saw the organic connection that could be achieved when combining athletic and artistic cultures. Indeed, “Theater as Sport” uses sport—albeit not football but rather boxing, a favorite of Brecht’s—to elucidate the problems at play with modern drama, which he deemed vacant of critical thought. The theater, Brecht argued, should be more like a sports arena, where people go knowing what will happen. Patrons attend without high pretense, watch, and are invested in a fight without losing themselves in the action. That is to say, sport allows for the critical distance Brecht advocated as essential in individual thought. This concept of alienation, the vital attribute in his concept of Episches Theater (Epic Theater), would come to be a cornerstone of his later works and iconic groundwork in twentieth-century German drama.12 Though Vischer and Brecht were not explicitly documented as being close friends at the time Fußballspieler was published, it is not a stretch to think that Brecht’s influence and rising notoriety had reached Vischer in the theater circuit. Scholar Karl-Heinz J. Schoeps, for example, notes Brecht’s widespread influence: “Brecht inspired the playwright and producer Melchior Vischer [he

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produced Brecht’s one act play The Wedding in 1926] to write and stage a play about football and football players entitled Fußballspieler und Indianer [Football Players and Indians].”13 Considering that Fußballspieler was staged the same year as Vischer’s production of Brecht’s play, it is safe to assume that the drama was, as Manfred Voigts notes, “certainly not produced entirely without Brecht’s influence.”14 Indeed, Vischer seemingly draws explicit connections to Brecht’s “Theater as Sport” in an interview with Die Szene after the play’s premiere. In it he declares: “For me, sport is the staging area, focal point, and center of the stage, of a new stage.  . . . [T]he audience at the Sportpalast would suddenly become the audience at the theater.”15 He also notes that there is only one thing that should be valued in a dramatic production: “die Wirkung [the effect].”16 Vischer, then, advocates for a new theatricality, which brings the audience to individual thought. Like Brecht’s Epic Theater, Vischer proposes dramas, which do not bore the viewer into passivity, but rather effect change. It is precisely that aspect of drama on which this chapter focuses: the ability of a drama to bring the viewer to independent thought, incite social change, and see the professionalization as the corrosive influence of the elite, capitalistic society of the modern city at odds with the precommercial, raw state of football in the wild. While the state of theater and the dramatic tendencies of the author are vital in understanding the play, it is also important to take note of the societal and athletic arenas surrounding its composition and production. Though the play was published during Vischer’s time theater hopping as a director around Germany, his years as a reporter and critic at the Prager Presse (1921–23) and the professionalization dilemma in football in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Germany almost certainly played a role in the drama’s conception. At the turn of the twentieth century, clubs began forming throughout Germany. The late 1870s saw the founding of teams in Hannover (1878) and Bremen (1880), while others in Austria (First Vienna football club, 1894) and Czechoslovakia (Slavia Prague and Sparta Prague in 1892 and 1893 as well as FC Prag [Football Club Prague] in 1896) soon followed suit. The Deutscher Fußball-Bund (DFB; German Football Association) was then officially founded in 1900, with eighty-six teams from all over the Austro-Hungarian Empire, including across Germany, and in Prague and Vienna. The expansion of the association happened at a phenomenal pace. Five years after its foundation, the DFB had 254 clubs with 13,000 players. Five years later, in 1910, there were 1,361 clubs totaling 111,000 players. By the beginning of World War I in 1914, the league boasted more than 2,200 clubs.17 The rate of growth also points toward the popularity of football and the rise of the sport as a mass phenomenon at all levels of society. While football’s notoriety in larger cities drew interest from the public, it was not until after World War I that the popularity of football began to rise exponentially, and the financial windfall the sport could offer came to the fore-

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front. What remained largely a working-class sport before World War I (due in large part to the Industrial Revolution and the English roots of the game) had become a cash cow during the postwar years for club owners, who took advantage of the sport’s transition into a fan-oriented and professionalized athletic event. With such popularity, the rise of football as a mass phenomenon seamlessly integrated itself into the literary works of the day.18 A prime example of this lies in the fact that players from the Czech team AC Sparta are auctioned in the first act of Fußballspieler. It is of note that this specific team is brought in by name in Vischer’s work, considering that the idea of a professional league was being hotly debated—and vocally supported by the fans of AC Sparta—at the time, and would subsequently be approved in 1925.19 With the staggering increase in professionalized teams throughout Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Germany, it is unsurprising that an avant-garde dramatist like Vischer, once a football player himself, would turn to this theme to voice a critique of the misfortune and social upheaval such commercialization and commodification could bring. Fußballspieler does not simply give a play-by-play of Indian footballers, but also presents a staggering eight acts that trace a transformation of both football and football stars in the city and in the ancient jungle landscape. This dichotomy begins in a metropolitan city with the exploits of football midfielder Bill “the Bomber” Week as he embarks on a professional football career. After only a few games on an affluent football team, however, Bill suffers an injury that sidelines his promising career. Realizing he is no longer the dominant and popular player his career promised and unwilling to conform to the cultured rules dictated by the club, Bill abandons professional football to work as a stoker on a locomotive in South America. During a trip through the Urwald (primeval forest/jungle) along the Orinoco River, he quite literally stumbles over the elders of an Indian tribe while playing football with his fellow workers.20 After upsetting the elders and narrowly escaping execution thanks to Waya, a young woman of the tribe and daughter of the traditional healer, Bill returns to the city, only to discover that Opito, the chief ’s son, and Waya had stowed away on the train. Bill befriends the two and teaches Opito to play football, who eventually secures a position on the professional team. Bill’s fate, however, ultimately does not lie on the urban football field, and he returns to the tribe’s village, marries Waya, and becomes the new chief. Bill’s reign, though, is short lived. When Opito and Schimsa, the team’s recruiter, approach the tribe to bring more indigenous players to the league, Bill challenges Opito to a fight to the death in the forest. Opito returns from battle alone, and the tribe follows him to become a new athletic commodity in the city. In following the title and basic premise of the play’s events, the absurd nature of the drama becomes utterly apparent. The title on its own, Fußballspieler und Indianer: Für die alte Welt eine Tragödie, für die neue Welt eine Komödie und

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umgekehrt, reveals the absurd nature of this comedy/tragedy. The eight acts also contribute to the nontraditional theatrical components the drama presents to the reader/viewer. Moreover, not only are the events geographically nonsensical, in that a European player named Bill Week leaves his professional career to work as a stoker on a locomotive traveling down a South American river, but also suggesting that Indians who have never been exposed to a city landscape or population embrace and immediately display football talent is ridiculous. Indeed, even individual scenes, such as that of the Indian elders worshipping a football, relying on it to dictate the fate of the tribe’s fiercest warriors, only further support the absurdity Vischer no doubt intended to be portrayed on stage. In Vischer’s play, the absurd content and character layout continuously alienates the audience, forcing each to step back and critically analyze the actions occurring before them rather than identify (and thus lose themselves) in the characters and action. At the same time, Vischer’s Dada and avant-garde tendencies are also arguably responsible for the primitive and absurd nature of the play, casting everyday environments—like the football stadium—in an absurd and grotesque light. Regardless of the source, the absurdity prominent in the groundwork of Vischer’s play worked to achieve this desired alienation, allowing the viewer to focus on the fatal results of the commodification and corruption rampant in the further professionalization of football and its players. Vischer posits football as a microcosm of capitalism, revealing the danger not only to the athletic world, but to society at large when absolute power is held exclusively by any society’s upper class. While the drama predominantly focuses on the introduction of Indians to the urban jungle of German society, Vischer’s drama begins at the core of metropolitan athletic corruption: a player auction, whereby athletes are sold like slaves on an auction block. Players hoping to become professionals stand on and move across stage, as the elite managers and trainers of the club haggle over price. Naturally, the richest teams easily acquire the best talent. At center stage directly before the audience, Chester and Townly, managers for a relatively new professional club, sit with their talent scout Schimsa and discuss their desire for a star player to bring them fame and fortune. As the men converse and players are displayed on the auction block, statistics, athletic qualities, and accomplishments are listed off for the bidding crowd. In this first glimpse into Vischer’s athletic world, sport has become an industry for itself within society, with players are treated like commodities sold to the highest bidder. In fact, Schimsa openly views the players as products, continually referring to players as Ware (wares) and stating, “People work here. Here players are objects to be bought: and who can say that you would have been cheap with other things?”21 Schimsa was, after all, hired by the managers to buy good players for cheap. As a top-class scout, he prides himself on finding the top raw talent for the lowest price. While this may sound ideal for the clubs, it reduces the players to subhu-

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man objects, paid the least amount possible for their talent. Bill, who later enters the scene, is the best option for Schimsa, since “[Bill] will be very cheap. He does not even know his worth. He does not yet know that his talent and quality is a commodity for some people [points to himself ].”22 Moreover, he does not care to know Bill’s name, seeing him only as a goal scorer: “What are names? His name is no name. But his shot on goal is a shot on goal. That suffices.”23 Already in the opening sequence of the play, it is utterly apparent that athletes are no longer viewed as human, but rather as objects to be bought and sold to achieve victory, which in turn will make money for the club and its owners. The industry surrounding football eradicates any primal “fun” found in its execution. It is not about whether the player enjoys his role or can rally the team behind him. Playing football as a means unto itself ceases to exist entirely. Schimsa even describes the most important productive attribute for a star player on their team as “Scoring goals! That is the only productivity that is important and impressive here. Scoring goals, that is the productivity of our century—A strong goal scorer: out of nowhere, he draws points; the points grow larger and turn into spheres and then into footballs, which turn into goals—out of nowhere: Goals!”24 Each player ceases to be human, but rather is a commodity necessary in achieving points, and therewith success. As long as the player is able to put goals in the record book, the style or motivation for playing is unimportant. The footballer Schimsa, Chester, and Townly purchase is not bought because of his raw talent and his enjoyment of the game, but rather because he, as their featured star player, would make their product more marketable, and thus earn the club revenue. This introduction to football clearly shows a world already entrenched in capitalistic ideals and relegated by the upper classes of the athletic world. Because Townly and Chester cannot afford high-class players (like those from AC Sparta, who quickly go for high prices), they hesitantly accept Schimsa’s suggestion of Bill Week as their new midfielder. Unlike other footballers present, Bill is not there to be auctioned into the league. In fact, he had no intention of becoming a professional athlete. He simply stands in the corner of the room speaking with the waiter. It is immediately clear that Bill is not the typical professional athlete, in that he is neither auctioned off nor does he even use the front door, as societal rules dictate. Bill, unlike those who conform to the athletic society, enters through a window specifically, as he states, “because the door was already open.”25 His entrance immediately distinguishes Bill as an outsider rebelling against the most basic social formalities. Rather than follow the rules—even those as simple as how to enter a room—he follows a different nontraditional, yet effective, path. His introduction on stage displays not only his distinction from the other players but also foreshadows his reputation as the league’s troublemaking rebel, who sees Schimsa and the managers for what

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they are. When Schimsa begins his recruitment, Bill responds, “I know you. You stick your dirty hands everywhere.  . . . I know you well: your grandfather was a known slave trader, your father traded young girls and you [he laughs menacingly] trade in footballers.”26 While Bill does indeed call Schimsa out for his dehumanization of athletes, he also falls for his pitch and signs on to the team. Just because he has joined the professional league, however, does not result in Bill’s adherence to the rules of the club or the league. As intimated in his initial appearance onstage, Bill does not conform to the traditional rules in place in the metropolitan, professional football league. He is not auctioned, nor does he negotiate his contract for more money. Though bought by the team solely for his perceived capitalistic worth, Bill joins simply because of his desire to play. Bill is aware of his natural talent, rather than being learned and practiced with the goal of a professional career. He, then, represents the natural, raw talent in football, without the desire to profit financially from it. In other words, he never played football for money or power, but rather plays because his skill and power are a natural part of him. Emphasizing this inherent passion for football, Bill tells the three men, “Do you know what it really means to play football?—Your own soul becomes the soul of football, your heart and skin become leather.”27 In short, football exists as a life force for Bill, and it allows for no ulterior motives from those around him. He knows no other life than one where he is athletically at one with football and is, thus, the antithesis of the commercial and profit-driven nature of the city’s elite football league. As a blue-collar worker, Bill enters the league untouched and untarnished by the contaminated state of football in the city’s modern society. In fact, Bill’s demeanor and actions come in direct contrast with how the professional league stipulates their stars should act. While he displays athletic prowess as a midfielder—arguably the most vital position on the field—Bill does not conform to the image of the perfect gentleman the club seeks off the field: he drinks, he smokes, he does not follow the curfew, and he frequently has sex with his girlfriend, to name only a few indiscretions. In other words, while Bill displays extreme talent on the field, he encompasses what was seen as a crass member of low-class society off the field. Although his uncouth nature causes concern within the team management, Bill’s popularity soars to the extent that fans call him “the Bomber.” This suggests, then, that sporting success comes not from making it suitable for upper-class society but rather by maintaining this crass, low-class mentality and passion for the game. The upper levels of the football club, while content with the results on the field, attempt to civilize his personality off the field, reminding him of the rules he contractually agreed to. Before the league championships, for example, Schimsa reminds Bill to “read the published house rules of the club to which you signed your name—everything printed is treacherous and treasonous!

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Alcohol is strictly forbidden!”28 While Bill has no intention of following such rules, he did indeed contractually agree to them in order to play football. That the contract specifically stipulates such nonathletic qualities only further emphasizes the capitalized, modern influence on sport, keeping each player in line in order to create the largest yield. Though he tries to maintain these regulated healthy habits, Bill eventually revolts, refusing to play while injured. Schimsa, Townly, and Chester dictate to Bill that he is to play, injured or not, and to score the goals he was contracted to produce. Fed up with the prescribed obligations, Bill leaves the stadium and the team behind, choosing South America where, he claims, “Football is no longer a business.”29 Bill desires “an honest life” playing “honest football”30 while working a manual labor job as a train stoker. It is only by removing himself entirely from the contaminated state of football in the city and returning to a worker’s mindset that there is any possibility of rediscovering honest sport. Bill’s raw and natural (i.e., nonmonetarily incentivized) talent cannot survive the corruption and commodification that has engulfed the metropolitan, modern athletic world. Rather than watch his own demise, Bill opts to remove himself entirely from the urban jungle, and its athletic business, in favor of the Urwald. Bill discovers an athletic realm utterly void of the capitalistic influence of modern football in an Indian tribe. As the elders of the tribe sit discussing Opito’s fate as a warrior, Bill’s football falls in the middle of the circle. Fascinated by the novel foreign object, which seemingly dropped from the heavens, they believe it to be an embodiment of a manitu (spirit being). Though there are numerous manitus maintaining differing meanings for different Native American tribes,31 it is most commonly understood as the Great Spirit—the spiritual and fundamental force of life.32 That the elders, the most revered members of the tribe, view the football as the physical representation of the fundamental life force is particularly telling. While the elders have no concept of the function of a football, it immediately holds the highest value, quite literally equating football with life, much like Bill did earlier. At the same time, this association only further solidifies the void in exposure to organized athletics. Bill, then, has produced the incarnation of this fundamental life force, which the tribe holds in the highest honor, far from the confines of the modern, urban jungle. That the ball falls into the discussion of Opito’s future as a warrior foreshadows his fate in the football world. Not only does Bill bring the life force to the Indian tribe, but he also foolishly takes it away when he attempts to return to the city. Angered by his attempt to retrieve the ball, the elders sentence Bill to death, keeping manitou safe in their possession. Escaping execution (courtesy of the young woman Waya), Bill travels back to the metropolis and his team. After finding Waya and Opito stowed away on board, Bill concocts a plan to alter the state of the athletic world by introducing an utterly foreign athlete, one completely untouched by capitalism

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and modern corruption, to the elite football society: the Indian warrior. Arriving back in the urban jungle, Opito vows to remain true not only to Bill, his source of new life outside of the Urwald, but also to his tribe in the primeval jungle. By bringing what is viewed as an uncivilized and savage player, one completely foreign to the league as well as foreign to modern, metropolitan life, Bill introduces new, primitive, and untarnished football to the professional athletic system. Opito’s athletic ability harnesses the inherent and raw talent of a player entirely disassociated from the modernity of Weimar society, and likewise foreign to the concept of athletic talent as a paid commodity. Immediately signed to Bill’s club, Opito initially plays out of curiosity for the game and continues because of the enjoyment he discovers on the field, and not for the money he earns. Opito epitomizes the idea of a primeval, premodern society—one untouched by the modern, bourgeois ideals found in the city. However, shortly after exposure to the intricacies of the elitist athletic machine, his loyalty to the pure life force of football and to his friend are corrupted by league executives, who view the tribe as a market for new and talented players exclusively for their team. It does not take long for the upper powers of the club to seduce Opito away from his heritage. After the warrior’s first game for the club, Schimsa praises his strengths to the public—not unlike the qualities described on the auction block. He lists Opito’s physical strengths, which he sees as an untapped resource, rather than his raw talent and enjoyment of the game. Those are the people from the primeval jungle! They are made of desire and strength!—That is the definition of football! Playing with strength and desire!—These people also have excellent lungs. It’s the little things: jungle air! What is air? It’s a storm.—Do we have storms in our cities? No!—I can sense something great happening here: In the future the primeval jungle will deliver our players. The only good players will be Indians, because they have lungs.— Do we even have such lungs?33

In other words, Schimsa, ever the recruiter, sees a material value he can harvest for the league, and thus himself, in the primitive, rural world outside of the modern cityscape. Here, the Indian is an ideal athlete to mold into a successful and obedient player in the football league, unlike white players like Bill, who push against the status quo. Thus, instead of the Urwald transforming the metropolitan world of athletics in the city as Bill had hoped, the urban jungle engulfs and systematically dismantles the inherent, yet untarnished, athletic skill and passion brought from the tribe. Rather than fostering a new form of football distinct from the commodified, modern standards of the elitist league, Opito falls victim to the luxury and material gain offered, severing ties with Bill and enthusiastically adhering to the rules and regulations of the league. In fact, after a short time in the league,

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Opito scornfully renounces his heritage entirely to embrace the urban football of the elite league. He proclaims, “The grass of the prairie has made my feet soft and hands melancholic. Gasoline and football training rid me of my dejection. You all do not see that asphalt makes you strong and happy!  . . . My strength is alive now because we live and fight here, and especially in the game. — To battle against jaguars and Indians: such things are laughable and idiotic. — I am no longer an Indian!”34 With this, Opito openly denounces his Urwald heritage and fully embraces the perceived civilized lifestyle of the metropolitan league. He praises the modern aspects of the city, with football training listed alongside synthetic products such as gasoline and asphalt, citing the prairie grass as the source of his weakness. The modern city and its upper-class athletic elite have conquered the former warrior, corrupting him with the temptations of a commercialized, modern metropolis. Indeed, the raw talent and joy that served as the incentive for both Opito and Bill has been transformed into a modern image of football success: movement and speed created by good lungs and muscles bred in the Indian jungle. Opito’s near instantaneous transition from primitive indigenous warrior to elite football star reflects the manipulative stronghold of the upper class in society. Though initially completely alien to both life in the city and organized football, those in power quickly exploit him as a lucrative and exotic commodity. The athletic world reveals itself as a microcosm of capitalism that creates and molds players for profit, power, and prestige. No longer is football a sport of leisure and fun. Those against the rules of the league (Bill) and even those originating entirely outside of the system (Opito) are manipulated and integrated into the commercialization of football as a cultural good or are banished. However, Opito does not simply immerse himself in ideals of the athletic world in the metropolis: he actively seeks out and corrupts the realm left untouched in recruiting his tribe for the league, joining forces with Schimsa. The athletic world of the city has become so strong and powerful, it not only corrupts those players within the confines of the concrete jungle, but also invades and infects areas entirely separated from modern civilization, namely the raw, primeval jungle. Excited by the marketability of the Indians, Schimsa proclaims, “In any case, I know I will soon set out on an expedition into the Urwald.—That is where the raw material is! That is where Schimsa will find players, where he will produce players. Schimsa will bring you a new, better race!”35 Schimsa does not proclaim they will find raw talent or passionate players, but rather material that can be molded into players, producing a new athletic race. The players are not human for Schimsa but rather material for a new product to be created and controlled by the powerful in the league. The dehumanization and commodification of modern Weimar society has, then, reached beyond its borders, invading like a colonizer.

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The fact that Opito does not dissuade or protest against Schimsa recruiting his tribe members but rather encourages the act further cements the utter disavowal of his heritage, embracing the athletic lifestyle not only in the modern city but also in his attempt to join the elite echelons of the league as a recruiter. Unlike the novel athlete Opito once represented, the warrior has lost the detached and critical viewpoint he once held after exposure to the city’s athletic society. That is to say that, while football may have had the capability to revive an uncorrupted, detached, and critical mindset as represented by the Indian tribe, Opito fails to maintain these imperative qualities after integrating into the modern urban jungle. Instead, he becomes part of the corrupt system, his only desire to rise in the ranks of that society by harnessing, and likewise corrupting, the commodity of uncorrupted players of the Urwald. The climactic battle between the raw, rural, “uncivilized” world (represented by Bill, (now chief of the tribe called “the White Buffalo”) and the modern city (Opito, dressed in a tailored three-piece suit and bowler hat) finally comes to pass in the Urwald, an untarnished arena away from the modern, manufactured stadium of the city. In the final scenes, Opito and Schimsa approach Bill to discuss recruitment and consignment of his tribe as a new race of footballers unique to their team. Completely opposed to the corruption of the commodified league, Bill does not permit Schimsa and Opito even to approach the tribe members. While Bill acts as the antithesis of the urban upper class in his role as Chief White Buffalo, Opito epitomizes his new professionalized role in his modern, urban uniform of a tailored suit and hat. He no longer wears a football uniform, but has been completely enveloped by the white, affluent members of the metropolitan league. To harvest the “raw athletic material” of the Urwald as Schimsa promised, and considering Opito is the rightful heir of the tribe, he challenges Bill to battle in order to determine the inheritance of the warriors. Though the battle ensues offstage, Opito returns to the stage alone to address his tribe. That Opito and Bill, the embodiment of both ends of the civilized spectrum of athletic modernity, fight to the death in the Urwald is especially poignant, in that it sets the two sides of the athletic world against one another in a landscape far from both the industrial and commercialized city league as well as the manufactured concrete football stadium. During the battle, Bill repeatedly claims he will “stand before and protect each tree,”36 while Opito states he will cut it down “one [tree] after another.”37 That is to say that, while Bill swears to protect the undeveloped and untouched jungle, Opito wishes to systematically destroy it, using the trees to build huge stadiums meant to fit thousands of fans. While Opito transforms both physically and mentally from the ways of his tribe to the white, metropolitan athletic world, Bill resigns himself to a life away from both the city and sport in the Urwald, ridding himself of any trace of athletic societal influence. His football nickname of the Bomber, a machine-made weapon of

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destruction, has changed to White Buffalo, a natural wonder. The battle that ensues in the Urwald, then, parallels the war for the future of athletics, and Opito’s victory solidifies the death of any hope in reversing the corrosive athletic mentality of the league. The audience does not see Bill’s death, nor is it confirmed by anything but his scream, followed by deathly silence before Opito reemerges on stage. He explains that Bill tripped and fell into an abyss, while Yurupari, the tribe’s traditional healer, announces, “Manitu has spoken!”38 For Opito and the tribe, Bill’s demise was determined and facilitated by nature. It is important to note, however, that Bill’s body is never shown on stage, nor is he ever confirmed as dead. He falls into an abyss and simply ceases to be entirely. That is to say that Bill, whose last words were, “I am the forest—I am the forest,”39 simply vanishes into nothingness, accompanied by the reluctance of the tribe to join Opito. The nature of the Urwald, which not only produces non-manufactured, indigenous, athletic talent but also serves as refuge for those fleeing from the professional football of the modern city, likewise vanishes with Bill. Thus, the epitome and embodiment of premodern society, where the obsession with goals, technology, and money ceases to exist, likewise disintegrates into darkness. Assuming control of his football warriors, Opito announces that Bill was old, and old things die. The Urwald—literally the old, primeval forest—will soon follow. The untarnished, natural refuge of the Urwald, away from the modern metropolis of sport, is engulfed and commodified by the corrupted, professional league, leaving no room for the raw, inherent fun football in the rural jungle provided. As the new chief, Opito immediately details the destruction of the old forest in favor of modern stadiums. He addresses his tribe members, explaining, I will lead you all into a new future. But first, every tree here must be cut down. The forest treats us poorly. From the trees we will build goal posts. In the areas, where the trees stand, football stadiums!—Then we will hunt the buffalo. We need the hides for leather, and the leather will become footballs!40

In the end, the influence of the elite in football kills Bill, snuffing out any opposition to its rising power and suggesting that even an isolated, untarnished mentality intentionally sought out—that is, one that goes against the desires of those in power—cannot survive the elitist-ruled, modern athletic world. Moreover, Opito physically and mentally transforms from an exotic, natural talent into an elite recruiter—actively seeking others to throw into the athletic machine—revealing the absolute and inescapable power the upper echelons of a capitalistic society wield. Bill’s death is brought on by the precise person he had hoped would revolutionize the game by bringing back the raw, inherent nature of sport. The end of the play exposes a world where professional, modern football society has corrupted not only the city, but also the innocent,

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rural fields of the prairie. The final stage directions reveal the obedient Indians following Opito and Schimsa as “one mass . . . like a phalanx.”41 The mass of freshly minted footballers, no longer individual tribal warriors, moves forward like militaristic squadron, poised to fight any society that opposes it. In the end, there is no question that the corruption and commodification of sport has ruined the individual nature of the game. The invasion of football warriors will see the enslavement of any opposition, as well as the destruction of the environment that produces it. Vischer’s drama Fußballspieler ends without hope for the athletic world to overthrow the power of the elite, professional society, as evidenced in Opito’s victory and Bill’s demise. Even when an athlete seeks to maintain the incorruptible, “raw” qualities of sport, as Bill does first in his crass demeanor and later by abandoning the city and professional league entirely, the modern football league not only seeks out but also extinguishes any sign of premodern sport, controlling players as if they were athletic puppets. This arguably not only anticipates the perceived dire state of Weimar modernity in the 1920s, but furthermore foretells the societal upheaval to come as a result. In fact, this commodified society becomes so strong that it moves beyond its own borders and corrupts a culture previously unexposed to its allure of power and social standing, allowing it to exert its influence for selfish gain. Vischer’s depiction of sport reveals one of a capitalist society where power resides only with the upper strata, football has become a business, and critical thought ceases to exist. Bill’s inability to penetrate, influence, or even escape the athletic society in the city and Opito’s immediate corruption both reveal the suffocating stronghold under which modern society suffers. Though Vischer’s drama suggests that the method for transformation can be achieved by returning to a so-called primitive, uncorrupted, premodern athletic state, it ends with the disappearance of that very possibility in an athletic abyss. Vischer not only criticizes modern life in Weimar Germany, but also examines the increasingly powerful, and dangerous, bourgeois capitalist mindset present during the 1920s. Attacking the increased professionalization and commodification of athletics, the drama questions the overpowering and negative draw of capitalism in Germany. Fußballspieler reveals sport as a profit-oriented venture, as evidenced by the continual materialistic merit placed on players. Just as the rebel against the authority is sought out and terminated, so too will the “raw” nature and talent he embodies be terminated. Sport in this drama elucidates a social critique against Weimar society and suggests the demise of the surrounding world should such corruption continue. The play concludes with a state of sport—that is one corrupted by professional ideals and riddled with capitalist characteristics—primed for an unavoidable hostile fascist takeover in both the Urwald and in German society as a whole.42 Just as the Indian tribe silently follows Opito and Schimsa like a military phalanx, their unfaltering obe-

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dience facilitates their acceptance into the monetary-obsessed athletic machine of modernity. In a world obsessed with production, goals, speed, and financial gain, all of which dominate one’s work and life, the nature of premodern culture and existence—one in which sport is simply played for enjoyment—is ejected from the arena.

Author Rebeccah Dawson is associate professor of German studies at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Dawson’s research focuses on sport in literature and cinema of twentieth-century Germany. In addition to presentations and lectures (both in the United States and abroad) on the role of sports in German literature and culture, she has published on a range of sport topics, such as the propaganda of aesthetic athletic beauty in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, twentieth-century German film, and the commodification of football in Melchior Vischer’s Fußballspieler und Indianer. Currently, she serves as coeditor for a Colloquia Germanica special issue on football in German literature and film, is the co-editor of Colloquia Germanica, and the editor of H:Sport—German Journal Watch.

Notes 1. Meisl, “Der Sport am Scheidewege,” 20. 2. Although the term “Indian” is no longer the appropriate name for indigenous people of the Americas and culls a racial stereotype in today’s society, the play bases heavily on the term itself. As such, I have maintained the terminology Vischer implements in the text as applicable in this chapter. The title of the drama by Melchior Vischer, as well as all quotes cited from it, have been translated by this author. 3. The text Fußballspieler und Indianer will be referred to as Fußball in this chapter. 4. Toman, “Now You See It,” 11. 5. Engel, “Vom Prager Avantgardisten,” 417–37. 6. Hauff, “Nachwort,” 287. 7. See, e.g., Pethes, “Fußballspieler und Indianer,” 94–99; Engel, “Vom Prager Avant-

gardisten.” Kramer, “Sport und literarischer Expressionismus,” 245. Ibid., 244. Vischer qtd in Voigts, 100 Texte zu Brecht, 60. Voigts, Brechts Theaterkonzeptionen. Epic Theater called for the alienation of the audience to induce a detachment resulting in true critical thought and came as a direct result of Brecht’s athletic obsession. Critical of the complacent state of both performers and spectators, he used the sport stadium as a basis for this novel conceptualization of the theater-going experience. For Brecht, sport was the missing link in inciting the artistic revolution Brecht believed would reinvigorate society. Willett, The New Sobriety, 102–3. 13. K-H Schoeps and J. Schoeps, “Bertolt Brecht,” 51. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

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Voigts, 100 Texte zu Brecht, 60. Vischer qtd in Voigts, 100 Text zu Brecht, 60. Ibid., 60. Kramer, “Sport und literarischer Expressionismus,” 207–8. Ibid., 201–15. Kramer elaborates on the rise in football-themed expressionist literary German texts during the first part of the twentieth century in his “Sport und literarischer Expressionismus.” In this, he examines iconic author whose literary works focus on sports (boxing, tennis, cycling, and football). For his section on football, Vischer serves as the climatic final subject of analysis, preceded by Egon Erwin Kisch, Max Brod, and Hans von Flesch-Brunningen. 19. Pethes, “Fußballspieler und Indianer,” 94–99, 96. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

20. Although the play does specifically note the existence of the Indianerstamm (literally translated as Indian tribe) in South America, it does not specify which tribe the characters belong to. As such, I use the English translation of the German listed in the original drama. 21. Vischer, Fußballspieler und Indianer, 16. 22. Ibid., 18. 23. Ibid., 18. 24. Ibid., 30. 25. Ibid., 15. 26. Ibid., 20. 27. Ibid., 22–23. 28. Ibid., 28. 29. Ibid., 79. 30. Ibid., 79. 31. Considering the numerous variations of manitus, it is important to note that

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

the translation into English also offers a challenge. Scholar Basil Johnston offers multiple possible translations: “Mystery, essence, substance, matter, supernatural spirit, anima, quiddity, attribute, property, God, deity, godlike, mystical, incorporeal, transcendental, invisible reality.” For the purpose of this chapter, the general translation of “fundamentals of life” or “Great Spirit” will be used. Johnston, The Manitous, 242. Bragdon, The Columbia Guide, 18. Vischer, Fußballspieler und Indianer, 130–31. Ibid., 140. Ibid., 131–32. Ibid., 179.

Ibid., 180. Ibid., 180. Ibid., 180. Ibid., 181. Ibid., 182. Vischer’s drama is not the only Weimar cultural production examined in light of the impending takeover of the Nazi Reich. For more on this topic, see Bastian Heinsohn’s chapter in this volume.

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Bibliography Bragdon, Kathleen. The Columbia Guide to American Indians of the Northeast. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Engel, Peter. “Vom Prager Avantgardisten zum Berliner Unterhaltungsschriftsteller. Die Wandlung Melchior Vischer [From the Prague avant-garde to Berliner authors of popular fiction: The development of Melchior Vischer]. In Prager Profile. Vergessene Autoren im Schatten Kafkas [Prague profiles: Forgotten authors in Kafka’s shadow], edited by Hartmut Binder, 417–37. Berlin: Gebr Mann, 1991. Hauff, Sigrid. “Nachwort [Afterword].” In Fußballspieler und Indianer. Chaplin. Zwei Theaterstücke [Football players and Indians. Chaplin. Two dramas], edited by Sigrid Hauff, 275–95. Munich: edition text + kritik, 1984. Johnston, Basil. The Manitous: The Supernatural World of the Ojibway. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. Kramer, Andreas. “Sport und literarischer Expressionismus” [Sport and literary expressionism]. In Expressionismus und Kulturgeschichte [Expressionism and cultural history], edited by Frank Krause and Andreas Kramer, 243–57. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2019. Meisl, Willy. “Der Sport am Scheidewege” [Sport at the crossroads]. In Der Sport am Scheidewege [Sport at the crossroads], edited by Willy Meisl, 19–131. Heidelberg: Iris, 1928. Pethes, Nicolas. “Fußballspieler und Indianer” [Football players and Indians]. In POP. Kultur und Kritik [POP. Culture and criticism] 6, no. 1 (2017): 94–99. Schoeps, Karl-Heinz, and J. Schoeps. “Bertolt Brecht and the Weimar Republic: Rebel with a Cause, or Between Bacchant and Bolshevik.” In Brecht Unbound, edited by James K. Lyon and Hans-Peter Breuer, 43–62. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995. Toman, Jindřich. “Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Dada in Czechoslovakia, With Notes on High and Low.” In The eastern Dada orbit: Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Central Europe and Japan, edited by Stephen C. Foster, 11–40. New York: G. K. Hall & Co, 1998. Vischer, Melchior. Fußballspieler und Indianer: Für die alte Welt eine Tragödie und für die neue Welt eine Komödie und umgekehrt [Football players and Indians: A tragedy for the old world, a comedy for the new world and vice versa]. Munich: edition text + kritik, 1984. Voigts, Manfred, ed. Brechts Theaterkonzeptionen: Entstehung und Entwicklung bis 1931 [Brecht’s conceptualizations of theater: Beginnings and development to 1931]. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1977. ———. 100 Texte zu Brecht [100 texts on Brecht]. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1980. von Schemm, Axel. Dichter am Ball. Untersuchungen zur Poetik des Sports am Beispiel deutschsprachiger “Fußball-Literatur [Writers on the ball. Examinations on the poetics of sport in the German “Football literature”]. Oulu: Oulu University Press, 2006. Willett, John. The New Sobriety 1917–1933: Art and Politics in the Weimar Period. New York: Pantheon, 1978.

CHAPTER 6



Controlling Definitions

Racism and German Identity after Mesut Özil’s National Team Resignation KATE ZAMBON

O

n 22 July 2018, German national team star Mesut Özil smashed multiple taboos by resigning from the team in public protest of his experiences of racism. Hitherto considered one of Germany’s shyest celebrities, the Muslim German footballer of Turkish descent posted a detailed explanation of his resignation on Twitter in English. This choice made his indictments a matter of global public record to his transnational fan base, rather than keeping discussions of racism and Islamophobia domestic. For nearly a decade on the public stage, the unrelenting public scrutiny common for celebrity athletes was compounded by Özil’s status as a paragon of integration. This framework kept Özil on a razor’s edge between public adulation and deep-seated mistrust of his true loyalties. Özil’s resignation also threatened a sacred site of national mythologies around integration: sport. Sport is characterized as having intrinsic integrative power, uniting people across lines of difference. Men’s national football, in particular, appears time and again in German national narratives of the past several decades, from the supposed return of national pride as hosts of the 2006 World Cup1 to Germany’s debut as a cosmopolitan powerhouse with the newly diverse 2010 World Cup team. This chapter asks how Özil’s resignation disrupted treasured colorblind mythologies of integration in German national sports. It explores the struggle of athletes of color for self-determination in the public sphere and the white supremacist rhetoric and logic used to suppress their resistance. White supremacy, here, is perpetuated through double standards, differential treatment, and the denial or disregard of racist acts, rather than primarily through the machinations of committed racists and white nationalists. It operates under the auspices of defending German liberalism while dismissing the structural

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and social conditions that render the citizenship of minoritized Germans precarious. This case study resonates with similar struggles across Europe and across the Atlantic, but also demonstrates the heightened symbolic significance of football within shifting German national narratives. Despite common conceptions of sports as pure entertainment, mediated sports and the celebrity athletes they cultivate are inherently symbolic and, thus, are political. Sporting celebrity constitutes a circuit of meaning whereby athletes provide material for the collective identities of audiences. Thus, as David Marshall argues, the power of celebrity is “its capacity to house conceptions of individuality and simultaneously to embody or help embody ‘collective configurations’ of the social world.”2 This process is shaped and commodified by media industries. Sharon Marcus views celebrity culture as a drama involving three principal players—media producers, the public, and celebrities themselves— each interacting and competing to shape the cultural meaning of celebrity.3 This chapter examines how each of these players attempted to fix the meaning of Özil’s resignation in protest. To understand these players, this chapter provides background on Özil’s history with the national team and then analyzes his resignation statement and the subsequent press coverage. First, I collected front-page stories in the top circulating German periodicals appearing the day after Özil’s resignation.4 This yielded 46 unique articles, whose text I analyzed with a computer-assisted inductive coding to identify the key themes and their discursive logics. I also included results for Özil Rücktritt (Özil resignation) over the following five days in the online archives of the center-left magazine Der Spiegel (146 results) and the national populist tabloid Die Bild (44 results). For these results, I focused on opinion, analysis, and editorial content. In addition, I analyzed the responses of German fans and the public as reported by the media.

Hero and Villain: Making a National Symbol Within popular culture, sport stands out as a particularly potent symbolic space. Athletes are the pinnacle of what Rojek5 calls “achieved celebrity” whose renown derives from professional success. Sporting celebrities enjoy privileged moral standing among celebrities as the embodiment of discipline, focus, and health. As the national game in Germany, football symbolizes the ideal national self-conception, one that includes a postracial, consumable form of difference. As Sara Ahmed argues, “The fantasy of football is that it can take us ‘out of our ethnicity’” and toward a happy diversity based on “loyalty to what has already been given as a national ideal.”6 With his breakthrough on the national stage in the 2010 World Cup, Mesut Özil became a central figure in emerging identity narratives celebrating Germany as a tolerant and welcoming nation. As

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the grandson of an immigrant worker from Turkey, Özil belongs to Germany’s largest minority community. While wearing the German jersey, Özil allowed the German nation to redefine itself. As a celebrity-icon, Özil was incorporated into the subjectivity of a nation seeking to rejuvenate itself and shed the burdens of its Blut und Boden (blood and soil) history. The team’s diversity had enormous symbolic value on the global stage. Evoking Özil by name in 2010, President Christian Wulff proclaimed, “The team was the best ambassador in the world for our country. They attracted great affinity and projected an image of a colorful, cosmopolitan Germany.”7 By objectifying the rising star as a model of integration, politicians and the media enthusiastically appropriated his success in colorblind national narratives. Meanwhile, with every tournament, insinuations resurfaced questioning Özil’s loyalty and commitment to the German national team. He was plagued with speculation about his identity and legitimate claim to Germanness from the ugly corners of the internet to the country’s prestige periodicals. This was evident in articles scrutinizing his feelings about national matches against Turkey in 2010 and 2011. It can also be seen in interviews throughout his career, when the interviewers ask pointed questions to separate the “Turkish” from the “German” within Özil’s identity, gameplay, and life. Özil frequently subverts the Manichean trap, emphasizing the integrated multiplicity of his lived experience. In an interview with Die Welt in 2017, Özil emphasized his attachment to Germany as his Heimat (homeland), contradicting the interviewer’s description of his upbringing within a Turkish bubble: “That’s not at all how I experienced it. It wasn’t the ‘Turkish bubble’—as you say—over here and the German surroundings there. It was all one. Germany was my homeland from the very beginning. When I went on vacation, I was soon homesick for Germany, for Gelsenkirchen.”8 Although Özil acknowledged concrete challenges of learning German in school, he staunchly refused the interviewer’s characterization of his early life as separate from German society. He went on to say, “I’m very thankful that I have both cultures in my heart. I could always sort of pick out the best [from both]. [laughing] But of course, for every child of immigrants it’s always a lifelong challenge living a bit as though in two worlds.”9 In addition to asserting his full claim to multiple cultural affiliations, Özil alluded to the inequalities triggered by his Turkish heritage. He said that, as a young player, “I always had to be a bit better than my German teammates,” noting that he always had to work harder and make fewer mistakes.10 Foreshadowing the scandal to come, Özil avoided questions about politics, including Turkish-German relations, stating after repeated pressing, “Look, it doesn’t matter what I say, certain people will take it the wrong way. I don’t want that,” before praising the diversity of the men’s national team.11 Interviews like this demonstrate the multiplicity of Özil’s identity as well as his awareness

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of the precarity of his public position. Despite this complexity, the headline emphasized his foreignness, with the comment about needing to concentrate when he speaks German. Özil is clearly aware of the concentration necessary to avoid racialized backlash in the German public sphere. Probably the most obvious example of relentless othering is the perennial debate that started in 2010 about whether players of color who did not sing the national anthem before games should be forced to do so. Özil has answered journalists’ questions about his pre-game practice consistently since his time with the U-21 national team, explaining as early as 2009 that his practice of praying during the anthem “gives [him] strength and unburdens” him and that not doing so would leave him with a “bad feeling.”12 The debate around obligating athletes to sing the national anthem emerged only after the liberalization of citizenship law in 2000 finally produced a substantial cohort of national players of color. While some of the targeted players eventually gave in to pressure to sing along, Özil maintained his practice of silently praying before kickoff. Many fans, media commentators, and national team functionaries fixated on this refusal to fall into line, evident in the frequent references to Özil’s “refusal to sing” in the context of his 2018 resignation. Özil’s status as “coverboy for integration”13 afforded him no protection from suspicion, relentless double standards, and racialized exclusion. Despite Özil’s long record of being forced to contend with pointed questions about his heritage and insinuations of divided loyalties, his resignation in protest of racist treatment evoked shock and indignation in the mediated public sphere. Understanding Özil’s protest starts with the decade-long history of his treatment as both a shining symbol of the tolerant and “colorful” new Germany and as a potential infiltrator with divided loyalties who felt “uncomfortable in the German jersey.”14 This extreme binary treatment is typical of minoritized athletes who, as Stuart Hall argues, are represented as both heroes and villains simultaneously.15 Instead of acknowledging this history, the media set the opening scene in the resignation drama just a few months earlier, when Özil appeared for a photo-op with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan alongside fellow national team member Ilkay Gündoğan, and German-born Turkish national team player Cenk Tosun. Among the three Turkish-German footballers, the backlash concentrated overwhelmingly on Özil. Although Gündoğan signed his jersey with the controversial statement, “For my president, with great respect,” Özil took the brunt of the criticism. The press coverage suggested Özil garnered greater criticism because of his unwillingness to speak to the press about the affair, whereas Gündoğan made several brief statements asserting his lack of political intentions and his devotion to the German team. However, Özil’s long-established status as both a national hero of integration and as a notorious anthem-abstainer appear decisive here. Based on Özil’s past interviews, he believed that no response would assuage public suspicion.

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The timing and context of the Erdoğan photo heightened the national focus on the event. With the 2018 World Cup in Russia just two weeks away, the national team was already in the spotlight when the photo appeared. This fueled a flurry of coverage debating whether the photo should disqualify Özil and Gündoğan from the team. Throughout the tournament, German fans heckled and abused Özil and Gündoğan without any response from national team leadership.16 After defending champion Germany failed to advance from the group stage of competition for the first time in World Cup history, the media and national team leadership revived a focus on Özil, denigrating his performance and blaming him for disrupting the team with the photo affair.17

Avid Athlete, Reluctant Celebrity: Özil’s Social Media Stand After months of relentless questions from the media and pressure from national team leadership to respond to the public criticism of the Erdoğan photo, Özil took control of his response by releasing three statements through his Twitter account. By writing in English, Özil addressed his transnational followers first while drawing a global audience into an affair hitherto free of international scrutiny. This allowed him to circumvent the entrenched German frameworks for interpreting the Erdoğan photo and its aftermath and it also provided Özil with more control over his message than traditional media outlets or press conferences. Özil’s decision not to post in German might also be understood in light of the above interview when he expressed a conviction that the German public would not give him the benefit of the doubt. Indeed, the decision to share his experiences of racism with a global audience angered many in the German media and public sphere. By releasing his statement in English on Twitter, Özil reclaimed agency and his right to narrate his experience and the meaning of his actions. In terms of political action, Özil’s statements are testimony of personal experience—like the #MeToo movement, which raised awareness of pervasive sexual assault—rather than systemic, policy-oriented protests like the Black Lives Matter movement against racist policing and mass incarceration. Özil’s statement presents personal experiences of discrimination with systemic roots to disrupt colorblind public mythologies. Özil used his personal experience to highlight systemic racism, an experience that was further validated by the many minoritized Germans who identified with his struggle. As I discuss below, although media responses largely sidelined the details of racism in Özil’s statement, they resonated powerfully with Germans of diverse backgrounds, inspiring many to share their experiences of microaggressions and everyday racism on social media through the hashtag #MeTwo, a reference to the multiplicity of transnational identities. Beyond specific instances of hate, Özil’s pri-

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mary complaints center on forms of differential treatment—double standards, scapegoating, and conditional belonging—that are rarely understood as constituting racism in Germany. Özil began his three-part statement with a clarification of his reasoning for the meeting and photograph with President Erdoğan during his state visit to the United Kingdom in May 2018. Özil rejects the terms set by the media, which framed it as explicitly political and highly consequential: “For me, having a picture with President Erdoğan wasn’t about politics or elections, it was about me respecting the highest office of my family’s country. My job is a football player and not a politician, and our meeting was not an endorsement of any policies.”18 The media overwhelmingly interpreted the event as an endorsement of Erdoğan’s policies and, thus, charged Özil with supporting autocracy and betraying German values. Özil also framed his decision in terms of values, but not those of nation-state politics. He distinguished the political from the personal, viewing the meeting in terms of familial values of respect for important national symbols. For him, the meeting signified his respect for the office of the presidency in what he took pains to distinguish as his family’s country. His statement asserts his positionality as both fully German and fully connected to his Turkish ancestry. He rejects a zero-sum notion of identity. Özil asserted, “For me, it didn’t matter who was President, it mattered that it was the President,”19 noting that the queen and Prime Minister Theresa May must have also recognized the difference between endorsing policies and respecting a political office when hosting Erdoğan for a state visit. With this comparison, Özil asks why he is held to a higher standard of political responsibility than actual politicians. The same question applies to German and European Union (EU) politicians who made treaties giving Turkey extraordinary new leverage as an external gatekeeper blocking refugees from entering Europe in 2016.20 The contrast between Germany’s material political cooperation, including treaties and state visits, and the extreme public backlash against Özil’s photo-op is precisely the kind of double standard that Özil highlighted in his resignation statement. Özil asks whether the extreme and sustained response to the Erdoğan photo was fair or proportionate based on any other public standard. The second statement criticized the press and sponsors for scapegoating and maintaining double standards. Özil asserted his openness to fair criticisms of his athletic performance. Instead, he noted that that criticism of the World Cup defeats did not focus on performance, writing, “Certain German newspapers are using my background and photo with President Erdoğan as rightwing propaganda to further their political cause. Why else did they use pictures and headlines with my name as a direct explanation for defeat in Russia?,”21 a pattern that was well documented by media watchdog sites.22 In particular, Europe’s highest circulating periodical, the German tabloid Die Bild, led the

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campaign against Özil, splashing insinuations about his dedication and loyalty across the front page throughout the tournament. In addition to this pattern of insinuations, Özil identifies a blatant double standard in the treatment of former national team player Lothar Matthäus, who met multiple times during the tournament with Russian autocrat, Vladimir Putin. Matthäus even gave a speech at the Kremlin with superlative praise for Putin’s World Cup.23 Matthäus was also one of Özil’s most vociferous critics, singling out Özil for the 2018 World Cup defeat in terminology that places Özil under suspicion of a traitorous lack of commitment to German victory: “His body language is negative. His play is joyless. With Özil on the field, I often feel that he is uncomfortable in the German jersey, that he’s not free, yes, almost as if he didn’t want to play at all. There’s no heart there, no joy, no passion.”24 This language goes far beyond an individualized critique of Özil’s athletic skill and performance. It presumes to see into Özil’s heart, implying that he is shirking his duty to compete for national glory because of a lack of identification with Germany, symbolized by the team jersey. In case suggestions of Özil’s disloyalty were not sufficiently clear, Matthäus then criticized Özil’s refusal to demonstrate commitment to Germany by singing along with the national anthem. Matthäus casts Özil as an outsider lacking loyalty and cultural knowledge rather than a minoritized insider with a lifetime of experience facing white Christian supremacist double standards. Although Matthäus’s praise at Putin’s Kremlin photo-op drew some criticism, Özil pointed out that, “despite [Matthäus’s] role with the DFB [Deutscher Fußball-Bund, or German Football Association], they have not asked him to publicly explain his actions and he continues to represent the players of Germany without any reprimand. If the media felt that I should have been left [off ] the World Cup squad, then surely, he should be stripped of his honorary captaincy? Does my Turkish heritage make me a more worthy target?”25 Some in the media questioned Matthäus’s judgement but never his national loyalty or his right to a position with the Deutscher Fußball-Bund. The disparate treatment of the two similar incidents reflects the media’s racialized interpretation of Özil’s meeting and the team’s poor World Cup performance. Özil’s final statement criticizing the DFB detailed experiences of explicit, aggressive racism by fans, politicians, and DFB leadership. In the most famous line from his resignation, Özil stated that for DFB President “[Reinhard] Grindel and his supporters, I am German when we win, but I am an immigrant when we lose.”26 This line closely echoes statements by other European footballers of color, including national players Karim Benzema of France and Romelu Lukaku of Belgium,27 as well as the famous statement by Albert Einstein from 1929: “If my theory of relativity is proven correct, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should

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my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.”28 The conditioning of the citizenship of minorities on their performance resonated deeply with other Germans of color who responded on social media. Grindel’s history of exclusionary remarks about Muslim Germans and immigrants reflect the contingency of their citizenship, as when he warned in 2013 that allowing dual citizenship would permit “unterschiedliche Loyalitäten” (divergent loyalties).29 Özil’s statement emphasized this pattern, noting that Grindel had condemned multiculturalism as a “myth [and] a lifelong lie” in a 2004 speech before the Bundestag. Özil connected Grindel’s perspectives to overtly racist statements by prominent Germans, including a politician who tweeted that the national team consisted of “23 Germans and two goatfuckers.”30 Özil also quoted the director of the German Theater in Munich who tweeted, “Hello, you idiot, you have no business being on the German national team. Piss off to Anatolia.”31 Özil writes that these prominent Germans are no better than the fan who accosted him with “‘Ozil, verpiss Dich Du scheiss Türkensau. Türkenschwein hau ab’ or in English ‘Ozil, fk off you Turkish s*t, piss [off ] you Turkish pig.’”32 This was the only sentence in the statement that Özil posted in the original German alongside an English translation. Özil bolded this section of the statement with the most inflammatory racist statements, indicating their importance and a desire for the public to grapple with the violence of this racist speech. The German original of the fan tirade calls Özil a Turkish swine and a Turkish sow, mirroring the vile antisemitic trope of the Judensau ( Jew’s sow), which dates back to the thirteenth century in German-speaking countries.33 Jewish and Muslim faiths both classify pigs as unclean animals, heightening the impact of this dehumanizing trope. The bestiality of the “goatfucker” slur also has roots in both antisemitic and Islamophobic racism. By keeping the original German, Özil confronts German-speaking readers with the historical echoes of this racist speech. Özil argued that prominent individuals used his “picture with President Erdoğan as an opportunity to express their previously hidden racist tendencies, and this is dangerous for society.”34 He calls attention to how the photo incident normalized racism and provided pretext and cover for the ensuing hate speech.

Mediated Public Responses: Hegemonic Repair Özil’s statement took back some control over the development of the celebrity drama previously directed primarily by media producers. The domestic press coverage can broadly be divided into two camps based on their relationship with the hegemonic status quo. The smaller counterhegemonic contingent used Özil’s statement to validate experiences of everyday racism and decon-

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struct normalized white supremacy. This counterhegemonic coverage emerged in conjunction with the third player in the celebrity drama: the public, or more precisely an online counterpublic35 of minoritized people in Germany with whom Özil’s statement resonated strongly. Before exploring the solidaristic counterhegemonic coverage, the next section analyzes the larger segment of media production: coverage focused on hegemonic repair. This contingent involves not only reactionary editorials against Özil’s statement, but also straight news reporting that amplified the voices of powerful politicians, football functionaries, and other public figures. The coverage sought to recover interpretive authority by rewriting Özil’s protest and revising his meaning as a national celebrity-icon. Media attention executed boundary maintenance and reconstruction in response to the challenge posed by Özil’s protest. The maintenance of hegemony requires the flexibility to accommodate challenges and suture ruptures without fundamental changes to the existing social order. This involves blunting the parts of Özil’s statement that target systemic issues of white Christian supremacy by asserting that, while problems exist at the margins, national values and identity must be strengthened rather than fundamentally questioned. White supremacy is not limited to extremism. Indeed, it functions most effectively in its banal and naturalized forms where it is protected from scrutiny by plausible deniability. As the Black German writer and activist Noah Sow argues, denialism and linguistic evasions that make discussions of racism unspeakable “maintain the racist status quo.”36 Sow argues that we must name racism for what it is, and that understanding the function of white supremacist discourse, logics, and structures is part of this. These discourses create the idea of Germany and Europe against the image of the migrant other,37 who may be celebrated but whose citizenship is always under scrutiny. One necessary step to diminish the impact of Özil’s statement was to undermine the seriousness and authenticity of its author or to characterize it as aggressive, self-serving, and unreasonable. This involved both patronizing and fear-inducing rhetoric. Özil’s statement is described with language of violence and warfare, called an unprecedented Wut-Attacke (furious attack), a Rundumschlag (sweeping attack), Radikalschlag (sweeping or radical blow), an Angriff (onslaught). The modifiers suggest that this attack is not only singularly violent and brutal, but is also pauschal (indiscriminate) and voller Zorn (rage filled). While these characterizations were particularly strong in Die Bild and other conservative-leaning outlets like Die Welt, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), they also appeared in more-progressive sources like die tageszeitung and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, often through quotes from public figures. This follows the white supremacist technique of transforming the protests of racialized Others into a threat to the social order by characterizing them as unrestrained, unhinged, and threatening, despite Özil’s famously calm

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temper. While criticism of Özil’s athletic performance falsely painted him as lazy, passive, and listless, “with the body language of a dead frog,”38 his social critique is framed as erratic and explosive. The umbrage underlying these assessments communicates the wish for an inversion: aggression on the field in service of national glory and passivity in his domestic public persona; both are demands for submission to the nation. In another bold contradiction, Özil’s statement is characterized as both carefully calculated to inflict maximum damage and crudely incoherent, sometimes at the same time. One article declares, “Mesut Özil seemingly prepared [the statement] long and intensively with his advisers. It’s no rush job. It follows a plan, a resignation in three acts that left behind a mountain of shards.”39 The author credits that it was carefully orchestrated, but claims the results are crude and imprecise, writing, “Özil’s indiscriminate attacks against the media . . . are as abstruse as they are shameless.”40 These statements construct a figure that is shrewd but unintelligible. The conception of Özil as calculating pairs with other characterizations of him as a wealthy, covetous globalist. As one commentator in Die Bild wrote, “Özil is the only German citizen on our national team who speaks to the German public in English and shares his crude thoughts on Facebook. The PR-strategies as a global brand appears more important to him than making sure every fan understands him.”41 Similarly, an article from Focus online magazine states that “Özil’s global strategy is proving successful: he’s being celebrated abroad . . . with statements in the English language Özil chose the global stage for his broadside.”42 A Die Welt commentator drives this point home, writing that “In fact, integration in Germany doesn’t depend on whether a vain young millionaire—who has been earning his money in England for years and only opens his mouth when his sponsors abandon ship—plays on the German national team or not.”43 These commentaries from three different publications echo the racist tropes against the figure of the stranger,44 typified by the racist archetype of the self-interested, greedy, wandering Jew. They separate Özil from true Germans, placing him on the side of the global, English-speaking world where profits and personal branding are more important than a treasured national institution. Critics also claimed that Özil’s English is too poor to have written the statement and, thus, it cannot represent his true voice. The choice of English is associated with inauthenticity as well as self-interested calculation, both of which contravene genuine identification with Germany. As with Matthäus’s highly publicized quip about Özil’s discomfort in the German jersey, commentators expressed overt suspicion of his loyalty to the German team and nation. UN secretary general’s special advisor on sport for development, Willi Lemke, claimed that he never believed Özil had “a great identification” with the German national team.45 He also maintained that Özil’s statement is obviously not his own. Ostensibly giving Özil an out, Lemke suggests that he might not understand what others have written on his behalf:

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“If that [statement] is truly his opinion and he read the text closely, discussed it with his advisors and friends, and he means it as he said it, with all the accusations against the media, against parts of society, sponsors, the DFB, particularly with the dreadful accusation of racism—if he really means it, then I say, ‘Okay and bye.’”46 Lemke suggests that anyone who advances the arguments in the statement has no place in the public sphere and is not worthy of being taken seriously. This statement also evokes another theme common in the coverage: that the real aggression is Özil’s “monstrous accusation” of racism.47 The accusation of racism is also construed as self-indulgent, for example Die Bild’s claim that “Özil luxuriates in his role as victim, which has no basis in reality.”48 Either he is a hapless puppet whose advisors put words in his mouth, or he is a malicious actor who intentionally fabricated stories to elevate himself at the cost of the German public. Özil’s critics do not merely disagree with him—they invalidate and demean him. Even many sympathetic-presenting critics frame Özil as lost, muddled, whining, and irresponsible. Some attribute this to cultural rootlessness: “Migration means origins and future—and the sometimes-long road between them. The shorter this road is, the better for migrants and the host society. Mesut Özil has illustrated—to the detriment of the German national team— how many switchbacks, dead ends, and one-way streets there can be. And how abandoned an erratic character can feel on that road.”49 Here, Ulf Poschardt patronizingly argues that, for everyone’s benefit “Germany must set clear expectations so that every athlete who wanders between cultures can decide whether he can or will meet them.”50 In a barely veiled criticism that doubles as a defense against accusations of racial othering, he claims to see clear German traces in Özil’s “introverted melancholia and Heideggerian existential angst.”51 This supposed allusion to Özil’s Germanness is a direct exemplification of Sara Ahmed’s figure of the “melancholic migrant,” who stubbornly “holds on to the unhappy objects of difference” and “insists on speaking about racism.”52 This parallel is driven home by Poschardt’s lament, “Özil ultimately withheld a happy ending for the whole affair.”53 He uses the Özil affair as a springboard to demand stricter top-down regulation of immigrants and their descendants. This vision of belonging erases multiplicity in favor of an assimilationist monocultural ideal with a short linear path from past heritage to a happy colorblind German future. These characterizations of Özil’s statement as belligerent, inauthentic, and irresponsible carry into the apportionment of responsibility central to the hegemonic repair in the early coverage of the resignation. In Germany, Özil’s resignation was generally treated as the final act of a drama that began with the Erdoğan photo, building through the national team’s embarrassing losses during the World Cup group stage.54 Thus, the legitimacy of Özil’s narrative was adjudicated by rehashing the photo incident and its aftermath. The Ger-

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man media’s focus on assessing blame overshadowed the problems Özil raised. Few articles acknowledged the examples of overt racism that Özil posted in bold text. Coverage drew attention away from the broader questions of social inequality and structural racism and shifted it back to personal responsibility or nationalist frameworks of values and identity. The bulk of media coverage made Özil responsible for supporting autocracy, creating division, and dragging down the national team during the World Cup. Still, Die Bild editor Julian Reichelt claimed that “the actual scandal has been almost forgotten: a German does election publicity for a Turkish dictator.   .  .  .  It hardly gets more mendacious. What’s even more pathetic: broad contingents in German politics are falling for Özil and his absurd generalized accusations of racism.”55 Contrary to Reichelt’s claims, statements from politicians and public figures following Özil’s statements nearly universally criticized Özil for the photo incident, and few focused on the specific experiences of racism. This anger that Özil’s concerns were taken seriously by some political figures is echoed by another commentator who asserted, “It is an upside-down world where a football player in the whining tone of a failed politician sees guilt everywhere but with himself, and where half of the federal cabinet comments on the departure of a failed footballer.”56 While denigrating Özil’s experience and professional skill, the author suggested that heeding Özil demeans serious politicians. Despite several analytical pieces showing that Özil’s performance was among the best on the admittedly weak 2018 team,57 many commentators painted Özil as a failure, reinforcing the connection between citizenship and performance. To heal the rupture of his resignation, hegemonic repair stripped Özil of his Germanness by revoking his place among Germany’s most successful footballers. Taking Özil’s concerns seriously is framed as beneath German politicians and even possibly a threat to democracy itself. Some commentaries even argued that Özil deserved abusive treatment because of his support for a dictator. One example in an article about selected reader comments states, “Regarding Mr. Özil, I have to mention that he brought this [racist] reaction on himself. Erdoğan is an autocrat who tramples the individual rights of his citizens.  . . . Therefore, Özil can’t excuse his own failures by playing the racism card. He provoked these reactions himself.”58 It was more common, however, to deny that the treatment of Özil was racist at all. Instead, a major technique of hegemonic repair was to burnish democratic German virtues by calling for a harsher stance against Özil as a supporter of autocracy.59 As Reichelt put it, “Özil’s photo stands symbolically for the battle between liberal and repressive systems.”60 Turkish-German boxer Ünsal Arik’s position on this was particularly stark: “Arik is ‘sad’ that the DFB didn’t throw him out before. Özil stood on the side of a dictator. Consequently, you

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can also say to Özil: ‘You support political values that we don’t stand for. So, we can’t take you to the World Cup.’ That’s not racist, it’s right.”61 Critics also argued that Özil’s protest supported Erdoğan’s agenda, which seeks to convince Turkish Europeans that they will never be accepted as equal citizens.62 Commentators used support from Turkish politicians to argue that Özil’s protest serves their interests, with one headline exclaiming, “Erdoğan is the biggest winner of the resignation.”63 This view denounces serious consideration of Özil’s claims of racist treatment as playing into the hands of an autocrat. This absolves the public—in the interests of democracy—from critically engaging with systemic racism against both Muslim and Turkish Germans. The argument that Özil’s protest against racism benefits Erdoğan is frequently paired with praise of a diverse, colorblind Germany, which has always welcomed immigrants. In a postwar Germany, the idea that racism could persist threatens the self-conception of a reformed Germany, beacon of liberalism.64 As one Die Bild columnist wrote, “[Erdoğan is] now using him to accuse Germany of racism. This is simply not true. We live in Germany with Turks, Italians, Greeks, Chinese, Vietnamese, Scots. We have become a colorful people in Germany. Mesut Özil was never excluded. He was trained at Schalke. Germany gave him every opportunity.”65 Another opinion writer in Die Bild argued that “If Germany were really as racist as Özil—and also Erdoğan— claim, it raises the question of why millions of people from all over the world, and especially from the Muslim world, want to come to Germany specifically. For the answer you don’t have to think hard. Because they know that the great majority of Germans wish them well. The exceptions prove the rule. But they are just that—exceptions, a minority.”66 This revisionist narrative whitewashes discrimination and racist violence against Turkish-Germans and other immigrants from majority Muslim countries, which is particularly problematic in the context of using that narrative to deny experiences of racism by one of Germany’s most celebrated symbols of integration. The most common view of racism in the corpus defines it in extremely limited terms: only explicit racist acts that cannot be explained away qualify. And according to the quote above, those extreme examples somehow prove the rule that racism is not a problem in Germany. Some even frame Germany as the real victim, with one headline proclaiming a “Hate campaign against Germany because of Özil—Erdoğan defames us as Nazis.”67 Özil’s evidence of differential treatment, double standards, hate speech, and scapegoating is ignored or invalidated. In the pursuit of hegemonic repair, most of the coverage reclaimed the right of interpretation and definition for the white German public. This approach suppresses and reframes clear evidence of discrimination, reestablishes Germany as a welcoming country, and affirms the national football team as a prime symbol of integration.

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Mediated Resistance: Counterhegemonic Solidarity In the days following Özil’s resignation, grassroots responses of solidarity and validation from minoritized Germans coalesced around the Twitter hashtag #MeTwo, started by activist and author Ali Can. A play on the #MeToo movement in which women shared their experiences with sexual violence and harassment, Can saw #MeTwo as a way to assert the multiplicity of transnational and multiethnic identities and also to show how widespread experiences of everyday discrimination are in Germany. These experiences were amplified by a subset of the press coverage that advanced counterhegemonic solidarity against the silence and denialism that perpetuates white supremacy in Germany. While those engaging in hegemonic repair restored a positive national self-conception by rehabilitating national football—by narrating its values and ideals, its role in creating a colorful Germany, and Özil’s supposed failure to meet its symbolic and athletic expectations—the counterhegemonic response focused on the content of Özil’s statement. One of the dominant themes in the public confessionals was the feeling of precarious belonging. Integration mythologies promise belonging without the need to relinquish one’s roots to all who fulfill their duties as citizens. However, two decades of so-called integration debates have shown that the actual contract offers belonging that is permanently contingent on material success and not making trouble, including the “good trouble” of protesting inequality advocated by the late US senator and civil rights activist John Lewis. With sentiments familiar to minoritized people across borders, #MeTwo was filled with stories of people believing that they had to work harder than others to secure less, while enduring the everyday indignities of being praised for being a so-called good German and asked where they really come from. These constant reminders of one’s difference come from a place of “white racial innocence,”68 which, as James Baldwin argues, can be more effective at maintaining white supremacy than overt racist aggression.69 As these stories proliferated on Twitter, major news outlets published testimonials of diverse young immigrants and transnational Germans.70 Alongside shorter vox populi narratives, several longer commentaries used the backlash against Özil’s protest to explore deeper problems preventing Germany from facing white supremacy. Jean-Pierre Ziegler71 drew on Mark Terkessidis’72 research with young, multiethnic Germans to challenge narrow definitions of racism that dismiss quotidian and structural forms. Rather than seeing racism as the aberrant behavior of marginal antisocial white people, the experiences detailed in Terkessidis’s work show how banal racism is and how clearly it is felt by racialized youth. Furthermore, the striking similarities between the narratives of #MeTwo and those in Terkessidis’s research twenty years earlier show that these experiences are longstanding.

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In Der Spiegel, journalist Gilda Sahebi reflected on a traumatic experience of verbal and physical assault by a young white man in a busy supermarket. Repeatedly calling her a “fucking K-ke,” and telling her to “go back to where [she] came from,” he paradoxically accused her of stealing both jobs and welfare.73 What struck Sahebi even more than the sound of his screed was the silence and averted gazes of the cashier and other customers. The silence and lack of support (with few exceptions) from Özil’s teammates reminded Sahebi of that feeling of abandonment, the stark certainty that, while those silent bystanders might attend a demonstration against racism, she cannot expect their solidarity when it counts. Sascha Lobo drilled deeper into this plague of white German silence and its role in Germany’s historical atrocities.74 By downplaying racism—both violent and banal—Germans risk allowing silence to usher extremism back into power. With biting humor, Ferda Ataman offered a counternarrative: Özil’s resignation is, in fact, the truest sign of the progress of integration in Germany. “The mood among the Kanakisierten [racialized], it roils. For a long time now. And Özil, the ungrateful, impertinent young man with a migration background, he goes further: he ‘swings the racism cudgel,’”75 as one commentary in Die Bild bemoaned.76 Instead, Ataman argues that resisting inequality and causing trouble is a hopeful sign. It shows that minoritized Germans are gaining a greater public voice and more social agency.

Conclusion The protest of racism by an athlete touted as the embodiment of integration ideals threatened to shatter treasured national self-conceptions. As hosts of the men’s FIFA World Cup in 2006, Germans declared themselves the world champions of the heart, with party patriotism sweeping away stereotypes of a dreary introspective nation. The newly diverse team in 2010 completed Germany’s symbolic transformation into a cool, colorful, postracial country on the world stage. Meanwhile, at home, two decades of moral panic about immigrant “parallel societies” and the threat posed by “less intelligent” but “more fertile” Muslim populations replacing the shrinking white Christian German majority77 has brought casual racism from barstool chatter to the center of the public sphere. This paved the way for the besorgte Bürger (concerned citizens) of new far-right protest movements and the first entrance into the Bundestag in 2017 of an openly racist far-right party, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD; Alternative for Germany), since 1945. While these developments remained largely a domestic matter or could be grouped in with the rising success of the far-right globally, Özil’s protest was different. It raised issues of everyday racism to a global English-speaking audience on Twitter and risked tarnishing Germany’s identity as a global role model for overcoming its virulent racist past. This

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peril to the status quo triggered an effort to contain and repair the damage by demeaning Özil and promoting colorblind narratives denying racism. While Americans frequently point to Germany as an example of how to remember and make reparations, Özil’s protest and the counterhegemonic solidarity it inspired show how persistent silences preserve regimes of white Christian supremacy familiar on both sides of the Atlantic. If Ataman is correct, we can expect to hear a lot more noise from integrated citizens making good trouble.

Author Kate Zambon is assistant professor of communication, University of New Hampshire. Dr. Zambon’s research in global media studies focuses on the cultural politics of nationalism and migration in the media, including in international sporting events, news, and entertainment media. Her current research analyzes how the rejection of multiculturalism across Europe has paved the way for the rise of integration as a new racializing paradigm targeting transnational and multiethnic populations. Her research has been published in Media, Culture & Society, The International Journal of Communication, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, and Popular Communication.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Daffner, “Football, Mythology and Identity.” Marshall, Celebrity and Power, xi-xii. Marcus, The Drama of Celebrity. The periodicals are Die Bild, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), FOCUS, Der Spiegel, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Welt, and Die Zeit. Rojek, Celebrity. “The Politics of Good Feeling,” 2. Horeni, “Mesut Özil.” Wallrodt, “Mesut Özil.” Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Rosentritt, “Mesut Özil.” Horeni, “Mesut Özil.” Matthäus, “Lothar Matthäus knallhart.” Hall, “The Spectacle” 228. Spiller, “Mesut Özil.” Tschermak, “Medien über Mesut Özil.” Özil, “I/III Meeting President Erdogan.” Ibid. Okyay and Zaragoza-Cristiani, “The Leverage of the Gatekeeper.”

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21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62.



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Özil, “II/III Media & Sponsors.” Köster, “Integrationsmaskottchen.” “Is Russia the Real Winner.” Matthäus, “Lothar Matthäus knallhart.” Özil, “III/III DFB.” Blome, “Die große Debatte.” Lüdke, “Mesut Özil.” Ratcliffe, “Albert Einstein,” 98. Woratschka, “Schon der Politiker Reinhard Grindel.” Schaffner and Schankweiler-Ziermann, “Nach rassistischer Entgleisung.” Müller and Kotteder, “Hass Tweets.” Özil, “III/III DFB.” Levy, Antisemitism, 387. Özil, “III/III DFB.” Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 109–42. Sow, Deutschland Schwarz Weiß, 31. El-Tayeb, Undeutsch; El-Tayeb, European Others. Bünte, “Toter Frosch.” Eder, “Rücktritt von Mesut Özil.” Ibid. Brügelmann, “Das war’s für Özil.” “Özils globale Strategie geht auf.” Bettermann, “Politik und Sport.” Bauman, “Making and Unmaking of Strangers”; Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel. “Lemke kritisiert Özil.” Ibid. Blome, “Die große Debatte.” Brügelmann et al., “Wirre Abrechnung mit Deutschland.” Poschardt, “Zwischen den Welten.” Ibid. Ibid. “The Politics of Good Feeling,” 12; see also Fischer and Mohrman, “Multicultural Integration in Germany.” Poschardt, “Zwischen den Welten.” See, e.g., “Wir Deutschen.” Reichelt, “Verlogener geht es kaum.” Bettermann, “Politik Und Sport.” Cöln and Flohr, “Wie sind Özils Leistungen.” “Deutschland debattiert über Özil.” Idealizing national football as a symbol of liberal democratic values contravenes the realities of the DFB’s corruption along with FIFA. See Timm Beichelt’s excellent book, Ersatzspielfelder: Zum Verhältnis von Fußball und Macht, for more on national football’s autocratic structures. Reichelt, “Verlogener geht es kaum.” “Deutsch-türkischer Boxer entsetzt.” For an exploration of Erdoğan’s mobilization of European racism for Turkish nationalist projects, see Aksoy and Robins, “Thinking across Spaces.”

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63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

Mikhail, “Mesut Özil.” Chin et al., After the Nazi Racial State. Wagner, “Hassprediger Erdogan.” Wolffsohn, “Özil schwingt die Rassismus-Keule.” “Hasskampagne gegen Deutschland wegen Özil.” Balfour, “Presumptions of Innocence.” Ibid. “Wir Deutschen”; Thiede, “‘Was Özil getroffen hat”; Hölter, “#MeTwo.” “#MeTwo: Die Banalität des Rassismus.” Terkessidis, Die Banalität des Rassismus. Sahebi, “Mesut Özil und der Rassismus im Alltag.” Lobo, “Mesut-Özil-Debatte.” Ataman, “Mesut Özil und Rassismus.” Wolffsohn, “Özil schwingt die Rassismus-Keule.” See Sarrazin, Deutschland schafft sich ab.

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Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. “The Politics of Good Feeling.” Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 10, no. 2 (2014): 1–19. Aksoy, Asu, and Kevin Robins. “Thinking across Spaces.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 3, no. 3 (2000): 343–65. Ataman, Ferda. “Mesut Özil und Rassismus. Integriete Mitbürger machen Stress” [Mesut Özil and Racism. Integrated citizens cause trouble]. Der Spiegel, 28. July 2018. https:// www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/mesut-oezil-und-rassismus-integrierte-mitbuer ger-machen-stress-a-1220156.html Balfour, Lawrie. The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. ———, ed. “Presumptions of Innocence.” In The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy, 87–112. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Bauman, Zygmunt. “Making and Unmaking of Strangers.” Thesis Eleven 43, no. 1 (November 1, 1995): 1–16. Beichelt, Timm. Ersatzspielfelder: Zum Verhältnis von Fußball und Macht [Ersatz playing fields: On the relation between football and power]. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2018. Bettermann, Ulrich. “Politik und Sport: Der Fall Özil zeigt Führungsversagen in krassester Form” [Politics and sport: The case of Özil reveals the failure of leadership in its crassest form]. Die Welt, 23 July 2018. https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/bilanz/article 179837610/Politik-und-Sport-Der-Fall-Oezilzeigt-Fuehrungsversagen-in-krasses ter-Form.html Blome, Nikolaus. “Die große Debatte um das Özil-Zitat—‘Ich bin Deutscher, wenn wir gewinnen, und ein Immigrant, wenn wir verlieren’” [The big debate surrounding Özil’s quote: “I am a German when we win, and I’m an immigrant when we lose”]. Die Bild, 23 July 2018. https://www.bild.de/bild-plus/politik/inland/mesut-oezil/die-grossedebatte-um-das-oezil-zitat56406452.bild.html Brügelmann, Matthias. “Das war’s für Özil!” [That was it for Özil!]. Die Bild, 22 July 2018. https://www.bild.de/politik/inland/mesut-oezil/das-wars-fuer-oezil-56396352.bild .html

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Brügelmann, Matthias, Christian Falk, Julian Reichelt, Marc Schmidt, Nils Suling, and Michael Manske. “Wirre Abrechnung Mit Deutschland—Özils Jammer-Rücktritt” [Confused reckoning with Germany—Özil’s miserable resignation]. Die Bild, 23 July 2018. https://www.bild.de/sport/fussball/nationalmannschaft/oezil-analyse-julianreichelt-56397550.bild.html Bünte, Ben. “‘Toter Frosch’: Was Basler und Matthäus über Özil sagen, finde ich peinlich” [“Dead frog”: What Basler and Matthäus say about Özil I just find embarrassing]. Focus Online, 19 June 2018. https://www.focus.de/sport/fussball/wm-2018/wieein-toterfrosch-was-basler-und-matthaeus-ueber-oezil-sagen-finde-ich-nur-nochpein lich_id_9122797.html Chin, Rita, Heide Fehrenbach, Geoff Eley, and Atina Grossmann. After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. Cöln, Christoph, and Stephan Flohr. “Wie sind Özils Leistungen in der Nationalelf tatsächlich zu bewerten?” [How can one evaluate Özil’s accomplishments with the national team]. Die Welt, 23 July 2018. https://www.welt.de/sport/fussball/article 179836658/Mesut-Oezil-Wie-sindseine-Leistungenin-der-Nationalelf-tatsaechlichzu-bewerten.html Daffner, Carola. “Football, Mythology and Identity in Sönke Wortmann’s Deutschland. Ein Sommermärchen.” Austausch 1, no. 1 (2011). “Deutschland debattiert über Özil: Das sagen FOCUS-Online-User zu seiner Abrechnung” [Germany debates Özil: That is what FOCUS-Online users say about his account]. Focus Online, 24 July 2018. https://www.focus.de/sport/fussball/debatte-ue bermesut-oezildas-sagen-focus-online-user-zu-seiner-abrechnung_id_9301108.html “Deutsch-türkischer Boxer entsetzt: ‘Özil half Menschen, dem Blut an der Hand klebt’” [German-Turkish Boxer appalled: “Özil helped people, who have blood on their hands”]. Focus Online, 24 July 2018. https://www.focus.de/sport/fussball/ Dubois, Laurent. Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Eder, Michael. “Rücktritt von Mesut Özil: Abrechnung in drei Akten” [Mesut Özil’s retirement: An account in three acts]. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 22 July 2018. https:// www.faz.net/1.5703692 El-Tayeb, Fatima. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ———. Undeutsch: Die Konstruktion des Anderen in der postmigrantischen Gesellschaft [Ungerman: The construction of the other in the postmigrant society]. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2016. Fischer, Mia, and K. Mohrman. “Multicultural Integration in Germany: Race, Religion, and the Mesut Özil Controversy.” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication ( July 24, 2020): 1–19. Focus Online. “Özils globale Strategie geht auf: Im Ausland wird der Ex-Nationalspieler gefeiert” [Özil’s global strategy begins: The ex-national player is celebrated abroad]. 23 July 2018. https://www.focus.de/sport/fussball/gut-gemacht-mesut-oezilsglobale-strate gie-geht-auf-im-ausland-wird-der-ex-nationalspieler-gefeiert_id_9300817.html Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually. Existing Democracy.” In Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun, 109–42. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.

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Hall, Stuart. “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’.” In Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, edited by Stuart Hall, 223–90. Culture, Media, and Identities. London, UK: Sage, 1997. “Hasskampagne gegen Deutschland wegen Özil—Erdogan lässt uns als Nazis beschimpfen” [Hate campaign against Germany because of Özil—Erdogan curses us as Nazis]. Die Bild, 25 July 2018. https://www.bild.de/politik/inland/recep-tayyiperdogan/ver schaerftkampfum-die-deutsch-tuerken-56429174.bild.html Hölter, Katharina. “#MeTwo: Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund erzählen von Rassismus” [#MeTwo: People with migrant backgrounds talk about racism]. Der Spiegel, 27 July 27 2018. https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/metwo-menschen-mitmigrations hintergrund-erzaehlen-von-rassismus-a-00000000-0003-0001-0000-000002667477 Horeni, Michael. “Mesut Özil: Druck von rechts” [Mesut Özil: Pressure from the right]. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 22 June 2012. https://www.faz.net/1.1794657 “Is Russia the Real Winner of World Cup 2018?.” BBC News, 14 July 2018, sec. Europe. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44812175 Köster, Philipp. “Integrationsmaskottchen zum Buhmann degradiert” [Mascot of integration degraded to a boo-man]. Übermedien (blog), 29 June 2018. https://uebermedien .de/29417/integrationsmaskottchen-zum-buhmann-degradiert/ “Lemke kritisiert Özil: ‘Nie große Identifikation gespürt’” [Lemke criticizes Özil: „Never felt a big identification”]. Süddeutsche Zeitung, 23 July 2018. https://www.sueddeut sche.de/sport/fussball-bremen-lemke-kritisiert-oezil-nie-grosseidentifikation-gespu ert-dpa.urn-newsml-dpacom-20090101-180723-99-267424 Levy, Richard S. Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution. Santa Barbara: ABC CLIO, 2005. Lobo, Sascha. “Mesut-Özil-Debatte: Wir schweigen Extremisten an die Macht” [MesutÖzil debate: We silence the extremists in power]. Der Spiegel, 25 July 25 2018. https:// www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/mesut-oezil-debatte-wir-schweigenextremisten-andie-macht-kolumne-a-1220067.html Lüdke, Steffen. “Mesut Özil: Karim Benzema und Romelu Lukaku haben ganz ähnliche Probleme” [Mesut Özil: Karim Benzema and Romelu Lukaku have very similar problems]. Der Spiegel, 23 July 2018. https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/mesutoezilbenzema-und-lukaku-haben-ganz-aehnliche-probleme-a-00000000-00030001-0000000002647730 Marcus, Sharon. The Drama of Celebrity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Matthäus, Lothar. “Lothar Matthäus knallhart: ‘Özil fühlt sich nicht wohl im DFB-Trikot’” [Lothar Matthäus tough: Özil does not feel comfortable in the DFB-jersey]. Die Bild, 18 June 2018. https://www.bild.de/bild-plus/sport/fussball/fifa-wm-2018/matthaeus habe-das-gefuehl-oezil-will-gar-nicht-mitspielen-56047046.bild.html Mikhail, Jean. “Mesut Özil: Erdogan ist der größte Gewinner des Rücktritts” [Mesut Özil: Erdogan is the big winner of the retirement]. Die Welt, 23 July 2018. https://www .welt.de/sport/article179820874/Mesut-Oezil-Erdogan-ist-der-groessteGewinnerdes-Ruecktritts.html Müller, Frank, and Franz Kotteder. “Hass Tweets: Chef des Deutschen Theaters beschimpft Özil und Gündogan” [Hate tweets: Head of the German theater berates Özil and Gündogan]. Süddeutsche Zeitung, 15 June 2018. https://www.sueddeutsche.de/ muenchen/oezil-guendoganerdogan-deutsches-theater1.4018175

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Okyay, Asli, and Jonathan Zaragoza-Cristiani. “The Leverage of the Gatekeeper: Power and Interdependence in the Migration Nexus between the EU and Turkey.” The International Spectator 51, no. 4 (October 2016): 51–66. Özil, Mesut. “II/III Media & Sponsors.” Tweet. Twitter, 22 July 2018. https://twitter.com/ MesutOzil1088/status/1021017944745226242 Poschardt, Ulf. “Zwischen den Welten” [Between the worlds]. Die Welt, 23 July 2018. https://www.welt.de/print/welt_kompakt/vermischtes/article179799640/Kom mentar-Zwischen-den-Welten.html Ratcliffe, Susan, ed. “Albert Einstein 1879–1955.” In Oxford Essential Quotations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Reichelt, Julian. “Verlogener geht es kaum” [It can hardly be more deceitful]. Die Bild, 23 July 2018. https://www.bild.de/politik/inland/mesut-oezil/verlogener-geht-es-kaum56406344.bild.html Rojek, Chris. Celebrity. London: Reaktion Books, 2001. Rosentritt, Michael. “Mesut Özil: ‘Mein Ballgefühl ist türkisch’” [Mesut Özil: My touch on the ball is Turkish]. Der Tagesspiegel, 14 October 2009. https://www.tagesspie gel.de/sport/fussball-wm2010/interview-mesut-oezil-meinballgefuehl-ist-tuer kisch/1615388.html Sahebi, Gilda. “Mesut Özil und der Rassismus im Alltag: Die stille Mehrheit kann mich mal” [Mesut Özil and everyday racism: The silent majority can kiss my ass]. Der Spiegel, 24 July 2018. https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/mesut-oezil-und-derrassis mus-im-alltag-die-stille-mehrheit-kann-mich-mal-a-1219812.html Sarrazin, Thilo. Deutschland schafft sich ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen [Germany eliminates itself: How we placed our country to chance]. Munich: Deutsche VerlagsAnstalt, 2010. Schaffner, Sebastian, and Gudrun Schankweiler-Ziermann. “Nach rassistischer Entgleisung: Bebraer Politiker entschuldigt sich bei Özil und Gündogan” [After racist derailment: Bebraer politician apologizes to Özil and Gündogan]. Hessische/Niedersächsische Allgemeine, 24 May 2018. https://www.hna.de/lokales/rotenburg-bebra/ bebraort46578/nach-facebook-beleidigung-bebraer-stadtrat-entschuldigt-sich9895718.html Simmel, George. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff. New York: The Free Press, 1964. Sow, Noah. Deutschland schwarz weiß: Der alltägliche Rassismus [Germany in black and white: Everyday racism]. Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2018. Spiller, Christian. “Mesut Özil: So viel mehr als ein Rücktritt” [Mesut Özil: So much more than retirement]. Die Zeit. 23 July 2018. https://www.zeit.de/sport/2018-07/ mesut-oezil-fussball-rassismus-kommentar-ruecktritt Terkessidis, Mark. Die Banalität des Rassismus: Migranten zweiter Generation entwickeln eine neue Perspektive [The banality of racism: Second generation migrants develop a new perspective]. Bielefeld: transcript, 2004. Thiede, Lara. “‘Was Özil getroffen hat, ist purer Rassismus, der vielen von uns begegnet’” [What Özil dealt with was pure racism that many of us encounter]. Jetzt, 23 July 2018. https://www.jetzt.de/sport/fußballspielerinnen-mitmigrationshintergrundzuözils-rücktritt Tschermak, Moritz. “Medien über Mesut Özil: der Rassismus der Anderen” [Media on Mesut Özil: The racism of others]. BILDblog.de (blog), 3 July 2018. https://bildblog .de/99621/medienueber-mesut-oezil-der-rassismus-der-anderen/

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———. “‘Welt’: Pseudoseriöses Unken über Mesut Özil in ‘Bild’—BILDblog” [World: pseudoserious toads on Mesut Özil in ‘Bild’— BILDblog]. 20 June 2018. https://bild blog.de/99327/welt-pseudoserioeses-unken-ueber-mesut-oezil-in-bild/ “Vom Foto bis zum Rücktritt: Chronologie der Özil-Erdogan-Affäre” [From a photo to retirement: The chronology of the Özil-Erdogan-Affair]. Der Spiegel, 23 July 2018. https://www.spiegel.de/sport/fussball/mesut-oezil-vom-foto-mit-recep-tayyip-erdo ganzum-ruecktritt-die-chronologie-a-1219642.html Wagner, Franz Josef. “Hassprediger Erdogan” [Erdogan—Hate monger]. Die Bild, 25 July 2018. https://www.bild.de/politik/inland/recep-tayyip-erdogan/hassprediger-erdo gan56428336.bild.html Wallrodt, Lars. “Mesut Özil: ‘Noch heute muss ich mich konzentrieren, wenn ich Deutsch rede’” [Mesut Özil: “I have to concentrate even today, when I speak German”]. Die Welt, 26 March 2017. https://www.welt.de/sport/fussball/article163153522/Noch-heutemuss-ich-michkonzentrieren-wenn-ich-Deutsch-rede.html “Wir Deutschen; Die Rassismusvorwürfe von Mesut Özil bewegen das Land. Was erleben andere junge Menschen mit ausländischen Wurzeln?” [We Germans: Accusations of racism from Mesut Özil move the country. What do other young people with foreign roots live through?]. Die Welt 24 July 2018. Wolffsohn, Michael. “Özil schwingt die Rassismus-Keule” [Özil swings the racism-club]. Die Bild, 24 July 2018. https://www.bild.de/politik/inland/mesut-oezil/wolffsohnkommentar-zu-oezil56411282.bild.html Woratschka, Rainer. “Schon der Politiker Reinhard Grindel war gegen Multikulti” [Even the politician Reinahrd Grindel was against multiculturalism]. Der Tagesspiegel, 11 July 2018. https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/dfb-praesident-in-der-oezildebatteschon-der-politiker-reinhard-grindel-war-gegen-multikulti/22786674.html Ziegler, Jean-Pierre. “#MeTwo: Die Banalität des Rassismus” [#MeTwo: The banality of racism]. Der Spiegel, 27 July 2018. https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/gesellschaft/ metwo-diebanalitaet-des-rassismus-a1220574.html

PART III

 Forming Identities through Football Class and Gender in German Culture

CHAPTER 7



The Making of a Football Myth Memory, Masculinity, and the Media FRIEDERIKE B. EMONDS

F

ootball as a cultural phenomenon has been ascribed almost mythical powers in German society. For decades, it has been imbued with such magic as creating shared experiences and individual and collective memories; shaping mentalities and cultural identities; and inducing a new sense of unity and community, thereby strengthening national identity and the construction of a new national self-image that is said to have led to a complete reinvention of the nation itself. Football milestones are often represented as major historical events, such as the legendary 1954 victory of the World Cup in Switzerland, in which Germany beat the favored Hungarian team 3–2 in the final. This surprise victory is still today perceived as nothing less than a miracle in German cultural memory (Das Wunder von Bern) and even acts as a founding myth to claim that the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD or FRG; Federal Republic of Germany) really came together on 4 July 1954, in the Swiss football stadium.1 Likewise, the Sommermärchen 2006 (Summer Fairy Tale 2006) when Germany hosted the World Cup, is said to have magically transformed Germany to a more self-confident yet open and worldly society, in which collective cheering, public enthusiasm, and patriotic waving of German flags are not only kindly tolerated, but even cautiously embraced.2 Whether perceived as founding narrative, miracle, or fairy tale, football’s most highly mediated events of the past have been mythologized and, as such, have become an integral part of German cultural memory.3 Today, with the proliferation of globalized sports markets as well as the rise in sports media, ascribing magical expressions like “miracle” and “fairy tale” to a particular victory or competition might sound quite trite. After all, most spectator sports trigger intense emotions in the audience and numerous memorable

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upsets in a variety of disciplines in sport history have been perceived as miracles. In addition, although superstitious rituals before an important competition are widespread and a common practice among athletes and fans alike, they also develop in hindsight after an especially good performance. Yet most of those sport miracles are restricted to the actual event and to the performance of its athletes. What is different in the two aforementioned German football events is their alleged impact on the German nation as a whole. The very notion that the mundane sport events supposedly had the power to cause fundamental changes in society and the nation not only has been espoused in the media but also has been vividly debated in academic discourses. In this chapter I analyze the myth-making process that the two particular football events inspired far beyond the success of the teams. Clearly, athletic performance notwithstanding, the emotional experience of these football events has significantly shaped the cultural discourse. The intense positive emotional responses of happiness and excitement at the time imbued the actual sports events with a sense of the extraordinary. But how did these affective reactions cause those myths to be created in our cultural memory over time? More specifically, when and how did the memories of the 1954 victory and the 2006 World Cup become nationalized? And, most importantly, why is it taken for granted that it is specifically the men’s football events in both instances that are reputed to have had lasting effects on German society and the nation as a whole? If the cultural consumption of football indeed unifies and generates constructions of national identity, why are women’s football successes, such as the first World Cup victory in 2003, not celebrated with the same emotional attachments, and why do they not have an equally strong impact on German society? Guided by these questions I examine how memories of the two men’s football events became gendered and constructed into myths, which were then nationalized and finally established into German cultural memory. To that end, I situate the inquiry within the methodological framework of memory studies with a distinct focus on gender, owing particularly to the theories developed by Aleida Assmann (2010, 2016), Alison Landsberg (2004), and Pierre Nora (1989), as well as gender theories by R.W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt (2005). In postwar West Germany football became increasingly popular as a spectator sport as well as an active player sport, although it was mostly for men. This trend is evidenced on the one hand in the expansion of male fan culture across larger slices of German society, and on the other hand in the boom of memberships to local football clubs for boys and men. By contrast, very little is documented about female fan culture in the immediate postwar decades. Leisure-time activities were typically gender-specific and most women showed very little interest in watching football, dismissing the sport as men’s pastime. However, female athletes had already begun to play on organized teams in the early 1950s and won their first international game against the Neth-

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erlands in 1956—despite the explicit prohibition by the Deutscher Fußball Bund (DFB; German Football Association) in 1955.4 It was only at the DFB Bundestag in 1970 that the ban against women’s football was lifted, but by then numerous women’s teams had already been established in defiance of open and virulent misogynistic prejudices and institutional disapprobation. It took another three years for the DFB Bundestag to finally approve and introduce the German championship for women’s football, starting with the 1973–74 season, and another staggering twenty years to establish the Frauen-Bundesliga (women’s Bundesliga), a professional association football league for women, in the 1990–91 season. In the relatively short period of women’s professional football, the national team won eight European championships (1989, 1991, 1995, 1997, 2001, 2005, 2009, 2013) and two World Cups (2003, 2008). None of these victories was even remotely celebrated with such national enthusiasm as the men’s successes, let alone to have had any reputed impact on German society or its image of the nation. In fact, the victories mostly went unnoticed due to the misconceptions, chauvinism, and outright sexism still governing the sport today. It is therefore not surprising that the women’s national football team is still desperately clamoring to achieve equal footing with the men’s team, as emphasized by the brief video aired shortly before the 2019 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA; International Federation of Association Football) Women’s World Cup.5 By contrast, all four World Cup victories by the men’s national football team (1954, 1974, 1990, 2014) were widely celebrated throughout the country. Compounding the effect, both the 1954 victory and the 2006 World Cup have been subject of countless discussions in the public discourse. While earlier publications about the former event almost exclusively came from journalists and football enthusiasts, often supporting the claim of Germany’s national rebirth, the fiftieth anniversary of the event in 2004 brought about a flurry of more comprehensive, scholarly examinations, probing the football milestone for its sociopolitical implications. For example, Wolfram Pyta claims that the importance of the victory lies in its symbolic meaning, marking a new beginning for German society—an interpretation that to some extent is supported by Kay Schiller.6 In contrast, Franz-Josef Brüggemeier focuses on the intense but fleeting emotional moment without higher meaning; and Markwart Herzog, emphasizing the regional aspect of the celebrations afterward, concludes that the founding myth attributes “a vastly inflated and inappropriate importance and impact to sport.”7 Similarly, Diethelm Blecking considers those theories as exaggerated and links them to football’s political appropriation by the Gerhard Schröder’s social democrat government, while Thomas Raithel points out their distance from historic reality.8 A similar range of interpretations exists for the 2006 World Cup, often connecting the two football events.9

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To illuminate the complex entanglements of football, myth, and gender, as well as of their significance in our cultural memory, this chapter is divided into three parts. First, I focus on the historical event of the 1954 World Cup and its contemporaneous representation in the media. Situating the football event into the sociopolitical context of the early years of the Federal Republic, I analyze how the memory of the football victory eventually lost public attention and value in the subsequent decades. Following Assmann, I argue that this process of forgetting was “a necessary and constructive part of internal social transformations” in the young West German republic.10 The second and third parts of this chapter concentrate on the mechanisms of the myth-making process. I investigate the cultural constructions and media productions that capitalized on the emotional interpretations of the two seminal football events as miracle and summer fairy tale, respectively. Specifically, I examine Sönke Wortmann’s two football films Das Wunder von Bern (The Miracle of Bern) (2003) and Deutschland. Ein Sommermärchen (Germany: A summer fairy tale) (2006), arguing that Wortmann’s films play a key role in this myth-making process because both films re-staged the football events as media events, thereby constructing idealized images of the male football players. Masculinity, then, not only becomes the leitmotif in the films, but also is re-inscribed into the football narrative itself. To be sure, the gender of German football has always been male, but Wortmann’s films reinforce this identification and make it socially meaningful for the twenty-first century.

Football Memories and the Media When the West German and Hungarian teams faced off on 4 July 1954 in the final game of the World Cup, the encounter had all the makings of the David and Goliath myth.11 On the one side were the mighty Hungarian players, dominating football in Europe for more than four years with a winning streak of thirty-one games. On the other side, the West German team had only very limited international experience after World War II, since West Germany’s DFB had just been re-established and allowed to rejoin FIFA in 1950 and Sepp Herberger had been reinstated as the head coach of the national team one year prior to that.12 When the underdog surprisingly beat the favored squad, after a devastating loss against the same team in the group stage, the unexpected World Cup upset triggered rare and unusually emotional public reactions in West Germany. The significance of this moment would be unthinkable without the unprecedented media coverage that turned the final game into a sport spectacle and afforded most German fans the opportunity to participate in this experience. For the first time, the games of the World Cup were transmitted simultaneously

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into several European countries by live media.13 This made the final match particularly appealing, because it could now be shared with an international audience beyond the Wankdorf Stadium in Bern. While only a few had the chance to watch the event on the limited number of televisions available in West Germany at the time, the majority of German football fans listened to reporter Herbert Zimmermann’s legendary broadcast.14 In addition, press coverage from the World Cup flooded West Germany. Large daily newspapers and periodical magazines, apart from the usual sports outlets, reported from the nearby football event, making the German press corps the largest foreign media representation at the games.15 This extraordinary media attention to the World Cup certainly shaped expectations and increased excitement in West Germany, particularly toward the end of the tournament.16 Only a few days after the final whistle, the feature-length documentary Die Welt spielt Fußball: Fußball-Weltmeisterschaft 1954 (The world plays football: the 1954 football World Cup) was released in movie theaters in West Germany and abroad. The film, directed by Sammy Drechsel, contains brief clips and commentaries of the games, interspersed with a comic storyline and landscape images of Switzerland.17 Thus appealing to different audiences, the film was a box office hit. Further film footage from various matches, including the final, were also built into the Neue deutsche Wochenschauen (weekly West German newsreels), which aired in the movie theaters. Yet despite the new international TV broadcasting technology and film footage, the fact, incomprehensible for today’s football fans, is that complete film coverage of the entire final game no longer exists. The original TV images of the broadcast supposedly could not be archived, and the extra footage filmed for the documentary was disposed of only a few years later due to lack of interest and space.18 In contrast to the public euphoria and overwhelming initial media coverage, the reaction of the West German government had been reserved from the very beginning.19 There was no official government representation at the final match, though both President Theodor Heuss and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer were quick to send the team congratulatory telegrams afterward. In the political context of the mid 1950s, most West German politicians, as well as the media apart from the tabloid press, strove to downplay the football victory as a mere sports achievement, trying to avoid any kind of national manifestations. Adenauer’s political emphasis in foreign policy was to integrate the newly founded Federal Republic into Europe and connect it to Western alliances. While the defeat of fascism can be considered a foundational narrative of Europe, West Germany, as the successor state to the Third Reich, could obviously not partake in this shared narrative. Instead, acknowledging guilt of the past and responsibility for the future, the government declared to never again repeat the crimes and atrocities of the Holocaust and World War II, thereby forging its new political identity. Guilt and the moral obligation to never forget

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became the founding narrative of West Germany and was firmly anchored into its national memory. A more positively defined identity was suggested with the recourse on German culture. Harking back to Goethe und Schiller, the authority of high culture and the classical canon turned into the dominant cultural discourse of the postwar years. In that sense, the football victory with its feared resurgence of latent German nationalism was ill-timed because it posed a counternarrative that had the potential not only to destabilize West Germany’s new political identity but also to jeopardize its foreign policy efforts. It is therefore not surprising that this counternarrative was more or less suppressed by the government and almost ignored by the intellectual elite and educated middle class whose disdain for popular culture resulted in almost complete silence of the football event in the following years.20 In this political and cultural context, the once-celebrated football victory quickly lost its public significance. Even its cultural memory was short-lived, buried and abandoned in the storerooms of the film, TV, and broadcasting studios as well as in newspaper archives because the triumph lacked a meaningful framework to keep it alive. As mentioned earlier, some of the TV recordings even ended up in the trash, making “an important return path from cultural forgetting to cultural memory” almost impossible.21 Consequently, anniversaries of the event in the following decades were hardly publicly noted and the incongruent memory seem to have been all but forgotten.22 Drawing on Assmann, one could argue that, in this case, the active practice of cultural forgetting was a necessary intervention since West Germany was in an ongoing process of political and social transformations.23 However, as the cultural memory of the unexpected 1954 World Cup victory disappeared from public discourse, it continued to live on in communicative memory. Thriving within the personal narrations of families, circles of friends and in local Stammtisch (gathering of regulars) discussions, the memory continued to be transmitted to the next generations through anecdotes and stories, sometimes with hero worship proportions. This aftereffect may also account for the sudden boom of interest in football among young boys and teenagers, who played in the streets and on makeshift pitches while memberships in local football clubs—for boys and men only—started to gain momentum.24 Evidently, the football players of the victorious team not only found recognition in the sports world but also offered a new type of masculine role model for young boys and male teenagers at home.25 Hidden in the privacy of the home and the imagination of young boys and men, the cultural memory of the 1954 victory acquired a decidedly male re-interpretation and gained in importance as a postwar countermemory especially for men. Embellished with heroic overtones, the memories were now shaped by traditionally male values, such as camaraderie, toughness, and perseverance, which, in the context of competitive football on

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an international arena, suddenly seem to have lost all their notorious militaristic connotations.26 Clearly, this male counternarrative did not offer a positive identification for women, especially since it was prohibited for women and girls to play football in the 1950s. Thus, without continuous public discussions, criticism, and reflection, this recoded memory of the 1954 World Cup victory turned into an exclusively male myth, which almost fifty years later would get reclaimed and framed within the new context of a unified Germany preparing to host the 2006 World Cup.

From Memory to Myth Fast-forward to 12 September 2003, the day of the inauguration ceremony of the arts and culture program conceived as an integral part of the 2006 FIFA World Cup and sponsored by the German government with a budget of 30 million Euros. Then-chancellor Gerhard Schröder initiated the thousand-day countdown to the kick-off with the following words: “The World Cup offers the chance to become a calling card of our country, even beyond 2006.  . . . We want to show not only games that excite people, but also a cosmopolitan Germany.”27 Franz Beckenbauer, football legend and president of the organizing committee, emphasizing the uniqueness of this cultural framework, summed up its two major goals: to present “the cultural diversity of our country” and to “heighten anticipation for the upcoming events.”28 These were ambitious goals for a country that was still grappling with the aftermath of unification thirteen years earlier and a series of violent attacks on migrants and refugees in the 1990s. Germany was under much pressure and scrutiny to showcase an integrated society and fulfill its ambitious FIFA motto, “Die Welt zu Gast bei Freunden” (Time to make friends) in time for the 2006 World Cup when it was in the international limelight. More importantly though, both official statements confirm the notion that, by 2003 political goals and sport ambitions had merged again. While the Adenauer government was reluctant to celebrate national football victories in the 1950s, fifty years later the Schröder government openly embraced the sport for its own political purposes. It is in this cultural context that Sönke Wortmann staged the premiere of his film Das Wunder von Bern (The Miracle of Bern) in the Lichtburg (movie theater) in Essen, the largest in Germany, on 15 October 2003.29 As Kimberly Coulter put it, the “premiere had all the trappings of a state event; the chancellor, interior minister, the governor of the state of North Rhine Westphalia, general counsel of Switzerland, and the officials of the Hungarian embassy were all invited” as well as a number of (male) football stars and several prominent members from German arts, industry, and society.30 To top it off, Wortmann and his actors and crew arrived in Essen on a train, which paid homage

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to the legendary train the victorious national football team returned to Germany aboard in 1954.31 Wortmann had orchestrated an almost perfect reenactment—this time with official government representation—that set the stage for the legendary final match in his film. All three German politicians—Gerhard Schröder, Otto Schily, and Peer Steinbrück—who were all born in the 1930s and 1940s, had experienced the surprising victory during their lifetimes and therefore easily conjured up memories of the event itself. After the premiere, Chancellor Schröder admitted having shed “echte Bundeskanzlertränen” (real chancellor tears) and claimed that Helmut Rahn was a great personal role model. Turning to Rudi Völler, then the manager of the German football team, Schröder urged “2006 is do or die,” clearly referring to the World Cup championship three years later.32 The film’s release date was timed at the right cultural and political moment, which could have accounted for its enormous box-office success in Germany.33 The football fever, triggered by the start of the FIFA arts and culture program, facilitated the film’s promotion and marketing campaign. Moreover, Chancellor Schröder’s interest in the film and his presence at the premiere, which subsequently generated additional media hype, turned the film into a “national affair.”34 Another factor that contributed to the popularity of the film was the new framework of memory due to social, political, and cultural transformations in the aftermath of German unification. As Assmann suggests, those changes shaped new “frames of reference and modes of interpretation both for the perception of the present and, belatedly, for memory” and determined “how and what (of the past) should claim attention and be brought forward.”35 In post-unification Germany, the desire for a shared past brought about a profound shift in foundational narratives, which provided a new context for the cultural memory of the 1954 football victory. The first signs of renewed interest became evident upon its fortieth anniversary, when the World Cup victory received more public recognition than ever before. An increasing number of publications, TV and radio specials, and newspaper articles appeared to commemorate the event. At this time, publicist Arthur Heinrich first formulated the claim that the Federal Republic of Germany was founded in the Wankdorf Stadion in Bern.36 Roughly at the same time, historian Joachim Fest in an interview declared Fritz Walter to be the “mental founding father” of the young republic, next to Adenauer and Erhard as its “political” and “economic founding fathers,” respectively.37 These controversial claims catapulted the almost forgotten memory back into public discourse and imbued it with new political and social meaning that turned the forty-year-old football event into a positive founding story, the beginning of a modern myth, appealing to recently unified German society. Furthermore, the affective re-interpretation of the historic event paved the way for its big

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fiftieth anniversary celebration in 2004 and raised expectations for its definitive restaging in Wortmann’s film Das Wunder von Bern in the wake of the 2006 World Cup.

Wortmann’s Restaging of the Football Myth Born in 1959, Wortmann had no first-hand experience of the 1954 football victory. Relying on memories from the surviving football players and other witnesses, written documents about players, coaches, and audiences, as well as the remaining scraps of film materials, he constructed his own narrative of the actual event. In his film, historical representation is subsumed by strong emotional tensions and nostalgic sentiments, typical for the cinematic genre of the melodrama. Indeed, rather than a critical discussion of the past, the film produces a Geschichtsgefühl (feeling of history), marking the emotional turn in representations on German history in post-unification cinema—a far cry from the critical film tradition of the New German Cinema. In contrast to earlier cinematic representations of postwar West Germany, Wortmann’s film depicts its German characters mostly as victims. As it recounts postwar German history in the 1950s, the destruction of the war provides the background for the film’s focus on the hardship of rebuilding country, society, family, and individual—all without any references to the Holocaust. The melodramatic plotline weaves in several different strands that tell the stories of the various male protagonists: Richard Lubanski, a returning German soldier traumatized by his experiences in a Soviet prison camp, has difficulties fitting into postwar German society. His youngest son Matthias, to whom his father is a complete stranger, has adopted the rebellious football player Helmut Rahn as his surrogate father. Rahn, though a struggling outsider, “is Matthias’s hero and also the star of the other ‘German family’—the national football team.”38 The three female characters represented in the film are reduced to stereotypical supporting roles that reinforce the idea of football as a male space. Christa Lubanski, Richard’s wife and hardworking mother of three, built up the local pub to support the family while her husband was gone. She fits the stereotype of the Trümmerfrau (rubble woman). Annette Ackermann, newly wed to awkward journalist Paul, evokes all the images of the Fräuleinwunder (girl wonders)—beautiful, young, modern, and self-confident—but her role is undercut because both Ackermann characters are designed for comic relief. Christa’s daughter Ingrid plays an even more marginal role, but she has one central line in the film, with which she reminds her mother (and the audience) of the importance of the new TV set for the pub: “You know the men are all crazy about football, don’t you?”39

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Ingrid’s sentiment is echoed by a rapid succession of images shortly thereafter, in which the film tells us exactly who the audience for the final football match is: the exclusively male crowd in Christa’s pub, the group of men in front of a storefront with TV screens playing the match in its windows, the monks in front of the radio, and an all-male group of the Freie Deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik [GDR; German Democratic Republic]) in front of a TV set. The camera even pans over the empty desks in the local government building, informing us that even the infamous German bureaucracy, staffed by male civil servants introduced earlier in the film, comes to a halt during the final match. In sum, the film makes it very clear that, while all German men are united in their football fever, no woman would choose to watch the match.40 It indeed goes to great length to show that none of the adult female characters understand football, nor do they even pretend to have the slightest interest in it although Ingrid and her mother join in the celebration after the game. Yet all strands of the plot converge into the main event at the end: the final football match between Germany and Hungary, which predictably solves all problems. The film unabashedly celebrates the football victory as a sheer miracle and reinforces the myth. Football, as the film wants to make us believe, is more than an all-male German pastime or a mere sport event, but indeed becomes the healing power that unites the family, the team, and the nation. To drive this point home, the film prolongs and thereby reinforces the cathartic moment as it switches back to its plot line to illustrate football’s healing power on the more personal level of its main characters. In the final scene, on board the train, the father (the returning World War II soldier), in tears, renounces his authoritarian values (perhaps best illustrated by his sentiment, “German boys don’t cry”). He is comforted by his son, who, remembering Rahn’s previous admonishments to have more empathy for his father, utters the last words in the film, “You know, I think, German boys are allowed to cry now and then.”41 Thus, re-unified with his family and redeemed by the next generation, the father on board the train becomes part of the winning team, the confident and successful younger generation, riding into the sunset—a departure into a new era. Parallel to the Lubanski family plot, the film narrates the developments of the German national football team—the other German family. Following the squad to the training camp and, of course, to the World Cup matches, the film also features the dynamics within the team in more private spaces such as hotel rooms, bars, and on bus rides. Wortmann mostly cast second-tier football players as members of the German team to recreate the familiar football scenes more authentically. A notable exception, however, is the actor Sascha Göpel from Essen in the role of Helmut Rahn, who emerges as the hero of the film even before he shoots the decisive goal in the final match. The film goes out of its way to portray Rahn as a talented yet undisciplined and disorganized out-

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sider, who tends to drink too much, oversleeps, is habitually late for practices and games—the antithesis of the stereotypical German values associated with National Socialism.42 Rahn embodies the new generation of German men who, in contrast to the previous generation, do not easily conform, but have a mind of their own, resist authority, yet work hard and are honest and true to themselves albeit with headstrong and somewhat uncontrollable behavior.43 Rahn’s personality sets him apart from the other players but, as coach Sepp Herberger and team captain Fritz Walter help polish his rough edges, Rahn not only becomes a successful team player and hero of the final match but also emerges as the new male role model for the future revered by the younger generation. In the film, Rahn constitutes the link between the older and younger generations. Since he has not only shown but also taught the younger generation (Matthias) forgiveness and empathy toward the father’s generation, he forges a new sense of unity and belonging between the generations of men. Additionally, Rahn’s role also serves to connect with the film audience. With his boisterous joviality, cheeky quips, and directness, twenty-first-century viewers easily relate to him. The two other characters with whom the audience gets emotionally involved are Matthias, who initially grew up fatherless, as well as his father, the returning POW represented as a victim of the war. In contrast, the film does not invite viewers to engage with any of the rather unspectacular female characters. This exclusively male identification that the film offers its viewers corresponds to the film’s marketing slogan on the official film poster: “Every child needs a father. Every person needs a dream. Every nation needs a legend.”44 Although the second and third statements in the slogan suggest universality, in the plotline they are exemplified only by male characters. While Matthias and Rahn essentially share the same dream, namely for Rahn to become a successful football player, the father hopes to reintegrate into his family and into postwar society. Furthermore, all male characters in the film wish for the World Cup victory, which at first seems completely out of reach. The legend that the film represents is of course the football victory, which, as I mentioned earlier, within the storyline is predominantly of interest to the male characters. As the film intertwines the three protagonists’ stories (Rahn, Matthias, and his father), it does not question that this narrative of the past is based on almost exclusively male experiences and sensibilities, which then become nationalized and established as a foundational myth—a legend supposedly “every country needs.”45 Thus, the new national identity, the sense of belonging as represented by this foundational myth created by the football event, in fact binds only men together, leaving the women once again as passive bystanders on the sidelines. The film even visualizes this obvious exclusion with the complete absence of women on the train in the last scene. Clearly, only men forge the new future, while women are seen working in the fields and waving their handkerchiefs as the train speeds by.

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Wortmann’s film fulfilled another important social function besides rediscovering the football myth from its buried existence in the “storeroom of cultural relics” and reconfiguring it to address needs and desires of the newmillennium audience.46 While the film’s emotional plot line succeeded in recalling a nearly forgotten event, particularly for an audience too young to remember, it also empowered those younger generations to vicariously relive the event and thereby reaffirm its significance in our cultural memory. As such, the mythical football match, now restaged and simulated as a film event, made it possible for everyone in Germany to retroactively share this particular cultural memory and assimilate it as personal experience even though the majority of the audience was not alive in 1954. This kind of memory transmission, which Alison Landsberg calls “prosthetic memory,” allows for everybody to participate regardless of race, ethnicity, class, gender, or age.47 Hence, the film Das Wunder von Bern not only created the perfect allusion of shared collective memories of this historic moment but also forged a new bond across generations and ethnic groups between the viewers of the film and the ones who actually experienced the real-life event. In doing so, the film’s simulation of shared experiences prepared the audience for the 2006 World Cup in Germany—only three years later—by contributing to infuse national pride on a broader level into the already prevalent football fever.

Wortmann’s Football Myth 2.0 For the 2006 World Cup, director Sönke Wortmann secured the exclusive rights to film the real-life football events in order to record them for posterity. In his second football film Deutschland. Ein Sommermärchen (Germany: A summer fairy tale), Wortmann travels with the men’s national football team before and during the weeks of the World Cup.48 This time, Wortmann did not have to cast actors as football players, re-create important football scenes, or construct a side plot to entice the audience and evoke emotional identification, since the real-life event was still vivid in the communicative memory when the film premiered on 3 October 2006, only four months after the tournament’s end.49 Instead, the film focuses exclusively on the men’s national football squad. It not only concentrates on matches and training days, press conferences, and interactions with the public, but also, once again, follows the team into more intimate spaces, such as locker rooms, meetings, lounges, celebrations, hotel rooms, and private gatherings, to which fans, the press, or even friends and family rarely have access. The shaky footage of the handheld camera suggests an unrehearsed filming of reality, creating an authentic and intense atmosphere and a sense of immediacy for the audience. These cinematic techniques convey the illusion of a documentary, which the film claims to be; as Carola Daffner contends, however, it is “far

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from objective documentation.”50 In fact, a closer look at the film Deutschland. Ein Sommermärchen reveals that Wortmann follows the all-too-familiar formula of his first film to create “a nostalgic celebration . . . [and] a stylized and emotionally charged dream of a Mythos Deutschland for the new millennium.”51 Indeed, while Wortmann reinterpreted the 1954 football victory into a foundational narrative of the past in his first film, his second film constructs the 2006 World Cup as the catalyst for transforming German society into a modern, confident, and inclusive union—an idealized vision for the future. Similar to his first film, his second film also suggests that the feeling of unity and inclusion across different slices of German society is achieved by identification with the men’s national football team. Yet, the film once again represents football as a men’s world where women have very little space—and are typically relegated to the sidelines as cheerleaders and fans. Since we do not hear any women voicing football expertise in the film, we are led to believe that the masses of young female fans waiting outside the hotel gate are admirers who seem to be heterosexually interested in the players as men, thereby once again reinforcing the masculine ideal embodied by the football player in the all-male space. While Wortmann again portrays the players as a group of friends, having fun in their leisure time off the pitch, representations during practice and especially in the matches show their real strength. Focusing on the physicality and athleticism of the players, he constructs masculinities as heroes fighting opponents while the pitch turns into a battlefield. This impression is emphasized by the selection of plays included in the film. Representations of most matches are reduced to successful goals in addition to striking ground duels, showcasing players’ agility, power, and fortitude. Camera and editing techniques, such as closeups, low-angle shots, and slow motion add deeper emotional intensity to these scenes and create iconic moments. Moreover, snippets of Klinsmann’s pep talks in the locker rooms underscore the impression of a combative atmosphere. To show the public reactions to the team’s successes, these match scenes are offset by those with increasingly large crowds of fans, cheering not only in the stadium but also in the streets, or in front of the hotels. Because those images are often filmed from inside the team bus, the camera, panning back and forth, also captures the players’ responses while the film’s introspective theme song, Xavier Naidoo’s “Dieser Weg” (This path), accompanies the images as non-diegetic music in the background.52 Often devoid of any verbal exchanges or sounds from outside, these quieter scenes introduce a change of pace to the highly dynamic match scenes and greatly appeal to the emotions of the audience, since the music quietly calls for optimism and perseverance in the effort to overcome all obstacles. Interestingly, the film does not show the end of the World Cup but instead follows the team after their third-place victory to the grand finale: the public celebration at the Berlin fan mile in front of the Brandenburg Gate. At this point, the theme song switches to diegetic music as Naidoo joins the team on

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stage, singing a new version of the song, which culminates in the refrain, “This nation stands behind you, very much.”53 Creating an emotional bond not only with the huge audience at the fan mile but also with the film viewer, the song reaffirms the performative production of the male football players as heroes. This final scene encapsulates the film’s own mythic narrative and its affective power as it combines patriotic music with images of the enthusiastic fan crowd, a sea of black-red-gold in front of the Brandenburg Gate, Germany’s iconic national symbol. This happy ending, while it certainly conveys the feeling of a historic moment, completely disregards earlier pronouncements of the World Cup title as well as the real winner of the tournament: Italy. Clearly, the actual football narrative is secondary to the homage to the male German team and the central function it fulfills in creating a new German myth of social cohesion and national pride. And so, the summer fairy tale of the 2006 World Cup seemed to have worked its magic all around. In the aftermath, the tournament was credited with Germany’s economic upswing and transformation to a more open society. Never mind that intense international marketing and image campaigns before and during the World Cup, such as “Germany—Land of Ideas” and “Invest in Germany,” more likely caused Germany’s successful rebranding as a cosmopolitan and sustainable nation and a strong economic player in the global market.54 Similarly Wortmann’s vision of a more self-assured and open-minded society seemed to have come true. During the unabashed and enthusiastic public celebrations, Germany had witnessed a national coming out, with the twenty-first-century football fans confidently showing their colors.55 The national media had reassuringly reported that free from past restraints, Germany had finally developed a new playful football patriotism and a more casual and relaxed relationship to its national symbols.56 Twelve years later, the myth of the summer fairy tale started to crumble. Allegations of corruption and bribery by the DFB in the process of narrowly winning the bid over South Africa to host the 2006 tournament surfaced in 2015 and severely tarnished the image. At roughly the same time, the illusion of Germany as an inclusive society was shattered with the rise of populist movements and right extremist parties that used the German flag to explicitly exclude immigrants. Even the myth surrounding the men’s national football team that Wortmann had carefully constructed throughout his film disintegrated four years after the 2014 World Cup victory. With a lackluster performance at the 2018 World Cup in Moscow and its historic elimination at the group stage, the German squad also suffered from internal controversies over allegations of xenophobia and racism before the event. Once considered a model for social integration, the team’s midfielder Mesut Özil was targeted by a series of xenophobic and anti-Islamic attacks after pictures were published of Özil and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in London, during Erdoğan’s re-

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election campaign. Since the racist insults came even from German politicians, public figures, and officials from the DFB in addition to coming from his fan base, Özil resigned from the German national team. This controversy brought to light underlying tensions based on xenophobic and racist sentiments in German football. Yet it also revealed the potential conflict in the problematic conflation of national pride with masculinity concepts that Wortmann’s film affirms through the emotional identification with the men’s team. Twelve years later, this identification had been fractured, because Özil’s photo not only set off racist accusations of disloyalty by the (male) fans but also threatened their masculinity. As this incident shows, German football is not only a “hegemonic sport” as Andrei Markovits describes its long history deeply entrenched in culture and society and its historically developed male structures and discourses.57 More than that, football, although its position in German society is changing within certain parameters, continues to provide a fertile space in which “hegemonic masculinity” is constructed and reproduced. Formulated by R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, the concept “embodied the currently most honored way of being a man, it required all other men to position themselves in relation to it, and it ideologically legitimated the global subordination of women to men.”58 In the context of German football, hegemonic masculinity describes a social practice in which heterosexuality and nationalism become linked with masculine identities and circulate as an idealized but normative definition of masculinity. Celebrated by the media, football stars become models of admired masculine conduct, as long as they fulfill that ideal.59 This practice becomes problematic when football is used as a metaphor for society at large, as stated at the outset of this chapter. More specifically, while the 2006 World Cup in Germany undoubtedly drew large crowds celebrating in public spaces, it seems rather unlikely that all people truly identified with the football event, particularly given the fact that, according to an Allensbach analysis, more than 50 percent of women declared before the World Cup that they were not interested in football.60 Hence, the claim that this particular football event effectively transformed German society as a whole completely disregards notions of social diversity and cultural differences. Likewise, while the 1954 World Cup victory of the German football squad certainly triggered feelings of happiness and joy for many people at the time, it did not produce any lasting changes in the self-image of Germany in its aftermath as I have shown here. In fact, retroactive interpretations of the event as foundational myth of (West) Germany emerged and circulated decades later. As it has become evident throughout this chapter, the German media representation of football is an important factor not only in perpetuating the sport as a prime site of hegemonic masculinity and masculine privilege but also in emotionalizing the athletic discourse as a means of anchoring social sensibili-

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ties and crystallizing them into national myths. Wortmann’s cinematographic reinterpretations of the two seminal football events solidified these media myths as the miracle and the summer fairy tale, respectively. In both films, Wortmann restages the sport events as myths by focusing on the football players and presenting them as ideals of masculinity, heroes of the pitch, who are successful and socially admired (even if they fail to win the World Cup). In the heteronormative gender order of his films, women, by contrast, are defined as the admirers on the sidelines while other gender identities are simply ignored. Wortmann’s two football films were released only three years apart and should be seen together. Both films reenact hegemonic practices that consequently reinscribe football as a site of hegemonic masculinity into cultural memory, thereby reaffirming football’s self-image as a masculine sport and reinforcing that self-image to be normal. Normative maleness on the football turf marginalizes women not only by ubiquitous practices of hegemonic masculinity but also by the cultural memory of those practices that reaffirm the status quo. The symbolic meaning of the heroic female football player that could potentially start a new myth has yet to be invented. As of now, there is no place for her in our cultural memory. By contrast, regardless of social upheavals and unfulfilled dreams of an inclusive society, both of Wortmann’s football films are firmly established in the realm of German cinema. In addition, their narratives have started to replace stories of the historic events in German cultural memory. This can be seen by the placement of the film poster for “The Miracle of Bern” is now used side by side with original photos of the 1954 match in a recent exhibit in Bonn’s official history museum Haus der Geschichte (House of the History of the Federal Republic of Germany).61 It is only now through Wortmann’s cinematic restaging of the 1954 World Cup victory as a myth that the football event has retroactively become a lieu de mémoire (site of memory), a “symbolic element of the memorial heritage” of Germany.62

Author Friederike Emonds is associate professor of German, University of Toledo. Dr. Emonds’s research focuses on autobiographical narratives, memory, gender, World War I, the Spanish Civil War, and the Holocaust in German literature, theater, and film. She has published on women and war, wartime theater and Holocaust films and literature in numerous journals and anthologies, while also presenting her work at international conferences in the United States and in Europe. Currently, she is working on constructions of cultural memories of World War I in German and Austrian literature in the late 1920s.

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Notes 1. See Hütter, “Vorwort,” 7; Kilz, “Biedermänner werden Weltklasse,” 15; Heinrich, 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

3:2 für Deutschland; Raithel, Fußballweltmeisterschaft 1954, 115; Der Triumph von Bern; Heinrich, Tooor! Toor! Tor, 136. Schiller, “Siegen für Deutschland?,” 191. Although German fans celebrated the 1990 victory with German flags—similar to how they celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall only a few months earlier— the ubiquity of national colors in public during the entire four weeks of the 2006 World Cup in Germany was unprecedented. In 1956, private business owner Willi Ruppert founded the Westdeutscher Damen-Fußballverband e.V. (West German Lady’s Football Club) and organized several international games. Thoma, “Mädchen ihr müsst einen Club gründen,” 68. “Commerzbank-Spot mit den DFB Frauen.” Pyta, “Football Memory,” 255–69; Schiller, “Siegen für Deutschland?” Quoted in Brüggemeier, “Eine virtuelle Gemeinschaft,” 632; see also Herzog, “Win Globally—Party Locally,” 138. Blecking, “Das ‘Wunder von Bern’ 1954,” 197–208; Raithel, Fußballweltmeisterschaft 1954. Preusser, “Deutsche Gründungsmythen,” 159–91; Daffner, “Football, Mythology and Identity,” 95–115; Schediwy, Ganz entspannt in Schwarz-Rot-Gold. Assmann, “Canon and Archive,” 98. Preusser, “Deutsche Gründungsmythen,” 172. Raithel, Fußballweltmeisterschaft 1954, 33. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 43ff. Ibid., 45. Schiller, “Siegen für Deutschland?,” 179. Dreschel, Grindel, and Wigando, Fußball-Weltmeisterschaft 1954. Raithel, Fußballweltmeisterschaft 1954, 49. Eggers describes the international hunt for individual scenes from the lost film footage in “Jäger der verlorenen Minuten.” Raithel, Fußballweltmeisterschaft 1954, 54. For the social status of football and the rift between popular culture and high culture in postwar West Germany, see Brüggemeier, “Eine virtuelle Gemeinschaft,” 612f, 618ff. Assmann, “Canon and Archive,” 98. For a thoroughly researched overview of publications and commemorations in the intervening years, see Raithel, Fußballweltmeisterschaft 1954, 125–41. Assmann, “Canon and Archive,” 98. Raithel, Fußballweltmeisterschaft 1954, 121. For example, Franz Beckenbauer as a boy identified with Fritz Walter when playing football with his friends; see Raithel, Fußballweltmeisterschaft 1954, 121. For an analogy between the football players and the ordinary German soldier in the public perception of the time, see Schiller, “Siegen für Deutschland?” 180. “Fußball Globus auf Reise.” Please note that quotes from this article have been translated by the author of this chapter. “Fußball Globus auf Reise.”

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29. Wortmann, Das Wunder von Bern. 30. Coulter, “Film Geopolitics in Practice,” 963. 31. Wortmann had the train restored and repainted for his film. Ironically, in 2018

32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

the Deutsche Bahn (DB; national railway company of Germany) in an apologetic statement admitted that that particular train was not the authentic train used by the 1954 football team but was a similar model. The original train had been scrapped in the mid-1980s. See Balser, “Im falschen Zug.” Binz, “Wenn sogar der Kanzler weint,” 302. Three and a half million people saw the film in the cinema in the first three months according to Binz (“Wenn sogar der Kanzler weint,” 302). While it was the second most successful film of 2003, grossing 20,468,763 Euros at the German box office, the film flopped abroad despite promotion and marketing efforts even by the German government. See Coulter, “Film Geopolitics,” 960, 963f. Binz, “Wenn sogar der Kanzler weint,” 302. Assmann, Shadows of Trauma, 147f. Heinrich, Tooor! Toor! Tor. Fest cited in Raethel, Fußballweltmeisterschaft 1954,115, 133f. Coulter, “Film Geopolitics,” 959. Wortmann, Das Wunder von Bern, TC: 22:20. Please note: all quotes from the film have been translated by the author of this chapter. A notable exception is Matthias’ friend Carola, the only girl playing football with the boys, but her role is nearly reduced to that of an extra. Likewise, the unnamed Swiss cleaning lady has very little impact on the plotline. Though ignorant of any football rules, she is credited in the film with coining the bon mot, “The ball is round and a game lasts ninety minutes,” for which Herberger later became famous. Wortmann, Das Wunder von Bern. TC: 1:45:21. For a discussion of old values and character traits within the 1954 social context, see Schiller, “Siegen für Deutschland?,” 180. Wortmann’s representation of Rahn as a rebellious daredevil of the next generation also illustrates the fact that Rahn was too young to serve in World War II and therefore has no official connection to National Socialism. Marketing poster for Das Wunder von Bern (The Miracle of Bern). The original German poster uses the word “Land” (country) as opposed to “nation” to reveal its political reading. For further discussions, see Coulter “Film Geopolitics,” 960–61. Marketing poster. Assmann, “Canon and Archive,” 99. Quote in Landsberg, “Prosthetic Memory,” 2; see also 175–89. Wortmann, Deutschland. The term “Sommermärchen,” as a description of the atmosphere and the unusually sunny weather during the World Cup was already circulating in the media before Wortmann used it for his film. See, e.g., Allgöwer et al., “Deutschland, ein Sommermärchen,” 69. Wortmann deliberately chose 3 October 2006 as the opening night of his film because it is Germany’s only national holiday. See Daffner, “Football, Mythology and Identity,” 95. Ibid., 112. Ibid., 96. Naidoo, “Dieser Weg.”

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53. Naidoo, “Dieser Weg (WM Version).” The title track “Danke” illustrates Naidoo’s 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

masculine hero worshipping even more because it highlights each individual player in addition to the whole team. Bundesregierung, “Fußball-WM 2006.” Schediwy, Ganz entspannt, 313. Ibid., 87. Completely ignored in this media assessment of the World Cup are the effects of the largest post–World War II social marketing campaign, “Du bist Deutschland” (You are Germany) shortly before the tournament, aiming to shape the mood in German society toward positive thinking, confidence, and moderate patriotism. See Münkler, Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen, 490. Quoted in Markovits, “Fußball in den USA,” 255–56. Connell and Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity,” 832. Ibid., 838. “A Time to Make Friends.” Spin-off cultural productions, such as the musical “Wunder von Bern” in Hamburg, are another indicator that Wortmann’s film is firmly placed in our cultural memory and has come to represent the historical event. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” xvii. It is not surprising but speaks for its recent, retroactive reinterpretation into a myth that the 1954 World Cup victory has not been included in the three-volume collection Deutsche Erinnerungsorte (Places of German Memory). By the time the editors had published the work in 2001, the event had not reached its symbolic status as a site of memory in our cultural memory. Wortmann’s film was released two years later in October 2003. See Deutsche Erinnerungsorte.

Bibliography Allgöwer, Kristina, Dirk Kurbjuweit, Klaus Brinkbäumer, Uwe Buse, Markus Feldenkirchen, Jochen-Martin Gutsch, Barbara Hardinghaus, et al. “Deutschland, ein Sommermärchen” [Germany: A summer fairy tale]. Der Spiegel, no 25 (19 June 2006): 69. Assmann, Aleida. “Canon and Archive.” In A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, 97–107. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010. ———. Shadows of Trauma. Memory and Politics of Postwar Identity. New York: Fordham, 2016. “A Time to Make Friends: The 2006 FIFA World Cup and its effect on the image and economy of Germany.” Germany: The Travel Destination, 2005. Retrieved on 29 July 2021, https://www.germany.travel/media/en/pdf/dzt_marktforschung/Fazit_der_ FIFA_WM_2006_PDF.pdf Balser, Markus. “Im falschen Zug. Deutsche Bahn und die WM 2006” [In the wrong train. Deutsche Bahn and the World Cup 2006]. Süddeutsche Zeitung, 8 September 2018. Retrieved on 12 July 2021, https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/ deutsche-bahn-und-die-wm-2006-im-falschenzug1.4120853 Binz, Roland. “Wenn sogar der Kanzler weint. Die Berliner Republik und ihr ‘Wunder von Bern’” [When even the chancellor cries. The republic of Berlin and their “Miracle of Bern”]. Zeithistorische Forschungen [Contemporary research], no. 2 (2004): 302–9. Blecking, Diethelm. “Das ‘Wunder von Bern’ 1954—Zur politischen Instrumentalisierung eines Mythos” [The “Miracle of Bern” 1954—The political instrumentalization of a myth]. Historical Social Research 40, no. 4 (2015): 197–208.

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Brüggemeier, Franz-Josef. “Eine virtuelle Gemeinschaft: Deutschland und die Fußballweltmeisterschaft 1954” [A virtual community: Germany and the Football World Cup 1954]. Geschichte und Gesellschaft [History and society] 31, no. 4 (2005): 610–35. Bundesregierung, “Fußball-WM 2006. Abschlussbericht der Bundesregierung”[Football World Cup 2006. Final Report of the Federal Republic]. Berlin: Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung, 2006. “Commerzbank-Spot mit den DFB Frauen” [Commerzbank-Commercial with the women of the DFB]. Deutscher Fußballbund [DFB; German Football Association], 1 June 2019. Retrieved 20 November 2021 from https://tv.dfb.de/video/commerzbank-spot-mitden-dfb-frauen/30076/ Connell, R. W., and James W. Messerschmidt. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.” Gender and Society 19, no. 6 (2005): 829–59. Coulter, Kimberly. “Film Geopolitics in Practice: Marketing The Miracle of Bern.” Geopolitics 16, no. 4 (2011): 949–68. Daffner, Carola. “Football, Mythology and Identity in Sönke Wortmann’s Deutschland. Ein Sommermärchen” [Football, mythology and identity in Sönke Wortmann’s Germany: A Summer Fairy Tale]. Austausch 1, no. 1 (2011): 95–115. Der Triumph von Bern: Weltmeisterschaft 1954. Cologne: Deutscher Sportverlag, 2004. Dreschel, Sammy, Gerhard Grindel, and Horst Winganko. Fußball-Weltmeisterschaft 1954. Munich: Sport-Film GmbH, 1954. Eggers, Erik. “Jäger der verlorenen Minuten” [Hunters of the lost minute]. Jungle World, 20 December 2002. Retrieved 24 June 2020, https://jungle.world/print/pdf/node/ 22840/debug François, Etienne, and Hagen Schulze, ed. Deutsche Erinnerungsorte [German memory sites]. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2001. “Fußball Globus auf Reise” [traveling football globe]. Rheinische Post, 12 September 2003. Retrieved 12 July 2021, https://rp-online.de/sport/fussball/fussball-globusaufreise_aid-16751565 “Fußball-WM 2006. Abschlussbericht der Bundesregierung” [The Football World Cup 2006. Final report of the federal government]. Presse und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung [Federal press and information office], November 2006. Retrieved on 29 July 2021, https://www.gudrun-zollner.de/files/gudrun_zollner/berlin/Bro schueren_Sport/WM2006_Abschlussbericht_der_Bundesregierung.pdf Heinrich, Arthur. 3:2 für Deutschland—die Gründung der Bundesrepublik im WankdorfStadion zu Bern [3:2 for Germany—The foundation of the federal republic in Wankdorf Stadium in Bern]. Göttingen: Die Werkstatt, 2004. ———. Tooor! Toor! Tor! 40 Jahre 3:2 [Goooal! Gooal! Goal! 40 years 3:2]. Berlin: Rotbuch, 1994. Herzog, Markwart. “Win globally—party locally. The Miracle of Berne and its local reception.” In The Fifa World Cup 1930–2010: Politics, Commerce, Spectacle and Identities, edited by Stefan Rinke and Kay Schiller, 125–41. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2014. Hitchcock, A. (dir.) (1959/2000), North by Northwest (Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video) Hütter, Hans Walter. “Vorwort” [Foreword]. In Deutsche Mythen seit 1945 [German myths since 1945], edited by Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 7. Bielefeld: Kerber, 2016. Kilz, Hans-Werner. “Biedermänner werden Weltklasse. Warum in Deutschland die Helden von 1954 noch heute als Vorbilder verehrt werden” [Biedermänner become world

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class. Why the heroes of 1954 are still revered as role models in Germany today]. In WM- Bibliothek. Schweiz 1954 [World Cup Library. Switzerland 1954], edited by Josef Kelnberger, 15. Munich: Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2005. Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Markovits, Andrei S. “Fußball in den USA als prominenter Ort der Feminisierung: Ein weiterer Aspekt des ‘amerikanischen Sonderwegs” [Football in the US as a prominent site of feminization: Another Aspect of the “American special way”]. Arena der Männlichkeit [Arena of masculinity], edited by Eva Kreisky and Georg Spitaler, 255–76. Frankfurt: Campus, 2006. Miracle of Bern, The (Das Wunder von Bern). Marketing Poster. Senator Film, 2003. Münkler, Herfried. Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen [The Germans and their myths]. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2010. Naidoo, Xavier. “Dieser Weg” [This path]. Telegramm für X [Telegram for X], Naidoo Records, 2005. ———. “Dieser Weg (WM Version)” [This path (World Cup version)]. Danke [Thank you], Naidoo Records, 2006. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire” [Between memory and history: Realms of memory]. Representations, no. 26 (1989): 7–24. Preusser, Heinz-Peter. “Deutsche Gründungsmythen: Schlachten, Fußball und die Staatliche Einheit. Kleist—Wortmann -Reitz.” [German Foundation Myths: Battles, football, and the state unity. Kleist—Wortmann-Reitz]. Revista de Filología Alemana 15, no. 7 (2007): 159 191. Pyta, Wolfram. “Football Memory in a European Perspective. The Missing Link in the European Integration Process.” Historical Social Research 40, no. 4 (2015): 255–69. Raithel, Thomas. Fußballweltmeisterschaft 1954: Sport—Geschichte—Mythos [The football world cup 1954: Sport—history—myth]. Munich: Bayerische Landeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 2004. Schediwy, Dagmar. Ganz entspannt in Schwarz-Rot-Gold? Der neue deutsche Fußballpatriotismus aus sozialpsychologischer Perspektive [Completely relaxed in black red-gold? The German football patriotism from a social psychological perspective]. Berlin: LIT, 2012. Schiller, Kay. “Siegen für Deutschland? Patriotism, Nationalism and the German National Football Team, 1954–2014” [Victory for Germany? Patriotism, nationalism and the German National Football Team, 1954–2014]. Historical Social Research 40, no. 4 (2015): 176–96. Thoma, Matthias. “‘Mädchen, ihr müsst einen Club gründen’: Frauenfußball in Frankfurt am Main” [Girls, you need to create a club: Women’s football in Frankfurt am Main]. In Frauenfußball in Deutschland [Women’s football in Germany], edited by Markwart Herzog, 65–86. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2013. Wortmann, Sönke. Das Wunder von Bern [The miracle of Bern]. Munich: Bavaria Film International, 2003. ———. Deutschland. Ein Sommermärchen [Germany: A summer fairy tale]. Cologne: Shark TV GmbH, WDR Westdeutscher Rundfunk, 2006.

CHAPTER 8



A Gendered Network of Double Binds in Joachim Hasler’s Football Musical Don’t Cheat, Darling! KALEIGH BANGOR

Introduction

O

n New Year’s Eve 1970, the publicly owned East German energy company, VEB Energiekombinat (Energy Combine), threw a party for its employees. When football was discussed, everyone lamented the poor performance of the company-sponsored men’s team, BSG Turbine Potsdam. According to Birgit and Heiko Klasen, the male employees apparently rejected criticism from the womxn.1 When it came to football, womxn were to keep quiet.2 However, the upcoming year, 1971, saw the creation of a womxn’s side of Turbine Potsdam. Initially a joke, two male sports functionaries tried to play a prank at the energy company by posting an advertisement for a womxn’s team. In response, thirty-six womxn formed a team that would go on to establish Potsdam as a dominant presence in womxn’s football, both in the former Deutsche Demokratische Republik (GDR; German Democratic Republic) and in a reunited Germany after 1990.3 Two years later, in 1973, a cinematic discussion of womxn’s football in East Germany appeared in Joachim Hasler’s film, Nicht Schummeln, Liebling! (Don’t Cheat, Darling!)4 Although football was as popular in the GDR as it was in the rest of the world, it was rarely the focus of feature films produced by the Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA; East German state-owned film studio).5 With football as a pretext, Hasler admittedly set up his main goal for the comedy, which was to reunite Schlager (pop) stars, Chris Doerk and Frank Schöbel, in another summer musical after the success of their collaboration in Heißer Sommer (Hot Summer) in 1968.6 However, compared to the plot of Hot

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Summer, which centers on two groups of high schoolers hitchhiking their way to love and fun on the Baltic Sea, the social-political interests behind men’s football, let alone womxn’s, were far from trivial, and certainly not, as Hasler phrased it, “a fable that can be told at half the length of a feature film.”7 What is more, within this genre, the Schlagerfilm (pop musical), Hasler also criticizes the state’s inability to ensure gender equity or curtail financial corruption. In trying to both entertain the masses and criticize the authoritarian state, a number of dilemmas arise in Don’t Cheat, Darling! On the one hand, the film uses dramatic irony in order to draw attention to the status of equality, equity, and respect in both womxn’s football and in state leadership positions. On the other hand, the film uses womxn both to subvert censorship (to criticize party bureaucrats) and quite overtly for pleasurable viewing. Thus, when the pop musical takes up the issue of parity for womxn’s football while simultaneously relying on the objectification of womxn, the film confronts the viewer with a network of double binds for womxn in general, and especially for womxn in football. Instead of overlooking the entire film because of its sexist components, this chapter addresses various contradictions that arise for womxn, and turns to René Girard’s understanding of the double bind, or a network of unresolvable dilemmas, to move away from the initial reception of Hasler’s football musical in the early 1970s and examine the film’s treatment of womxn, both positive and negative, to discuss the discrimination womxn faced playing football in the former GDR.

A Network of Double Binds for Womxn’s Football in East Germany As the late literary critic, Ruth Klüger, suggests in her collection of essays entitled, “Frauen lesen anders” (Women read differently), prejudicial media is unavoidable. As Klüger phrases it, “I would simply miss too much if I wanted to push aside every work in which Jews, or . . . women, were prejudicially devalued. I simply no longer accept of these works what traditional criticism has required.”8 Canceling entire aspects of human culture and thought is, personally for Klüger, neither possible nor advisable.9 Instead, what she implies is boycotting how traditional criticism takes up such media without addressing the derisive content. While Klüger poses one solution to the problem of prejudicial media, questions remain: What exactly constitutes traditional criticism and how might prejudicial media be accepted in some respects but not in others? Furthermore, if critics condemned a work in the past, is it worth revisiting that work? Indeed, the initial reception of Don’t Cheat, Darling! was overwhelmingly negative, as Jan Tilman Schwab summarizes in his lexicon of football films.10 The general reaction from critics of all genders lambasted every aspect of the musical comedy, from the sexualized uniforms the womxn’s team wears to the

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name of the main character, Dr. Barbara Schwalbe, whose last name in German colloquially means a faked foul in football. While Heinz Hoffmann quipped, “The cheerfulness of our lives cannot be represented by half-fables and halftruths,” Renate Holland-Moritz stated bluntly, “Something so stupid, contrived and witless has—I boldly claim—never existed since the existence of DEFA.”11 Only two decades later, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent end of the GDR, Don’t Cheat, Darling! was rebroadcast on television and received slightly more positive reviews, mainly from Kerstin Decker, who claimed, “There was such an original lightness in all this that the Schöbel-Doerk duet never became trivial.”12 While the duet may not be trivial, the juxtaposition of sexism in football and the lightheartedness of the musical genre is still problematic today. In order to concur with these previous critics and concomitantly provide contradictory analysis, it is helpful to turn to René Girard and his understanding of the double bind, which precisely allows for the simultaneous evaluation of the positive and negative aspects of the film.13 Girard, of course, was discussing the mimetic effect of desire in his chapter from Violence and the Sacred and referring to Gregory Bateson’s analysis of schizophrenia from 1972 when he claimed, “Far from being restricted to a limited number of pathological cases, as American theoreticians suggest, the double bind—a contradictory double imperative, or rather a whole network of contradictory imperatives—is an extremely common phenomenon. In fact, it is so common that it might be said to form the basis of all human relationships”.14 Two critical factors in Girard’s general understanding of the double bind assist in the analysis of prejudicial media: the commonality and the frequency. First, the commonality addresses, similarly to Klüger, that sexist ideas, for example, run rampant in certain patriarchal societies and thereby in the art produced by such societies. Second, by assessing the frequency of contradictions arising in one work of art, the double bind allows for a framework capable of addressing both progressive and prejudicial content without canceling the entire work. Lastly, given this multitude of contradictory imperatives, it is unclear whether the reproduction of sexism, in Hasler’s film for example, is overt or an attempt to illustrate the reality of the time. Thus, within this framework, Don’t Cheat, Darling! avoids general condonation of sexism for which the film was first criticized.

Form-Content and Feminist-Sexist: The Two General Double Imperatives The network of double binds found in Hasler’s film center around two main contradictory double imperatives. The first is a progressive-prejudicial double imperative on the basis of gender, wherein certain situations in the film could

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equally be interpreted as either feminist or sexist. The other main double imperative, which is also related to the progressive-prejudicial double imperative, arises between the content and the form, or genre, of the film, which in this case is the pop musical. Previous reviewers were highly critical of this general double bind at the center of the film: the lightheartedness of the comedic musical and the seriousness of the subject matter. Through the plot, screenwriters Hasler and Heinz Kahlow and dramaturge Maurycy Janowski address the impact of football in GDR society, the marginalization of womxn’s football, and financial corruption at the provincial level, all while choreographing the characters to sing, dance, and laugh about these incredibly serious topics. The film begins with the desire of the local mayor to achieve national recognition by investing in the men’s football team. When the mayor promises to grant the men’s team one request for every win (e.g., a new team bus), the new director of the local agricultural school, Frau Dr. Barbara Schwalbe, becomes suspicious and perplexed by the mayor’s ability to pay for such expensive incentives. Increasingly frustrated with the mayor and the Gemeinderat’s (city council) football obsession, Dr. Schwalbe decides to form a womxn’s football team in order to achieve parity under the assumption that “for every win, a wish” would apply to the womxn’s victories as well.15 However, after the womxn win their first match, the mayor falls short on the team’s desire for a youth clubhouse. Instead, both teams are instructed to work together to renovate a dilapidated Schützenhaus (marksmen’s clubhouse), if they want a venue for their youth club. While it is not quite what Dr. Schwalbe had in mind, the mayor technically succeeds in keeping his initial promise. However, when many citizens in the fictional East German town of Sonnethal are invited to join the club and form their own football teams, the threat of many potential requests, which the mayor would financially not be able to fulfill, prompts him to resign early. In the end, for his misappropriation of funds directed toward men’s football, he is required to enroll in reeducation initiatives. To a certain extent, the film’s genre and topic helped skirt state censorship, especially since films in the GDR were vulnerable to surveillance and outright bans (even after the state-sponsored production company completely funded a film).16 Controversial films were not always censored at the conclusion of the film, but rather throughout the entire production process via a network of DEFA party officials.17 Hasler, who had already directed politically conforming films in the 1960s, saw the potential of the pop musical to attract large audiences (and revenue for the state) and to distract from party criticism “because they [musicals] could be characterized as ‘non-committal apolitical entertainment.’”18 In addition to the accommodating genre, womxn’s football provided another buffer behind which the government could be criticized. Given the post-gender attitude of East German communism, the disenfranchisement of womxn in the film was not seen as such because, according to Article 20 in the

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GDR constitution, “men and women are equal; they have the same rights in all spheres of society.”19 In other words, the legal hardline on gender equality enshrined in the constitution functioned as a loophole for filmmakers to subvert party censorship and indirectly comment on fundamental issues, particularly financial matters, inherent in the communist policy in the GDR. This need for such subversion is alluded to in the film itself. In an exchange between the two football captains, Brigitte questions her male counterpart, Bernd: “Why are we fighting? You don’t even know me. I’m just like you. . . . Do you do the prima donna on the field so that you can move ahead faster? Me too, a little sport and social work will help gild the censorship.”20 This exchange not only shows how Brigitte thought of her role as a captain as equally important, but it also indicates that football, in addition to song and dance, would help the film pass through the many vague censors over the course of its production. Furthermore, by 1971, after DEFA had been established for more than twenty years, the threat of state censorship induced a form of self-censorship among filmmakers as well as an expectation that their audiences would interpret films in a highly symbolic manner.21 In this regard, it is possible that the musical form, or the various song and dance numbers, facilitate a subliminal critique of the content matter regarding both inappropriate state spending and the status of equality, equity, and respect in womxn’s football in the 1970s GDR. More specifically, the pop musical exaggerates a dialectical form of dramatic irony that “involves the making of a statement that is open to ambivalent interpretations, that is, interpretations of opposite weights and meanings. The construction of a meaning that is to be taken as the intended one is left to the audience.”22 Throughout the film, Hasler’s assessment of gender equality is articulated through the continual use of dialectical dramatic irony, which has the potential to situate the audience in a double bind. Traditionally, dramatic irony poses a clear discrepancy to the viewer—that is, the action or dialogue reveals a clear contradictory statement to the audience that is not known to the character. However, in Don’t Cheat, Darling!, the dialectical dramatic irony reveals contradictions that have different degrees of clarity for the characters and the audience. For example, in the dialogue between the two football captains, the audience has time to question the equality of the genders: Would both men’s and womxn’s football affect the censorship in the same way? That is, would they both carry the same influence or curry the same favors with party officials? While the answer was most likely no, Bernd remains silent, leaving the question open. Throughout the plot and within the dance numbers and songs, numerous instances of the feminist-sexist double bind arise. The main example occurs on the football pitch and with the help of dialectical dramatic irony. First, there is a brief scene of the men’s team winning their match with a lucky header. Next, in a longer series of shots, a Riefenstahl-esque portrayal of the physicality of the

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womxn’s game is shown. But when the mainly male audience begins rebuking the womxn, this documentary style stops abruptly.23 In its place, the womxn on the pitch sing and dance their way to victory. The change between womxn playing football and dancing begins when a Sonnethal player is tackled by an opponent. The film then cuts to a shot of the audience laughing followed by Bernd’s exchange with a fellow player: “This just isn’t football” and “A circus is what this is!”24 Following their captain, another player continues on to say, “Look at the blonde! One ball on the head and two on the chest,” to which the entire team roars in laughter.25 The shots of the public reacting to womxn’s football then zoom in on the city council members, the first of whom admits that he finds the game to be aesthetically pleasing in some instances. After Liese Bredemeier, councilor for commerce, vaguely exclaims that the entire thing is simply impossible, her colleague in charge of finances, Kalluweit, replies that it is not costing the city anything. Unconvinced, the mayor exclaims that the womxn’s game is ruining Sonnethal’s reputation.26 The tone of the audience changes as soon as Brigitte, the captain, is fouled. The negative reactions turn to the referee and his decision not to grant Sonnethal a corner kick. Shortly thereafter, as Sonnethal is about to score for the first time, the mayor reacts seemingly out of reflex. In the process, Kalluweit tries to suppress his applause by pushing him down on the shoulders. However, following the goal, the crowd, including the disgruntled city council members, begins to sway and sing the reoccurring line, “An diesem Tag ist alles dran! (On this day, everything is perfect,)” while the womxn celebrate on the field.27 As the music continues, the womxn begin a synchronized song and dance that at first appears as a team celebration and then continues to take the place of the actual football movements on the field. The series of scenes on the pitch concludes with the players lifting up the referee and tossing him in the air.28 After scoring six goals, the merit of the womxn’s football team in Sonnethal is no longer in question, and yet the dance number they must perform reinscribes the discrepancies in respect between the genders in football. In this sequence, the ability of womxn to play football is directly called into question by the men’s team as they watch from the stands. This sentiment echoes the monologue from Thomas Brussig’s football novel, Leben bis Männer (Life until the men’s team), wherein the main character, a male football trainer, states plainly that womxn can play as much football as they like, but they should not expect anyone to watch them play football.29 But in Don’t Cheat, Darling!, womxn are shown playing football in a similar manner to the men. However, after the sexist remarks by the male players, the dance number follows, thus reinforcing the initial claims by the male players that what the womxn are doing does not constitute football, but rather a circus. Yet, the same ambivalent dance number can also be understood as a physical rebuttal to the sexist comments. The transition from playing to dancing on the field demonstrates to the viewer

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the difference between playing football and doing a dance or circus number, ultimately laying bare the absurdity of the sexist comments. In other words, if the overdone performance is read as ironic, the scene ridicules the male spectators when they make sexist remarks and criticize the competence of womxn on the pitch. Looking at the scene from another perspective, the physical (almost slapstick) comedy of the routine with the referee could also convey the extra effort womxn have to put forth to garner respect from male viewers. Alternatively, given that the artistry of the dance number breaks down and the womxn begin to simply toss the referee in the air, the silliness of the routine with the referee contradicts this progressive interpretation and shows a lack of respect for the representation of womxn’s football. Over the course of one game, the male audience members do turn into fair-weather fans for the womxn’s side, but only after they start winning. While this acclamation might not constitute respect, it does suggest that audience members began to take the womxn’s game more seriously. In addition to merit, the idea that local patriotism trumps everything, even sexism, most likely played a key role, since that was certainly the case in the history of men’s football in the GDR, and more broadly, as Jan Palmowski has argued, in shaping the East German national identity.30 Thus, the pop musical, via dialectical dramatic irony, creates a double bind that poses the question: Did the film use negative, sexist remarks to deride womxn’s football or to show the obstacles womxn needed to overcome in the GDR in the 1970s to play football and be taken seriously? Furthermore, would the omission of the overtly sexist remarks and the routine significantly impact the film overall? Although there are no concrete answers to these questions, the reproduction of this type of sexism in Don’t Cheat, Darling! aligns with the fact that, according to Alan McDougall, such “views were reflected in the media coverage of the game, which often conformed to gender stereotypes (concentrating, for example, on a player’s marital rather than sporting status).”31 The juxtaposition of two football matches in a fictional provincial town resembles the historical reality of successful womxn’s teams arising—through a concerted, piecemeal effort—in locations where male football teams had losing records, which was the case with the club Turbine Potsdam. In the absence of a successful men’s side, womxn had the opportunity to gain some respect, if not equity in these types of situations, which Hasler’s musical aptly demonstrates.32 Even so, the approval of men’s football is a given, while the womxn of Sonnethal can only hope to earn temporary respect through merit—a struggle that all womxn footballers across Europe faced in the 1970s, a key decade in the global revival of the womxn’s game, especially in West Germany, where the Deutscher Fußball-Bund (DFB; German Football Association) had lifted its official ban on womxn playing football only in 1970.33 Taken in contrast to the short clip of men playing football, the dialectical dramatic irony in this scene continues

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to raise questions regarding gender, football, and success. In the scene when the men’s team is playing on the pitch, the film shows how they win their match via a lucky header. In the shot prior to the goal, one of the city council members, over the phone, thinks he can encourage the men’s team to win with the promise of a new coach. From the press box, another council member shouts loudly and in slow motion, “You’re getting a coach!” When the captain turns his head in surprise, the ball redirects off his head and into the goal.34 Here, the dramatic irony of the situation reveals the absurdity of the events. Given the inclement weather and the distance from which the city council member shouted the information, it is almost impossible that his shouting was heard on the field. But still, the ball finds the back of the net, which disparages the capitalist idea that men’s football teams are driven to win through expensive incentives. This point is reiterated in the following shots of the womxn’s team on the field, when it is expressly stated by the city council member in the stands that the womxn’s team “does not cost the city a cent,” and yet they win as well—in a six to nil blowout—demonstrating that victories do not require expensive incentives.35 As the film continues, the double bind on the pitch leads to a double standard for men and womxn in Sonnethal, which can also be interpreted as an allegory of the general double burden of work and homemaking that womxn in the GDR faced.36 For men, victories yielded further incentives; womxn, however, had to put in more work off the pitch to be considered for further financial benefits.37 For example, after the excitement of the womxn’s first win, the city council fails to grant the team a new youth clubhouse. Instead, the womxn were forced to work to fulfill their wish for Sonnethal, and, in a socialist spirit, the men’s team is instructed to assist them in transforming the broken-down hall into a place suitable for gathering.38 While the mayor, who already allocated his limited resources to the men’s team, fails to give the womxn the money necessary for the youth clubhouse, he does, through this Subbotnik (unpaid volunteer work), succeed in keeping his promise to Dr. Schwalbe and the womxn’s team. The power the mayor wields here shows that he, as the head of the socialist provincial town, plays favorites by rewarding men with salaries and new commodities, but also expects a quid pro quo, both on and off the football pitch. The mayor can avoid labeling this request as a quid pro quo because of the socialist tradition to demand citizens to perform unpaid labor, which illustrates how male footballers, who were held on a pedestal in the GDR, were still susceptible to exploitation by the state. Nevertheless, the men’s team in Sonnethal was paid to play competitive football, while the womxn were permitted to play for their own entertainment. This is the next discrepancy that Dr. Barbara Schwalbe tries to bring to the mayor’s attention. In between shots of the renovation of the marksmen’s club, Dr. Schwalbe dons an evening gown and accompanies the mayor to dinner. By flirting and trying to seduce the mayor, she hopes to get him to approve salaries

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for the womxn’s team. This proves to be more difficult than she expected, and she does not get the chance to propose the idea she and Brigitte previously discussed. Initially, Dr. Schwalbe coyly rejects the mayor’s advances by saying she would prefer to go home. But then, as she continues kissing the mayor, it becomes clear that she wishes to find the perfect moment to ask him about the salaries. To her dismay, when she brings up the womxn’s competitive match in Rostock, the mayor becomes more concerned with a successful game strategy than their intimate physical relationship. His obsession with football manifests in his behavior when he stops kissing and almost ignores Dr. Schwalbe in favor of talking about football tactics out loud to himself. Due to the physical rejection from the mayor and her failure to negotiate the salaries, she leaves in a hurry. Mayor Karl, though, continues to joyfully envision what it would mean for Sonnethal if the womxn’s team beat Rostock, an important port city for East Germany on the Baltic Sea. In these scenes following the football match, the plot centers less on womxn’s football and more on the political efforts of Frau Dr. Barbara Schwalbe, whose interaction with the mayor and his colleagues on the city council are meant to establish equity for womxn. As the quick-witted Dr. Schwalbe soon learns, football rules life in Sonnethal, or, as one of her students puts it, “Whatever starts rolling in this town, in the end it is always a football that rolls.”39 Her astute observation leads her to conclude, “If you want to achieve anything in this town, you have to play football.”40 The idea that equal opportunity in sport would translate to equity and respect for womxn reflects the socialist idea that the legislation of gender equality, after it was written into the constitution of the GDR, would transform East Germany into a completely fair and egalitarian society. The truth, however, was that the GDR and football in East Germany maintained deeply rooted patriarchal hierarchies.41 Dr. Barbara Schwalbe’s exasperations depict her frustration with the idea of the football nation, which is entirely constructed and controlled by men. Following her comments that football controls everything in the provincial town, she turns to leave the mayor’s office. Next to the door, in front of the fireplace, she encounters a small statue of a football, and proceeds to kick it in frustration, only to hurt her foot. In this painful attempt at slapstick comedy, the film reinforces the fact that the social construct of the football nation was ironclad in the former GDR. Not only football, but also the DEFA film industry, as Margit Fröhlich states, was a prime example of the fact that, “although provisions in all fields of society promoted women through a quota system (Frauenförderungspläne) and granted special benefits for working mothers, the number of women in the directing chair did not rise.”42 Womxn’s equity in the film industry mirrors the situation in football as well. Or to put it in an even broader perspective, as McDougall states, “Leading footballers ultimately bumped against a ‘socialist glass ceiling’ not dissimilar to that which met ambitious women looking to be-

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come factory directors, doctors, or national political figures.”43 For football, this was also a collective glass ceiling, since womxn footballers in the GDR did not have a national, top-tier division. It was not until October 1989, only weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall, that the DFV even recommended upgrading the recreational and non-competitive status of the womxn’s league. But a professional competition did not arrive until after the Wende. In socialist terms, football was a mass sport and not an elite sport, and the womxn’s season would culminate in a best-of competition, not a championship. Without the status as an elite sport, there were neither salaries nor additional benefits (such as child care) for womxn footballers.44

Using and Objectifying Womxn: Further Implications of the Feminist-Sexist Double Bind While Don’t Cheat, Darling! draws attention to inadequacies of football on the basis of gender, it ultimately aims to critique problems fundamental to socialism, particularly financial corruption. Of course, Hasler’s film was not the first film in which womxn’s issues were used as a means to critique the socialist state. This trend was also taken up by many male filmmakers, as Andrea Rinke elucidates: “[DEFA] filmmakers used female protagonists as vehicles to point out more general problems within society.”45 Although Konrad Wolf,46 for example, took up the narrative written from a womxn’s point of view, most East German writers and directors, in a field dominated by white, cis, heterosexual men, used womxn as vehicles in their films to subvert state censorship and address the issues that pertained to GDR citizens of all genders, as in Hasler’s football comedy.47 Thus, the questions that arise from this trend are: what is at stake when predominantly male directors use womxn as vehicles for the purpose of reproaching an authoritarian state in a highly censored medium? Furthermore, what is implicated in Don’t Cheat, Darling! when womxn’s football is used to criticize the state but womxn’s bodies are objectified overtly for pleasurable viewing? In line with Rinke, one possible answer is the simultaneous understanding of what the heterosexual patriarchy envisioned for womxn’s football and the idealized role of womxn in either resisting or improving the state’s power. Another answer, as Laura Mulvey advocates in her influential essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,”48 is that deconstructing the sexist ideas produced by patriarchal societies helps to highlight the film’s dependence on voyeuristic mechanisms and to destroy the satisfaction in the depiction of womxn, whose image has been continually used and stolen. As Rinke argues, there was a tendency to portray womxn in film as either rebels or misfits in order to express the need for change in the GDR. “There

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was no explicit feminist approach to filmmaking in the GDR . . . however, a remarkable number of DEFA films feature female protagonists and address ‘women’s concerns’ in the late 1970s and 1980s.”49 Within this unofficial framework, womxn, on the one hand, were viewed as rebels when they worked within socialist institutions to actualize equity on the basis of gender that was legislatively promised during the foundation of the GDR in 1949. On the other hand, womxn who were portrayed as social misfits showed the impact of the failure of the state to live up to the promise of equality. At the same time, however, the characterization as a misfit simultaneously cast womxn as unfit socialist counterparts to men. In Don’t Cheat, Darling!, Dr. Barbara Schwalbe and her younger collaborator, Brigitte, far from being misfits, could be categorized as rebels. While Barbara is a paradigmatic example of a socialist heroine—highly educated and leading a provincial agricultural school—she is also what the director Lothar Warneke would call a “woman with a maximalist attitude,” or, in other words, a womxn not afraid to question political and societal taboos.50 Barbara, with the help of Brigitte, accomplishes this on two fronts: she questions the postgender attitude of the GDR and she pokes at the financial difficulties inherent in this socialist society. From the beginning, Barbara recognizes not only the need to organize locally and politically to achieve parity for womxn, but also the fact that gaining respect within social organizations plays an imperative role in both a male-dominated society and a society dominated by football— that is, in a football nation. Unlike the main character, Franziska, in Warneke’s One Short Life (1980), Barbara must not accept defeat at the end of the film. While she may not have received the equal treatment she desired and deserved, she succeeds both with the womxn’s football team and in convicting the mayor of embezzlement, the punishment for which included sending him to one year of forced reeducation. According to this positive, feminist viewing of the film, Don’t Cheat, Darling! and its central figure, Dr. Barbara Schwalbe, flip the paradigm of the womxn as either a failed rebel or a social misfit and instead cast male bureaucrats as unfit to hold state leadership positions and male footballers as less-successful athletes. Even though Barbara and Brigitte appear to triumph socially with football and with politics by holding the mayor to account for his dubious financial dealings, they are still the main objects of the male gaze whether they try to subvert it or attempt to benefit from it by manipulating heteronormative male power. To begin, Hasler’s musical uses what Mulvey, borrowing from Freud, terms “fetishistic scopophilia,” or the pleasure that arises “in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight.”51 Brigitte, and the rest of the highly stylized womxn’s team, is both the main visual erotic content of the film and the object of the spectator’s look.52 Barbara, especially after she dons

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a glamourous evening gown to seduce the mayor and convince him to pay the womxn to play football, also becomes a focal point of the male gaze. Although beautiful womxn seducing men, performing dance numbers, and playing football in sexualized uniforms is satisfying in and of itself for the male gaze, the narrative, which eventually develops two main romantic relationships (one between Brigitte and Bernd and the other between Barbara and Karl, the mayor), does use the mechanism of voyeurism as well. These two mechanisms, scopophilia and voyeurism, structure Hasler’s musical. Mulvey’s analysis of Howard Hawks’s films could also describe the general structure of Don’t Cheat, Darling! The film opens with the woman as the object of the combined gaze of the spectator and all the male protagonists in the film. She is isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualised. But as the narrative progresses she falls in love with the main male protagonist and becomes his property, losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her generalised sexuality, her show-girl connotations; her eroticism is subjected to the male star alone. By means of identification with him, through participation in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her too.53

One important point of departure here is that Mulvey discusses capitalist cinema, whereas in Hasler’s socialist musical not one, but two womxn are isolated from the collective, namely Brigitte and Barbara. Thus, there are two male figures, the men’s football captain and the mayor—both symbolic of the patriarchal order in that they occupy powerful positions on and off the pitch—with whom the male audience can identify. Unlike the teenage couple in Hasler’s Hot Summer, the pair of couples do not officially end up together, which was a characteristic of the socialist musical.54 But, by the end of the film, the mayor and the men’s captain could be said to possess their love interests to some extent, insofar as they both succeed in establishing physical intimacy. Whether Brigitte will move into an apartment with Bernd, or whether Barbara will reciprocate Karl’s love upon his return from his year-long reeducation class, remains unknown. And yet, within the analysis of the male gaze on womxn’s football, another feminist-sexist double bind comes to light. Although the womxn footballers are ridiculed, objectified, and eroticized, the song lyrics offer a type of feminist inner monologue aimed at subverting the sexist advances of the male characters. The juxtaposition between the plot and the lyrics suspends the narrative of the film and allows for a few minutes of reflection on the plot with the lyrics often voicing frustration. The womxn, in particular, sing lyrics in which they boldly express their anger and frustration with the status quo. For example, during the clean-up for the youth clubhouse, the womxn sing a song entitled, “Der Mann gehört mir,” which could either translate to “The man is mine” or “The man belongs to me,” or even “Leave him to me!”55 In this song, the double

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(or even triple) entendre in the lyrics signifies that Brigitte and her team feel as if they can take on the men to the extent that they can succeed at owning them, or, at the very least, the mayor of Sonnethal. As the film goes on, the song lyrics express more frustration with men and culminate in Dr. Schwalbe’s song with, “Ich bring dich um” (I’m going to kill you).56 While these lyrics, here directed at the mayor, are obviously idiomatic tongue-in-cheek phrases, the womxn in the film are allowed a space to vex about their position in sport, in a provincial GDR town, and in patriarchal society. This vexing is also encapsulated in the fact that the lyrics “Ich bring ihn um” (I’m going to kill him) are continually repeated in the film.57 And yet, right after collective exasperations about how they want to take on the men or figuratively “kill” them, the central figures lust after the same men that continually frustrate them, thereby never fully able to buck the power of the male protagonists.

Conclusion The juxtaposition of the sexist content and the feminist lyrics brings the network of progressive-prejudicial and form-content double binds full circle in the football musical Don’t Cheat, Darling! By both acknowledging the political and social lack of equality, equity, and respect for womxn and womxn’s football and continuously objectifying womxn for the purpose of pleasure in both form and content, the contradictory double imperatives appear all too frequently in the film. By the end, Hasler’s musical gives short shrift to womxn’s football and fails to follow Dr. Schwalbe’s titular line, “Don’t cheat, darling!”58 Instead, the film cheats by taking exaggerated and superficial liberties in two directions: the influence of womxn’s football is overemphasized and the depiction of womxn playing football is highly eroticized. Lastly, given that the plot uses a womxn’s issue (equal access to football) as a pretext in order to criticize the failures of the socialist state, this, along with the frequent pandering to the male gaze, ultimately outweighs the progressive moments regarding gender in the film. In the end, the network of double binds for womxn is not surprising, given that womxn’s football has been historically overlooked not only in East Germany, but also in every culture that has had an interest in the game of football.59 Unfortunately, womxn today still fail to garner equal respect and parity with men in general, and not just in the world of football, nor in a reunited Germany. There are glimpses, though, when womxn’s football approaches the glass ceiling. These glimpses are important to recognize even when they are found in the midst of progressive-prejudicial double binds, as in the 1971 formation of the womxn’s side in Potsdam. Instead of letting the sexist prank get the better of them, the womxn of BSG Turbine Potsdam formed a team that has been succeeding at football for the past fifty years. Furthermore, womxn’s

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sides all over Germany have strengthened their national team presence on the international stage, which has culminated in eight European championships, two World Cups, and an Olympic gold medal. Just as Don’t Cheat, Darling! portrayed, womxn’s football in Germany has bolstered and will continue to bolster the concept of a German football nation, even when that nation fails to grant them equality in the form of equity and respect.

Author Kaleigh Bangor is a lecturer at The University of Oklahoma. Dr. Bangor specializes in twentieth-century German culture and women’s and gender studies. Her research and teaching interests are invested in critical feminist approaches. As a fan and player of many sports, her contribution to understanding the impact of East German football is rooted in her prior research into the culture of the GDR and her personal experiences as a former female athlete in the United States and Germany.

Notes 1. Dictionary.com, which is based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary,

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

defines womxn as “a woman (used, especially in intersectional feminism, as an alternative spelling to avoid the suggestion of sexism perceived in the sequences m-a-n and m-e-n, and to be inclusive of trans and nonbinary women).” Dictionary. com, “womxn.” Klasen and Klasen, Elf Freundinnen, 9–11. Linne, Frei gespielt, 85. Hasler, Nicht schummeln, Liebling! For more on how seldomly football appeared in East German film, see McDougall, “Eyes on the Ball,” 4–18. Hasler, Heißer Sommer. Schwab, Fußball im Film, 691. Klüger, Frauen lesen anders, 96. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. Currently, cancel culture is a main focal point for public discussion. Cultural boycotts of public figures or companies for prejudicial actions have existed for a while. The concept of a cancel culture arose with the #MeToo movement in an effort to demand greater and more-consistent accountability. See Clark, “DRAG THEM,” 88–92. Schwab, Fußball im Film, 690–95. Both in ibid., 694. Ibid., 695. Girard’s definition of a double bind is broad yet concrete, which aids in assisting cinematic interpretation without subscribing the film to more complex feminist theories, such as Elizabeth Grosz’s mobius strip. See Grosz, Volatile Bodies.

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14. Girard, Violence, 147. 15. Hasler, Nicht schummeln, Liebling!, TC 27:18. 16. Although the musical genre had, at times, been officially viewed as apolitical enter17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

tainment, its popularity was a way for DEFA to entice viewers back to the cinema. See Heiduschke, East German Cinema, 88. Brockmann, Critical History, 218. Heiduschke, East German Cinema, 88. The 1974 constitution of the GDR as cited and translated by Susanne Kranz. See Kranz, “Women’s Role,” 74. Hasler, Nicht schummeln, Liebling!, TC 1:09:00. Brockmann, Critical History, 215. Brown, “Dialectical Irony,” 550. Only in 1989 would there be a fifteen-minute documentary film about the womxn’s team in Potsdam. See Tetzke, Frauen am Ball. Interestingly, with regard to the documentary, it was the preferred genre of the few DEFA directors who were womxn and whose work primarily depicted womxn’s issues. See Fröhlich, “Behind the Curtains.” Hasler, Nicht schummeln, Liebling!, TC 27:32. Ibid., TC 27:46. Ibid. Ibid., TC 28:28. Alan McDougall writes about the general dislike of referees in the GDR, given that they were perceived to favor the Berliner Fußball Club Dynamo because party officials wanted the football champions in the capital. McDougall, The People’s Game, 228. “Sollnse spielen, so wie sie wollen, Gedankenstrich, aber sie sollen nicht erwarten, daß irgendeiner zuschaut.” (Let them play as they like, dash, but don’t expect anyone to watch.) Brussig, Leben bis Männer, 60. Palmowski, Inventing a Socialist Nation. McDougall, “Whose Game Is It Anyway?,” 40. McDougall, The People’s Game, 280. See “Vereine: Fallbeispiele aus Deutschland und Österreich” in Herzog, Frauenfußball in Deutschland. Hasler, Nicht schummeln, Liebling!, TC 28:28. Ibid., TC 28:00. The double burden of work and home had some distinctive features in the GDR, both before and during the (relative) golden age of the early-mid 1970s. See Harsch, Revenge of the Domestic; McLellan, Love in the Time of Communism; Pence and Betts, Socialist Modern. The material struggles of the women’s team in Sonnethal also reflect, or perhaps anticipate, the material difficulties that many women’s football teams faced in the so-called DDR-Sportland in the 70s and 80s, as funding mostly went to Olympic sports and men’s football. See McDougall, “Whose Game Is It Anyway?,” 36. Forced volunteerism was key to the building and rebuilding of sports and leisure facilities in the GDR after 1949. See Johnson, Training Socialist Citizens. Hasler, Nicht schummeln, Liebling!, TC 10:46. Ibid., TC 23:35. Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary,134.

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42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57 58. 59.



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Fröhlich, “Behind the Curtains,” 43. McDougall, “Whose Game Is It Anyway?,” 43. Ibid., 41–42. Rinke, “Models or Misfits?,” 210. Womxn were central to cinematic portrayal of everyday life in the GDR and the problems of the newly formed socialist state. Konrad Wolf ’s 1964 adaptation of Christa Wolff ’s Der Geteilte Himmel (1959) is perhaps the best example. In the film, the protagonist, Rita, faces a difficult decision about whether to stay in the East or flee with her boyfriend, Manfred, to West Berlin. Whereas Rita deals directly with the state, womxn in later DEFA films faced issues tangentially or at least indirectly dealing with the state. See Heiduschke, East German Cinema. Fröhlich, “Behind the Curtains,” 44. Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 14–26. Rinke, “Models or Misfits,” 207. Brockmann, Critical History, 230. Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 18. Brigitte also performs the audible pleasure of the film, which was paramount, as Hasler has stated, given that the goal was to condense the narrative of the film in order to highlight the music of the pop stars. The act of singing, which draws attention to Brigitte’s open mouth, also panders to the male gaze. Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 21. Heiduschke, East German Cinema, 90. Hasler, Nicht schummeln, Liebling!, TC 55:09. Ibid. TC 1:18:06. Ibid., TC 2:28 and TC 21:05. Ibid. TC 5:07 and 30:37. See Langen, “Kampf der Kugeln.”

Bibliography Brockmann, Stephen. A Critical History of German Film. Rochester: Camden House, 2010. Brussig, Thomas. Leben bis Männer [Life until the men’s team]. Frankfurt: Fischer, 2001. Brown, Richard Harvey. “Dialectical Irony. Literary Form and Sociological Theory.” Poetics Today 4, no. 3 (1983): 543–64. Clark, Meredith D. “DRAG THEM: A Brief Etymology of so-called ‘Cancel Culture.’” Communication and the Public 5, 3–4 (2020): 88–92. Dictionary.com. “womxn.” Retrieved 13 February 2022, https://www.dictionary.com/ browse/womxn Feinstein, Joshua. The Triumph of the Ordinary: Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema, 1949–1989. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Fröhlich, Margit. “Behind the Curtains of a State-Owned Film Industry: Women-Filmmakers at the DEFA. In Triangulated Visions: Women in Recent German Cinema, edited by Ingeborg M. O’ Sickey and Ingeborg von Zadow, 43–64. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

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Harsch, Donna. Revenge of the Domestic: Women, the Family, and Communism in the German Democratic Republic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Hasler, Joachim, dir. Heißer Sommer [Hot summer]. Berlin: Icestorm, 2017. DVD. ———, dir. Nicht schummeln, Liebling! [Don’t cheat, darling!]. Berlin: Icestorm, 2007. DVD. Heiduschke, Sebastian. East German Cinema: DEFA and Film History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Herzog, Markwart, ed. Frauenfussball in Deutschland: Anfänge—Verbote—Widerstände— Durchbruch [Women’s football in Germany: Beginnings—bans—oppositions—breakthrough]. Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 2013. Johnson, Molly Wilkinson. Training Socialist Citizens: Sports and the State in East Germany. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Klasen, Birgit, and Heiko Klasen. Elf Freundinnen: Die Turbinen aus Potsdam [Eleven female friends: The turbines from Potsdam]. Berlin: Das Neue Berlin, 2005. Klüger, Ruth. Frauen lesen anders: Essays [Women read differently: Essays]. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997. Kranz, Susanne. “Women’s Role in the German Democratic Republic and the State’s Policy Toward Women.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 7, no.1 (2005): 69–83. Langen, Gabi. “‘Kampf der Kugeln’: Die Anfänge des Frauenfußballs in der Sportfotografie [Struggle of the balls: The beginnings of women’s football in sports photography].” In Frauenfussball in Deutschland: Anfänge—Verbote—Widerstände—Durchbruch [Women’s football in Germany: Beginnings—bans—oppositions—breakthrough], edited by Markwart Herzog, 285–300. Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 2013. Linne, Carina Sophia. Frei gespielt: Frauenfußball im geteilten Deutschland [Played freely: Women’s football in a divided Germany]. Berlin: bebra verlag, 2011. McDougall, Alan. “Eyes on the Ball: Screening Football in East German Cinema.” Studies in Eastern European Cinema, vol.8, no.1(2017): 4–18. ———. The People’s Game: Football, State and Society in East Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. ———. “Whose Game Is It Anyway? A People’s History of East German Football.” Radical History Review no. 125 (2016): 35–54. McLellan, Josie. Love in the Time of Communism: Intimacy and Sexuality in the GDR. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1989. Palmowski, Jan. Inventing a Socialist Nation: Heimat and the Politics of Everyday Life in the GDR, 1945–1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pence, Katherine, and Paul Betts, eds. Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Rinke, Andrea. “Models or Misfits? The Role of Screen Heroines in GDR Cinema.” In Triangulated Visions: Women in Recent German Cinema, edited by Ingeborg M. O’ Sickey and Ingeborg von Zadow, 207–18. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Schwab, Jan Tilman. Fußball im Film: Lexikon des Fußballfilms [Football in cinema: Encyclopedia of football films]. Munich: Belleville, 2005. Tetzke, Ted, dir. Frauen am Ball [Women on the ball]. Berlin: Icestorm, 2007. DVD.

CHAPTER 9



From GDR-Emigrant to Third-Class Citizen

Football Stadiums, Social Divides, and East German Identities in Andreas Gläser’s BFC is to Blame for the Wall OLIVER KNABE

Introduction

I

n his memoir Der BFC war schuld am Mauerbau (BFC is to blame for the wall, 2002), Andreas Gläser describes football as an inevitable force that introduced itself to him at an early stage in life.1 As he was on his way to a round of coffee and chit-chat with his parents and his sister, the game found Gläser in the streets of 1970s East Berlin when a crowd of Berliner Fußballclub Dynamo (BFC) fans was streaming from the nearby stadium toward the unexpecting boy. Intrigued by the masses of supporters, he “counted on getting lost in the bustle” at Schönhauser Allee.2 At age twelve, he allowed “himself to be dragged” to his first football game.3 Soon thereafter, through the pressure of one of his classmates, he gave in to what appeared to be a natural imperative: he declared his loyalty to a local football side. However, unlike many of his peers, he chose BFC, arguably the most disliked team in the former East Germany due to its close ties to the state.4 “Stasi [Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, or Ministry for State Security] patronage,” Alan McDougall writes, “ensured that BFC, a team with a modest fanbase . . . had access to the best facilities, the best young talent, and the best players from rival clubs. Above all, it was widely assumed that BFC received preferential treatment from referees.”5 This suspicion was especially fueled by the dubious streak of ten consecutive championship wins that started in the 1978–79 season. Open hostilities from opposing fans across the republic

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were the result, and BFC fans embraced their negative reputation as they “took a perverse delight in unpopularity.”6 Yet, this questionable image was likely not the only aspect that impacted Gläser’s decision for BFC Dynamo, since the club’s spatial proximity to his home was another factor. Born in 1965, he grew up in the Prenzlauer Berg district where his family’s residence was right around the corner of the club’s stadium, the Friedrich-Ludwig-Jahn-Sportpark. However, the place of his upbringing did not shape him solely in terms of his football fandom. The apartment (similar to BFC’s home ground) was located near the Berlin Wall.7 With this geographical setting, the division of Germany and the game of football ultimately took center stage in Gläser’s reflections about East German life. The author, whose first literary productions appeared in a variety of fanzines,8 has been considered part of the Zonenkinder (Children of East Germany) generation: a group of East German writers who spent their youths in the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (GDR; German Democratic Republic), witnessed the end of the state as adolescents or young adults and started writing about their experiences after the turn of the century.9 These authors’ literary productions predominantly address their “childhood and adolescence in the former German Democratic Republic and describe the societal and political change of the transitional period as a caesura in [their] lives and as a calling-into-question of [their] own identity.”10 Similar to other writers who share the same cultural roots (e.g., Jochen Schmidt, born 1970; and Falko Hennig, born 1969), Gläser started to gain traction within Berlin’s subcultural circles through weekly appearances at Lesebühnen (reading stages), venues where he developed what he calls his “proletarian prose.”11 For emerging East German writers, these events often served as a means to communicate their personal perceptions of the GDR and to mediate their experiences to both an East German and a West German audience.12 Being one of the cofounders of the Lesebühne Chaussee der Enthusiasten, he described these performance-based forums as his personal “fields of experimentation”13 where he tested a significant portion of his work before it eventually made it into Der BFC war schuld am Mauerbau, his first major publication. This autobiographical collection of personal and anecdotal narratives has been mostly overlooked by scholarly criticism and has found its readership predominantly in more regional circles. In a 2004 interview, Gläser acknowledged that his book “rather appeals to [Germany’s] northeast,” or in less geographical terms, to readers from the former GDR. “One runs the risk that a Westerner will not have any use for it.”14 In addition to carrying in its title the name of a club that is mostly known for its former Stasi ties but also for a violent hooligan scene, Mauerbau’s uncompromising and unapologetic East German speak (complemented by a rough blue-collar aura) make this book a local affair indeed. However, despite or maybe precisely because of its exclusive nature, Mau-

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erbau has the ability to contribute to contemporary debates about national and cultural memories as they relate to the former GDR. Gläser grants us critical insights into East German life as he tells us the story of his upbringing and his migration from East to West via Ausreiseantrag (exit visa) right before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Furthermore, he dedicates significant portions of his autobiography to the immediate post-Wende years.15 What makes Mauerbau a particularly intriguing case study, however, is Gläser’s seemingly paradoxical status as a late emigrant who ultimately returns to the eastside of Berlin after 1990, at a time when former citizens of the GDR were leaving the region disproportionately for West German opportunities. His anecdotes lend themselves to a nuanced examination of the Ostalgie (eastalgia) phenomenon—East Germans’ “vibrant nostalgia for a lost cultural identity”—which was often questioned by the Western mainstream media that generally dismissed “the forty years of the GDR as a failed experiment.”16 The return signifies commitment to (and not just retrospective embellishment of ) his former home. It challenges the media’s narratives from the 1990s that often reduced the East German experience to life in a Stasiland.17 Gläser rejects an exclusively political interpretation of the GDR and draws a distinguishing line, as this chapter will show, between polity and the private. In Mauerbau, I maintain, football becomes a realm in which the author addresses larger East German desires and issues, both before and after the collapse of the GDR. Germany’s favorite pastime allows Gläser to coalesce strongly diverging experiences from two vastly different German nations into one autobiographical narrative. It is especially the physical space of the football stadium that functions as his medium of reflection; it is a carefully shaped site of personal remembrance through which the narrator contemplates his own relationship to the former GDR and his East German identity in the context of a reunified nation.

Reflecting on the GDR through Imagined Spaces: Wembley and Empire Stadium While the majority of football anecdotes in Mauerbau revolve around his fandom, the autobiography also covers Andreas Gläser’s time as an adolescent street footballer. In these accounts from his teenage years, it becomes clear that the game signifies more than mere physical activity; in the Wembley episode, for example, he turns it into a political expression. At the time, when I was supposed to prepare for the school’s final exams, I often played football with my friends. Sometimes, we moved into the Wembley Stadium of Hohenschönhausen, located amid some ’50s buildings. This is what we called the generously sized backyard which featured a lawn. It was not easy to play football between the many clotheslines. The locals always evoked a hostile

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atmosphere. Probably just like in London’s Wembley Stadium. Whenever our ball left an imprint on a hanging piece of laundry, the young German mothers bawled like old English fathers.18

Kicking the ball in East Berlin’s backyards is a moment of repudiation for Gläser. As he moves to “Wembley,” instead of studying for a predictable career path within the socialist confines, he rejects the state’s expectations and norms (“supposed to”) by refusing to prepare for the exams. He chooses the camaraderie among “my friends” while they are playing a game that—despite being rooted in a collective idea—allows for individualism, spontaneity, and creativity, and that has captured audiences around the world with its open-endedness. It is, however, the name Gläser chose for this “generously sized backyard” that bears the strongest political message. Over the course of eight decades, London’s old Wembley Stadium garnered a legendary reputation and was coined a cathedral, capital, and the heart of football by Brazilian superstar Pelé.19 Beyond football, it served repeatedly as the site for milestone events such as the 1948 Olympics and concerts like Live Aid in 1985, and the Nelson Mandela Freedomfest three years later. In the case of the adolescent Gläser, who had grown increasingly annoyed with the “ostzonale Mief [fusty atmosphere of the East German zone]”20 and ultimately “felt incarcerated”21 by the state, the walks to backyard Wembley represent symbolic departures, spiritual crossings to the West where he believed “the Promised Land” awaited.22 These figurative gestures were ultimately followed by Gläser’s actual self-chosen Übersiedlung (relocation) to West Berlin in 1989.23 Yet, for most Germans, Wembley’s significance as a site of memory24 stems exclusively from the game of football—and here from one match in particular: the Federal Republic’s infamous 2–4 defeat against the English hosts in the 1966 World Cup final. The fate of the West German team was decided by the goal line and one question that day: Should Geoff Hurst’s shot resulting in England’s 3–2 lead have counted? Did it really cross the line? Coined the Wembley Tor (Wembley goal), this perceived injustice has since been part of the nation’s memory and occupied its collective imagination. What if the goal had not been allowed? What if the linesman had not been from the Soviet Union (whose team had been beaten by West Germany just five days prior)? In addition to serving as a mental refuge that fueled Gläser’s imagination of the West (“probably just like”), it is Wembley’s fatalistic aura that captures his predicament. At the mercy of the Soviets, his fortunes and sorrows have been separated by a single line. The real Wembley, however, remains out of reach for Gläser. His fantasyfueled construct ultimately cannot withstand the pressures of the “hostile atmosphere” created by local realities, and is constantly subverted by the intersecting clotheslines. The youths have to look for a new space.

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We had to scoot to Malta. This is what we called the fenced rectangle concrete area in the middle of some 70s buildings in Hohenschönhausen. On this concrete space stood two gifts from our Albanian sister city: two iron art objects with one basketball hoop each. Those were our football goals. On this concrete pitch, we felt like we were in Malta’s Empire Stadium which we knew from television.  . . . Whenever we played football in Malta as students, we never complained and we scored many goals.25

Gläser’s Empire Stadium, which was also informed by Heinz Florian Oertel’s famous 1977 “Malta vs. GDR” radio broadcast, is made up of a symbol system that captures the ambiguity of his relation to the former East German state.26 Its gray concrete pitch does not allow for black or white interpretations and should instead be read and understood in terms of its dialectic qualities. It is neither a sole space for nostalgic reminiscence nor only an expression of his frustrations with the former GDR—instead, it is both. Particularly the space’s configuration (emphasized by the repeated mention of the concrete surface) serves as a symbol for this complexity. As an imagined space, the Empire Stadium becomes an arena of layered histories where concrete is not just constructional material but also an artistic element pars pro toto. It represents two preeminent building projects, thus connecting two strikingly different phases within the GDR’s history. The constructions in question went on to define the GDR’s self-perception as well as the external image of the state for decades: East Germany’s ambitious and ultimately successful housing development after World War II on the one hand, the erection of the Berlin Wall on the other. Thus, in concrete, the hopeful aspirations for the German socialist project share the same metonymic imagery with a landmark that stood for division, imprisonment, and authoritarian rule. Since the reconstruction of Berlin and other East German urban spaces were guided by Soviet architectural philosophies, nature’s role, Paul Stangl writes, was only “given modest attention compared to historic, cultural, and economic factors.”27 As the city’s developers balanced socialist realism with modernist designs, the “crane and the large [concrete] panel became ubiquitous symbols of progress” as well as “power.”28 Yet, in 1961, the “massive, concrete incision through the city would provide a colossal counterpoint to East Berlin’s touted ‘socialist’ building projects.”29 Through the double-barreled imagery of concrete, Gläser artistically cements his ambivalent relationship to the former East German state in his version of the Empire Stadium, as he modifies historic facts with fiction. In the tradition of autobiographical writing, Gläser approached the textualization of his past in a modus operandi that is, similar to Goethe’s Truth and Poetry, “half-poetical, half-historic.”30 Just like this famous nineteenth century autobiography, Gläser’s memoir about life in the former socialist state is rooted in the Grundwahre (fundamental truth). It is not a photographic copy

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of events, places, or people; yet it embodies “something of a spirit of the time in which it was written.”31 Written more than a decade after the GDR had ceased to exist, Mauerbau channels Gläser’s adolescence through a new East German post-Wende spirit—or, in other words, the East German zeitgeist of the 2000s guided Gläser in construing his life before the fall of the Wall. To fit his retrospective perception of the state, and here particularly the young man’s surroundings, Gläser reshapes the Empire Stadium’s pitch. Although Malta’s opponents regularly feared serious injuries due to its unorthodox surface coating (“You’d have broken every bone in your body, for goodness’ sake!”),32 this historic football ground located in the town of Gżira never featured concrete but instead a sandy field. This alteration aids Gläser’s fundamental truth about his adolescence as images of concrete landscapes (including the Wall) dominate his memories of the former republic and now even seep into those imagined spaces that are located outside of the GDR. By carefully reworking this ground’s surface, the author also merges two politically separated worlds: East Germany and Malta. In doing so, he captures his young self ’s unwavering desire for an end to the Cold War’s partition as well as the political consolidation process of East and West that would eventually commence in 1990. Yet, despite his symbolic stance for freedom through open borders (and thus for the end of his confinement), the same symbol, concrete, manages to express a sentimental post-Wall mood, as well. Just like “Maltese football enthusiasts still talk with nostalgia about local prowess against foreign opposition”33 whenever they think of the Empire Stadium, Gläser underscores the fighting mentality of those East German students who turned an inadequate plot of land into a space of resistance and success stories. “Whenever we played football in Malta as students, we never complained, and we scored many goals.” He evokes a strong sense of pride in the East Germans’ resilience and their ability to perform at a high level—no matter the circumstances, even during an underdog Cold War struggle against overly powerful Western competitors. In that way, Gläser’s nostalgic courtyard anecdote echoes a sentiment of the immediate postwar generation whose labor and belief in a better future resulted in the rise from ruins, as the GDR’s national anthem put it so solemnly. Notwithstanding this political undertone, the strength of these youths and their many goals are not to be mistaken as reasons for Gläser to support the GDR’s political system. For him, the strength to prevail in the face of difficult conditions does not represent East German socialism—a system so flawed and inadequate in his mind that he decided to abandon it—but it speaks to the qualities of those working within the political constraints imposed by the state. His Ostalgie is anchored in the GDR’s working-class people themselves to whom, after the Wall had fallen and the system had abolished itself, Gläser returned. Reflected already in the additional title of the book, Ein stolzer Sohn des Proletariats erzählt (Stories from a Proud Son of the Proletariat), his affin-

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ity to blue-collar culture is also echoed in the earlier Wembley passage that he closes with the comparison between bawling East German mothers and old English fathers. Through this reference, he evokes the commonplace image of male workers populating England’s stadiums together with their sons on the weekend. The polity on the one side and its people on the other: this separation between the state with its ideological doctrine and the personal social realm is a significant feature of East German remembrance. Such a division of GDR life was not construed retrospectively (e.g., in an attempt to distance oneself from the regime) but instead was already noted at the time by West German observers like Günter Gaus, a diplomat and journalist, who in 1983 wrote about the GDR as a niche society. The retreat into the private he saw especially in the popular Kleingärten (allotment gardens),34 little plots of land that served as a vent and a place where happy memories were made. “Selective nostalgic remembering of past experiences,” Roger Cook writes, “provided East Germans with a self-devised sphere of autonomy that enabled them to make sense of their lives in the New Federal States on their own terms.”35 By laying bare the fact that the term “East German” must not be reduced to a political attribution or conviction but that it serves instead as a signifier for the emotive aspects (e.g., the interpersonal) in the people’s identity formation, this distinction counters the Western approach to Ostalgie that often has rejected any form of positive retrospection as whitewashing or revisionist. As scholars like Frank-Michael Kirsch have pointed out, a positive memory culture does not equate to a yearning for the resurrection of the GDR.36 Gläser’s memories of his football playing days with “my friends” and their “many goals” were “emotional connections to moments of the former life which went beyond the political, and their disappearing were perceived as a loss.”37 They focus on the positive human qualities of his East German experience and serve, in light of the West’s hegemony over the national narrative, as a defense against the devaluation of his own biography.38 With Germany’s reunification, the GDR had become history, and so had many spaces that are at the center of Gläser’s memories by the time he was writing Mauerbau.39 This realization is captured in his Malta anecdote from the 1990s. During a three-week-long vacation on the island, Gläser attempts to see a live match at the original Empire Stadium, yet, the venue, he learns, had ceased operations permanently. “Why was this stadium, which was as unique as the Berlin Wall, closed?”40 Standing on the rooftop of a local innkeeper’s house across from the old ground, he eventually sees the remains of an arena that once had ignited his imagination as an adolescent. But how did things look for the Mediterranean temple of the twentieth century? Oh dear! The stands had collapsed, and, what was even worse, the pitch was overgrown with shrubs and trees! How was that possible? Did someone dump

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soil?  . . . The Empire Stadium, according to [the pub’s innkeeper] King George, had been closed over ten years ago.41

Gläser experiences a two-fold awakening. He is confronted with both irretrievable losses as well as his own past misconceptions of the West.42 While the end of Malta’s Empire Stadium with its challenging pitch, an embodiment of the burdens and deficiencies of the socialist system, serves as a reminder of the irreversible dissolution of the East German state, it also underscores that, with the GDR’s demise, the fundamental prerequisite for the people’s resilience and persistence had ceased to exist. Furthermore, gone are the high hopes for the Western way of life that this space had once symbolized. During the postWende years, the East Germans’ romanticized image of Western liberty and democracy had often given way to disillusion due to rampant social and economic disparities between the former East and West, inequalities that continue to this day. Gläser’s personal disenchantment finds its expression in the moment he realizes that what he assumed was a temple was in fact nothing but a decomposing ruin; what he imagined to be concrete turns out to be soil that had produced shrubs. All that is left for Gläser (and his readers) is one last distant look from this rooftop, gazing over a space that had once captured his hopes for a better future, his fond memories of but also his frustrations with life in the GDR. The imagined spaces of his youth are lost, requiring him to shift his focus now toward the stadiums of reunified Germany.

The East German Stadium after Reunification: Microcosm and Space of Shifting Agency Having described his own prose writing as compulsive acts that resemble a medical condition, Schreibanfälle (writing attacks),43 Gläser offers especially in his football memories from the post-Wende years what appears to be a pathologically distorted view of the new realities in former East Germany. This feature of his autobiography is particularly striking in an anecdote of BFC’s away-game in the town of Rathenow, which Gläser visited in the mid-1990s, half a decade into a reunified nation. At that point, the club’s former elite status and the dominance that had made them serial champions during the 1980s, were already history. After an unsuccessful qualifying campaign for both the Bundesliga and 2. Bundesliga in 1992, the Berliners—together with many other former top Oberliga teams—now officially competed in regional amateur football.44 As Alan McDougall put it, “When the Wende came, BFC—shorn of the support of the disbanded Stasi—fell from its exalted position as rapidly and completely as the socialist state that it controversially represented.”45 Yet Andreas Gläser remained a faithful supporter of his childhood club, which rebranded itself as

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Fußballclub Berlin (FC Berlin) shortly after the Wall had fallen. With reunification, BFC’s decline, and a changed identity as the historical backdrop, he enters Rathenow’s Regionalliga (Third Division) stadium Stadion Vogelgesang in 1995. His recollections of this match, however, raise the question whether he witnessed a meeting of two football teams at all. In Rathenow, we sat by a lake under a pavilion which slowly started to fill with people who had parked their cars all the way to the horizon. From the kiosk nearby, we internalized body parts of dead pigs advertised as meatballs. A Berliner showed us his belly, laughed and danced. Shortly after the kick-off, BFC was digging through the box of the opposing team.46

Instead of the visual earmarks that commonly characterize football stadiums (e.g., terraces, seats, a pitch, goals, chalk marks, and fencing), the space is initially defined by a kiosk, an enormous parking site, and a pavilion set by a lake. Located in the Havelland District of East German Brandenburg and with its laughing and dancing, Stadion Vogelgesang resembles the image and atmosphere of a rural circus, carnival, or fairground. Furthermore, the game seems to lack its usual protagonists. Individual football players are never mentioned and the (penalty) box appears to float disconnected within this carnivalesque realm. Where balls are normally kicked, thrown, and headed, Gläser’s BFC is upturning the grass in the manner of a pig or a boar. This animal motif becomes even more vivid as it carries on beyond the pitch with the fans on the terraces. Here a bawdy Berliner exposes himself to the rest of the crowd as the latter collectively engages in the eating of body parts of dead pigs—that is, the local meatballs. In the spirit of the idiom “You are what you eat,” the narrator has his readers imagining the Berlin supporters as a horde, or, as the followers of BFC were viewed in the GDR, as “schweinische Schweine-Schweine” (swinish swine-swines)—a perception in which these fans took delight.47 However, the image of the swine that had once captured the widely held disdain for this club’s fanbase (“The people hated us”)48 serves additional functions in this post-reunification game. The swinish behavior of the guests can be understood as a way to hold on to their old GDR ways and thus to a part of their identity. At the same time, stylizing themselves as a dubious and yet fascinating Kirmes (funfair) act expresses their sense of East German otherness. They reproduce what they believe is the Western perception of former GDR citizens: simple and inferior.49 Consequently, the collective eating experience becomes a moment of internalization (“we internalized body parts”) rather than an act of devouring or consumption. As if to say, “We understand that we are what we eat!,” Gläser stresses that East Germans are recognizing their role as a German other. Gläser’s description of these football fans reveals an underlying pathology of the East German experience during this early post-Wall era. Read as a frame of mind allegory, some citizens of the former GDR feel as though they have

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become objects of ridicule and entertainment. Corresponding to their club’s third-division status (which they held for most of the 1990s), they see themselves devalued, relegated to third-tier citizens who have to find their joys offside, that is, “beyond the Bundesliga circus.”50 Although they were now officially considered part of the Bundesrepublik (Federal Republic), the nation’s main stages seemed reserved almost exclusively for the former West, both in the football arenas and in everyday life. On a football level, this was particularly mirrored through the merging of the two football organizations into one reunified league system that featured the Bundesliga as the nation’s top-tier division: “The German Football Association,” as Gläser put it, “struggled with the integration of East German clubs into the federal competition anyway.”51 What he called euphemistically a struggle resulted in an inequality in East German representation that is still felt in Germany’s professional football today. During its inaugural season as an all-German Bundesliga (1991–92), the league featured only two clubs from the former GDR in comparison to eighteen competitors from the West. As of the 2022–23 season, only one former Oberliga club was competing in the country’s highest competition. The East German impression, that there existed a lack of equity between citizens of the former East and West, grew out of social and economic disparities that permeated many facets of life. Unequal access to leadership positions as well as differences in health-care quality, retirement, income, education opportunities, and infrastructure, have been significant points of contention during a slow consolidation process of two vastly different systems that on paper were meant to be one. The consequent feeling of devaluation is already palpable in Gläser’s preface. Here, he refers to himself as a Literaturregionalligist (minor league writer) in contrast to established Nobel laureates—an honor that was accorded to West German but never to East German writers.52 By echoing BFC’s experience of relegation in his self-characterization, Gläser not only shows his continuing closeness to his childhood club but also emphasizes how these disparities are not simply limited to the realm of football. The imbalance within the nation’s league system and BFC’s decline are manifestations of larger systemic issues in post-Wall Germany that have posed significant challenges over the past decades. The one-sided interest that West German media took in the neue Bundesländer (new federal states) did not help to bridge these societal trenches, either. “The media,” Gläser notes, “bored us with their Stasi singsong.”53 While this sentiment was shared by many East Germans, it held particularly true for BFC supporters. In addition to hooligan and neo-Nazi controversies that have dominated the public perception, BFC’s image has been shaped by the club’s affiliation with Erich Mielke, the infamous head of the Ministry for State Security, thus turning the former East German champions and its fans into vestiges of a failed surveillance state in the public conscience of the German football nation.

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The constant sense of having one’s East German identity diminished, in addition to the stark economic shortcomings of the region, make for an uncertain future.54 The desire to maintain (at least parts of ) an East German identity is especially evident in the narrator’s use of the club’s old name. It is not contemporary FC Berlin but BFC, the name that carries the East German legacy, that the fans have come to see that day in Rathenow. “From a colloquial standpoint, FC Berlin never existed,” the author explained in 2008, arguing, “You did not want to let yourself be broken off from your dialect with the restructuring of the workers’ and peasants’ state into a service society.”55 The club’s refurbished post-Wende identity bears no significance for Gläser. FC Berlin’s new logo, an image of a football featuring the city’s iconic Brandenburg Gate, a symbol of 9 November 1989, he shrugs off as a “meaningless postcard picture.”56 Replacing old cultural signifiers (e.g., the club’s former crest featuring its golden wreath) in accordance with the new reunification spirit, created a sense of loss: lost here is part of one’s own East German narrative and thus any sense of meaningful continuity. The rebranding strategy eventually failed and the club, in 1999, returned to its old name. Just as meaningless as the new logo and the name “FC Berlin” seems to be the club’s game against Optik Rathenow. Containing barely any references to the actions on the field, the second part of Gläser’s account focuses predominantly on the fringes of this regional league encounter. The equalizer and the non-existent barriers were an invitation to a dance on the cinder track, which was accepted by ten Berliners. This buoyant mood, which just would not quite result in a pitch invasion, reminded me of spirited concerts where only a few people danced. The belly dancer from the pavilion did not mind. His failed attempt to start the Mexican Wave was met with “striptease” shouts. He ran onto the cinder track and showed us his belly nose. Four cops reprimanded him. Shortly thereafter, he was back in the block and shouted: “La Ola!” A fellow from the Mitropa strolled to the side of the pitch and picked daisies. Easter eggs flew onto the grass. Rathenow scored two [lucky] goals. The man with the [inflatable] hammer looked sad. The steam was lost.57

Had the introduction of Stadion Vogelgesang brought about a spatial disorientation for the reader—one that corresponds with a sense of East German lostness—the subsequent lines evoke disconnect. Gläser’s disjointed and associative (non-)depiction of the game is fashioned in expressionist language with its neologism for penis (Unterleibsnase, or belly nose). This visual is part of a larger series of jumbled, snapshot-like motifs: cinder track, concert, belly dancer, penis, police, flowers, Easter eggs, two goals, and finally a man with a hammer. As the story told by these images progresses, its coherence noticeably dwindles away. By the end, this account from the game is merely held together by the narrator’s voice. Gläser’s images are broken through his subjective lens

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and thrown back at us without any further comment. However, the subjectivity expressed here—while a product of the author’s literary ego—can be understood as more than just a personal view but rather as a collective East German zeitgeist. We hear a voice that subtly, hidden behind humorous word play, banalities, and even profanities, laments the disregard of an entire collective, reflecting the mental disposition of a people that feels downgraded and ignored. The hopes and expectations for a reunified Germany had dwindled away for many former GDR citizens (“Die Luft war raus” [The steam was lost]). As disillusion grew stronger, the relationship of these people to the West changed. This becomes even clearer if we understand Gläser’s stadium not only as an echo chamber for the East German state of mind but additionally as a microcosm for the entire region itself, including its demarcations. The correlation between football grounds and East Germany as a physical space is made evident by the parallels between stadium and border security during the GDR years. Gläser, too, notes this connection when he finds that the interior fence of BFC’s Friedrich-Ludwig-Jahn-Sportpark “was protected almost like the Berlin Wall.”58 The accuracy of his observation is illustrated by a 1984 letter written by Lieutenant-Colonel Radeke, head of the infamous Stasi Hauptabteilung XX (Main Division XX): “Especially during home games of BFC Dynamo at the Friedrich-Ludwig-Jahn-Sportpark . . . , special measures for the protection of the state’s border will be initiated and realized in accordance with the People’s Police, the Guard Regiment of the Ministry of State Security, and East German border troops.”59 What appears like an excessive counterviolence approach was in fact standard procedure for BFC matches during the 1980s. Since the stadium was only a stone’s throw away from the Berlin Wall, protecting the GDR’s border meant securing the football ground. Gläser’s BFC memories from the GDR era regularly feature details of stadium structures such as fences and cinder tracks, as well as security personnel. These alleged safeguards, however, were undermined by the supporters and their ritual-like breaches in form of pitch or block invasions (“Of course, barriers had to be overcome.   .  .  .  The fence proved to be no obstacle.”)60 If the allegorical alignment of stadium and state allow us to read fences, police, and cinder tracks as East Germany’s strictly protected borderlines and the pitch and block invasions as the people’s urge to leave the claustrophobic conditions of the GDR, then Gläser’s post-Wall anecdote from Rathenow demonstrates a remarkable decline of interest in “the other side.” The spatial setup has significantly changed and so has the fans’ behavior in relation to the stadium’s border-structures. The cinder track, this no-man’s-land that supporters had actively defied and crossed, is now, in 1995, a space filled with carnivalesque absurdities such as dancing, belly noses, and failed La-Olas (Mexican waves). Furthermore, border-crossings through a pitch invasion (here made especially easy due to the nonexistent barriers) only tempt a few visitors that day. An

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almost thirty-year-lasting force driving East Germans to the other side appears to have waned. All that awaits are a few “daisies.” Disillusion, disorientation, and disconnect are furthermore complemented by a fear of losing one’s own agency (again). While Gläser conveys that the GDR made him feel as though he only played a “Statistenrolle,” that is, the role of an extra on a movie set, a new threat of such passive existence emerged after 1990, despite the dissolution of the GDR.61 East Germans’ active engagement in this new era of the nation’s history seemed not only to be complicated by unequal conditions but also was perceived as unwanted. Their ability to contribute to the state was called publicly into question, as Gläser emphasizes when he cites a news magazine from that period. “Many so-called Germans,” the quote reads, “are coming directly out of prison! They are overwhelmed by the local workload.”62 Not only does it become apparent here how much the overall West German perception of the GDR was semantically reduced to notions of captivity but this news line also constitutes an attack on what made Gläser so proud to be a son of the proletariat: the people’s prowess and perseverance, no matter the circumstances. Claiming that they lack these very qualities, the magazine article raises doubts about their status as proper German citizens. Labeled as “so-called Germans,” they were simply moved to the sidelines of post-Wall Germany, a society that Gläser calls outright “undemocratic.”63 To Gläser and many other East Germans, their experiences in this reunified nation had been lessened to a consumer-focused “Spaßgesellschaft” (fun society)64 where people were meant to give their attention quietly to the entertainment provided, for instance by the aforementioned Bundesliga circus. His short-lived experiences with West German second-division team Hertha BSC (Hertha, Berliner Sport-Club) during the immediate Wende years, are paradigmatic of this passivity: “In the Olympic Stadium, I had no interest in the fan culture. I sat in the senior citizen’s block.” However, he adds, “football fans should rattle the chains instead of putting them on themselves.”65 The more modern (and often better) football offered by West German teams like Hertha BSC came at the price of the game’s hypercommercialization for supporters like Gläser. In line with capitalist interests, football matches were turned into choreographed events and often would not leave room for individual fan expression or participation on the terraces. In light of his own passivity, he ultimately turns back to his old club and the football grounds of the former GDR. Here, agency can still be felt, as the Rathenow anecdote demonstrates. Although Gläser’s depiction of the stadium expresses first and foremost the negative sensations of the East German Wende-experiences (disconnect, disorientation, disillusion, devaluation), it can also be read as a symbolic realm for hope and resistance. Stadion Vogelgesang serves as a space where the collective desire to break through the assigned role as passive observer can be manifested. BFC’s fans create their own circus where

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spectators turn into the spectacle. Passivity gives way to agency as the Berlin supporters are actively reshaping the story line that afternoon. Originally scheduled as a football match, an event with a linear sequence, this encounter between Rathenow and Berlin has become an unbridled and unpredictable show that is built around a new set of protagonists whose stage is located on the other side of the cinder tracks. Sidelined are now those (unmentioned) players on the pitch. Their contributions to the afternoon’s away trip hardly make it into Gläser’s account, and the few that do, have little to no effect on the plot. During a match in Cottbus—in another (although violent) example of the supporters’ ability to act—the reversal of audience and protagonist is brought to completion. “Our defenders, likely not yet solid in their characters, allowed themselves to be distracted by the commotion in the stands.”66 The gaze’s usual direction, from the crowd to the field, has turned around and affected those who used to be in charge of the plot. In Gläser’s football matches we can see how, through the appropriation of the negative image (swinish swine-swines), these East German fans rid their own narrative of passivity and gain a sense of agency, through both peaceful and violent transformations of the stadium.

Conclusion In BFC Is to Blame for the Wall, the football ground becomes a multilayered realm of meanings. What we know as a site of athletic competition, entertainment, and business in the modern world of professional sports is turned into a flexible textual canvas in Andreas Gläser’s memoir. Through the repeated engagement with this architectural structure, he captures himself both before and after the Wende, and each time he paints a complex introspective composition that allows us to see the dialectics at work in his East German identity. While the imagined spaces Wembley and Empire Stadium represent the young man’s longing for freedom from a repressive state, they also portray his Ostalgie, his emotive connections to his past life in the GDR. The latter, however, draws exclusively from his experiences as a private citizen. It is the selective remembrance from which the personal and depoliticized East Germany arises as a mental refuge. This again allows Gläser, despite the West German hegemony over the national narrative, to maintain a positive relationship to the lost GDR and preserve his biographical continuity. Similarly ambivalent is the function of Gläser’s stadium in reunified Germany. Here, he uses it as an artful medium to express sentiments such as disillusion, devaluation, disconnect, and disorientation. Serving Gläser as an incisive critique of systemic social disparities, these emotional states have been widely felt among many former GDR citizens in the post-Wall era. The same football ground, however, is additionally described as a venue where agency can be claimed. Football gives Gläser and his fellow

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BFC supporters (at least temporarily) the ability to hold on to parts of their old selves and a sense of their identity that would otherwise not find a place in this new unified nation-state.

Author Oliver Knabe is lecturer of German at the University of Dayton. Dr. Knabe specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century German literature and cinema, with a particular focus on politics and social justice. He teaches courses on both international and German football in English and German to undergraduates. He is the organizer of two consecutive football events at the German Studies Association convention (2018 and 2019) and is currently investigating East German football stadiums and their portrayal in German film and literature. His ongoing book project focuses on the game of football as a realm for social (in)justice.

Notes 1. This work will be referred to as Mauerbau in this chapter. Sources that are listed

with their German titles, including Gläser’s memoir, have been translated by the author of this chapter. 2. Gläser, Mauerbau, 22. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Ibid., 22–23.

Ibid., 23. McDougall, The People’s Game, 224. Ibid., 225. Gläser, Mauerbau, 11. These nonofficial publications are edited and distributed by fans among a variety of cultural circles, such as football supporters. The term is a blend of fan and magazine. Zone refers geographically to the Soviet Occupation Zone after WWII which became the GDR in 1949. In later years, the term was used as a derogatory reference to East Germany. Hähnel-Mesnard, “Zonenkinder,” 378. Gläser, Mauerbau, 7. Hähnel-Mesnard, “Zonenkinder,” 379. Gläser, Mauerbau, 8. Bartz, Gläser, and Willmann, “Viele sächsische Bauarbeiter.” The term Wende is used to describe the period of political change  in the time proceeding and immediately following the reunification of East and West Germany. Cook, “25 August 1992,” 524–25. Tate, “Introduction,” 7. Gläser, Mauerbau, 199.

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19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

Curry, “Wembley Stadium.” Gläser, Mauerbau, 17. Ibid., 47–48. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 53. Playing football on these imagined grounds of the West was not the only way for Gläser to escape East German realities. In addition to football, the cultural realm of Western music performed a similar function. Rather than listening to East German bands such as Pudhys, Karat, Silly, or City, Gläser and his friends consumed British rock and contemplated questions like, “Depeche Mode or The Cure?” Ibid., 47. For Erinnerungsraum, see Assmann, Erinnerungsräume; and for lieu de mémoire, see Nora, The Realms of Memory. Gläser, Mauerbau, 199–200. The GDR’s national team played two World Cup qualifiers in Malta’s Empire Stadium, in 1977 and in 1981. In Mauerbau, Gläser references the famous radio commentary by Oertel who—due to a lack of stadium access—literally phoned in his commentary from a local’s apartment near the football ground. However, Gläser was mistaken when he stated that Oertel’s commentary occurred in the “early 1980s” instead of 1977. Stangl, Risen from Ruins, 81. Ibid., 254, 259. Ibid., 261. von Goethe, The Autobiography of Goethe, vii. von Goethe and Zelter, Goethe’s Letters to Zelter, 388–89. Gläser, Mauerbau, 200. “Malta Football Association.” Gaus, Wo Deutschland liegt, 157. Cook, “25 August 1992,” 526. Kirsch, “Nostalgie oder die Metamorphosen,” 215. Ibid., 212. Ibid., 203. Besides Malta’s Empire Stadium, Old Wembley had ceased operations by the year 2000, as well. The ground, with its iconic Twin Towers, was eventually demolished in 2003 and was replaced by a more modern stadium, also called Wembley, four years later. Gläser, Mauerbau, 207. Ibid., 208. In regard to the experience of loss, Gläser evokes the notion of death when he suggests that the termination of all operations at the Empire Stadium is part of the continuing widespread phenomenon that he calls Stadionsterben (dying of stadiums). Ibid., 208. von Rauch and Gläser, “Stolzer Sohn des Proletariats,” 10. The Oberliga was the first division in the East German football league system. McDougall, The People’s Game, 241. Gläser, Mauerbau, 109. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 24.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

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49. The seemingly fitting facilities for these fans can be found in Gläser’s description of 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

another BFC game in Cottbus where the away crowd was penned up in a Gästekäfig (guest cage) rather than the supporters’ section. Ibid., 108. Ibid., 107. Ibid., 104. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 104. These characteristics—ridicule, entertainment, and an East German existence in jeopardy—were also central elements of the biggest 1999 media event in Germany, which was ignited by show host Stefan Raab and the release of his song “Maschendrahtzaun.” Ultimately making fun of the East German Regina Zindler and her Saxonian dialect, the song became a major commercial hit. Although Zindler benefited from the sales, she eventually had to sell her house and leave her hometown for the anonymity of Berlin. Adelt, “Interview mit Andreas Gläser.” Gläser, Mauerbau, 104. Ibid., 109. Mitropa was a former company known for catering services on trains. Ibid., 43. Radeke,“Zuarbeit zur Berichterstattung.” Gläser, Mauerbau, 42. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 106. The phrase “so-called Germans” echoes the dismissive idiom “die sogenannte DDR” (the so-called GDR), that has regularly been used by West Germans, and that implies doubts about East Germany’s statehood. Ibid. Ibid., 104–5. Ibid., 108.

Bibliography Adelt, Hardy. “Interview mit Andreas Gläser” [Interview with Andreas Gläser]. Fussballvorhersage.de, April 2008. Retrieved 11 February 2022, http://www.fussballvorhersage .de/interviews/interview_200804_andreas_glaeser.htm Assmann, Aleida. Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlung des kulturellen Gedächtnisses [Sites of memory. Forms and transformations of cultural memory]. C.H. Beck: Munich, 2009. Bartz, Dietmar, Andreas Gläser, and Frank Willmann. “‘Viele sächsische Bauarbeiter haben sich doch gefreut.’ Dietmar Bartz im Interview mit Andreas Gläser & Frank Willmann” [“Many construction workers from Saxony were actually happy.” Dietmar Bartz interviews Andreas Gläser and Frank Willmann]. Satt.Org, January 2004. Retrieved 11 February 2022, http://www.satt.org/freizeit/04_01_willmann-glaeser.html Cook, Roger. “25 August 1992: Ostalgie Provides Pushback against Western Views on the East German Collapse.” In A New History of German Cinema, edited by Jennifer M. Kapczynski and Michael D. Richardson, 524–29. Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2012.

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Curry, Steve. “Wembley Stadium Is a Tower of Strength at last.” Mail Online, 16 June 2011. Retrieved 11 February 2022, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/arti cle-2004487/Wembley-Stadium-tower-strength-last.html Gaus, Günter. Wo Deutschland liegt [Where Germany can be found]. Hamburg: Hoffman und Campe, 1983. Gläser, Andreas. Der BFC war schuld am Mauerbau. Ein stolzer Sohn des Proletariats erzählt [BFC is to blame for the wall. Stories from a proud son of the proletariat]. Berlin: Aufbau Taschenbuch, 2002. Hähnel-Mesnard, Carola. “Zonenkinder” [Children of the GDR]. In Metzler Lexikon DDR-Literatur. Autoren, Institutionen, Debatten [Metzler Encyclopedia of GDR literature. Authors, institutions, debates], edited by Michael Opitz and Michael Hofmann, 378–79. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2009. Kirsch, Frank-Michael. “Nostalgie oder die Metamorphosen eines Prügelknaben” [Nostalgia or the metamorphosis of a scapegoat]. In Europäische Lichtblicke: Festschrift für Ernst-Ullrich Pinkert [European bright spots: Festschrift for Ernst-Ullrich Pinkert], edited by Jan T. Schlosser and Erich Unglaub, 193–220. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2010. “Malta Football Association.” History of Football, 16 November 2015. Retrieved February 12, http://footballhistoryfans.blogspot.com/2015/11/malta-football-association.html McDougall, Alan. The People’s Game. Football, State and Society in East Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Nora, Pierre. The Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Radeke, “Zuarbeit zur Berichterstattung entsprechend DA 1/81 des Genossen Minister. Berlin, 14. 11.1984.” BArch, MfS, HA XX, No. 221. Tate, Dennis. “Introduction: The Importance and Diversity of Cultural Memory in the GDR Context.” In Twenty Years on. Competing Memories of the GDR in Postunification German Culture, edited by Renate Rechtien and Dennis Tate, 1–19. Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2011. Stangl, Paul. Risen from Ruins: The Cultural Politics of Rebuilding East Berlin. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018. von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. The Autobiography of Goethe. Truth and Poetry: From my own Life, Volume 1. London: George Bell and Sons, 1897. von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, and Carl Friedrich Zelter. Goethe’s Letters to Zelter. London: George Bell and Sons, 1887. von Rauch, Johanna, and Andreas Gläser. “Stolzer Sohn des Proletariats. Johanna von Rauch im Gespräch mit dem Berliner Autor Andreas Gläser [Proud son of the proletariat. Johanna von Rauch in dialogue with Berlin author Andreas Gläser].” Volltext: Zeitung für Literatur [Full text: Newspaper for literature], no. 2 (2002): 10.

PART IV

 The Politics Beyond the Pitch German Fandom and Spectatorship

CHAPTER 10



Educating the Spectator Athlete-Fan Interplay in the Early German Football Film The Eleven Devils by Zoltan Korda BASTIAN HEINSOHN

T

he Austro-Hungarian and Jewish screenwriter and filmmaker Zoltan Korda, who would later work in Hollywood with casts including movie stars Humphrey Bogart, Jessica Tandy, and Sidney Poitier, began his directing career in Berlin during the 1920s with Die elf Teufel (The Eleven Devils). Released by the rather short-lived distributor National Film on 20 October 1927, The Eleven Devils is considered the first feature film in German cinema that portrays football as its main subject. The film, one of the last silent films to be released before German sound film saw its major breakthrough in early 1929, is indeed a remarkable artistic representation of football in a time that saw both the sport and cinema turn into spectacles for the masses, and that saw athletes turn into stars and role models.1 Korda’s debut film preceded the release of another football film, Fritz Freisler’s Der König der Mittelstürmer (King of the Center Forwards), by only a few weeks. More films surrounding the booming social mass phenomenon of sports were produced in the years following, but it took another fifteen years before German filmgoers saw the next major football film, Robert Adolf Stemmle’s Das große Spiel (The Big Game), in 1942 at the height of World War II. The cinematic exploitation of football in the 1920s had impacted the way the Nazi regime approached sports as a powerful tool in cinematic storytelling, directly addressing, entertaining, and at times instructing the German Volk (people) in moments of all-encompassing militarization and mobilization efforts.2 Football was closely linked to military preparation from as early as the 1910s, and the concept of a healthy and strong athlete on the pitch compared well to the image of a courageous and heroic soldier on the

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battlefield.3 As Kurt Tucholsky wrote in Die Weltbühne (The World Stage) in 1926, the goal of any enthusiastic athlete is to “gain a steel-like body with the only true goal, namely fight and win.”4 Military drills and football soon merged to form the key militaristic education for Germany’s young men and thus promoting the sport of football in all areas of Germany.5 This chapter contextualizes Korda’s The Eleven Devils within the 1920s, when sports saw a major rise in popularity, and subsequently shows that the film focuses on the concept of spectatorship and on intergenerational exchange between adult athletes on the pitch and children in the stands in order to shape a pedagogical message for the young generation in times of political upheaval and crisis. Intertitles give children a voice in this silent film and highlight their important role in the narrative. The Eleven Devils features children prominently by framing them in the football stadium, behind the goal on the training ground and in and around the team’s headquarters. The film uses the Volkssport Fußball (mass phenomenon of football) as a means to educate and instruct a young generation about skills that translate easily from the football field to the battleground, such as resilience, courage, physical and mental strength, endurance, loyalty, conscientiousness, and respect. The heroic senior players that form the team Linda Sport Club (Linda SC) in The Eleven Devils constitute the children’s role models, and Gustav Fröhlich, who shot to film stardom earlier the same year as the lead in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, plays the team’s captain and unchallenged leader. Despite their rather amusing, playful, and amateurish approach to the game in the beginning, the team shows and instructs the younger generation how to keep fighting without giving up in times of impending hardships and crisis, thereby preparing them for the time of war that was to come in the following decade. In fact, it is an intergenerational exchange of teaching important virtues in times of crisis, as the children take on a key role of pushing the squad back on track to beat their rival team in the film’s climactic final scene. In an eerie constellation, the generation of children shown in The Eleven Devils would have moved on in the following decade to join the Hitler Youth and to enter the battlegrounds of World War II rather than the football pitches in Berlin. The Eleven Devils presents athletes as ideal role models for the German youth and the broader society in times of political upheaval and foreshadows the increasing all-encompassing mobilization and militarization of Weimar society. The sports boom emerged as a mass phenomenon in the early years of the Weimar Republic and continued to grow exponentially throughout the 1920s. The quick rise of football’s popularity led sports journalist Willy Meisl to wonder in his 1928 treatise Der Sport am Scheidewege (Sport at the crossroads) about the connection between the German Republic and the epoch. “For can it be a coincidence,” Meisl writes, “that it happens to be our era, this brief, not-quite-finished post-war decade, which has produced such a flood-like

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expansion of the sports movement?”6 It was athletics and Körperertüchtigung (individual physical exercise) that had been popular for almost a century in Germany since Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, well known under his nickname “Turnvater Jahn,” encouraged Germans to exercise publicly and widely on the newly established Sportplätze (sports grounds) in Berlin, and to maintain a healthy body for the greater good of the Volk. Turnen was quickly superseded by Sport treiben (exercise sports) as a national pastime in the 1890s with the arrival of competitive sports and its dominating form, football. The first three decades of the twentieth century saw Germans becoming passionate followers of sports, particularly tennis, motorsports, cycling, boxing, and football. Transgressing social classes and age groups and bringing together sports enthusiasts from all over the German Republic, the so-called Sportfimmel (an extreme and uncontrollable passion for sports), began to affect many people around Germany, young and old. Whereas the Körperkult (cult of the body) of the nineteenth century was primarily exercised individually rather than enjoyed as a spectator, sports shifted in the early Weimar years toward forms of spectacular mass entertainment. A specific constellation of circumstances, according to Jon Hughes, may explain why it was the decade of the 1920s that finally saw the significant rise in the popularity of sports in Germany—namely, the installment of a regulated eight-hour work day in 1918—“allowing workers more time for leisure and recreation, which also resulted in attendance at sporting events becoming popular as never before.”7 Leisure time for sports enthusiasts combined with aspects of modern life such as radio broadcasts from sporting events and increasing coverage of sports in magazines and newspapers created popular athletic heroes and new national role models that embody strength, beauty, and glamour. The nation’s body and soul, the Volkskörper (the collective body of the German people), which had been so gravely damaged during World War I, could rejuvenate and reenergize with the help of a different kind of hero: the athlete. Modern role models for the nation came in the form and shape of, for example, boxers, race car drivers, cyclists, and football players. The stardom of 1920s athletes was simultaneously further heightened in the booming market of illustrative and sports magazines including John Heartfield’s short-lived avant-garde Die Arena (1926–27), the popular weekly Sport im Bild (Sports in the picture) (1895–1934), and magazines devoted entirely to football such as kicker, founded by Walther Bensemann in 1920. In addition, daily newspapers expanded their coverage of sports events and thereby elevated their sports sections to nearly equal importance alongside others such as politics and economics. Sports turned into a large-scale cultural and social phenomenon by the mid 1920s, and a fast-growing network of amateur sports clubs and youth and workers’ organizations emerged alongside professional sports such as cycling. In Berlin the spectacle of the six-day bicycle race Sechstagerennen (six-

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day race) at the Sportpalast (sports palace) caused an annual roar that Meisl termed a sensation; and the Grand Prix motor racing at the newly built AVUS racetrack showcased the newest technology, mobility, and speed, the very pillars of modernity to thousands of Berliners.8 The enthusiasm surrounding various forms of sports and the emergence of sports competitions as a mass phenomenon was, as Meisl puts it, a “product of its time.”9 The booming market of mass media in the 1920s, particularly newspapers and magazines, covered everything from politics, the economy, and fashion, to cultural life and sports competitions in fast-paced modern times. Society’s desire and need to stay informed about the latest sociopolitical and cultural trajectories in hectic interwar years marked by turmoil and instability coincided with the maturation of cinema as a new art form and mass medium. Germany’s film production industry grew exponentially, numerous movie palaces—cinemas with the grandeur of an opera house—were built and a star system surrounding actors and actresses in movies emerged.10 In Germany, the medium cinema reached its first truly climactic moment in terms of production costs, box office numbers, global distribution and reception with the premiere of Fritz Lang’s major blockbuster (and financial failure at the time) Metropolis on March 13, 1927.11 Glamour and stardom surrounding famous actors such as English actor Charlie Chaplin, German actress Henny Porten, and Danish actress Asta Nielsen enchanted Weimar audiences. In the same vein, media coverage ascribed fame to athletes such as the much-adored boxer Max Schmeling and world-class tennis player Ilse Friedleben. The casting of Weimar’s newest film star, Gustav Fröhlich, for the leading role in The Eleven Devils reflects the project’s intention to target a wide audience in its efforts to combine film star glamour and football in a pioneering sports genre film. Sports coverage entered the print media sections devoted to glamour and stars and also the culture sections, the Feuilleton, to report with sophistication on aesthetics, beauty, and grander meanings of sports beyond the mere listing of numbers, stats, squads, names, and results. Bertolt Brecht, for example, famously enjoyed boxing and compared the boxing ring to the theater stage. For Brecht, as John Willett notes, “sport was a form of entertainment whose principles ought to be taken over by the theatre, with the stage as a brightly lit ring devoid of all mystique, demanding a critical, irreverent attitude on the part of the audience.”12 On the other hand, Brecht condemned tendencies he witnessed in media coverage at the time, namely to consider sports as forms of art: “The second main antagonist of the sport is scientific mania. Mostly with the special support of the press, this is unfortunately where the desperate efforts of some connoisseurs ‘to turn sport into a kind of art’ belong.”13 Sports and the arts formed a bond easily, as can be seen in exemplary fashion in the depiction of Max Schmeling in August Sander’s 1925 photograph that was part of his seminal series People of the Twentieth Century and in the 1925 painting

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by Georg Grosz, emphasizing Schmeling’s athletic and robust body that juxtaposes the weak and shattered figures that dominate his Weimar street scenes. Football games drew large crowds and the Deutsche Fußballmeisterschaft (German Football Championship) with early top teams such as 1. Football Club (FC) Nürnberg and Hamburger SV (Hamburg Sports Club) regularly attracted thousands of spectators at the annual final game at Deutsches Stadion (German Stadium) in Berlin.14 In 1923, for example, the final in the German football championship between the Hamburger SV and SC Union Oberschöneweide attracted a staggering 64,000 spectators. Korda’s The Eleven Devils premiered just five months after fifty thousand football fans attended the sold-out final of the German football championship’s twentieth season between Nürnberg and Hertha BSC Berlin (Hertha Berlin Sport club) at the Deutsches Stadion in the summer of 1927. The passion for football was focused on support for regional teams but also began to reach beyond the local support with the rise of top national teams like Hamburger SV, and especially FC Schalke 04, from the late 1920s onward. Even the fairly mediocre German national team attracted large crowds, for example in Cologne in November 1927, when Germany and the Netherlands tied 2–2 in front of fifty thousand spectators. By 1927, the year The Eleven Devils was released, football had become a national obsession and Germany’s film industry capitalized on its potential and appeal for the big screen. Fandom and spectatorship were more dominant features in football than in any other sport in Germany at the time. As a team sport, football allowed spectators to become loyal supporters of clubs and athletes who competed throughout the football seasons at regular intervals. The relatively busy season schedule with, on average, weekly games and biweekly home matches, facilitated ongoing discussions about players and teams among family or work circles and among friends and fans, in contrast to the relatively irregular competitions held in boxing and tennis. Football players became celebrities and role models due to the increasing media coverage at the time. Live radio broadcasts, a medium that emerged in Germany around 1924, of single games brought football into the homes of people and helped spread the football fervor farther.15 The emergence of advertising in the stadiums and surrounding the players turned football into a semi-professional sport. As football became more fast-paced and professional on the field and beyond, it became a fitting expression of the new fast-paced, modern lifestyle in 1920s Germany. Football teams allowed spectators young and old to show regional and national allegiance, and the German national team enabled large audiences to unite behind a German team competing in international competitions. Youth organizations, school sports programs and the emergence of athletes as stars and appealing role models added to the development of football from a relatively new sport played in Germany to a Volkssport (people’s sport). Foot-

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ball helped a traumatized nation with an injured Volkskörper back on its feet. Particularly the youngest generation, children and adolescents, whose fathers fought in battle and returned from World War I as mere shadows of their former selves, if they returned at all, grew to love sports, passionately adoring and following their athletic heroes. Athletes served the youth as Ersatzväter (surrogate fathers) when real fathers were absent both literally and figuratively in the postwar years. Admired heroic athletes functioning as role models certainly contributed to the common Sportfimmel that affected many children at the time.16 German film in the late 1920s serves as one of the earliest examples in world cinema that portray an important link between children on the one hand and role models on the other hand in illustrating educational growth.17 Cinematic depictions of children often function as indicators of potential sociocultural and political trajectories by presenting the future generation as pillars of hope. Within the context of late 1920s and early 1930s, with developments toward a radicalization of political standpoints and increasing division of Weimar society, children serve as indicators of a Germany that would soon turn from an unstable and crumbling republic to a newly formed fascist nation. In Korda’s The Eleven Devils, children inhabit a dominant role as fans and enchanted spectators that resemble, in retrospect, the preparation of youth members as feverish followers of the Nazi ideology and of the cult of strength, courage, and heroism in battle. The Eleven Devils is set in contemporary 1920s Berlin and opens with an intertitle that reads, “On the fringes of the big city lies the home ground of the poor and unknown club SC Linda.” The big city is Weimar Germany’s capital Berlin and the fringes of the urban center are southeastern edges in the Neukölln district around the Hasenheide Park.18 Tommy, played by Gustav Fröhlich, is the star and captain of amateur football club SC Linda, one of the two fictional football clubs that are the focus of this film. In addition to Tommy’s outstanding football skills on the pitch, he is also popular among his coworkers, teammates, and the local children. An intertitle calls Tommy “Liebling der Vorstadtjugend” (the suburban kids’ darling). He is the team’s leader, a player coach who motivates and guides his fellow players on and off the pitch. SC Linda fans featured in the film are predominantly children, and the narrative focuses on a boy called Pips who greatly admires Tommy. In the film, Pips serves as a surrogate for all young and passionate football fans idolizing the team’s top athletes. The German language lexicon of football films terms Pips a Lausebengel, a colloquial term for a rascal, alluding to the idea that the boy represents the unruly young generation that is in need of guidance and role models.19 Interestingly, Pips eventually inhabits a key role in the film by bringing Tommy to his senses in a crucial scene of the film. “Football—the Sport of the Century” reads an early intertitle in The Eleven Devils propheti-

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cally, capturing well the sport’s appeal for players and spectators within the film narrative and in real life. The film’s two fictional local football teams are from two strikingly different parts of Berlin and represent two entirely different social environments and circumstances: SC Linda, on the one hand, is the working-class club with team members who are factory workers, cab drivers, or mechanics, and is located, as the first intertitle states, on the outskirts of the big city.20 The players bond as friends and colleagues and the atmosphere on and off the pitch is friendly and warm. The club’s name, SC Linda, refers to a young woman from the same suburban area. Linda, played by Evelyn Holt, is in love with the sport and even more so with her soon-to-be fiancé Tommy.21 On the other hand, there is the professional Sportklub International (sports club International) located in the urban center of Berlin.22 International is a rich top club with all the amenities amateur football players like the Linda players could only dream of, such as massage benches, large and luxurious facilities, and top-notch sports equipment. The team is coached and run by a man with the British- or even American-sounding name, MacLawrence, therefore already subtly insinuating that money and profit play a dominant role in this club and ambitions run high. MacLawrence notices the talent and popularity of SC Linda’s team captain despite the fact that his team plays in a lower division than International. Again, Pips plays a vital role here since he is the one who leads MacLawrence to the training grounds of SC Linda where the International coach witnesses Tommy’s skills and popularity. MacLawrence quickly promises Tommy stardom, money, and all amenities of a star athlete if he agrees to sign a contract with International. To fully convince him, the club uses Vivian Holm (Lissi Arna), an early version of a femme fatale character in cinema, to lure him into leaving Linda (both the team and the woman) by signing for International. Tommy cannot resist the temptation and signs a contract with the new team; however, his happiness and excitement to play for International does not last long. He soon realizes that he was manipulated into signing a devilish pact, while his heart and soul remain with SC Linda. A chance draw had decided that both teams, despite their greatly differing skill levels, should meet in a cup competition and the duel serves as the film’s climactic final sequence. Quite unbelievably for the critical viewer, the chance draw was kept from Tommy until five minutes before kick-off. He is shocked to learn that he is supposed to play against his old team SC Linda. In a turn of events that can only work in fictional films, the match begins and Tommy fights with his conscience while sitting in the dressing room throughout the first half of the game, unwilling to play against SC Linda. International leads and, in what must be considered a key scene in the film in the context of the relationship between child spectator and athlete hero, his biggest fan, Pips, convinces him to switch teams

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on the spot and Tommy enters the pitch as a SC Linda player. To everyone’s surprise and excitement, Tommy joins the game, but not for International that had signed him, but as SC Linda’s captain. Through a display of excellent skills in technique, stamina, courage, discipline, and the relentless confidence in winning the fight, SC Linda eventually beats International in a dramatic finish as Tommy scores the winning goal for the underdog in the last minute. Two key scenes emphasize the close relationship between children and the athlete role model illustrating the importance that the film assigns to educating the young generation. The first begins with the intertitle “Scrimmage of the Sport Club ‘Linda’”23 and then cuts to the training ground from the viewpoint of children sitting on a railing behind the goal. The children sit in the middle ground with their back to the camera and the players can be seen in the background. The scene captures six children watching the Linda players closely, followed by a series of four shots of players showing their skills including headers and a back-heel flick,24 and then cuts back to the behind-the-goal viewpoint framing the children. The training grounds’ scene is intercut with indoor shots from the clubhouse, where lovers Tommy and Linda hug and kiss.25 Tommy points to a wall calendar and tells Linda about his raise and how they will be able to celebrate her birthday and their upcoming engagement at the same time.26 They embrace each other happily and talk about their marriage plans when young Pips enters the clubhouse carrying the ball under his arm.27 Tommy and Linda turn around and the look on their faces recall embarrassed parents caught by their child while making out.28 Indeed, this sequence suggests that Linda, Tommy, and the boy would constitute the ideal family by framing them together as it moves from a two-shot (Tommy and Linda) to a medium shot capturing all three together in a frame.29 A medium close-up shows Pips looking up to his hero, Tommy, who is placed off-screen, and offering him the ball.30 Tommy rejects the offer, asks for the ball to be returned, and promises to make Pips the team’s Vize Mittelstürmer (second striker).31 They banter and shake hands and Tommy confirms that Pips will now be part of the team.32 Linda and Tommy kiss and Pips watches from behind the clubhouse bar smiling happily.33 This moment of perfect harmony among the three is disrupted with the arrival of a limousine carrying MacLawrence and Vivian Holm, who had followed Pips.34 The subsequent scene shows Tommy running onto the training grounds wearing a shirt and tie while kicking the ball past SC Linda’s keeper into the goal and giving his teammates instructions. Cut to the group of cheering children that has now more than tripled with altogether twenty-one boys in the frame.35 Scenes of play and cheering kids switch back and forth in medium shots.36 Excitement, joy, and enthusiasm reign over this playful football practice and, shown in several medium shots and close-ups, the children begin making faces to distract the keeper to allow Tommy to score more goals.37 A frontal

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view of the goalkeeper and the children on the railing behind reveals that the first shot of the entire sequence is in fact from the perspective of children sitting on a wooden fence. Hence, the viewer takes over the role as observer of the pitch, fan, and admirer of SC Linda, and particularly of its star, Tommy.38 This sequence emphasizes the film’s use of a football athlete as father figure and hero for the younger generation, and the audience repeatedly takes on the viewpoint of the children shown behind the goal. Tommy’s nominating Pips as the second striker on the team if he returns the ball to its rightful owners and the handing over of the football presents an initiation scene, transferring skills and power to the child, who from now on will consider himself to be part of the team. It is important to consider the fact that the roughly eight-year-old Pips is the exact age required to join the Hitler Youth less than a decade later and consequently to fight for Nazi Germany on the battle grounds of World War II. The inherent and highly symbolic meaning of the transfer of skills and power is important to point out because similar scenes reoccur in Nazi cinema, for example Robert Stemmle’s 1942 football film The Big Game, developed, produced and supervised by the Nazi regime and Reich minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.39 Nazi Cinema reused several strategies already applied during the Weimar years, thereby allowing continuities in this art form after 1933.40 The conspicuous use of youths and intergenerational exchanges for educational purposes can be seen in Nazi propaganda films such as Hans Steinhoff ’s Hitlerjunge Quex (Hitler Youth Quex, 1933) and Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1935). Children and adolescents also feature in The Big Game that bears great resemblance to Korda’s The Eleven Devils in style and content. The film continues where politicized Weimar sports films left off and uses intergenerational encounters and initiation rituals showing top athletes passing on values, virtues, and skills to a younger generation to remain put and be ready to fight in dire times during the ongoing war. Scholars differ greatly in their assessments of The Big Game, with some interpreting it as a good example of cinematic Nazi propaganda and others seeing it as one of the many escapist films that were mainly produced to entertain and distract the masses at home during difficult war years in the early 1940s.41 A significant number of scenes in The Big Game show adult athletes surrounded by children, adults giving the younger generation advice, children admiring their heroic role models, children surrounding the football pitch similar to scenes in The Eleven Devils, members of the Hitler Youth in the stadium, celebrities such as boxer Max Schmeling and football coach Sepp Herberger, and children giving the adults on the pitch the Hitler salute. Throughout the gameplay sequences, scenes of adolescent fans in the stands cheering for the two competing teams are intercut with the players in action in the final for the German football championship at the Olympiastadion (Olympic Stadium) in Berlin. Scenes featuring intergener-

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ational exchange begin early in the film, for example when one of the members of the football team Gloria 03 from fictional town Wupperbrück encourages children in the gymnasium to “Anständig trainieren!” (exercise properly);42 children trying to catch a glimpse of the men’s restaurant Stammtisch (gathering of regulars43); children surrounding senior players,44 and children gathering and listening to advice from an adult athlete.45 Children and adolescents feature prominently in the stands at the final game, a sequence in the film that was shot in technicolor. Numerous scenes capture children conspicuously in the frame with some adolescents wearing Hitler Youth brownshirts, badges, and swastika armbands.46 The film’s editing techniques put attention to the future generation in the stands from young fans completely spellbound by the event, many of them seemingly accompanied by their fathers. A scene recalling The Eleven Devils shows an injured key player reentering the field, surrounded and cheered on by children sitting close to the pitch. High-angle long shots of the Olympiastadion show adolescents wearing Hitler Youth brownshirts and younger children in plain clothes sitting around the field.47 Other shots show men wearing shirts revealing Schutzstaffel (SS; major paramilitary organization under Hitler and the Nazi Party) insignia, adding to the overall impression that this stadium is filled with a highly mobilized German population during wartime. Football excites the masses from young to old, and several shots see children in ecstasy over their favorite team’s win in the final.48 The culminating scene shows one of the key players surrounded by cheering adolescent fans, while being carried on their shoulders, and wearing a victory crown with the colors of the Third Reich, adorned with two swastikas.49 The Big Game is a thinly concealed cinematic call to the German people to support the ongoing and strenuous war, using strikingly similar visual and narrative means to those that Zoltan Korda had used in The Eleven Devils in 1927.50 A second key scene in Korda’s film illustrates the close bond between children and the football-playing athlete is the climactic cup game sequence that takes up the final twenty minutes of the film.51 Tommy is seen sitting on a bench in the stadium’s dressing room. Young Pips enters with a duffle bag that contains, as becomes clear later in the sequence, Tommy’s football shoes and an SC Linda jersey. Tommy is visibly in distress after telling MacLawrence that he will not play against his old teammates. Pips walks toward Tommy and both are shown in a two-shot. The following intertitle reads, “The suburb kids want to ask you if I should play for you.”52 Pips is ready to play, even if his question is meant playfully as an encouragement for Tommy to go onto the pitch to play for SC Linda. Tommy sits and ponders while Pips stands up straight making hand gestures that point toward the pitch. The child has taken on a guiding role at this point and pretends to be ready to replace Tommy on the field. Tommy bends down, burying his head in his hands, while the child, shown in control of the situation, opens the bag and awaits Tommy’s decision.53 “You will not betray

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us, will you?” reads the following intertitle, but Pips’ question is not met with any response. The scene cuts between various moments from the game: Linda in the stands, cheering children, and the intertitle revealing what the young fans chant: “Tommy!”54 Throughout the entire sequence, children are linked to SC Linda, while International is cheered on by adults, particularly by men in suits. The scenes with cheering children are intercut several times with moments showing Tommy pacing up and down the dressing room.55 Meanwhile, a nearly one-minute-long montage sequence of game scenes, intercut only once for two seconds, shows that International gets close to scoring a goal.56 The sequence then cuts back to the dressing room where Tommy sees Pips’s duffle bag, his football shoes, and the SC Linda jersey. What follows is that Tommy picks up the clothes, and enters the pitch to great cheers from children and adult spectators alike. An almost two-minute-long montage of match footage attempts to capture the fast-paced action on the field. The montage consists of close-ups of players’ faces, medium shots of tackles, tracking shots of Tommy running with the ball, and several shots of large groups of cheering children and the adult fans feverishly following the action on the pitch. Even an injury and a brief pause in the dressing room, where Tommy is joined by Vivian and Linda, does not stop the film’s hero from reemerging on the pitch and scoring the winning goal. After SC Linda’s surprise win against the favorite team International, an intertitle praises the purpose of football, namely the Zusammenhalten (team spirit, cohesion, or solidarity). It is proof, reads the intertitle further, of “camaraderie in danger and in fight.”57 It is important to note that the children in the stands, as well as Pips’ ultimately successful attempts to convince Tommy to play for Linda, play a significant role in the surprising turn of events in the game, namely that the underdog, led by reenergized team captain Tommy, wins the cup game thanks to courage, resilience, and fighting. In short, the trophy was won through SC Linda players’ relentless Kampfgeist (fighting spirit). This must be understood as a clear message to the youth to prepare and be ready for war, even if the full proportions of what was to come for Germany was impossible to anticipate at the time despite the increasing militarization processes. Football served two main functions in 1920s Germany: namely, to heal the inner wounds and to overcome the war trauma and defeat suffered in World War I on the one hand, and to unite in times of increased militarization in the years leading up to the Nazis’ rise to power on the other hand. The Eleven Devils showcases a mobilization among a group of comrades, coworkers, and friends toward unity and renewed strength following trauma and loss, a feeling that most Germans could easily relate to during the interwar years. The Eleven Devils captures football as more than a game of sports, because the duel on the pitch carries many similarities to warfare, and the skills needed for success recall the skills needed for battles in the trenches. The educational aspect in regard to mobilization in times of crisis shines through clearly in the film’s nar-

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rative that must be read as a pedagogical lesson on how to unite and be strong when facing extraordinary challenges. Korda’s film locates football in the realm of the working class as Proletensport (sports for the proletariat), and each player of SC Linda is shown as a devoted and diligent worker, who is as disciplined and eager to do his best on the field as he is in the factory. Yet, the impact of the rich club International represents the infiltration of commercialized structures surrounding a sport in the middle of professionalization processes at the time. The significant difference in the portrayal of the two teams, SC Linda and International, in The Eleven Devils mirrors the way football was organized in Germany during the 1920s. The national football association Deutscher Fußball-Bund (DFB; German Football Association), the institution that hosted the Deutsche Fußballmeisterschaft tournament each year, supported the professionalization of football. At the same time, the Arbeiterfußball (workers’ football) movement emerged. Arbeitersportvereine (workers’ sports clubs) were founded and new unions were formed that held parallel and more regional championships, for example in and around Berlin. The developments on both the amateur and professional side fostered the sport’s popularity, while it also manifested an early indication of a polarization and politicization of spectators. Also important to note is that football under the roof of the Deutscher Fußball-Bund (DFB; German Football Association) was officially considered to be amateur sports, which allowed the league to avoid paying players as well as taxes. Football gained a strong following on a regional and on a national level, among the workers and the bourgeois, the poor and the rich, in urban and in rural areas in Germany.58 The binary between the camaraderie among friends and equals versus the looming danger of an infiltrating element that may cause harm anticipates the coming Nazi ideology and politics. In fact, it reflects an atmosphere marked by widespread and deep-rooted antisemitism in Europe in the years leading up to the Nazi’s rise to power in Germany. Cleansing, shaping, and strengthening the Volkskörper became the Nazis’ first and foremost goal. According to the Nazi ideology, all foreign elements that pose a potential threat to the health of the German body were to be eliminated. Physical education became a key element in shaping and unifying the German population at the time, especially the young generation that soon transitioned into the Hitler Youth and later into the generation of soldiers that was sent to the war fronts. In cinema and newsreels, the healthy and strong human body became the visual tool to represent a powerful Germany, perhaps best exemplified in the films of Leni Riefenstahl.59 As Kevin Simpson points out, DFB officials in the early Nazi years considered football’s commercialization and professionalization as a threat to the people’s nonprofessional athletic activities and could lead to a passive consumption of the sport by the masses, weakening their physical fitness and endangering each worker’s devotion and diligence.60

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The film’s allegorical portrayal of two very different teams—one marked by solidarity and camaraderie, the other by greed and ruthlessness—represent an early visual means to show the Volkskörper on the one hand that unifies, shapes, and strengthens under the guidance of a charismatic leader (Tommy), and on the other hand the infiltrating evil element that attempts to deter the collective German body from succeeding by any means necessary. While not necessarily proto-fascist at its core, The Eleven Devils nevertheless reflects underlying sociopolitical trajectories in the heated atmosphere of a weak Weimar Republic in the late 1920s, and foreshadows major sociopolitical and cultural developments, namely the increasing commercialization of football and life and the mobilization and militarization of the masses and the nation. Children in Korda’s The Eleven Devils function as witnesses to the aforementioned developments and walk a fine line between influencing and succumbing to the trajectories that take place on the grander scale in the later years of Weimar Germany on the brink of collapse. Looking back at Korda’s The Eleven Devils through the lens of later football genre films such as The Big Game, it becomes clear that depictions of children in these two early football films are crucial cinematic tools to assess contemporary sociopolitical developments and to help shape the future. The Eleven Devils presents a call to mobilize in a medium—cinema—that was on the brink of becoming a highly influential mass phenomenon soon to be fully exploited for political and pedagogical reasons during the Nazi regime. Football served as a welcome means for the two films discussed here to illustrate what it takes to fight and endure as a tightknit community of comrades, young and old, whether it is on the field, in the stands, or in Germany in times of crisis that called for utmost national unity.

Author Bastian Heinsohn is associate professor of German, Bucknell University. Dr. Heinsohn’s research focuses on the representation of urban spaces in German cinema and literature and examines graffiti texts as key elements of linguistic landscapes. He has published on graffiti in Berlin, German cinema, and literature. His most recent publications are “Cinematic Space and Set Design in Paul Leni’s The Last Warning (1929),” that appeared in a volume on German director Paul Leni by Edinburgh University Press (2021); and the forthcoming articles “Mapping Spaces Beyond the Football Pitch: Football Fandom and Coming of Age in Philipp Winkler’s novel Hool” in Colloquia Germanica’s special issue on football in German literature and film; and “Romy Schneider: Memories of Home and New Beginnings in Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Romy—Anatomy of a Face (Romy—Porträt eines Gesichts, 1967) to be published in a volume on German Stars in Camden House’s Screen Series, edited by Jaimey Fisher.

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Notes 1. A few weeks prior to the film’s release, Film-Kurier (Film-Courier) observed the 2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

making of the film. See “Aufnahmen für den ersten Fußballfilm.” (Shooting the first football film) The Nazi regime controlled all German film production and ensured that films were either in line with Gleichschaltung (synchronization) or limit themselves to visual spectacle and entertainment for the masses. For a thorough analysis of Nazi cinema, see, e.g., Rentschler, Ministry of Illusion; and Hake, Popular Cinema of the Third Reich. See, e.g., Eggers, Fußball in der Weimarer Republik, 76–79; Gunkel, “Ein Spiel? Ein Kampf!”, 74–78. “Machen wir uns nichts vor! Der begeisterte Sportsmann hat nicht das Endziel, seinen Körper zu stählen. Sondern diese Stählung ist nur ein Mittel zu seinem einzigen, wahren Ziel, welches heißt: Kampf und Sieg.” Tucholsky, “Fußball mit Menschenköpfen,” 335. Ibid., 16. Meisl, “Der Sport am Scheidewege,” 20. Hughes, Max Schmeling, 17. Meisl, “Der Sport am Scheidewege,” 92–93. Ibid., 20. Charlie Chaplin plays a vital role to help install a star system surrounding actors. The 1920s were the pivotal time in his rise from actor in short films to Hollywood’s biggest male star with Gold Rush (1925) and The Circus (1928). By the time he visited Berlin in 1931 to promote his film City Lights (1931), Chaplin was the most popular and famous actor in the world. Production costs for Metropolis were a staggering 5.3 million Reichsmark, making it the most expensive film made at the time. Willett, Brecht on Theatre, 102–3. Author‘s translation. “Der zweite Hauptgegner des Sports ist der wissenschaftliche Fimmel. Hierher gehören leider meistens mit besonderer Unterstützung der Presse die krampfhaften Bemühungen einiger ‘Kenner’, aus dem Sport eine Art ‘Kunst’ zu machen.” Brecht, “Die Todfeinde des Sports,” 98–99. Berlin’s Deutsches Stadion hosted the championship finals every year starting in 1922. Prior to the move to Berlin as host city, the finals after the end of World War I were held in Düsseldorf (1921) and Frankfurt (1920). For further information on the emergence and role of radio broadcasts in Weimar Germany, see Führer, “A Medium of Modernity?” See, e.g., children’s book author Else Uhry, who included the sports craze among children in her popular 1920s series Professors Zwillinge. Von der Schulbank ins Leben: “Helga, früher eine gute Schülerin, hatte durch ihre Sportbegeisterung in der Schule nachgelassen. Ihr “Sportfimmel,” wie es in der Untersekunda hieß, war allgemein bekannt” (Helga, previously a good student, struggled in school because of her enthusiasm for sports). Her “sports craze”, as it was called in tenth grade, was generally known”. See full text at Uhry, “7. Kapitel. Professorenkinder.” The portrayal of youth plays a key role in the early postwar films The Murderers Are Among Us (dir. Wolfgang Staudte, 1946), Somewhere in Berlin (dir. Gerhard Lamprecht, 1946), and Rotation (dir. Staudte, 1949) as well as in later 1950s

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18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.



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DEFA films that focus on Aufbau (the build-up of a socialist society), as can be seen in exemplary fashion in Berlin—Schönhauser Corner (dir. Klein, 1957). In German rubble films of the late 1940s, for example, children are split into good versus evil youths. A good youth is loyal and innocent and the ideal figure that embodies a positive trajectory in a society that is endangered by a rebellious and corruptive youth in times that demand loyalty and obedience for the greater good of society. Jaimey Fisher calls youth on each side of this differentiated youth as socially threatening versus youths that function as social cement. See Fisher, “Who’s Watching the Rubble Kids?,” 99–103. In the spring of 1811, Friedrich-Ludwig Jahn established the Hasenheide Park as Germany’s first open-air gymnasium. Schwab, Fußball im Film, 263–70. A wall calendar shown in a close-up reads Urbanstrasse and Hasenheide, locations that place the SC Linda in an area along the border of the Neukölln and Kreuzberg districts. Evelyn Holt’s career in the movie industry spanned only from 1926 to 1932. She fled Nazi Germany in 1938 with her husband Felix Guggenheim and settled in the United States in 1940. In fact, no professional football team existed in Germany in 1927, adding to the perception that International embodies the threat of commercialization and capitalism to the football sport in Germany at the time. SC Linda represents an idealized and romantic version of the status quo of football in Germany at the time, while International foreshadows upcoming trajectories in sports in general and in football, in particular.

Das große Spiel, TC 7:53. Ibid.,TC 8:07. Ibid., TC 8:22. Ibid., TC 9:42. Ibid., TC 9:55. Ibid., TC 10:14. Ibid., TC 10:18. Ibid., TC 10:20. Ibid., TC 10:27. Ibid., TC 11:05. Ibid., TC 11:18. Ibid., TC 11:25. Ibid., TC 11:39. Ibid., TC 11:59 Ibid., TC 12:08. Ibid., TC 12:31.

See, e.g., Möller, The Film Minister. See Hales, Petrescu, and Weinstein, “Introduction.” For excellent and thorough analyses of The Big Game, see especially Herzog, “Football as Politically Neutral Entertainment; Wick “Der Spielfilm Das große Spiel, 283–96; Dawson, “Soccer, Film and the Third Reich.” Herzog argues that The Big Game shall not be seen as an overly political and pedagogical film, whereas Uwe Wick and Rebeccah Dawson argue that Stemmle’s film indeed functions as a propaganda tool.

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42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Das große Spiel, TC 09:14. Ibid., TC 22:14. Ibid., TC 23:46. Ibid., TC 26:59. Ibid., TC 1:04:22, TC 1:12:09; and TC 1:16:43. Ibid., TC 1:10:12. Ibid., TC 1:15:21. Ibid., TC 1:18:46.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

Das große Spiel, beginning at TC 1:13:58. Ibid., TC 1:14:10. Ibid., TC 1:14:47. Ibid., TC 1:15:21. Ibid., TC 1:15:36. Ibid., TC 1:15:44. Ibid., TC 1:31:47.

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Dawson concludes her analysis of the film by saying that at its core “lies the same end goal as that of propagandistic films of the time: the glorification of the Third Reich and its idyllic Aryan citizens.” Dawson, “Soccer, Film and the Third Reich,” 13–14.

The strong regionalization of leagues presented challenges for clubs to attract a nationwide following in the way teams like Schalke 04 were able to achieve in the 1930s, 1. FC Kaiserslautern in the 1950s and Borussia Mönchengladbach and Bayern Munich from the late 1960s on in the newly founded German Bundesliga. 59. See especially Leni Riefenstahl’s well-known films Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938). 60. Simpson, Soccer under the Swastika, 10.

Bibliography “Aufnahmen für den ersten Fußballfilm” [Shooting of the first football film]. Film-Kurier, Nr. 211, September 7, 1927. Brecht, Bertolt. “Die Todfeinde des Sports” [The deadly enemies of sports] In Bertolt Brecht: Der Kinnhaken und andere Box- und Sportgeschichten [The uppercut and other boxing and sports tales], edited by Günter Berg. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995. Das große Spiel [The big game]. Directed by Robert Adolf Stemmle. DVD. Hamburg: Black Hill Pictures, 2004. Dawson, Rebeccah. “Soccer, Film and the Third Reich. Hunters, Cowards and Glory” In Sport, Film and National Culture, edited by Seán Crosson, 112–25. Milton: Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. Die elf Teufel [The eleven devils]. Directed by Zoltan Korda. DVD. München: Edition Filmmuseum, 2006. Eggers, Erik. Fußball in der Weimarer Republik. Kellinghusen: Eriks Buchregal, 2018. Fisher, Jaimey. “Who’s Watching the Rubble Kids? Youth, Pedagogy, and Politics in Early DEFA films.” New German Critique, no 82 (Winter 2001). Führer, Karl Christian. “A Medium of Modernity? Broadcasting in Germany 1924-1932.” In The Journal of Modern History, 69, no. 4 (December 1997). 722–53.

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Gunkel, Christoph. “Ein Spiel? Ein Kampf!” [A game? A fight!]. Spiegel Geschichte, no. 6 (2020): 74–78. Hake, Sabine. Popular Cinema of the Third Reich. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. Hales, Barbara, Mihaela Petrescu, and Valerie Weinstein. “Introduction.” In Continuity and Crisis in German Cinema, 1928–1936, edited by Hales Barbara, Petrescu Mihaela, and Weinstein Valerie. Rochester, NY; Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2016. Herzog, Markwart. “Football as Politically Neutral Entertainment during the Nazi War: Content and Impact of Robert Adolf Stemmle’s Romantic Football Movie Das große Spiel.” In European Football During the Second World War, edited by Markwart Herzog and Fabian Brändle. New York: Peter Lang, 2015. Hughes, Jon. Max Schmeling and the Making of a National Hero in Twentieth Century Germany. New York: Palgrave Studies in Sports and Politics, 2017. Meisl, Willy. “Der Sport am Scheidewege” [Sport at the crossroads]. In Der Sport am Scheidewege [Sport at the crossroads], edited by Willy Meisl, 19–131. Heidelberg: Iris, 1928. Möller, Felix. The Film Minister: Goebbels and the cinema in the Third Reich. Stuttgart: Edition Axel Menges, 2000. Rentschler, Eric. Ministry of Illusion. New Haven: Harvard University Press, 1996. Schwab, Jan Tilman: Fußball im Film. Lexikon des Fußballfilms [Football in film. Dictionary of the football film]. Munich: Belleville, 2006. Simpson, Kevin. Soccer under the Swastika. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. Tucholsky, Kurt: “Fußball mit Menschenköpfen” [Football with human heads]. Die Weltbühne, Issue 45, August 31, 1926. Uhry, Else. “7. Kapitel. Professorenkinder.” [7th chapter. Children of Professors]. Projekt Gutenberg-DE. https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/ury/profzwil/chap007.html Wick, Uwe. “Der Spielfilm Das große Spiel. Ein Beispiel für NS-Propaganda im Film?” In Fußball zur Zeit des Nationalsozialismus: Alltag, Medien, Künste, Stars, edited by Markwart Herzog and A. Bode. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2008. Willet, John. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978.

CHAPTER 11



Antisemitic Metaphors in German Football Fan Culture Directed at RB Leipzig PAVEL BRUNSSEN

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singularized hatred has emerged in German football fan cultures since the foundation of the football club RasenBallsport Leipzig (RB Leipzig) in 2009. The fans’ contempt has been triggered by the club’s short history, its close ties to the founder and sponsor Red Bull (reflected in the club’s name, RB Leipzig), the club’s colors, and the club’s stadium name Red Bull Arena. Furthermore, fans criticize the club’s neglect of membership participation. Different from, for instance, those in the United States, football clubs in Germany must be member owned by at least 50+1 percent. Red Bull avoided this policy simply by allowing only selected members to have a say in the club. Similar to RB Leipzig, the Bundesliga clubs VfL (club for physical activity) Wolfsburg, Bayer Leverkusen, and TSG (gymnastics and sports community) Hoffenheim are exempt from the 50+1 rule. These three clubs are totally commodified and more or less belong to their sponsors. Yet, they are all perceived as local, traditional, and authentic by German fans and thus are seen as fundamentally different from RB Leipzig. Only RB Leipzig is hated so much that many German ultra1 groups—the most passionate group of fans in German stadia, usually traveling to every away game of their favorite teams—began to boycott their clubs’ away games in Leipzig. Their hatred is not about what RB Leipzig does or has done but about its very existence. I argue that the hostility against the club by the German football public contains antisemitic stereotypes centered on the hatred of modernity and globalization which, in and of themselves, bespeak a disdained inauthenticity, although RB Leipzig is not seen as explicitly Jewish. A case study of the fans’ passionate hatred against the newcomer reveals much about antisemitism2 in contemporary Germany well beyond the case at

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hand. It is a study about antisemitism in a nation praised for its coming to terms with Nazism in recent books such as Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans (2019), but in which antisemitism remains an everyday phenomenon although no one wants to be called an antisemite.3 The fans’ hatefulness thus shows how antisemitic ways of thinking and feeling are ingrained into German society beyond antisemitic objectives and sometimes even despite anti-antisemitic intentions. While many of the fan groups position themselves as anti-antisemites, they nonetheless express antisemitic tropes in their enmity toward RB Leipzig. I have analyzed hundreds of primary sources for my 2021 book Antisemitismus in Fußball-Fankulturen: Der Fall RB Leipzig (Antisemitism in football fan cultures: The case of RB Leipzig), showing the antisemitism in the fans’ textual, visual, and performative expressions. This chapter is part of my continuing work on this topic and focuses explicitly on textual and visual metaphors on banners, blogs, and in fanzines, and thus on antisemitism within forms of communication specific for football fandom. This chapter will show that the derogatory language that football fans use to attack RB Leipzig contains elements of antisemitic “Ressentiment-Kommunikation” (ressentiment-communication), a term coined by Julijana Ranc. She defines the term as “a specific, namely promotional form of verbal aggression, which calls for unification as well as for ‘co-haters and co-despisers’—in order to be enjoyed collectively.”4 I understand antisemitic ressentiment-communication as a specific way of thinking and feeling that I define as follows: First, the adjective “antisemitic” points toward antisemitic tropes directed at RB Leipzig. Second, “ressentiment” directs the focus to those who express antisemitism. I understand antisemitism as a specific way to see and understand the world. The antisemitic ressentiment stands for a way of thinking and feeling that takes on a moral perspective and that is defined by its chronic character and a feeling of powerlessness; in ressentiment, the feeling of powerlessness can be overcome through collective action, although the actual state of powerlessness may remain unchanged.5 In a way, antisemitism is the problem of the antisemites. It follows that a study of antisemitism has to focus more on the antisemites than on the object of their hatred. This comes at the risk, however, of overemphasizing intentions. The third term, “communication,” is thus crucial because it directs the attention to the antisemitic quality of what is being communicated rather than to the intention of those communicating. Studies on antisemitism focus either on the perpetrator’s motives, the victim’s perception, on objective effects or outcomes, or on discourse and representation.6 Most of the time, the focus is on the motives to determine whether an action qualifies as antisemitic. To decide whether something is antisemitic solely by speculating about someone’s intentions, however, ignores that we cannot fully know someone’s intentions (maybe the person or group studied is not conscious of their intentions). Furthermore, antisemitism was no longer

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a legitimate cultural code7 after the Holocaust.8 Today, everyone (except a few neo-Nazis) would vividly refuse any antisemitic intentions when confronted with one’s actions. It follows, I argue, that we must move away from focusing almost exclusively on intentions. (How can we study real intentions, anyway?) My study of metaphors used by partly anti-antisemitic football fans in Germany thus intervenes into contemporary debates on antisemitism and shows that we can find antisemitism in discourse and representation even where the motives are supposedly not antisemitic. I understand modern antisemitism as more than mere acts of discrimination against Jews. Antisemitism is ideology, a specific way of thinking and feeling.9 Reinhard Rürup illuminates the structure of modern antisemitic thinking in his influential book Emanzipation und Antisemitismus (emancipation and antisemitism 1975). According to Rürup, antisemitism offered an explanatory model and possible solutions to the economic, political, and cultural crisis of late nineteenth-century Germany. He argues convincingly that antisemitism is a “Zerrbild einer Gesellschaftstheorie” (distorted image of society).10 Moishe Postone (1982) similarly describes how forms of anticapitalist thinking tend to perceive capitalism only under the form of its abstract side—for example, money as the root of all evil.11 This form of anticapitalism is, he claims, a “onesided attack against the abstract”12 in which Jews are equated not only with money, but also with capitalism in general; they are not only seen as representatives, but also as personifications of capitalism. Subjectively, perhaps, no antisemitic goals are pursued, but the potential for manifest antisemitism is objectively laid out in personified critiques of capitalism that occur in personalizing and moralizing ways. Antisemitic ressentiment thus reaches deep in how people understand society. Antisemitism is, as Jean-Paul Sartre claims, “a comprehensive attitude that one adopts not only toward Jews, but toward men in general, toward history and society; it is at one and the same time a passion and a conception of the world.”13 The study at hand shows that we can find traces of the antisemitic conception of the world, as described by Rürup, Postone, and Sartre, in the ressentiment-communication directed at RB Leipzig by contemporary German football fanatics. Antisemitism in football has been studied in different ways and in several countries.14 In the Netherlands, rival fans of Ajax Amsterdam chant, “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas,” and Ajax’s fans themselves began calling themselves the “Super Jews.”15 In England, those fans who hate Tottenham Hotspur despise the club as “Jews,” and the Tottenham supporters began naming themselves “Yid Army.”16 In Germany, violent hooligans and neo-Nazis are often held responsible for antisemitism in football.17 The study of the German fans’ passionate hatred against RB Leipzig is a case different from all others. Here, the despisers are to be found across all German football leagues and across political differences. Some of them are even engaged in activities against discrimination and antisemitism in football. The case thus

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requires a change of perspective: instead of focusing on the potentially antisemitic intentions, I study antisemitism in textual, visual, and performative forms of communication. Analyzing the contempt of RB Leipzig by what is being communicated shows how embedded antisemitism remains in German society despite all the memory work and public statements against discrimination, Nazism, and antisemitism by German politicians, football clubs, and fans. The case study at hand helps to sharpen our understanding of what antisemitism is today and questions whether the German society has learned “enough” in its attempts to work through the past. I aim to discuss these issues by interrogating metaphors used by German football fans and how antisemitic elements are transmitted in them.

Antisemitism in Democracy In his 1959 lecture “Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit” (The meaning of working through the past), Theodor W. Adorno raised the issue of what later became known as Schlußstrichsehnsucht (longing to consider something finished) when he made the following statement: The question “What does working through the past mean?” requires explication. It follows from a formulation, a modish slogan that has become highly suspect during the last years. In this usage “working through the past” does not mean seriously working upon the past, that is, through a lucid consciousness breaking its power to fascinate. On the contrary, its intention is to close the books on the past and, if possible, even remove it from memory.  . . . National Socialism lives on, and even today we still do not know whether it is merely the ghost of what was so monstrous that it lingers on after its own death, or whether it has not yet died at all, whether the willingness to commit the unspeakable survives in people as well as in the conditions that enclose them.18

In 2019 and thus sixty years of Aufarbeitung (working through the past) later, a monumental exhibition titled Auschwitz: Not Long Ago, Not Far Away opened at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan. Literary scholar Dara Horn reviewed the exhibition for The Atlantic in a piece titled “Auschwitz Is Not a Metaphor.”19 Horn argues that the exhibition “is everything an Auschwitz exhibition should be,” yet, she questions whether “presenting all these facts has the opposite effect from what we think.” Horn writes, “ I mean . . . that perhaps we are giving people ideas about our standards. Yes, everyone must learn about the Holocaust so as not to repeat it. But this has come to mean that anything short of the Holocaust is, well, not the Holocaust. The bar is rather high.”20 Horn provides many examples of events that are “not the Holocaust,” such as a shooting in a synagogue that is perceived as “not systemic” and the crime of a “lone wolf,” or swastikas drawn on the table of Horn’s chil-

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dren’s school desks, which is perceived as “not a big deal.” Horn’s powerful essay is a thoughtful attempt to look behind the exhibition’s display walls and beyond the surface of contemporary Erinnerungskultur (a term that describes how Germany has or has not come to terms with its past and how the past is made present in contemporary German memorial culture). Horn’s essay is a compelling intervention similar to the one Adorno made sixty years earlier. Adorno makes an argument that is in line with Horn’s essay when he claims that he considers “the survival of National Socialism within democracy to be potentially more menacing than the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy.”21 This chapter claims that antisemitism is a problem not limited to far-right extremists. Instead, antisemitism remains a problem in the midst of society, in democracy. The hatred against RB Leipzig is shared across all political positions and among those who understand their participation as fans and members in their respective football club as a form of democratic engagement. The case study at hand thus allows us to look behind the walls of Auschwitz exhibitions and beyond the rituals of Erinnerungskultur, and enables us to discuss questions of collective memories, transmission, and antisemitism in post–World War II Germany.

Antisemitic Ressentiment-Communication in German Football Fan Culture Berlin, May 2018. Thousands of football fans have gathered early in the day at the Theodor-Heuss Platz (Theodor-Heuss square). Freshly applied stickers announce their messages on a street sign: “125 years of Hertha BSC” (Berliner Sport-Club) reads one, “Against RB” another. The organizers requested that fans wear the club’s blue-and-white jerseys to this march for tradition against Leipzig. In the early afternoon, the group has grown to approximately two thousand. United together behind a banner reading “Since 1892,” they march, wave flags, sing songs, and set off pyrotechnics. Their final destination is the Olympiastadion (Olympic Stadium), where Hertha will play RB Leipzig in the afternoon. Their songs express their hostility to RB Leipzig: “All bulls are pigs,” one of the chants avers, or “Rot in hell, Red Bull!” Other songs tell stories about their love for Hertha and their local pride. The emphasis on localism and tradition as well as the rejection of an Other indicate topoi that are part of a specific type of rhetoric directed at RB Leipzig. The march for tradition against Leipzig was anything but an isolated case. The hatred of German football fans targets RB Leipzig more than any other club. Fans have shown hundreds of banners against the club, boycotted away games, and attacked RB Leipzig’s fans and players. The protest continues even in the times of empty stadiums because of the Covid-19. Although the club

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is unique in some ways and is justifiably criticized for instance because of its resistance against member participation,22 I am concerned with the specific moment when the fans’ critique of RB Leipzig turns into ressentiment. To pinpoint this moment, I analyze antisemitic ressentiment-communication directed against RB Leipzig by focusing on metaphors expressed in various forms such as banners, flags, and written statements. Metaphors are particularly appropriate to analyze regarding antisemitism in acts of communication because they contain collective meanings that may differ from individual intentions. If, as I argue, many fans oppose fierce anti-Jewish sentiments but nonetheless use antisemitic tropes, metaphors as acts of communication offer a fruitful object of analysis for antisemitic ressentiment-communication within democracy.

The Football Club as a Quasi-Natural Being Ultras understand themselves as extreme fans who travel to every away game of their respective clubs in order to show support with chants, banners, and flags. This is not the case when it comes to RB Leipzig. In 2014, the fans of VfR (Verein für Rasenspiele, club for lawn games) Aalen explained in a blog post that RB Leipzig was so horrible that they were boycotting the away game in Leipzig. They framed this explanation using the following metaphor: “To us, the promotion of RB Leipzig crossed a red line.  . . . The barrel overflowed and for us there remains only one consequence although we have to abandon our team on that day. Our team has been informed that our boycott is not directed against them but solely against the home team, including its fans, and everything that stands behind it.”23 This metaphor does not contain explicit antisemitic language, but it exemplifies how RB Leipzig has become a subcultural code that personifies all the negative elements of football’s commodification and must be eliminated in order to save football from the threat RB Leipzig has become in the eyes of German football fans. RB Leipzig thus is similar to the cultural code antisemitism became in nineteenth-century Germany.24 Both codes identify a single actor as responsible for a societal change and personify capitalism in a single object, to which they object instead of the system. The similarity lies not in blaming the Jew, but in the particular way of thinking and feeling, in the personification of an abstract societal system and thus the key “logic of [modern] antisemitism.”25 Water rises until something overflows; if this happens, consequences follow. The consequence in this case is that the fans from Aalen boycotted the away game in Leipzig although they usually attend every away game of the club. The barrel metaphor and the red line metaphor both work with the metaphor of a border that has been crossed and someone who has gone too far. In this case, the club RB Leipzig is perceived as too commercialized and too modern.

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Fans of Hertha Berlin think of RB Leipzig as being in opposition to clubs with tradition, who have to “fight for their lives”: “The support of businesses that buy off football teams in order to secure league positions for themselves while traditional clubs in the region fight for their lives is not what the once again shining flag of Hertha should represent.”26 The fans think of their clubs—in opposition to RB Leipzig—as things that have lives, that are locally rooted, and that have grown naturally. Fans of FC Bayern München write, “This team does not have a club with history and no grown fan base behind it.”27 Fans from Cologne argue that their club is different from RB Leipzig because 1. FC Köln (Cologne football club) is “deeply rooted”28 in the region. These metaphors of nature are linked to the notion of Heimat (homeland), as the following statement by fans from Nuremberg exemplifies: “People could identify with their clubs because they have been a Heimat.”29 RB Leipzig not only lacks the quality of constituting a Heimat, but it also differs from other clubs because it lacks a soul: “The only goal of Red Bull is to sell their product and the investor does not care to sell the soul of football.”30 So-called Traditionsvereine (traditional clubs) not only have a soul, but also have a heart. A banner by fans of 1. FC Köln reads, “Better poor with a heart than puppets of commerce!!!”31 In addition to associations with lives, bodies, souls, and Heimat, we even find the expression of Volkskrankheit (a disease affecting the whole people or the concept of a Volk). (Due to the long history of nationalism, racism, antisemitism, and Nazism that shaped the German term Volk, it is neither easily translatable to “people” nor to any other English word.) “The fans of Sandhausen showed a banner reading ‘bulls killer’ before kickoff. In addition, protest banners were placed all over the stadium. They read “Boycott Red Bull,” “Anti RB,” “Sandhausen says no to RB,” and “Volkskrankheit plastic clubs thanks to the DFB officials.”32 The fans of Sandhausen not only used the metaphor of Volkskrankheit, but also referred to RB Leipzig as Plastikclub (a club that is made of plastic and thus has neither a heart nor a soul). Plastic is a manufactured substance. It is not natural; it is artificially created, lacks substance, is cheap, and has no resilience. Lastly, the metaphor Bullen Killer (killer of bulls) refers to the club’s nickname Die Roten Bullen (the red bulls) and is both another form of dehumanizing the Other by referring to an animal and a threat to kill it. While the metaphors of life (i.e., nature, Heimat, Volk, rootedness, heart, and soul) are applied to the respective traditional clubs, RB Leipzig is identified with metaphors of death and dehumanization (e.g., artificiality, rootlessness, and animals). The following passage from a fanzine text, written by fans of Hertha Berlin and dealing with their trip to an away game at RB Leipzig, contains metaphors about both the “we” and “the other”: “What we experience is the slow death of football. We experience it very hautnah [closely].  . . . Football is sick and we are the perverts watching how the dying patient perishes.”33

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The metaphorical expression that football can die is based on the metaphor that football is a living organism that has a soul and a heart. Football has a body, and the author has a close relationship to it as the metaphorical expression hautnah reveals. The word Haut (skin) refers to the existence of a body, the word nah translates to near or close. The metaphorical expression hautnah thus means that someone is as close as one can get to something or someone. To (almost) touch one’s skin is a very intimate act. Since football is a living body, football can become sick. Football is imagined as a slowly dying patient. Only a pervert would watch the patient die; a normal reaction to RB Leipzig (the one responsible for the death of football) would thus be to react in defense and to save football from dying—to become, in the words of Sandhausen’s fans, a Bullen Killer. Marion Müller argues that many football fans have a “romanticized-animistic notion,”34 according to which a football club appears as a “quasi-natural being”35 that not only lives and grows, but that also has roots and a history and evades the rational logic of money. In the eyes of its opponents, RB Leipzig violates the normative expectation that football must be an end in itself and locally rooted. Ultras from VfL Wolfsburg argue that it makes a big difference for them whether a sponsor is local or foreign. To them, the club’s dependence on the company Volkswagen (VW) stands for more local rootedness than other football clubs have.36 While VW, a global company based in Wolfsburg, is perceived as authentically local, Red Bull, a global company based in Austria, is detected as inauthentically global. Here—different from any other case in Germany—the Austrian ownership is thematized and despised as representing globalization. The ultras are setting rootedness and authenticity in opposition to the cosmopolitanism of the Other, thus moving closer to a construction that has been analyzed by Andrei S. Markovits and Lars Rensmann in their discussion of the link between counter-cosmopolitanism and antisemitism in the context of football: “It is not coincidence that radical counter-cosmopolitan sentiments and activities frequently exhibit pronounced anti-Semitism: traditionally, Jews have been identified with cosmopolitanism in Europe, and anti-Semites have always seen cosmopolitanism as their enemy because (like Jews) it presumably undermines the rootedness of the local and traditional, especially manifested by the Volk.”37 Gerhard Vinnai argues that no factor favors the identification of fans like a club’s local ties.38 One has identity and authenticity or not; they are perceived as naturally given. The idealization and exaggeration of the natural becomes evident in metaphors of soil, roots, and growth, and intensifies “in the construction of RB Leipzig as rootlessness and homelessness.”39 Nature metaphors of soil, rootedness, and growth suggest that what exists is naturally given.40 Since ultras refer to past and tradition but avoid any examination of their qualities, past and tradition are naturalized and romanticized.41 Localism converges with

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anti-cosmopolitanism and goes hand in hand with the desire for distinction. Jean-Paul Sartre argues that antisemitism brings joy because “there is nothing I have to do to merit my superiority, and neither can I lose it. It is given once and for all. It is a thing.”42 This antisemitic way of thinking and feeling finds its equivalent in the antithesis between the rooted traditional club and the homeless and groundless RB Leipzig. Whereas VfL Wolfsburg organizes football camps in China, FC Bayern München opens a fan shop at a Qatari airport, and FC St. Pauli promotes German football in the United States, none of these clubs is viewed as global in the way that RB Leipzig is. While there would be nothing irritating about saying that RB Leipzig has been founded by an Austrian company, RB Leipzig is singled out as the one and only club that destroys the Volkssport Fußball (the people’s game), as a banner by fans from Borussia Dortmund exemplifies.43

RB Leipzig and the Image of the Puppet While joyful mockery is heard in almost every German football stadium, the taunting directed at RB Leipzig has a unique quality that distinguishes the anti-RB banter from common football fan language. The antisemitism in the ressentiment-communication becomes evident in metaphors such as the portrayal of RB Leipzig as a puppeteer seen in a banner by ultras of 1860 München: “Even worse than a stupid idea are those who follow it blindly / against Red Bull and its fans.”44 The fans of RB Leipzig are portrayed as contradictory; they are perpetrators who destroy football and victims who follow blindly. Ultras of Union Berlin hoisted a banner with the inscription, “A club for Mitläufer [follower],45 failures, and the sons of bitches.”46 A puppeteer who holds the threads in his hand and thus acts deliberately brings the antisemitic tropes of world conspiracy to mind, in which the culprit would keep his true origin and intention a secret.47 The sponsor Red Bull appears to seduce not only the football associations (which had to agree to allow RB Leipzig to exist), but also the club’s fans. Both appear as puppets of commerce. The puppet that allows itself to be guided blindly is fitting to the perception of oneself as independent and incorruptible.48 One striking example is a banner shown by ultras of Erzgebirge Aue, which compared Red Bull founder Dietrich Mateschitz to Adolf Hitler: “An Austrian calls and you follow blindly / every child knows where this leads to / you would have been good Nazis!”49 Furthermore, Dietrich Mateschitz was depicted as Adolf Hitler on a banner, accompanied by the statement, “From Austria only the best for Germany.”50 A similar comparison can be found in the song “Anti RB,” in which rap artist and Dynamo Dresden fan Pie Kei raps, “Tradition cannot be bought, let alone pride / Papa Didi wants gold, and they follow the Führer / The ruble rolls, you

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are a disgrace to the Volk / A city as a puppet, but you wanted it that way.”51 Pie Kei attributes greediness to Dietrich Mateschitz, whom the fans of RB Leipzig allegedly follow. The city of Leipzig is portrayed as a puppet of Adolf Hitler—the Führer and puppeteer from Austria. It follows that RB Leipzig is a disgrace without tradition and pride. Talking about RB Leipzig as “a disgrace to the people,” evokes associations of the Volks- or Rassenschande (people’s and race defilement). In the fascist parlance of the past, the entity to be kept pure is the Aryan race; here it is the Volkssport Fußball (the people’s game) that must be cleaned of RB Leipzig. Even if the phenomena are completely different in their effects, they nevertheless follow a comparable logic. In a curious blend of antisemitic and anti-Nazi tropes, the key terms “gold,” “ruble,” “Führer,” “shame of the people,” and “puppet” not only arouse associations of the antisemitic image of Jewish greed, but also of Nazism and Adolf Hitler. A seductive potential is ascribed to Adolf Hitler, who was born, like Dietrich Mateschitz, in Austria. To connote an Other as both Jewish and a Nazi is a common antisemitic trope directed against Israel.52 The Nazification of RB Leipzig allows a person to position themselves in opposition to an Other demonized as Nazi, and thus to remain morally decent. Consequently, the antisemitic content of one’s own statements is portrayed as non-antisemitic. The fans accomplish this by externalizing the Führer figure, thereby demonizing the Other in a way that does not mention the Jew, but that uses antisemitic tropes at the same time. The underlying logic is that those who oppose Nazis cannot be antisemitic. Werner Bergmann and Rainer Erb—two of Germany’s most influential scholars of antisemitism—argue that Germans tend to avoid communicating antisemitic tropes in public discourse, whereas they express them more openly in private settings.53 Antisemitism in post–World War II Germany is antisemitism in a specific context.54 It often is without Jews55 and at times an antisemitism without even antisemites.56 In other words, while antisemitism is virulent in contemporary Germany, no one wants to be called an antisemite. Yet, antisemitism remains virulent, for instance in the metaphors used by the football public to accuse RB Leipzig of commercializing the Volkssport (people’s game). Contemporary Germans tend to disguise antisemitic tropes in their communication and take a detour when doing so, for instance by saying “Israel” when they mean “Judaism.” Bergmann and Erb rightly stress the suggested existence of a public taboo of antisemitism and its consequences. Something similar is happening when RB Leipzig is identified with Nazism: the rapper Pie Kei, whether consciously or unconsciously, recognizes the problematic connotation of his tropes and thus takes a detour in referencing Hitler. Pie Kei thereby actively creates the opportunity to communicate antisemitic thinking and feeling as he avoids the assumed antisemitism taboo through the externalization of the Führer figure and thereby opens a space for antisemitic ressentiment-communication.

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Animal Metaphors: On Rats, Vultures, and Grasshoppers The attacks single RB Leipzig out as a sole representative of a commodified sport. All professional German football clubs wear the names of sponsors on their jerseys, and fourteen out of eighteen Bundesliga teams played in a stadium that bears the name of a sponsor during the 2020–21 season. Most clubs function as companies on global markets of television rights. Yet, many fans glorify their favorite clubs as Traditionsvereine and identify the club RB Leipzig as the personification of the abstract capitalist societal system.57 This personification is illustrated in several metaphors that associate RB Leipzig with capitalism. During the home game against RB Leipzig in November 2015, fans of Karlsruher Sport Club threw fake $100 bills in the air.58 A caricature of RB Leipzig’s club logo was printed on the bills, which instead of two red bulls shows two rats touching a football ball with their mouths. The symbolic identification of Leipzig with the $100 bills represents the personification of the abstract capital sphere in the form of a concrete actor. Other animal metaphors are used as well: the St. Pauli fan club Ramba Zamba (hullabaloo) displayed a vulture marked “RB.”59 The inscription “Matti der Geldgeier” translates to “Matti the money vulture,” meaning “Matti the money grabber,” and indicates that the vulture is intended to be interpreted as metaphor for Dietrich Mateschitz. Ultras of VfL Osnabrück presented a banner with the inscription “G€LDG€I€R ABSCHIESSEN)” (Shoot the money vultures).60 The vulture metaphor fits the imagination of RB Leipzig as a vicious threat. The vulture is a large, scavenging bird and is known as a symbol of bankruptcy and its resulting demise.61 The implicit or explicit attribution of profit and greed is accompanied by the attribution of a destructive and deadly force. Even more frequently than metaphors of grasshoppers or vultures, images of rats are displayed to represent RB Leipzig. Ultras from Aue invited fans to a gathering for which they organized a Dosenwerfen (a game of throwing balls at stacks of empty cans) before the game of Erzgebirge Aue against RB Leipzig in 2014–15.62 The knocking down of cans depicting the symbol of RB Leipzig invoked associations of the club’s sponsor Red Bull, who sells its energy drink in cans. One of the cans showed a modified version of RB Leipzig’s club symbol on which the bulls originally depicted in the logo were now replaced by rats holding a Euro coin instead of a football ball between their mouths, similar to the $100 bills displayed in Karlsruhe. The can included the word Rattenball (rat ball), a pun on the club’s official name Rasenball. Likewise, the song “Anti RB” states, “These rats of RedBull are like a fashion line” and “We send bulls to the slaughterhouse—Maredo-business63 / Punches in the faces of these rats, we hate you more than other opponents / Dortmund will be the Kammerjäger (vermin exterminator) of this rat plague.”64 The function of a Kammerjäger is to kill rats, to clean up a place that had been clean before the plague of rats

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arrived. Thus, football can be pure again if RB Leipzig is killed. A banner by ultras of Darmstadt 98 showed a modified RB logo with the inscription “Rat ball Leipzig” in front of a heap of banknotes and coins, on which two red rats were gnawing a football that was running out of air and from which Euro signs were dropping to the ground. The banner stated, “Tradition dies here,” with an arrow pointed toward the sector of RB Leipzig’s fans.65 In the eyes of the fans, it is not the commodification in general that brings death to football—it is RB Leipzig in particular who degrades their beloved sport. Metaphors of disease, death, and healing are connected to the enhancement, naturalization, and biologization of the “we group.”66 Animal metaphors (such as the rat) or metaphors of dangerous diseases (such as the plague) vividly unfold motives of “sucking out, corroding, decomposing, suffocating, overgrowing, as well as the rapid increase of uncontrollable spreading, and rampant growth.”67 Furthermore, these metaphors also evoke the corresponding countermeasures of “rendering harmless, removing, and eliminating.”68 Disease metaphors fulfill multiple functions in the ressentiment-communication against RB Leipzig: sometimes the song “Anti RB” refers to RB Leipzig as carrying a disease (“The resistance grows from east to west, the whole German country hates the red bull plague!”),69 while at other times they reveal the desire for RB to fall victim to disease (“In the Pfalz we don’t call you anything but a scumbag-club / We don’t wish you anything good and nothing but the plague”).70 Fans from Dortmund perceive the healthy popular sport of football in opposition to disability (“RB stands for Richtig Behindert” [properly disabled] and inbreeding [“the parents of RB Leipzig are siblings”]).71 Much more common, however, is the attribution of illness. Because illnesses are menacing, one has to protect oneself against them: Wolfsburg’s fans showed a play on words with the phrase: “Give RB no chance,” which instantaneously references the anti-AIDS campaign “Give AIDS no chance” in style and language. Metaphors of illnesses and rats as such do not necessarily refer to a deliberate antisemitic intention but are tied to antisemitic images inscribed into the collective visual memory. The antisemitic ressentiment-communication is a method that allows focusing on antisemitic elements within these forms of communication instead of interpreting the potential intention of the fans. The ultras do not explicitly connect themselves to antisemitism but are tied implicitly to these antisemitic images deeply inscribed into the collective visual memory of German society. The fans may not connect themselves intentionally to antisemitism. However, the rat metaphor can transmit antisemitic ideology. This is specifically true in the German context, where rat metaphors were frequently used in Nazi propaganda films such as Der ewige Jude (The eternal Jew) of 1940. The narrator of the documentary-style film claims that “Jews [are] everywhere at the centers of the world and money economy. They are an international power.”72 Based on their capital, “Jews” would terrorize “world stock

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exchange, world opinion, and world politics.”73 The film contrasts supposedly “productive and honest German work” with allegedly “money-grubbing Jewish anti-work”; “While millions of the established German people went into unemployment and misery, immigrant Jews came to fantastic riches in a short time—not through honest work, but by usury, trickery, and fraud.”74 The film’s portrayal juxtaposes the migration of Jews from Eastern Europe with the migration of rats: “Where rats appear, they bring extermination to the land, they destroy human goods and food.”75 Rats thereby spread “diseases, plague, leprosy, typhus, cholera, dysentery, etc.” The rats are “no different from the Jews among the humans.”76 Grasshoppers and vultures were also part of antisemitic caricatures in National Socialism; in Veit Harlan’s Nazi propaganda film Jud Süß ( Jew Süss), the image of the grasshopper was associated with Jews: “Like the grasshoppers, they come over our land!”77 Vultures were used in personifying Stürmer (the attacker)-caricatures to transfer the negative qualities associated with the animals, such as bloodlust, cunning, or toxicity, to Jews.78 The rat, grasshopper, and vulture metaphors all refer to the transmission of diseases, the antisemitic stereotype of rootlessness, the conspiratorial theory of international power and threat, and the rejection of the abstract—notions characteristic of the ressentiment-communication against RB Leipzig.

Metaphors and the Collective Visual Memory Rat metaphors evoke disgust and aversion in the German viewer; they are associated with deviousness, cowardliness, and trickiness. However, reactions to rat metaphors are culturally specific. While rats are associated with such negative qualities in the European context, they are associated with honesty and creativity in China, and they are known as the animal used for riding by the God Ganesha in India.79 Images like these of rats contain irrational and subjective elements. These metaphors are socially mediated as part of a society’s collective visual memory and contain an unconscious and collective dimension.80 Individual memory is always embedded within a cultural framework of collective remembering. Metaphors are “embodied in their cultural environment,”81 and not just in the heads of individuals. In the German context, the collective and unconscious dimension of animal metaphors is shaped by the long history of antisemitism. Images of animals and diseases were among the most commonly used antisemitic metaphors between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries.82 Metaphors do have a history. They are a way of transmitting ideas and points of reference across time and space. Metaphors are part of collective cultural memories and thereby always for a specified time and place in history. In Nazism as well as in the ressentiment-communication directed at RB Leipzig, rats supposedly degrade the purity of the Volk. The Volk or Volkssport has a double

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function: it is both the patient and the one to make the intervention against the disease.83 The intervention is fundamentally different when it comes to Nazis or football fans. While some fans might attack supporters or players of RB Leipzig, xenophobic violence was common for Nazis. But similarities exist as well. Animal metaphors are of central importance in both cases. The potential for violence is a structural quality inherent in the animal metaphor against democracy (Nazis) and in democracy (football fans).

Conclusion RB Leipzig has become “the most hated club in German football,” as global newspapers such as The Guardian have recognized.84 For German football fans, RB Leipzig embodies inauthenticity, globalism, and commercialism. The club has become a subcultural code that is feared to finish off the Volkssport football. In the fans’ antisemitic ressentiment-communication directed at RB Leipzig, the club is held responsible for the commodification of football. Instead of identifying capitalism as a structuring element that affects all professional football clubs, everything commercial is projected onto RB Leipzig. Metaphors are particularly suitable for this form of othering because in metaphors we can portray something abstract in concrete forms.85 Raymond Gibbs Jr. argues that metaphors—in a way like antisemitic ideology—are not only a figure of speech, but also a form of “mental mapping that influences a good deal of how people think, reason, and imagine in everyday life.”86 Metaphors have the power to evoke negative emotions like fear, hate, disgust, or a feeling of superiority.87 Metaphors allow us to picture a threat in concrete terms that otherwise might remain abstract and invisible. Through metaphors, the threat becomes something that one can understand, make sense of, and therefore, actually fear. While we often think that these imaginations can only survive in authoritarian contexts, in propaganda they are not vanquished with the downfall of an authoritarian system; instead, they may have an afterlife within democracy, and thus also in the realm of sports. Sixty years after Theodor W. Adorno’s lecture, “Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit,” we might have raised the bar for a critique of antisemitism so high that we must look for more new and alternative ways than putting together the next Auschwitz exhibition. A critical reflection of football fan culture—one that allows for participation, that aims for a voice in the respective local football clubs, that is, in short, very much invested in democratic community life and social participation—is, as I have shown in this chapter, a good space for investigating antisemitic ressentiment-communication in contemporary Germany. RB Leipzig offers a specific opportunity to project antisemitic thinking and feeling toward a personified and concrete actor. In this chapter, I examined how

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antisemitic ressentiment-communication is expressed in metaphors directed at RB Leipzig. In sum, these metaphors reduce complexity on three levels. First, RB Leipzig is portrayed by means of metaphors as personifying supposedly negative developments of football. The second step is depicting the dehumanization of the club, its employees, and its fans through animal and disease metaphors. It follows, third, that the ultras want to get rid of this dangerous Other—that RB Leipzig must be destroyed. Despite RB Leipzig’s recent success in the Bundesliga and the German cup, the club cannot and will not be accepted, and RB Leipzig will never be a part of the game, as a banner by fans of 1. FC Köln stated: “Niemals ein Teil des Spiels—RB verpiss dich!!” [Never a part of the game—RB piss off !!]88

Author Pavel Brunssen is a PhD candidate, University of Michigan. Brunssen’s research focuses on antisemitism and antigypsyism in European football fan cultures. He received the Routledge Best Paper Award for his presentation “Football in the Buchenwald Concentration Camp” at the International Football History Conference in Manchester (UK). He co-organized “The Beautiful Game? Identity, Resentment, and Discrimination in Football and Fan Cultures” (2018), an international conference held at the Center for Research on Antisemitism in Berlin. He is author of the 2021 book Antisemitismus in Fußball-Fankulturen: Der Fall RB Leipzig (Antisemitism in football fan cultures: The case of RB Leipzig), and a a coeditor of the volume Football and Discrimination: Antisemitism and Beyond, which was published in 2021 with Routledge.

Notes 1. Although ultras are only a small portion of football spectators, they are the most

influential fan culture in the stands. Furthermore, the ultras’ youth culture is considered to be one of the largest in Germany. That ultras initiate and participate in initiatives against discrimination is more the case in Germany than in other countries. A recent attempt to define ultras says, “Across the globe, one particular group has taken a leading role in creating these highly passionate atmospheres: the ultras. They produce choreographies (also known as ‘tifos’ or ‘choreos’) that regularly involve collective chanting, flags, banners, clothing and pyrotechnics.  . . . Ultras are one of the only groups displaying collective behaviour that pride themselves on having a shared, coherent sense of identity based on an act of consumption: that of football.” Doidge, Kossakowski, and Mintert, Ultras, 2.

2. I use the word “antisemitism” (without hyphen) instead of “anti-Semitism,” because there is no “Semitism” that antisemites oppose.

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3. Neiman, Learning from the Germans. 4. Ranc, “Eventuell nicht gewollter Antisemitismus,” 205. Unless otherwise specified, all 5. 6. 7. 8.

translations in this chapter were done by the author.

Meltzer and Musolf, “Resentment and Ressentiment,” 240–55.

Waxman, Schraub, and Hosein, ‘Arguing about Antisemitism,’ 1–22. Volkov, “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code,” 25–46. Bergmann and Erb, “Kommunikationslatenz,” 223–46; Marin, Antisemitismus ohne Antisemiten. Salzborn, Antisemitismus als negative Leitidee der Moderne, 334. Rürup, Emanzipation und Antisemitismus, 91. Postone, ‘“Die Logik des Antisemitismus,” 19. Ibid., 21. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 12.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. For more information, see Brunssen and Schüler-Springorum, Football and Discrimination; Brenner and Reuveni, Emancipation through Muscles; Curtis, “Antisemitism and European Football,” 273–90; Rein, Fútbol, Jews, and the Making of Argentina. 15. See Gans, “Hamas, Hamas, All Jews to the Gas,” 85–103; Gans, “‘Have they Forgotten to Gas You,’” 71–100; Verhoeven and Wagenaar, “Appealing to a Common Identity,” 141–51. 16. Efron, “When Is a Yid Not a Jew,” 235–56; Poulton, “Towards Understanding Antisemitism”; Poulton, “Collective Identity and Forms of Abuse.” 17. Schubert, Antisemitismus im Fußball. 18. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working through the Past,” 90f. 19. Horn, “Auschwitz Is Not a Metaphor.” 20. Ibid. 21. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working,” 91; emphasis in original. 22. RB Leipzig—the youngest club in the Bundesliga—offers a well-suited object for

the fans’ hatred: RB Leipzig was founded in the spring of 2009. By taking over the starting rights of SSV (swim and sports club) Markranstädt, a village close to Leipzig, it gained the right to debut in the fifth league. The club gained rapid success, as it played in the Bundesliga from the 2016–17 and soon made its way into the Champions League. Most important, though, is that the club is exceptional because it exists only because of the investment made by the energy-drink producer Red Bull and does not provide much structure for club member participation—something of high importance in German football culture. RB Leipzig has about 750 club members, of which only nineteen have the right to vote. In contrast, Football Club (FC) Bayern München has approximately 300,000 members and TSG Hoffenheim has about 10,000 members. 23. Crew, “Stellungnahme zum Auswärtsspiel bei RB Leipzig.” 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

Volkov, “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code,” 5–46. Postone, “Die Logik des Antisemitismus,” 13.

“Charakter zeigen—RB Leipzig absagen.” “GEGEN DEN MODERNEN FUßBALL.” “Vor Leipzig. Erklärung der AG Fankultur.” “Am Anfang war der Verein.” Förderkreis Ostkurve. “Fotos Saison 2016/2017” “RB Leipzig—1. FC Union Berlin.”

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33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

“Rattenball Leipzig vs. Hertha BSC 2:3,” 17. Müller, Fußball als Paradoxon, 123. Ibid., 123. Weekend Brothers—Ultras Wolfsburg, “Blick in die Kurve,” 36–43, 40. Markovits and Rensmann, Gaming the World, 213. The term “counter-cosmopolitanism” goes back to Kwame Anthony Appiah. See ibid., 207.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

Pavel Brunssen

Vinnai, Fußballsport als Ideologie.

Fydrich, “‘RedBull,’” 27. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 30.

Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 18; emphasis in original. “Wir haben die Dortmunder Protestbanner.“ [We have the Dortmund protest banner] 44. “RB Leipzig—1. FC Union Berlin.” 45. The term was used during German denazification after World War II for people who supported Nazism but did not participate directly in atrocities. The term also implies a lack of commitment and authenticity. 46. “RB Leipzig—1. FC Union Berlin.” 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

Przyrembel, “Ambivalente Gefühle,” 544. Fialova Sbor.

Ibid. Pototschnig, “DFB leitete nun ein Verfahren ein.” Kopfnussmusik, “M.I.K.I..” Evelien Gans argues that the “equation of ‘Jew’ (or Israeli, or Zionist—the three are frequently indiscriminately interchanged) with ‘Nazi’ mostly takes place when it comes to a position-finding toward Israel. Zionism is being compared with Nazism, the Star of David becomes a swastika, Sharon (Olmert, Netanyahu) is another Hitler” (Gans, “Have They Forgotten to Gas You,” 90). According to Andrei S. Markovits, “Nazifying Israel makes it possible to kill three birds with one stone: The first objective achieved is the delegitimation of Israel by associating it with the symbol of evil par excellence. Second, one can attack and humiliate the Jewish people by equating it with the perpetrators of the brutal genocide that nearly succeeded in exterminating the Jews completely. Finally, this malicious analogy between Israelis and Nazis frees Europeans of any remorse or shame for their history of a lethal anti-Semitism that lasted a solid millennium” (Markovits, Uncouth Nation, 191). Bergmann and Erb, “Kommunikationslatenz.” Bergmann, “‘Störenfriede der Erinnerung,’” 3–95. Lendvai, Antisemitismus ohne Juden. Marin, Antisemitismus ohne Antisemiten.

See Stephan Schindler’s chapter in this volume. “KSC—Dosenverein.” “31-FC St.Pauli—Leipzig 1:0.”

Crew, “RB Leipzig—VfL Osnabrück.” Duden, “Pleitegeier, der.” Fialova Sbor.

Maredo is the name of a steakhouse chain with locations throughout Germany and Austria.

Antisemitic Metaphors in German Football Fan Culture Directed at RB Leipzig

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88.



235

Kopfnussmusik, “M.I.K.I.,”

Usual Suspects, “SVD vs. Bullenschweine 1:0.” Hortzitz, “Die Sprache der Judenfeindschaft,” 25 Ibid., 25.

Ibid., 25. Kopfnussmusik. Ibid. “Wir haben die Dortmunder Protestbanner.” Hippler, Der ewige Jude, Time Code 30:01 – 30:10. Ibid., Time Code 30:10 – 30:22. Ibid., Time Code 38:54 – 39:10. Ibid., Time Code 18:20 – 18:30. Ibid., Time Code 18:50 – 18:30. Reisin, “Das rülpsende Insekt,” 2.

Schwarz, “Visueller Antisemitismus,” 201. Pörksen, Die Konstruktion, 178. Salzborn, Antisemitismus, 118. Yu, “Metaphor from Body and Culture,” 247–61; quote on 247. Hortzitz, “Die Sprache der Judenfeindschaft,” 21. Pörksen, Die Konstruktion, 183. Oltermann, “How RB Leipzig Became.” Schwarz, “Visueller Antisemitismus,” 197. Gibbs Jr., “Taking Metaphor,” 145. Schwarz, “Visueller Antisemitismus,” 201. Rote Böcke.

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Hauptstadtmafia 2003. “Rattenball Leipzig vs. Hertha BSC 2:3” [Rat Ball Leipzig vs. Herta BSC 2:3]. Spreeathener Buschfunk, 2018. Hippler, Fritz. Der ewige Jude. 1940. Horn, Dara. “Auschwitz Is Not a Metaphor.” The Atlantic. 2016. Retrieved 31 May 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/auschwitz-not-long-ago-notfar-away/591082/ Hortzitz, Nicoline. “Die Sprache der Judenfeindschaft” [The language of Jew enmity]. In Antisemitismus: Vorurteile und Mythen [Antisemitism: Prejudices and myths], edited by Schoeps, Julius Hans, and Joachim Schlör, 19–40. Munich: Piper, 1995. Kopfnussmusik. “M.I.K.I—ANTI RB (In der Sache Vereint) (Pottblagen 05.10.2018).” 2016. Retrieved 24 July 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbJoDD7uTYs “KSC—Dosenverein (Saison 15/16, 2. Bundesliga, 16. Spieltag, 30.11.15).” Ultra1894. Retrieved 31 May 2021, http://ultra1894.de/bilder/254. Lendvai, Paul. Antisemitismus ohne Juden: Entwicklungen und Tendenzen in Osteuropa [Antisemitism without Jews: Development and tendencies in Eastern Europe]. Wien: Europaverlag, 1972. Marin, Bernd. Antisemitismus ohne Antisemiten. Autoritäre Vorurteile und Feindbilder (Unveränderte Neuauflage früher Analysen 1974–1979 und Umfragen 1946–1991) [Antisemitism without antisemites. Authoritarian prejudice and enemy images (Unchanged New Edition of earlier Analyses 1974–1979)]. Frankfurt: Campus, 2000. Markovits, Andrei S. Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Markovits, Andrei S., and L. Rensmann. Gaming the World: How Sports Are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Meltzer, Bernard N., and Gil R. Musolf. “Resentment and Ressentiment.” Sociological Inquiry 72, no. 2 (2002): 240–55. Müller, Marion. Fußball als Paradoxon der Moderne: Zur Bedeutung ethnischer, nationaler und geschlechtlicher Differenzen im Profifußball [Football as paradox of modernity. On the meaning of ethnic, national, and gendered differences in professional football]. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften; GWV Fachverlage GmbH Wiesbaden, 2009. Neiman, Susan. Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. Oltermann, Philip. “How RB Leipzig Became the Most Hated Club in German Football.” The Guardian. 8 September 2016. Retrieved 1 June 2021, http://www.theguard ian.com/football/2016/sep/08/why-rb-leipzig-has-become-the-most-hated-clubin-german-football. Pörksen, Bernhard. Die Konstruktion von Feindbildern: Zum Sprachgebrauch in neonazistischen Medien [The construction of enemy images: On the language of Neonazi media]. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2000. Postone, Moishe. “Die Logik des Antisemitismus” [The logic of antisemitism], Merkur 36, no. 403 (1982): 13–25. Pototschnig, Gerald. “DFB leitete nun ein Verfahren ein: Mateschitz als Nazi beschimpft” [DFB just introduced action: Mateschitz berated as a Nazi]. 2015. Retrieved 23 May 2018, https://www.kleinezeitung.at/sport/fussball/international/4657223/Mateschitzals-Nazi-beschimpft_DFB-leitete-nun-ein-Verfahren-ein Poulton, Emma. “Collective Identity and Forms of Abuse in Football Fan Culture: A Case Study on Antisemitism.” In Football and Discrimination: Antisemitism and Beyond, ed-

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“Vor Leipzig. Erklärung der AG Fankultur” [Before Leipzig. Statement by the AG fan culture]. AG Fankultur, 2016. Retrieved 31 May 2021., https://fc.de/fc-info/news/ detailseite/details/erklaerung-der-ag-fankultur/ Waxman, Dov, David Schraub, and Adam Hosein. “Arguing about Antisemitism: Why We Disagree about Antisemitism, and What We Can Do about It.” Ethnic and Racial Studies (2021): 1–22. Weekend Brothers—Ultras Wolfsburg. “Blick in die Kurve.” Blickfang Ultra 12 (2009): 36–43. “Wir haben die Dortmunder Protestbanner gegen Leipzig aufgeschrieben” [We wrote the Dortmund protest banners against Leipzig]. VICE Sports, 2017. Retrieved 31 May 2021, https://sports.vice.com/de/article/4xjw9j/wir-haben-die-dortmunder-protest banner-gegen-leipzig-aufgeschrieben Yu, Ning. “Metaphor from Body and Culture.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought edited by Raymond W. Gibbs, 247–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

CHAPTER 12



One Foot on the Ball and the Other Nearly in Jail? Analyzing the Role of Social Work in the Interaction of Supporters, Police, and the Media in Hamburg Football FABIAN FRITZ

Introduction

T

he relationship between Germans and football, especially as a spectator sport, permeates many areas of life and is perceived as unique by outsiders.1 Within the German football cosmos there is indeed something quite distinctive yet often overlooked: the engagement of social work with football supporters. Similar to British society during the 1970s, Germany struggled with the rise of football hooligans in the 1980s.2 Unlike in the United Kingdom, however, the problem in Germany was not solved with a massive restructuring of stadiums, police, and security apparatus.3 At German universities scholars initiated a number of measures, including social work projects incorporating these difficult supporters.4 In the 1990s, German hooligans were widely replaced by the so-called ultras, who were identified by authorities and the media as the most conspicuous fan group. While there was less violence compared to hooliganism, the new youth subculture appeared in opposition to clubs and leagues, and openly criticized the perceived commercialization of football.5 Subsequent conflicts arose, expanding the boundaries of the evergrowing realm of social work in football even further. As of 2020, social workers are employed at sixty-eight supporter communities in sixty-one geographical club locations, which span from Bundesliga to Regionalliga (fourth tier in the German football league system) and reach all corners of Germany.6 Such social workers are placed within football clubs

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or Fanprojekte (projects for fans/supporters), which offer social services for fans.7 These Fanprojekte are funded 50 percent federally and state and 50 percent by the Deutsche Fußball Liga (DFL; German Football League) and the Deutscher Fußball-Bund (DFB; German Football Association). Through their work, social workers provide a diverse array of social services to their respective communities, which include psychosocial intervention for individuals and groups, socioeducational work, and legal assistance for supporters who run into problems with the law. According to Winands and Grau, the social workers offer “permanent facilities (comparable to youth centers or youth clubs) and/or contact points in the stadiums.”8 These facilities are not only used by the social workers—for example, to conduct open meetings or consultation sessions—but are also available to organized supporters or ultras groups to host their own meetings or events. During games, social workers walk around both in and outside the stadiums, engaging in social street work.9 Furthermore, certain locations offer excursions to surrounding educational sites, such as former concentration camps. Some social workers are active members in political literacy, while other Fanprojekte maintain study support centers.10 In daily interactions, especially with young fans like ultras, Fanprojekte offer guidance in overcoming difficult situations, including stadium bans, police summonses, and coping with the repercussions of violent encounters or school issues due to an obsessive focus on football. This type of support assumes that both the media coverage and police power stand in opposition to the members of such fan groups.11 Indeed, through their own work supporting these fans, social workers themselves regularly interact with police, as is mandatory in their role as public servants. They are regularly summoned as witnesses during trials and are at times even the target of criminal prosecution themselves.12 Although the relationship between supporters like ultras and the police has been researched, little attention has been given to the role of social workers in this dynamic. While conclusions regarding social workers have been drawn from research relating to ultras,13 their perspectives and professional roles have remained largely unexamined in academic research. To fully explore this dynamic within a sociological realm, it is vital to elucidate the purpose and significance of cooperation with police in addition to addressing how, if at all, the corporation can be linked to the ethos of social work. It is precisely these intertwined landscapes that this chapter seeks to uncover and understand. In order to map the conflicts in this field, this chapter will first look to social theory and discourses on football as well as professional discourses in social work. Subsequently, this chapter offers a brief summary of current research surrounding social workers in and around German football clubs in Fanprojekte. Exploratory interviews with social workers employed in both Hamburger Sport-Verein (Hamburger SV; Hamburg Sport Club) and Fußball-Club St. Pauli (FC St. Pauli; Football Club St. Pauli), the main football clubs in Ham-

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burg, were conducted in summer 2019. The results of these interviews and the corresponding interpretations will be fleshed out in detail in order to reflect on the professional discourses of social work and wider social discourses.

Football and Social Work in Germany The philosopher Jürgen Habermas conceives of society in two spheres: system and Lebenswelt (lifeworld).14 For Habermas, the concept of the lifeworld is the complementary concept to communicative action, which takes place primarily in the lifeworld.15 While in the system, the communication between the monetary-bureaucratic complex and its subsystems is characterized by purposive action and takes place via the steering media of money and administrative power. Habermas argues that the colonization of the lifeworld dictates the process in which the systemic imperatives of money and administrative power penetrate areas oriented toward understanding, forcing them to adapt.16 Such adaptation results in reduced possibilities of communicative understanding in the lifeworld (i.e., understanding-oriented social spheres). Money and administrative power replace communication as a means of coordinating action. This development is not accidental, but rather compulsive. Capitalist growth has created ever-more-complex subsystems of economy and state, due in large part to capitalist growth, penetrating ever deeper into the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld.17 Moreover, colonization of the lifeworld harkens back to ageold problems such as objectification, alienation, dispossession, incapacitation, structural violence, as well as domination, control, and coercion.18 Habermas sees escape in taming capitalism, reconquering the lifeworld, and bringing therewith a normative model of deliberative democracy into play.19 This social theory provides a unique lens through which to understand the development of football culture in German society. In other words, clubs as a representation of the core of civil society in the lifeworld are, in part, replaced by corporations and influential associations, otherwise known as Verbetrieblichung (economization).20 Few sports other than football have been shaped by the media’s influence on moneymaking, making it in many ways hypercommodified.21 This applies above all to the clubs in the top leagues. Football as a spectator sport is one of the best-selling products in consumerist capitalism today, as well as one of the most popular forms of commodified leisure.22 In order to minimalize the capitalistic losses possible by such commercialization, the strategic exploitation must be diligently planned out and flawlessly implemented.23 Ultras, however, pose the greatest risk to this seamless exploitation by openly criticizing such commercialized football and advocating for an anticapitalistic mentality.24 Though the extreme nature of the ultras continues to be harshly criticized, it is important to note that one of the ultimate goals of the

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groups is to achieve democratic discourse, which has continually fallen on deaf ears at both the club and the league levels.25 In an attempt to garner attention, they set off pyrotechnics and, in some instances, have resorted to violence. The latter scenario, of course, results in an immediate intervention of administrative power by summoning police forces in a capitalistic effort to secure seamless use.26 The police force, however, is not solely responsible for ensuring security in German football culture. Indeed, at this point social workers intercede to coordinate between football fans and police. Such interventions follow the guidelines of the Nationales Konzept für Sport und Sicherheit (NKSS; National Concept for Sport and Security). Originally developed in 1993 with the most recent reconceptualization in 2012,27 the NKSS ultimately aims to achieve a peaceful coexistence of police, local authorities, clubs, leagues, Fanprojekte, transport companies, and other network partners.28 In order to achieve such a lofty goal, the clubs and the police requested the aid of social workers in maintaining security measures. This poses a fundamental problem, however, in that the goals of social workers and police forces differ greatly in both their ways and their means. In most countries, the definition of the International Federation of Social Workers is recognized and supported by the respective national umbrella organizations: “Social work . . . promotes social change and development, social cohesion, and the empowerment and liberation of people. Principles of social justice, human rights, collective responsibility and respect for diversities are central to social work.”29 As such, a propensity toward the lifeworld30 is a key element of social work, which relies heavily on communicative action.31 Social work maintains a fundamentally different orientation from the (commodified) clubs and leagues, whose goals focus on money and administrative power, and is also different from the police forces working in the football sector, who can be viewed as the executive force of administrative power. This then also further complicates the work of social workers because social work, with its intermediary position between system and lifeworld, is expected to meet different demands. In their paper detailing the Fanprojekte, football scholars Michael Gabriel and Julia Zeyn sketch out a standard conflict social workers encounter: a selfappointed task of Fanprojekte is to help supporters in legal altercations with police or clubs.32 Through these encounters, social workers seek to build relationships of trust with the supporters, who will theoretically then alert social workers to any further difficulties.33 This provides the basis for communicative action. Bound by confidentiality, social workers must keep any personal information they garner to themselves. As a result, they often obtain or observe comprehensive, albeit confidential, information detailing alleged criminal activity or deviant behavior by supporters. As such, police consider Fanprojekte to be a potential source of continuous information, through which they can enforce

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administrative power. Thus, the social workers are placed in a precarious position: to disclose incriminating information on police suspects or to become suspects themselves, since they are deemed responsible in the eyes of the law for not reporting such crime.34 They are approached with pictures and videos by police with demands to reveal supporter identification or are summoned as witnesses in a police investigation.35 In extreme cases, social workers have even been threatened with coercive detention.36 The distinct challenge that arises in these scenarios is that there is no legal right afforded to social workers in refusing to give evidence, as is extended to many other socially oriented professions.37 The problematic landscape social workers encounter, however, is not limited to the legal and police battles. Sport scholars Martin Winands and Andreas Grau describe this rising tension as follows: “Fan project workers take on a critical advocacy for fans who are often in conflict with institutions.”38 Winands and Grau, much like Habermas, posit that these social workers often find themselves in direct conflict with the administrative power of the system. What is more, a large part of social work is to act as an advocate for clients in cases of encroachments, such as discrimination or stigmatization, from precisely the same administrative system.39 These combative interactions with supporters that necessitate the assistance of social workers are often focal points in media coverage. German outlets tend to offer a wide span of live coverage of domestic club football games, punditry, and commercial aspects, including player transfers. However, if and when conflicts with police escalate into violent encounters, it is certain to become the highlight of the day’s media coverage. Such news stories generally tend to show the police force, rather than the fans, in a positive light, villainizing the fans as degenerate hooligans.40 In fact, scholars Sven Kathöfer and Jochem Kotthaus empirically prove this type of media mistreatment of ultras in their work.41 The reliance of the media on information provided by the police is one reason for their consistently favorable coverage by media outlets.42 The supporters, however, are rarely given the opportunity to defend their opposing opinions to the same media outlets, resulting in biased media information relayed to the public.43 It is precisely situations like these where social workers are called into action and find themselves in the middle of combative (both literally and figuratively) scenarios.44 Cases where false or incomplete information is provided by police and/or the media are of particular importance in advocating for their clientele.45 The only method of action is most often an avenue that pits social workers directly against the common practice between police and media. They can, for example, make public statements or address critical media representatives for an extensive report on both sides of any altercation. As social scientist Norbert Pütter’s overview reveals, this relationship between social work and police is characterized by a paradigm of cooperation that often does not allow a critical stance from the perspective of social work.46 As such, when social work-

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ers openly criticize police actions, the cooperation relationship, as prescribed in the NKSS, may be considered null and void by police, necessitating extensive explanation from social workers. In the end, there are two main reasons for the conflicts that social workers in Fanprojekte encounter. First, when they witness alleged criminal acts in their work, causing themselves to become the focus of police investigations. Second, when they engage in advocacy work to accurately present a public image of their clientele to police and the media. As aforementioned, the scope of research on football fandom has relied heavily on the ultras themselves, with very little, if any, scholarly attention dedicated to the staff of such Fanprojekte.47 In order to explore the role of social workers and their corresponding cooperation with police, the fan projects themselves were interviewed for the purposes of this chapter and further interviews were conducted with employees in the Hamburg Fanprojekte linked to Hamburger SV and FC St. Pauli. Both clubs have ultras who regularly come into conflict with police, yet they differ from the stereotypical supporter subculture. The interviews are subsequently analyzed using the Mayring method of Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse (content analysis),48 in addition to using MAXQDA software. The following sections will first present the findings of these interviews and then lay out feasible interpretations.

Shared Work Priorities, Formal Cooperation, and Informal Interaction in Hamburg It is clear from the interviews that ultras comprise a large focus of each Hamburg Fanprojekt, considering they are viewed as the largest organized group at any stadium. At the same time, police forces consistently monitor ultras. While there are points of shared contact, the conceptualization of ultra groups differs greatly between social workers and police in that, according to social workers, police categorize the ultras exclusively as troublemakers. The Fanprojekte, on the other hand, also see the ultras’ potential for self-organization, internal help, and support. According to the interviews, the points of contact between the social workers and police can be reduced to essentially two main forms: as supporters to ultras but also as the center of police focus themselves. On the one hand, formal cooperation with police takes place within the framework of institutionalized committees, for example at security meetings before match days, which are clearly dictated by the police force and seen as nonnegotiable in regard to NKSS and Fanprojekte cooperation. This is elucidated by the following excerpt from a series of interviews with a social worker: Social worker from Fanprojekt #1: “But we also have to do it, because the police force is a network partner, according to the NKSS. This means that we do not even have a choice. We

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cannot simply refuse every contact with the police.”49 While the groups must cooperate with the police in such situations, the work brings little to no advantage to the Hamburg Fanprojekte themselves, as these two excerpts emphasize: Interviewer: And what if we reverse and look at it from the other side. At which points can cooperation with the police be seen as support for you or where do you experience it as support? Social worker from Fanprojekt #1: No, I haven’t experienced anything like that in my two and a half years here. Social worker from Fanprojekt #2: Yes, that’s difficult to say. I can’t really think of anything as real support.

Furthermore, social workers claimed that police attempt to use Fanprojekte to profile supporters during meetings so they could later carry out arrests. Social workers within Fanprojekte stated that they felt pressured to conduct surveillance on behalf of law enforcement. Each of these instances was understood by police to be within the framework of cooperation surrounding the meetings. According to conducted interviews, this puts Fanprojekte in a difficult position, compromising the advocacy role as social workers and breaching the security of information protection. Considering Fanprojekte accompany supporters on match days as part of their regular work, social workers must regularly negotiate with police on a semiformal basis to ensure the safety of supporters attending the football matches. These procedures are described during the interviews as follows: Social worker from Fanprojekt #1: If the supporters are not interested in riots, they say: “Well then go there and ask what the cops want or tell them we want to leave or complain to them.” And then you go there and say: “So, what is the situation, when can people go on? And sometimes there is also a chance [for police] to give some sort of recommendation and say: ‘Please go back 20 meters and people will relax again.’”

The formal cooperation can thus be described as case-specific and solutionoriented—police seek to obtain information from social workers and the social worker attempts to defuse potentially combative situations and create breathing room. This, however, does not go beyond the implied formal framework. At the same time, it is not uncommon for social workers themselves to become the focus of police, either because they are considered as one with the supporters or the police does not acknowledge their presence and mediating role. This makes contact quite informal and has negative consequences for the social workers. In the opinion of the those interviewed, the rationale lies in police ignorance regarding the role of Fanprojekte and/or the single social workers, as this description of gender-related devaluation shows:

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Social worker from Fanprojekt #1: There are also boundaries that can be crossed [by police] of course, so it’s not true that it doesn’t stress me out. The longer the contact is, the more stressed you get, but that totally depends on the person you are dealing with, I must admit. If I get the feeling that I am being taken for a fool, or that I am not being taken seriously as a woman or as a female social worker, then maybe that’s something where you have to make a new plan for yourself.

While the Hamburg Fanprojekte play no role in arrests or summonses of social workers, there is growing concern regarding the police investigation and pressure in relation to the trust the clients feel toward the social workers. They explain their reasons as follows: Social worker from Fanprojekt #1: Sometimes I have the feeling that [the ultras] would actually tell us what they were involved with, even if it was just someone standing next to them, if they had the absolute certainty that we were not allowed to testify. Social worker from Fanprojekt #2: This plays a big role, because we must not forget that our work is, first and foremost, a work grounded in mutual trust. But we must, of course, also limit this trust-based work to a certain extent. Especially when young people come and actually need to talk, but then you have to say: “It’s actually not a good idea for me to know that.” This, then of course, destroys the basic approach of social work.

With these answers, it becomes clear that the interactions with police and media are fraught with insecurities that, in the end, affect how fan groups are handled, ultimately impacting the effectiveness of social workers in such football fan groups as a whole.

Media Reports, Police Influence, and the Pressure to Act The consensus among the social workers interviewed for this project was that media coverage of violence at or around football matches inevitably pressures police to implement strategies to minimize the risks for spectators and the wider public. In such endeavors, the police rely heavily on the cooperation of football clubs and Fanprojekte. In essence, Fanprojekte then have demands coming from both the police and football clubs to maintain order, which is no easy task to balance or achieve. A social worker from Fanprojekt #1 illustrates this problem: Social worker from Fanprojekt #1: If the first page of the Bild-Zeitung [Bild Magazine]50 is continually about the pyro-shame and 100 firecrackers and big smoke bombs, then that puts the police system under pressure. They have to show that they are willing to do something about it and then the football club also comes under pressure and then at some point we also come under pressure and are asked what we are actually doing about it.

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The interviewed Fanprojekte perceive the use of the digital media by police as a challenge. On the one hand, the tweets about street closures on match days, for example, can absolutely be useful. The criticism therein lies in the notion that the tweets are simultaneously suggestive and unquestioningly adopted by the local newspapers. The social workers argue that media reports highlight a major flaw in the representations of events related to football matches. From their stance, digital media reproduces police reports and statements verbatim without regard for the veracity of these statements. Considering that there are often no journalists on site, this lack of credibility, accountability, or journalistic integrity creates a dilemma for Fanprojekte. In addressing this problematic dynamic, they continuously state that Twitter and other social media platforms will only be used to spread their own information and do not want to comment on news-related posts. The police Twitter account, for example, with its on-thefly but perhaps not always accurate reporting, is often used in the press, only to be corrected or redacted later on the police homepage, rather than on the police Twitter account itself, resulting in incorrect public information. That is to say that if something negative or nefarious credited to fans occurs, but proves to be false in the end, the damage has already occurred and will likely remain in the viewer’s mindset, even if it is deemed incorrect after the fact. One social worker elaborates on such a scenario: Social worker from Fanprojekt #2: In examples where the club and its supporters have been in media coverage to a greater extent, it has always been the case that police reports have been published first, the initial damage done, and the rebuttal only leads to more critical reporting.

Interactions with digital media pose a dilemma for Fanprojekte, as they themselves make few public appearances, yet attempt to draw attention to perceived injustices toward their clientele by critical media representatives. As such, the interviewed Fanprojekte are increasing the interactive work with the digital media and the press into their educational training. Since this is an ongoing project still in its infancy, there are no methodically anchored ideas as of this time.

Differing Profession Standards The interaction between social workers and the police force continues to be fraught with tension. When asked about the reasons for this, the interviewed Fanprojekte highlighted the police emphasis on coercion. While the focus of Fanprojekte continues to be on violence prevention and encourages the ultras, in particular, to reflect on the meaningfulness of their actions, the police force tends to focus on coercive measures, such as prohibitions on entering the prem-

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ises and fines. The juxtaposing views about how football supporters held by police and social workers can be illustrated in their differing strategies in combating football-related violence. An explanation for possible tensions can be found in this description: Social worker from Fanprojekt #2: I believe that this is due to the ideas and expectations of the respective institutions. I do not think that this can be solved completely. The police, at least from my impression, are criminalizing football supporters more and more. In other words, there is a preliminary idea of what constitutes a football supporter. And if I approach it with this basic attitude, my negotiation with them is, of course, a little different. We don’t share this attitude and I would say that since the basic problem sometimes lies in cooperation, the understanding for acceptance-based youth work, for example, is not so great in police force.

Interpretation of Results It is not surprising that the Fanprojekte in Hamburg work primarily with ultras. Not only are they the most important organized group of football supporters, but they also have the most difficulties requiring the assistance of social workers. However, the NKSS also regulates this focus, making it typical for social workers to recognize the lifeworld potentials in these groups and to build on them. In this analysis it may come as a surprise that social workers see absolutely no advantage in cooperating with police. However, if one considers that social work functions as a form of confidential, trust-based, clientele work, it makes sense. With this confidentiality in mind, the police are not privy to information clients have divulged to social workers. In fact, as noted in multiple interviews, police would like to have information from Fanprojekte, even though they are aware of the importance of trust between Fanprojekte and ultras. However, it is apparent that, should the social workers cooperate with police, a distinct danger exists, in that the social work itself becomes compromised. If the ultras know about the potential that information might be leaked to the police, they will not confide to the full extent, thus preventing classic social work services, such as counselling, advocacy, or mediation, from being provided. The expressed desire in interviews for a right to refuse to testify must not be seen as a mere personal privilege for social workers, but as the basic right of the profession itself. Because this is not the case, police can implicitly influence the work of Fanprojekte. This could certainly be clarified by the NKSS within the framework of cooperation and agreements could be reached on these problems. However, the interviews make clear that there is a perceived inferiority of social workers, in that their concerns are not always taken seriously by police. This,

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then, results in an imbalance of power in favor of police in regard to binding cooperation. This imbalance can be further seen in the press, when the media outlets simply copy police reports verbatim, allowing for no accountability to prove the severity of the charges. Such instances, whereby fans are not given the opportunity to defend themselves against media accusations, are currently being investigated by the Hamburg Fanprojekte. What is new, however, is the statement that negative press also puts police under pressure, since it cannot always be controlled. Thus, it is no stretch to state that the press is not only influenced by police reports, but that negative press reports regarding ultras and supporters place everyone involved under pressure to act, including police. Finally, it should be noted that there are about ten employees working in the Hamburg Fanprojekte who are represented in the data of this project. Assuming the same number of staff throughout Germany, it can be concluded that approximately 250–350 social workers work with football fans. As such, the sample used for this chapter, which deals specifically with Hamburg, is rather limited in the scope of a national project. However, the data can serve as indicators for current discourses and can certainly be used as a basis for overarching conclusions regarding the topic at hand. For a more comprehensive analysis, further Fanprojekte research would need to be implemented on a larger scale. Additionally, the other parties involved in the Fanprojekte would need to be interviewed, such as ultras, police officers, clubs, and league representatives.

Conclusions The discussion of social work’s role between systems and lifeworld is by no means a novel one. Social work, according to Gängler and Rauschenbach, has always been suspected of colonizing itself.51 Early in the debate, however, the potential of social work was also recognized by critically questioning administrative power against the background of its own progressive tradition.52 This is not a far stretch, considering social work can break through colonization by seeing through and breaking through subsystems of communicative action, like for example arguments of constraint. In the case discussed in this chapter, this means specifically that social work does not adopt police narratives and limits itself only to legally necessary cooperation. Indeed, Michael Lindenberg and Tilman Lutz advocate that one should recognize the different rationalities of police and social work and resist the—by no means new—attempts of appropriation. The police do not decide how to support someone, but whether the reported or disclosed behavior could be criminally relevant.53 Social work, on the other hand, does not fundamentally decide whether behavior could be considered criminal. Instead, it looks only for the need for support or help, to which it responds with the necessary means and objectives. The question of

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security is one widely acknowledged and criticized within the field of social work. The desire for security often comes at the expense of the marginalized and nonconformist. However, the principles of social work, as explained earlier in this chapter, are freedom, social cohesion, democracy, and communicative action.54 If social work takes over the demand for security and order, it can only do so if it takes up the narratives of other institutions, such as police. This phenomenon is by no means a new theory in the field and is described as a dilution of the profession.55 Social work, then, loses the trust of its clients, entering a dangerous dynamic that shatters the core of its own practice. Yet, critical social work questions the narratives of order and security, especially if they are directed against clientele. This touches on a second discourse in social work concerning current rights: In a world where surveillance is increasing as part of colonization, even professions that hold confidentiality, like social workers, are under pressure, due to the reach of administrative power (such as police), which necessitates such information. Other professions, such as medicine or law, as well as a few select specialized fields of social work including drug or pregnancy counselling, have a right to refuse to give evidence, citing their own rules of client-patient confidentiality. Within social work discourses, this has been met with broad approval. However, its implementation for all social work remains a legal issue. In a relatively new campaign, social workers are lobbying in a nationwide effort for the right to refuse to testify.56 While the goal is one’s own protection, it can also be understood as the attempted safeguarding communicative action in the form of consultation against administrative power when understood in light of the system-lifeworld distinction. To understand this in more detail, further research is needed to determine the exact role of Fanprojekte as well as the overarching impact of their work. Though scholars like Jannis Albus have already developed a few ideas on this, they remain at an early stage of development.57 Since social work alone has not achieved great impact and, as aforementioned, is always in danger of colonizing itself in order to take over police narratives, it is also important to consider the larger social discourse at play. In German academic discourse, football is often considered a type of Brennglas (magnifying glass).58 In football, the colonization of the living world is clearly visible. Ultras and other fans see their lifeworld in danger through the manipulative control held by the media of the system. Their protests are often suppressed by the police in the exercise of administrative power, leading to further conflict. The motivation behind such protests are mainly demands for stronger rights for both fans and fan organizations. Thus, some might say that the ultras are fighting for the democratization of football. One could almost think that Habermas’ ideas were directly taken up in the current statement of the large supporter’s campaign unser fußball (our football) in Germany, since democratization is linked to a direct taming of football capitalism.59 If Ger-

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many is a football nation, then these discourses should be taken seriously in a democratic country. It is at this point that social and sports scientists would also be called on to conceive how football can be efficiently reorganized. When society as a whole is considered, it can be said that football, police, Fanprojekte, and the supporters are embedded in a democratic constitutional state. In such a state, according to Habermas, citizens should be able to discuss issues from all areas of society—especially if they are directly affected.60 There is one entity that plays an important role in this but is also subject to the danger of colonialization: the mass media. To shape the content of these discourses, each person needs equal access to information—which, according to Habermas, should be provided by mass media outlets. In order for this to work, however, the media must maintain independence from political and social influences, deal impartially with concerns and suggestions of citizens, and consider these issues and contributions to expose the political process in a compulsion for legitimacy and increased criticism.61 If viewed through the lens of reporting on football violence, the media should not simply copy police reports, though there are at times many pragmatic reasons for doing this.62 It should likewise be critically questioned when the police force uses its own powerful position to present itself well both in and through media reports.63 As this chapter shows, however, police also come under pressure. Either way, the democratic exchange as envisaged by Habermas cannot be fulfilled until media coverage is critical and is not influenced by system imperatives. Returning to the Brennglas metaphor, if society and scholarship are to work through the discourses of colonization and capitalism on the one hand, and democratization and taming on the other, they need tangible examples. Here, a look at football can be worthwhile, since it elucidates precisely that which Habermas describes. However, it is also important to keep a close eye on the Brennglas. Unfortunately, as this chapter illuminates, little attention has been paid to social work in this context. With its intermediary position, social work can take on various functions between the system and the lifeworld: a balancer, a mediator, or even a critic. Indeed, the research in Hamburg suggests that the Fanprojekte take a critical position and do not allow themselves to be taken over by the system imperatives, especially since the appropriation by cooperation with the police is put into question. Thus, in their small yet specialized area of expertise, they contribute to the fact that the colonization predicted by Habermas cannot progress unchecked and that a possibility of communicative action may arise. This is a position closely linked to the tradition of social work and illustrates its progressive character and potential to change society through a defense against the system imperative, not least in football. One must simply look closely through the Brennglas.

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Author Fabian Fritz is lecturer and research associate at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (Germany). In addition, Fabian is a PhD candidate at Hamburg University as well as the pedagogical manager at the FC St. Pauli-Museum. His primary research focus is on community-owned sports clubs and social work as they relate to sports. He has published a book on FC St. Pauli and authored articles that investigate not only the role of football clubs in democratic systems, but also social work and the police.

Notes 1. The title of this chapter is based on the title of a leaflet of the current campaign for a right to refuse to testify in social work, “Fast im Knast.” 2. von Wensierski and Puchert, “Die Jugendkulturen,” 249–68. 3. Winands and Grau, “Socio-educational Work,” 1–17. 4. Gabriel and Zeyn, “Die unabhängigen Fanprojekte,” 27–32. 5. Wensierski and Puchert, “Die Jugendkulturen der Fußballfans,” 260. 6. Koordinationsstelle Fanprojekte bei der dsj, “Fanprojekte.” 7. The German term Fanprojekte allows the fallacy that these are projects of supporters. This is often wrongly received. Since their inception, they have been an offering from social workers to supporters. The term is now used synonymously for social work with football supporters; this is also the case in this chapter. 8. Winands and Grau, “Socio-educational Work,” 7. 9. Ibid., 8. 10. Wohnig and Fritz, “Räume und Orte politischer Bildung,” 48–52. 11. Fritz and Bolten, “Zur Frage der medienpädagogischen,” 158–77. 12. Schruth and Simon, “Strafprozessualer Reformbedarf.” 13. Thalheim, “Ultras und der Fußball-Event,” 220–39. 14. Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns: Band 2. 15. Ibid., 192. 16. Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns: Band 1. 17. Ibid., 539. 18. Gängler and Rauschenbach, “Halbierte Verständigung,” 145–68. 19. Habermas, “Demokratie oder Kapitalismus?,” 59–70. 20. Ahlrichs and Fritz, “Mehr als nur Sport,” 45–56. 21. Gallacher, “Sporting Success?,” 11–21. 22. Ibid., 15. 23. Gessmann, Mit Nietzsche im Stadion, 109–32. 24. Doidge and Lieser, “The Importance of Research,” 833–40. 25. Kathöfer and Kotthaus, Block X, 169. 26. Kern, “Die Polizei im Neoliberalismus,” 223–34. 27. Nationaler Ausschuss Sport und Sicherheit, “Nationale Konzept Sport.” 28. Winands and Grau, “Socio-educational Work,” 4–6. 29. International Federation of Social Workers, “What Is Social Work?”

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30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Gängler and Rauschenbach, “Halbierte Verständigung,” 151. Richter, “Pädagogik des Sozialen,” 47–59. Gabriel and Zeyn, “Die unabhängigen Fanprojekte,” 29. Ibid., 28–29. Schruth and Simon, “Strafprozessualer Reformbedarf,” 16. Ibid., 48–50. Ibid., 50. Ibid, 50. Winands and Grau, “Socio-educational Work,” 7. Fritz and Bolten, “Zur Frage der medienpädagogischen,” 172–74. Gabriel, “Fußballfans sind keine Verbrecher,” 47–55. Kathöfer and Kotthaus, Block X, 164–68. Fritz and Bolten, “Zur Frage der medienpädagogischen.” Kathöfer and Kotthaus, Block X, 169. Fritz and Bolten, “Zur Frage der medienpädagogischen,” 168. Ibid., 173–74. Pütter, “Polizei und Soziale Arbeit.” Albus, “Fanprojekte und Fansozialarbeit,” 83–92. Mayring, Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse, 12. This and the following interview segments were translated by the author. Bild-Zeitung is a German national appearing yellow press newspaper. It is the most widely read German newspaper and at the same time by far the most criticized print media by the German Press Council. The newspaper tends to exaggerate and often calls for law and order. Gängler and Rauschenbach, “Halbierte Verständigung,” 158. Ibid., 168. Lindenberg and Lutz, “‘You Can’t Walk,’” 21–25. Richter, “Pädagogik des Sozialen,” 54–58. Fritz and Clark, “When They Kick,” 213–23. Deutscher Berufsverband, “Bündnis für.” Albus, “Fanprojekte und Fansozialarbeit,” 90–91. Blum, “Fußballfans,” 115–22. unser fußball, “Unser Fußball.” Habermas, Faktizität und Geltung, 52. Ibid., 457. Fritz and Bolten, “Zur Frage der medienpädagogischen,” 172. Kurth and Hiller, “Konstruktion von Angsträumen,” 211–28.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

Fabian Fritz

Bibliography Ahlrichs, Rolf, and Fabian Fritz. “Mehr als nur Sport? Demokratiebildung in und um den Sportverein: Empirische Schlaglichter aus aktuellen Forschungsprojekten” [More than just sport? Creating democracy in and around the sports club: Empirical illuminations from current research projects]. standpunkt sozial [standpoint social] 30, no. 2–3/2020 (2021): 45–56. Albus, Jannis. “Fanprojekte und Fansozialarbeit: (Wirkungs-)Erwartungen im Spannungsfeld von Sicherheit und Adressat*innenorientierung” [Fan projects and fan social work:

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(effect)-expectations in the contentious areas of safety and receiver orientation]. standpunkt sozial [standpoint social] 30, no. 2–3/2020 (2021): 83–92. Blum, Alice. “Fußballfans als politische Akteur*innen” [Football fans as political players]. In Fußball als Soziales Feld [Football as social field], edited by Werner Thole, Nicolle Pfaff and Hans-Georg Flickinger, 115–22. Wiesbaden: Springer, 2019. Deutscher Berufsverband für Soziale Arbeit e.V. [German Social Workers Association]. “Bündnis für ein Zeugnisverweigerungsrecht in der Sozialen Arbeit (BfZ)” [Federation for a Right to Refuse to Give Evidence in Social Work]. DBSH, 28 January 2020. Retrieved 5 April 2021, https://www.dbsh.de/profession/haltung-derprofession/zeugnis verweigerungsrecht/buendnis-fuer-ein-zeugnisverweigerungsrecht-inder-sozialenarbeit-bfz.html Doidge, Mark, and Martin Lieser. “The Importance of Research on the Ultras: Introduction.” Sport in Society 21, no. 6 (2018): 833–40. Fritz, Fabian, and Ricarda Bolten. “Zur Frage der medienpädagogischen Kompetenzanforderungen an Fanprojekt-Mitarbeiter_innen an einem Beispiel von Berichterstattung im Spannungsfeld Fans und Polizei” [On the question of media education competence requirements for fan project employees using an example from reporting in the area of conflict between fans and the police]. Fußball und Gesellschaft [Football and society] 1, no. 2 (2020): 158–77. Fritz, Fabian, and Zoe Clark. “When they kick at your front door: Zum aktuellen Verhältnis von stationären Wohngruppen der Heimerziehung und der Polizei. Ergebnisse des Panels “Jugendhilfe und Polizei” auf dem Bundeskongress Soziale Arbeit 2018.” [When they kick at your front door: On the current relationship of stationary living groups of residential care and the police. Results of the panel “Youth welfare and police” at the Federal Congress of Social Work 2018]. In Dressur zur Mündigkeit?!: Über die Verletzung von Kinderrechten in der Heimerziehung [Training to mature?!: About the violation of children’s rights in residential care], edited by Lea Degener, Timm Kunstreich, Tilman Lutz, Sinah Mielich, Florial Muhl, Wolfgang Rosenkötter and Jorrit Schwagereck, 213–23. Weinheim und Basel: Beltz Juventa, 2020. Gabriel, Michael. “Fußballfans sind keine Verbrecher!? Das schwierige Verhältnis zwischen Polizei und Fanprojekten” [Football fans are not criminals!? The difficult relationship between police and fan projects]. In Dasselbe in grün? Aktuelle Perspektiven auf das Verhältnis von Polizei und sozialer Arbeit [The same in green? current perspectives on the relationship between police and social workers], edited by Kurt Möller, 47–55. Weinheim, Munich: Juventa, 2010. Gabriel, Michael, and Julia Zeyn. “Die unabhängigen Fanprojekte: Jugendarbeit im Spannungsfeld von Partizipation, Repression und Abschottung.” [The independent fan projects: Youth work on the tension between participation, repression, and isolation] Sozial Extra 43, no. 1 (2019): 27–32. Gallacher, Grace. “Sporting Success? A critical criminology of children’s grassroots football.” Antigone 26, 1–2/2019 (2020): 11–21. Gängler, Hans, and Thomas Rauschenbach. “Halbierte Verständigung: Sozialpädagogik zwischen Kolonialisierung und Mediatisierung lebensweltlichen Eigensinns” [Bisected understanding: Social pedagogy between colonization and mediatization of material obstinacy]. In Verstehen oder kolonialisieren? Grundprobleme sozialpädagpgischen Handelns und Forschens [Comprehension or colonization? Foundational problems of social pedagogical action and research], edited by Siegfried Müller. 2., erw. Aufl., 145–68. Bielefeld: Kleine, 1986.

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Gessmann, Martin. Mit Nietzsche im Stadion: Der Fussball der Gesellschaft [In the stadium with Nietzsche: Football in society]. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2014. Habermas, Jürgen. Faktizität und Geltung: Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats [Between facts and norms: Contribution to a discourse theory of law and democracy]. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992. ———. Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns: Band 1 [The theory of communicative action: Volume 1]. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995. ———. Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns: Band 2 [The theory of communicative action: Volume 2]. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995. ———. “Demokratie oder Kapitalismus? Vom Elend der nationalstaatlichen Fragmentierung in einer kapitalistisch integrierten Weltgesellschaft” [Democracy or capitalism? From the misery of the fragmentation of the nation state in a capitalistically integrated global community], Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik [ Journal for German and international politics] 58, no. 4 (2013): 59–70. International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW). “What Is Social Work?” IFSW, 16 April 2020. Retrieved 29 March 2021, https://www.ifsw.org/what-is-social-work/ Kathöfer, Sven, and Jochem Kotthaus. Block X—Unter Ultras: Ergebnisse einer Studie über die Lebenswelt Ultra in Westdeutschland [Block X—Among ultras: Results of a study on the ultra environment in West Germany]. Beltz Juventa: Weinheim/Basel, 2013. Kern, Anna. “Die Polizei im Neoliberalismus” [The police in neoliberalism]. In Kritik der Polizei [Critique of the police], edited by Daniel Loick, 223–34. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2018. Koordinationsstelle Fanprojekte bei der dsj [Coordination and Assistance of fan projects in the dsj]. “Fanprojekte: Aachen bis Zwickau” [Fan projects: From Aachen to Zwickau]. KOS, 20 March 2021. Retrieved 29 March 2021. https://www.kos-fanprojekte.de/ index.php?id=von-aachen-bis-zwickau Kurth, Anne-Kathrin, and Chris Hiller. “Konstruktion von Angsträumen in der Fußball Berichterstattung” [Construction of spaces of fear in football reporting]. In Geographien des Fußballs: Themen rund ums runde Leder im räumlichen Blick [Geographies of football: Themes all around the round leather in spatial connections], edited by Jan L. Wilhelm, 208–31. Potsdam: Universitätsverlag, 2018. Lindenberg, Michael, and Tilman Lutz. “‘You Can’t Walk a Dead Dog’: Überlegungen zur polizeilichen Jugendsachbearbeitung mit MEIKs aus Sicht Sozialer Arbeit” [You can’t walk a dead dog: Considerations for police youth processing with MEIKs from the perspective of social work]. Zeitschrift für Jugendkriminalrecht und Jugendhilfe (ZJJ) [ Journal of juvenile criminal law and youth welfare] 31, no. 1 (2021): 21–25. Mayring, Philipp. Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse: Grundlagen und Techniken [Qualitative content analysis: Fundamentals and techniques]. 11th edition. Weinheim und Basel: Beltz, 2010. Nationaler Ausschuss Sport und Sicherheit. “Nationale Konzept Sport und Sicherheit (NKSS)” [National concept of sport and security]. KOS, 20 January 2012. Retrieved 25 August 2019. https://www.kosfanprojekte.de/fileadmin/user_upload/material/ sozialearbeit/Richtlinien-undRegeln/nkss_konzept2012.pdf Pütter, Norbert. “Polizei und Soziale Arbeit: Eine Bibliographie” [Police and social work: A bibliography]. CILIP, 11 June 2015. Retrieved 15 October 2020. https://www.cilip .de/2015/06/11/polizei-und-soziale-arbeiteine-bibliografie/ Richter, Helmut. “Pädagogik des Sozialen: Bildungsbündnis in Demokratiebildung” [Pedagogy of the social: Educational alliance in democratization]. Widersprüche [Contradictions] 36, no. 142 (2016): 47–59.

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Schruth, Peter, and Titus Simon. “Strafprozessualer Reformbedarf des Zeugnisverweigerungsrechts in der Sozialen Arbeit: Am Beispiel der sozialpädagogischen Fanprojekte im Fußball” [The need for reform of criminal procedure for the right to refuse to give testimony in social work: The example of social educational fan projects in football]. KOS, 15 December 2020. Retrieved 30 March 2021. https://www.kosfanprojekte.de/ fileadmin/user_upload/2020_Rechtsgutachten_2._Auflage.pdf Thalheim, Vinzenz. “Ultras und der Fußball-Event: Vom Miteinander-Machen zum Selber Machen und dem Machen der Sozialen Arbeit” [Ultras and the football-event: From working with each other to working alone and the acts of social work]. FuG – Zeitschrift für Fußball und Gesellschaft [FuG—Journal for football and society] 1, 2/2019 (2020): 220–39. unser fußball. “Unser Fußball—basisnah, nachhaltig, zeitgemäß” [Our football—grassroots, sustainable, contemporary]. unser fußball [our football], 27 June 2020. Retrieved 5 April 2021, https://unserfussball.jetzt/ von Wensierski, Hans-Jürgen, and Lea Puchert. “Die Jugendkulturen der Fußballfans im 20. Jahrhundert” [The youth culture of football fans in the 20th century]. In Rekonstruktive Jugend(kultur)forschung: Flashback—Flashforward [Reconstructive youth (cultural) research: Flashback—Flashforward], edited by Anja Gibson, Merle Hummrich, and Rolf Torsten Kramer, 249–68. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2020. Winands, Martin, and Andreas Grau. “Socio-educational work with football fans in Germany: principles, practice and conflicts.” Soccer & Society 1, no. 4 (2016): 1–17. Wohnig, Alexander, and Fabian Fritz. “Räume und Orte politischer Bildung: ‘Bildung am Millerntor’—das Fußballstadion als Lernort” [Spaces and places of political education: „Education at Millerntor”—the football stadium as a site of learning]. Journal für politische Bildung 30, no. 2 (2020): 48–52.

CHAPTER 13



Countering Contingency Aesthetics and Fan Codetermination in German Football ALEX HOLZNIENKEMPER

Introduction Especially since the Bundesliga’s experience of rapid commercialization that began in the 1990s, club fans and management have carried out contentious feuds that have caught the public’s attention. By publicly challenging management, German football culture differs from the fan culture encountered in American professional athletics, but also from the remaining Big 5 of European football: England, France, Italy, and Spain. European football culture entails strong participation by fans, which contrasts with the more passive, entertainment-driven attitude that marks US professional sports culture. While crowd involvement in US sports is often top-down, with fans reacting to prompts from a master of ceremonies, football culture in Europe is bottom-up, with fans crafting intricate choreographies in support of their team, or in opposition to the adversary. Even within the European Big 5, Germany embodies a uniquely proactive engagement that extends beyond any stadium fan block and reaches all the way to club management. Under the banner of Mitbestimmung (codetermination), a term central to labor politics as well, German football fans fight to have a say, to play a meaningful role in how clubs operate at the highest levels. Mitbestimmung is the term most prominently invoked by German fans in public displays, and the participatory element that it denotes is mirrored in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s substantive notion of Teilhabe (sharing or taking part in) as it constitutes the aesthetic experience. This public fight for Mitbestimmung and Teilhabe is in part a cathartic response to a more broadly perceived subjection to contingency. Football culture offers a certain reprieve from otherwise contingent, at times hegemonic, norms

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that shape everyday lives. In this sense, football culture denotes a social sphere that is quite literally extraordinary, delimited from everyday imperatives, responsibilities, and burdens. Yet German football culture in particular is marked by its concerted effort to combat a consumerist attitude toward its object, an attitude otherwise deeply ingrained in late modern everyday life. What is more, whereas the contingency that affects social norms can foster deep social frustration, sports (and football in particular) embrace and thrive on the contingency that constitutes the game’s rules. My central contention is that sport in general, and football in particular embraces contingency and transforms it into aesthetic forms that resonate on a deep level with modern cultures. This chapter proceeds from broad reflections on football culture to the more particular aspects that make German football culture unique. First, I highlight how sports generally entail an embrace of contingency. On this understanding, contingency is viewed as a broad social challenge, but one that is at times not fought but rather embraced and turned into something positive, even beautiful. Football embodies a particularly emphatic embrace of contingency, setting it apart from other sports. While all sports hinge on contingent rules, the degree to which football seeks out contingency and makes it a constitutive element of the sport stands out. Tying these broader reflections on contingency in football to the German aesthetic tradition, we can articulate an aesthetics of football in light of canonical readings of aesthetics vis-à-vis art and nature. These reflections build chiefly on Johan Huizinga, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Georg Bertram, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, the latter two of which offer critical reflections on Kant and Hegel. Their views on artistic autonomy, play, and social practice help us articulate football’s unique aesthetic appeal. Finally, the shift in focus offered by Bertram and Gadamer, a shift that highlights how participation is not merely tangential to aesthetic experience, but rather constitutive of it, can help us understand why the ideal of Mitbestimmung has captured the minds of so many passionate German football fans. It is this fight for Mitbestimmung that both embodies the rejection of external contingency and embraces the beauty of contingency contained within football.

Contingency Let us first outline this chapter’s view of the admittedly sweeping notion of contingency by following the lead of David Wellbery, who contrasts contingency with necessity. Wellbery, in turn, rests on reflections from Aristotle and Aquinas. “The contingent is, for Aristotle as well as Luhmann, that which is possible otherwise, the contradictory of necessity. Thomas Aquinas distinguished three varieties of contingent occurrences: those which are seldom, those which derive from choice, and those that result from accident (a casu vel fortuna). My

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concern is with the last of these: the accidental, random, or chance event, or, as some would have it, the event tout court as that which destabilizes and disrupts lawlike regularity.”1 Wellbery looks at the idea of contingency with an eye toward narratology specifically, and he reminds us of how central this idea of contingency is in Western modernity’s self-understanding. Citing Nietzsche, Wellbery states, “The fundamental project of modernism [is] the attempt to capture and bring to consciousness.  . . . The emergent moment of the New, the historical present, an attempt which, however, can only be carried out in a representational construct that, by its very nature, betrays the moment, condemning it to repetition.”2 This highlights a certain tension arising from our modern view of knowledge. The epistemological tension arises from the parallel developments of both grand encyclopedic projects spurred on by the scientific method and an increase in awareness that language itself (and thus knowledge) is ultimately contingent. Language radically hinges on chance and how speakers contextually establish meanings for concepts and words. Whereas Wellbery emphasizes the positive embrace of the contingent in investigating narrative over time, I want to highlight the far-reaching notion of epistemological contingency, as well as its associated notion of normative contingency and their ripple effects in modern society. These are not rival understandings of contingency, but rather different aspects of the same notion put forward by Aquinas, “the accidental, random, or chance event.”3 Concerning epistemological and normative contingency, the rise of the scientific method and move away from metaphysical worldviews toward an immanent frame4 provide the historical backdrop for modernity’s reassessment of how and what we can know. Whether for the ancient Greeks or medieval Christianity in Europe, divine will was believed to permeate and legitimize the social order, in everything from ontology to politics, the arts, caste systems, and epistemology. Faced with uncertainty, metaphysical explanations sufficed to explain (or sidestep) the unknown and the unknowable. Such epistemology operates under the presumption of divinely ordained necessity, as Wellbery alludes to, which stands in contrast with the epistemological contingency we believe we have awoken to in modernity. The rise of the scientific method entails both a dramatic increase of empirically verifiable knowledge and a slowly increasing awareness of the limits of scientific knowledge. After all, empirical science still says very little about questions of meaning and value—that is, about norms in terms of their epistemic validity. Modernity is thus marked by an epistemological perplexity; on the one hand, there is an increase in factual knowledge, on the other, there is an increased awareness of epistemic fallibility concerning values and norms.5 Football culture is but one of many possible responses to such epistemological contingency, which in turn touches on two aspects—both norms and

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forms—and arises from human fallibility. In the field of epistemology, this is commonly addressed in terms of the fact/value dichotomy.6 It has been both an achievement and a persistent challenge of modernity to come to terms with the realization that social norms are human-made, and hence fallible, and that their given form—generally speaking: language—is human-made, and hence contingent. The German aesthetic tradition has long wrestled with this contingency; extending said tradition highlights how an aesthetics of football expands the conventional art versus nature binary of aesthetic theory. Admittedly, this may all seem unrelated to the particular phenomenon of German football culture, but we are looking at nothing less than a rigorous aesthetics concerning football, an aesthetic appeal that is tied into a cultural industry nearly unmatched in its global reach and economic scale. It also happens to be a modern phenomenon, so questions at the heart of modernism, modernity, and even postmodernity, are of the utmost concern for a deep understanding of football culture(s). It is worth bearing in mind that the cognitive dimension figures prominently for German philosophers of aesthetics, from Kant to Hegel to Gadamer. If cognition figures in these broad reflections on the aesthetic experience of art and nature, then it likely also figures in the aesthetics of football and sports at large. As far as football is concerned, we will examine contingency at two levels. On the one hand, contingency figures in the game itself, in that it is constituted by contingent rules. In this sense, we are dealing with normative contingency applied to a particular game. This is not restricted to sports alone. Even the most cursory glance at how the rules of a given sport evolve reveals a high degree of contingency. While various ball sports in English public schools initially seemed to have more in common than not, the attempt at unifying ball sport rules ended up solidifying differences and establishing two separate games: association football and rugby.7 On the other hand, German fan culture responds to a more far-reaching sense of contingency at a political-cultural level.8 Mitbestimmung arguably serves as the central rallying point of German football fan culture, as it does in other realms as well, most notably in labor politics. Part of what distinguishes German and European economies from the American economic model is the former’s insistence on codetermination. “Perhaps the signal Christian Democratic commitment in the economic sphere was to codetermination: the idea that the worker, organized into free and independent trade unions, had the right to a share in either the management or the profits of his firm.”9 Just as in the economic realm, German football fans go to great lengths to ensure that they have a say in the management of football clubs. It should be noted, however, that having a say in management is conceived of in rather direct opposition to any personal economic gain. It is precisely such profit-driven motivation that grassroots activism seeks to counter, insisting instead on the Gemeinnützigkeit (common good) many football clubs invoke in

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their founding documents.10 The emphasis on these two levels (the game and the broader political-economic background) reveals subtle differences regarding our understanding of contingency.11 Concerning the contingent rules of the game, contingency denotes randomness, which is the opposite of necessity. In the realm of fan culture and codetermination, contingency is not so much marked as utterly random, but rather as hegemonic. Profit-driven management models are perceived to threaten more organic, grassroots-inspired fan participation and involvement.

Sports and Football as Responses to Contingency Let us bear in mind that modern grappling with contingency frequently unfolds in light of normativity. The epistemological conundrum of modernity is marked by the simultaneous increase in factual knowledge and decrease in conventional certainty concerning norms and values. The birth of social critique and theory have spurned persistent charges of contingency against various specific fields of normativity, spanning from Nietzsche and Foucault’s genealogical critiques of Christian morality and sexual norms, to Enlightenment critique in the vein of the Frankfurt School, Derridian deconstruction of normativity in language, and Queer Theory’s emphasis on antinormativity. All these schools of critique share in laying bare the historical contingency of various normative orders.12 This historical contingency of our social norms and values is thus a central, defining frustration of modern cultures, one that—subconsciously or consciously—inspires certain athletic-aesthetic engagement in response to it. Though perhaps not commonly associated with his writings on sport, Peter Handke’s essay “Die Welt im Fußball” (1965; The world in football) ties together central ideas in this chapter. For Handke, das Runde (the ball itself ) embodies the random, the unpredictable, the contingent: “But just as any other object, so too the ball is tricky. Neither its movement nor the direction or kind of movement can be calculated beforehand.  . . . The soccer ball’s spherical shape has become a symbol of incalculable chance.  . . . In football everything is said to be possible, for the leather ball is round. Just as everything else that is round, so too the soccer ball is an allegory for uncertainty, luck, and the future.”13 Handke’s emphasis on the unpredictability of the ball’s movement is not limited to soccer. Rather, a case could be made that the egg-shaped form of an American football entails less predictability in terms of its movement. Nevertheless, we can still give credence to Handke’s reflections, even if they apply more broadly to most ball sports. It is indeed the unpredictability of a sport that enables excitement among participants and spectators. Expressed more positively, the unpredictability of movements and forms points toward that

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which is possible in a given game. Where everything is possible, hope has yet to vanish. Spectatorship thrives not only on the unpredictable and the possible, but also on the unlikely and seemingly impossible: think of Leicester City winning the Premier League in 2016 or a sixteen-seed defeating a first-seed in the March Madness tournament. And even when the improbable does not occur, consolation is always nearby, such as, “There’s always next season.” The popularity of fantasy leagues, the data analytics treasure trove of statistical analysis (particularly pronounced in baseball), and the amounts spent on sports-betting all bear witness to the fundamental excitement of envisioning and experiencing the unlikely and the improbable. All the computing power in the world cannot render the contingency of sports law-like. Aside from the excitement and hope inspired by the possible and unpredictable, the Dutch anthropologist Johan Huizinga draws our attention to the idea of the extraordinary, or rather the extramundane. In his 1938 volume Homo Ludens (Man the player), Huizinga puts forward a cultural anthropology that grounds culture in play. Emphasizing the developmental primacy of play before culture, Huizinga offers a corrective of accounts that explain play or game as standing in for something else, as pointing toward a separate cultural object or sphere that is what sport truly aims at beneath its surface appearance. Over and against such stand-in analyses, Huizinga sets his eyes on the anthropological ubiquity of play and game in culture and nature, and—more importantly—its extraordinary nature.14 In our natural disposition to engage in “mere” play, we seek to delimit a particular time and space from the prevailing normative orders that shape our everyday lives. “Play is not ‘ordinary’ or ‘real’ life. It is rather a stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own.  . . . This ‘only pretending’ quality of play betrays a consciousness of the inferiority of play compared with ‘seriousness,’ a feeling that seems to be something as primary as play itself.”15 Of course, Huizinga is quick to point out that such emphasis on the extraordinary promptly establishes an alternative order in its own right, and also that the playfulness and joy in play quickly turns into deadly seriousness. Huizinga’s essay is expansive, reflecting on play as a whole, and not on a specific sport or game. Nevertheless, his reflections highlight general cultural phenomena that allow us to investigate the particularity of football. Within his anthropology of play, one central reflection concerns the relationship between play and ordinary life. He attests to the autonomy of play, its distancing from the ordinary, and the ultimate establishment of its own normative order. Two other thinkers echo this sense of extraordinary autonomy in sport. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht states as much concerning sports in general,16 and Jürgen Kaube emphasizes the degree to which football is the paradigmatic example of removal from the ordinary and predictable:

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For starters, there is its improbability. Soccer does not emulate anything else. There is nothing aside from the soccer pitch that it reminds us of. People also run, throw, punch, lift, box, jump over obstacles, dance and swim outside of arenas and sport venues. Most sports have thus evolved out of forms of movement that are ordinary, or at least show resemblance to some everyday model and remind us of social contexts such as hunts, disputes, war, celebrations or work. We could say that a bodily action becomes a sport whenever it is divorced from its ends and merely carries them out to show that one can perform them better than someone else.  . . . Soccer, by contrast, is a game that demands achievements that only make sense within this game, and nowhere else. No one kicks against a ball for certain ends unless it is within the game of soccer.17

What sets football apart from other sports, then, is the degree to which football’s driving force—kicking the ball with the foot—is removed from otherwise existentially useful movements, such as those found in hunting or battle. Countless sports are based around the distinctly human skill of accurate throwing18 or on the use of tools, yet precise use of the foot for propelling a ball is uniquely divorced from other human practices.19 The reflections from Gumbrecht, Huizinga, Handke, and Kaube bring two things to the fore: Huizinga and Gumbrecht show that, while sports and sport cultures quickly establish normative orders in their own right, the draw of sport is due in large part to its clear delineation from the normative orders of everyday life. There is a common tendency to view such delineation of sport from other realms of life as a form of retreat or escapism. Such is not a view shared by the thinkers cited here. Kaube helps us to approximate how football stands apart from other sports in terms of such a distinction, and Handke’s reflections point toward the question of contingency and possibility, and how football culture thrives in response to these concepts. Indeed, contingency stands in as the missing link between the realms of the ordinary and those of the extraordinary. Let us now turn toward the German aesthetic tradition in order to shed greater light on the relationship between concepts such as contingency, aesthetics, artistic autonomy, and how sport expands the conventional art-nature binary within which aesthetic theories have been developed.

The German Aesthetic Tradition: Art and Football as Social Practice In the German aesthetic tradition, art and nature have been the guiding cultural spheres of theoretical reflection, frequently drawing on or critiquing Kant and Hegel’s views articulated within the nature-art binary. However, sports can stand in as a third cultural sphere for reflection on aesthetics, and it even expresses foundational understandings of thought and action more clearly than

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do art and nature (particularly in the context of Gadamer’s aesthetics). In this vein, aesthetics concerns more than a mere sentiment or feeling tied to an aesthetic experience. As the writings of Kant, Hegel, and Gadamer attest to, aesthetics touches on the very act of understanding itself, even if such experience may at first seem removed from the kind of understanding we associate with scientific observation. Aesthetic experience entails a cognitive dimension that is at the heart of epistemology. One pivotal concept in discussions of aesthetics has long been the idea of artistic autonomy. As modernization entails the differentiation of cultural spheres formerly bound more closely together by theo-political institutions and norms, these spheres become increasingly autonomous from each other.20 But aesthetic theories emphasize a particularly strong detachment of art from its former ties to the patronage of the Catholic Church and royal courts. It is a commonplace to hear dismissals of modern art particularly on grounds of such autonomy, or detachment from apparent meaning. How often we hear dismissals such as, “My five-year old could’ve painted that!” when someone confronts particularly abstract, seemingly order-less art. Part of Georg Bertram’s intention is to question common views of artistic autonomy, especially as far as its purported detachment from other human practices is concerned. Bertram does not dismiss notions of artistic autonomy wholesale, though. As a matter of fact, he acknowledges that any conceptual response to the question “What is art?” will inevitably entail highlighting art’s distinctiveness from other spheres of cultural productivity21 (i.e., definitions ex negativo). So far, our own understanding of football has been similarly negatively defined—football as not the ordinary—but a more substantive notion will emerge. Over and against such a negative definition of art, Bertram draws on Kant and Hegel to emphasize art’s cognitive dimension. Thus, on Kant’s understanding of a Geschmacksurteil (judgment of taste), aesthetic experience stimulates insight, even if not necessarily a singular, coherent insight. Rather, aesthetic experience brings to the fore our very capacity for cognition. “In the experience of beauty, which is expressed in the judgment of taste, a subject thereby assures themself of their capacity for cognition. Kant makes this point by speaking of ‘cognition in general’: The judgment of taste does not articulate insights, but rather an experience of the capacity for cognition, thereby expressing insight in this sense in the first place.”22 While the increase in awareness of our capacity for insight is a substantive good on Kant’s account, it nevertheless remains (at least partially) a definition ex negativo in the sense that the aesthetic experience does not yield a concrete insight but is rather an experience of a potential. It enlivens us, especially our cognitive senses, and is thus valuable, but it does not produce articulate knowledge, at least not immediately. Hegel similarly recognizes and accentuates art and beauty’s cognitive capacity, but his view differs in that he insists that

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cognizance thus gained must also be concrete. It cannot be a general activity without tangible insight. Furthermore, he calls to mind the fact that two other spheres—religion and philosophy—also enliven our basic capacity for insight, but that art is distinguished by doing so in a sensory, vivid fashion.23 Bertram ultimately seeks to correct conventional understandings of artistic autonomy. He acknowledges the merit of Kant and Hegel’s reflections for drawing attention to aesthetic experience as inspiring introspection, but this introspection remains merely theoretical. “While we certainly seek to make contact with beautiful objects, we do not carry out certain actions with them or in reference to them.”24 Such an understanding is representative of what have become common critiques of Kantian thought as ultimately too monological and abstracted from lived experience. It posits a simplistic relationship of observer and object, a museum visitor viewing a canvas in front of her, “dwelling in ambiguity,”25 and experiencing some undefined cognitive stimulation of her individual psyche. Bertram builds on the cognitive aspect, but emphasizes the social dynamic at play, the social practice that constitutes art reception. This view homes in on the dialogical, intersubjective dimension of art and its reception, prioritizing the dynamic social practice over the singular, finished product—the work of art. Three points are worth highlighting. One, as far as Bertram’s shift from an autonomy paradigm to one of social praxis is concerned, sport cultures with strong spectatorship arguably embody this intersubjective dynamism even more forcefully than art reception does. Especially in filled football stadiums, there is an ongoing, complex relationship between players and fans, with home and away games changing the dynamic of the game. It is immediate, whereas reception of art can be slow and cumbersome, sometimes lasting centuries. Two, concerning art being viewed as autonomous and football as being particularly divorced from other spheres of life, we also observe a both-and relationship similar to the one Bertram articulates in the context of art. Indeed, football is radically extraordinary, as is art. Both function as reprieves from more mundane normative orders, and yet they establish new orders of their own making, intentionally distinct from more pervasive norms. They may even become so meaningful in their own right that they permeate the ordinary lives of fans. And three, sports culture can be viewed as a linking addendum to Kant and Hegel’s more theoretically-minded reflections on aesthetics. Where they see in the aesthetic experience of art and nature an impulse for theoretical cognition without a concomitant impulse for action, the aesthetic experience brought on by sports inspires action. The symbiotic relationship between supporting fans and players unfolds as an ebb and flow of excitement and deflation, each playing off of the others’ actions. In comparing and contrasting sport aesthetics with art aesthetics, one question to ask is whether sport aesthetics offer up much at all in terms of theoretical cognition.

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Returning to Gadamer and Bertram, an aesthetics of football emerges that extends Kant and Hegel further, beyond the binary of art and nature, which has been the centerpiece of aesthetics. Though they highlight the cognitive dimension of aesthetic experience, these thinkers disagree on which realm enjoys a primacy over the other. Their analyses overlap significantly, with each developing an understanding of aesthetic experience in terms of how beauty transmits meaning to the individual observer. They agree on what beauty does, and they agree on how artistic and natural beauty differ. Whereas artistic beauty contains a more explicitly defined cognitive content, natural beauty remains underdetermined, but nevertheless inspires an interest in what is beautiful, causing the observer to think about what is good and what is beautiful in more general terms. An artwork’s more predetermined meaning will guide the observer toward a more tangible idea of a particular good. In his retracing of their thought in Truth and Method, Gadamer draws our attention to Kant’s prioritization of natural beauty over artistic beauty, then turns this prioritization on its head: The conclusiveness of Kant’s argument is impressive, but he does not employ the appropriate criteria for the phenomenon of art. One can make a counterargument. The advantage that natural beauty has over artistic beauty is only the other side of natural beauty’s lack of specific expressive power. Thus, contrariwise, one can see the advantage of art over natural beauty in the fact that the language of art is a demanding language which does not offer itself freely and vaguely for interpretation according to one’s mood, but speaks to us in a significant and definite way. And the wonderful and mysterious thing about art is that this definiteness is by no means a fetter for our mind, but in fact opens up the area in which our freedom operates in the play of our mental faculties.26

As does Hegel, so Gadamer emphasizes artistic beauty’s more tangible transmission of meaning. And what is more, art does not fall into the trap of overdetermining the meaning, for this would undermine and manipulate the observer’s own capacity for understanding a work of art. Good art still allows us to dwell in ambiguity and reach our own conclusions, interpretations, and understandings. While natural beauty contains no obvious meaning, Kant highlights such beauty’s ability to inspire us to ponder beauty and the good, and to see the good in nature. What Kant’s and Hegel’s distinctions boil down to is the difference between one form of beauty that carries an elusive, albeit intelligible meaning, and one form that contains scarcely a discernable meaning, but a vague inspiration to ponder meaning per se. What makes art nevertheless challenging is the elusiveness of its purported meaning. The form an artwork takes—be it prose, painting, sculpture, performance, or other—often fluctuates between blunt opacity and obvious message. Rarely does an artwork enjoy a thorough-going reception if it entails an obvious ethical imperative that requires little interpretive engagement. In every

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work of art, the interpretive challenge stems from our need to interpret the form chosen by our fellow human, the artist. The form itself—language, imagery, sound, color—is contingent and always entails uncertainty in deciphering it. Natural beauty, by contrast and by definition, is not contingent. It is necessary. But deciphering a certain meaning becomes all the more improbable. Within this framework of nature, art, and Bertram’s dynamic and intersubjective understanding of art, the aesthetic experience of sports assumes a unique and complimentary third space that links the interpretable meaning of artistic beauty and the ethical disposition inspired by natural beauty. Sport inspires meaningful action for both spectators and participants. Where Gadamer highlights the strength of art’s relationship to cognition, we can see a parallel relationship between sports and action. Gadamer states that what makes art so wonderful and mysterious is its ability to neither under- nor overdetermine possible interpretations of a work’s content. Similarly, sports open up realms of possible actions, which themselves are based on possible interpretations and readings of past, contemporary, and future actions on the field. Furthermore, the respective relationships between art and its possible interpretations, and sports and its possible actions are both marked by the dynamic interaction of doer and observer (in the case of art: artist and reader/observer, in the case of sports: player and spectator). The prolonged reception of art finds its hyperaccelerated counterpart in the immediate reception by the fan block at a football stadium. Both reception histories rest on the complex interweaving of action, creation, and interpretation, often resulting in feedback loops that sustain yet further creation, interpretation, explication, and so on. Where a book might receive initial critical reception by a reading public and enjoy deeper explication by an author in media interviews, so the collective cheers of a stadium crowd react to an initial action on the field and might in turn hint at an emerging passing lane, spurning players on the pitch to see a space opening for the next pass that could lead to a goal. The traditional binary of aesthetics includes at least a third sphere of application. Whereas natural beauty entails an underdetermined meaning that might inspire ethical action, and artistic beauty thrives on a presumed balance of neither under- nor overdetermined meaning and potentially ethical action, sports aesthetics celebrates the creation of a realm of possibly beautiful actions in response to a narrowly defined meaning. Admittedly, the meaningfulness of actions in sports is almost laughably minimal (“Win!”). Nevertheless, it clearly resonates on such a broad scale that it should not be dismissed. One part of what defines play—at least in Huizinga’s account—is its autonomy from everyday normative orders. It is a realm unto its own that serves as a reprieve from mundane norms. If we want to further unpack the simplistic imperative to win, we can say that meaningful action in sports consists in performing the given sport’s defining end better than the opponent(s). In team sports, this usually means scoring more points (by

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various different calculations across sports); in individual competitions such as track and field, it entails performing better by means of a certain agreed-on standard (speed, height, distance, etc.). Given the preoccupation of aesthetics with perceived beauty’s cognitive capacity, how do sports and art engage the contingency of norms and forms, respectively? Especially in modern art, the contingency of its form has been wholeheartedly embraced. Though most canonical artists surely master their respective artistic techniques, traditional formalist norms have been disregarded, and the artist’s challenge consists in producing forms that evoke cognitive reflection by the observer. Many are still likely to argue that modern (visual) art has become under-determined, in that deciphering any meaning from an artwork becomes a near-impossible challenge, but, ultimately, it is art that evokes a lasting, interactive reception and can enjoin itself to the canon. Art’s form is thus contingent, and its meaning often remains abstract, though the abstract meaning and contingent form initiate something of a collective negotiation, a reflection on concepts and forms themselves. Over time, this can turn into more tangible action by producer and recipients. Bertram calls this prolonged, dynamic process an Aushandlungsgeschehen (a sustained process of negotiation). Sport, by contrast, is marked by forms that are over-determined and regimented: running, passing, throwing, catching, kicking, hitting, shooting are all drilled ad nauseam, to the point that they become second nature. But the beauty of the game arises as these forms are put into action within a radically contingent, delimited space and time. Whereas art provides opportunity for a pensive “dwelling in contingent ambiguity”27 entailing yet-to-be-determined action, sport commands immediate action that is naturalized-yet-spontaneous in light of rules that are radically contingent. We are left, then, with a general aesthetic of sport that resembles both a conventional view of (artistic) autonomy and Bertram’s more-dynamic, interactive aesthetics. Again, Bertram does not want to dismiss notions of artistic autonomy but emphasizes that art is not primarily defined by its detachment from other social practices. The process by which cognitive reflection on art in turn affects behavior and actions in other realms may indeed be protracted, but this tedious Aushandlungsgeschehen between producer and recipient is nevertheless “the aesthetic practice par excellence”28 on this reading. If such prolonged engagement by observers is quintessential in the realm of art, how much more so in sports then, particularly in the case of football? The feedback loop between players and fans in a football stadium is immediate and symbiotic. The contrast is apparent in how sport’s beauty arises out of forms that are borne of contingency and stupefying repetition, and that there is very little need for dwelling in the ambiguity of some abstract message. The forms and techniques are engrained to near-instinct, and the rules that constitute the game are random. Nevertheless, the beauty that is embodied and enacted in sports in general, and

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football in particular, arouses millions of spectators to jump, yell, celebrate, and cry around the globe. Sport inspires little cognitive reflection in light of ambiguous meaning, but it moves to immediate action by players and spectators alike. What is more, it inspires action in light of unpredictability and improbability. As Gumbrecht states, Beautiful plays are surprising for two reasons. Even if the specific form is what specialists call a set play—a play designed and rehearsed endless times—it will be new and surprising for the average spectator who is not familiar with the team’s playbook. But beyond that, plays that emerge in the real time of a ballgame are surprising even for coaches and the players who perform them, because they must be achieved against the unpredictable resistance of the other team’s defense. While the team in possession of the ball tries to create a play and avoid chaos, its opposing team in the defensive position tries to destroy the emerging form and precipitate chaos.29

Sport thus not only embraces contingency of norms and forms, but also crafts beauty despite and by means of this contingency and generates excitement in light of improbability and unpredictability. Part of the excitement that arises from sports is not a consistent production of beautiful plays, but rather the play that stands out for its extraordinariness, the play that stands in contrast to the largely predictable, even boring patterns of regularity. This recalls Wellbery’s definition of the contingent event as “the event tout court as that which destabilizes and disrupts law-like regularity.”30

Experience and Sharing in Football Aesthetics When it comes to understanding the particular case of German football culture—as opposed to sports in general—an argument by Gadamer proves helpful in understanding the unique character of German football enthusiasm. Though Gadamer affords the finished product, the artwork, a slightly more prominent role than does Bertram, he nevertheless devotes attention to the aesthetic experience and the degree to which it is constituted not by a singular moment, but by a process between producer and recipient. Arising out of a rich conception and articulation of experience, Gadamer underscores that spectators of an aesthetic event are more than just contingently present at the respective event. They are rather a constitutive part of it. His example of choice is drama: “The same is true of drama—it must be represented for the spectator, and yet its being is by no means just the point of intersection of the experiences that the spectators have. Rather the contrary is true, that the being of the spectator is determined by his being there present. To be present

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does not mean simply to be in the presence of something else that is there at the same time. To be present means to share.  . . . Thus to watch something is a genuine mode of sharing.”31 These reflections beg a similar question raised by Bertram: How much more so does spectatorship in a football stadium constitute participation in this sense? And how much more so even beyond the delimited space and time on the pitch? German football fans are not satisfied with playing a constitutive part of the game for ninety minutes. The most passionate fans insist on having a say in how their clubs are run at the managerial level. One of the rallying cries of contemporary German football fans is the defense of the 50+1 rule, a stipulation enacted by the Deutsche Fußball Liga (DFL; German Football League), which dictates that, within a club structure, the majority of votes has to reside with the club’s membership, even if only by a single vote.32 The rule arose during rapid commercialization and professionalization in the 1990s. In addition to the professionalization on the pitch, the most financially successful clubs professionalized the management of the football teams. The broader German phenomenon of a rich and proactive club culture generally rests on democratic grassroots structures, mainly based on paid membership in a given club. In the 1990s, teams like Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund created separate managerial structures within their club, structures largely shaped by corporatist managerial cultures. Opposition to such stakeholders arose promptly, and the 50+1 rule was adopted in order to combat the asymmetry of influence between fan members and corporate investors. The timing of the 50+1 rule seems prudent in hindsight, especially from the perspective of engaged fans. In the meantime, there are merely four teams in the topflight that do not have a distinct professional department for their respective football team. Some clubs maintain 100  percent of voting rights, such as the Rhine rivals 1. FC Köln and Borussia Mönchengladbach. But, in the past two decades, the teams with the most obvious corporate backing have become the target of many fans’ ire, whether it is the two dominating forces Bayern München and Borussia Dortmund, or less successful sides like TSG Hoffenheim 09 and Hannover 96. The undisputed villain of German football, however, is RasenBallsport Leipzig (RB Leipzig). It is the most aggressive club in trying to undermine the spirit of the 50+1 rule, inflating the cost of club membership in order to undercut a widespread involvement of local fans. Be that as it may, the obvious underlying value that German football fans have come to rally around in the past twenty-five or so years is that of Mitbestimmung, of codetermination in a team’s operation and culture. In recent years, club members have been able to establish greater influence in decision-making procedures for their teams.33 One example in particular

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stands out from 2018, in which members of 1. FC Köln were able to amend their constitution and gain ultimate say over the constitution of the professional management branch of the team. Whereas the club’s previous constitution required a simple majority of member votes in the case of the management subdivision seeking more than 25 percent nonmember participation, the new constitution requires more than a two-thirds majority for any nonmember participation in the management subdivision.34 German football culture is not necessarily unique in simply fighting for such values in how their preferred sport is run, but the conflict between the global phenomenon of corporatization of football and upholding grassroots fan involvement in team operations finds its crystallization in Germany. Fan blocks make very public, coordinated displays expressing their thirst for Mitbestimmung, and they also resort to rather demeaning displays of anger at individuals that embody the corporate hegemony in football, such as Dietmar Hopp at TSG Hoffenheim or Dietrich Mateschitz at RB Leipzig. We began our reflections with Huizinga’s understanding of game and play as preconditions for, and not merely outgrowths of, culture. On his reading, play represents a means of stepping away from more mundane social norms and needs, albeit a sphere that promptly assumes a normativity all its own. Though the fan culture fosters its own set of norms, this poised struggle for greater Mitbestimmung is nevertheless a reaction against prevailing everyday normative orders. Here, the corporatist normative order that imposes itself on much of the population’s everyday lives and routines becomes a foil against which a separate cultural sphere with more opportunity for Mitbestimmung becomes possible. The bulk of this chapter has been taken up by the more essentialist claims about the aesthetic appeal and practice of football. This German preoccupation with Mitbestimmung is more particular, and certainly not a necessary constituent of football culture in general. The two-fold dynamic Gadamer deploys to articulate the cognitive depth of the aesthetic experience in art finds a striking parallel in the aesthetic experience of the beautiful game. There is an element of drawing both players and spectators out of the ordinary, and an element of this extraordinary experience in turn reaching back into the ordinary. This is not to say that art aesthetics and sports aesthetics are the same. As mentioned above, the conceptual content in works of art figures much more prominently, and in the long run spurns (ideally, ethical) action. The conceptual content of a football match is admittedly less pronounced, but action in light of improbability and unpredictability is all the more imperative. The meaning is under-defined, but the action in light of contingent uncertainty is immediate. Against the backdrop of modernity’s sustained grappling with contingent normativity and knowledge, German football culture embodies one response

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to perceived uncertainty and precarity. The combination of the economic normative order, which imposes contingent norms on everyday life, and the contingency of knowledge in modernity, which recognizes the fallible (human) nature of norms and values, arguably fosters such uncertainty and precarity. The respite of football (among other possibilities) has proven to be a venue in which players and fans can convert such sweeping contingency into a cultural sphere of beautiful, inspiring action. Though arguably even more contingent than the everyday norms, the norms that govern football function in a cathartic way, enabling possibilities, against all odds, for beauty.

Author Alex Holznienkemper is Senior Lecturer of German at the University of New Hampshire. He recently translated Christoph Möllers’ monograph “The Possibility of Norms - Social Practice Beyond Morals and Causes” for Oxford University Press and has published in the Kleist-Jahrbuch, among other journals. For his class on German Soccer Culture, he has arranged for students to interview German soccer magazine editors and filmmakers who focus on soccer cultures.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

Wellbery, “Contingency,” 237. Ibid., 250; emphasis in original. Quoted in Wellbery, “Contingency,” 237. The term “immanent frame” is adopted from Taylor, A Secular Age. See chapter 15, The Immanent Frame, 539–53. Habermas, Nachmetaphysisches Denken; Habermas, Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, 49. For more on the fact/value dichotomy, see Putnam, The Collapse. Zeyringer, Fußball, 25–27. Admittedly, even this two-fold distinction is a gross oversimplification of the phenomena at hand. These two levels themselves could be subdivided into various particular normative systems (e.g., codified versus unwritten rules of the game, norms governing stadium attendance, etc.). Furthermore, a whole realm of other norms are intentionally sidelined in this analysis. Economic norms, for example, are largely unmentioned in this chapter. Chappel, Catholic Modern, 201. Chappel discusses the phenomenon of codetermination within the narrower scope of the evolution of Christian Democratic politics in response to European fascism, but codetermination was obviously eminently important to Social Democrats in post–World War II Europe as well.

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10. For example, see a comparative analysis of efforts by the fans of 1. FC Köln to emphasize this motivation; in particular, see “Vergleich der aktuellen Satzung.” 11. It should be noted that the respective fights for Mitbestimmung do not historically coincide. Whereas labor’s fight for Mitbestimmung begins in the late 1800s, in soccer the call for greater Mitbestimmung particularly picks up in the early 2000s as some traditional associations—most prominently FC Bayern München and Borussia Dortmund—establish separate professional management entities. 12. My much more general view of norms and normativity is in line with that put forward by Christoph Möllers whose notion includes norms both banal and sophisticated, from table manners and traffic laws to constitutions and identity. See Möllers, Die Möglichkeit. 13. Handke, Ich bin ein Bewohner, 134–35. Translation is mine; emphasis in original. 14. He lays this out clearly from the outset. See Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 9–11. 15. Ibid., 16–17. 16. Gumbrecht, In Praise, 79. 17. Kaube, Lob des Fußballs, 17–18. 18. See Roach et al., “Elastic Energy Storage.” 19. Beyond its popularity as a spectator sport, the popularity in terms of playing it also thrives on the simple accessibility to the game compared to many other sports. 20. Concerning general tendencies of differentiation, see disputes between Habermas and Luhmann, such as Habermas, Der Philosophische Diskurs, 38–59. For an overview concerning artistic autonomy and market forces today, see Rauterberg, Wie frei ist die Kunst? 21. Bertram, Kunst, 23. 22. Ibid., 63. 23. “In sinnlich-anschaulicher Form”; ibid., 74. 24. Ibid., 69. 25. This particular phrasing stems from reflections on aesthetics as a particular realm of normativity in Möllers, Die Möglichkeit, 268. 26. Gadamer, Wahrheit, 48. 27. I use this phrase as an amalgamation of ideas from both Hans-Georg Gadamer and Christoph Möllers, who refer to the gradual, unrushed consideration of beauty, of pondering its meaning over time. Gadamer speaks of “Verweilen [angesichts des Schönen]” and art’s ability to not stifle our discernment of meaning (Gadamer, Wahrheit, 57–59), whereas Möllers highlights how the ambiguity inherent in social norms contrasts with the luxury of dwelling on beauty. On his reading, social norms aim for immediate obedience and require more explicit articulation than artistic beauty. See Möllers, Die Möglichkeit, 258. 28. Bertram, Kunst, 110. 29. Gumbrecht, In Praise, 189–90. 30. Wellbery, “Contingency,” 237. 31. Gadamer, Wahrheit, 111. 32. See §16c, Section 3 of the DFB’s statutes, “Satzung,” 15–17. 33. For an overview, see Kohl, “Vereinspolitik.” 34. See “Vergleich der aktuellen Satzung” for the comparison and explanation by the volunteer organization “100 percent FC—Dein Verein.”

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Bibliography Bertram, Georg W. Kunst als menschliche Praxis. Eine Ästhetik [Art as human practice]. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014. Chappel, James. Catholic Modern—The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Wahrheit und Methode [Truth and method]. New York: Seabury Press, 1975. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. In Praise of Athletic Beauty. Cambridge: Belknap of Harvard University Press, 2006. Habermas, Jürgen. Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie [This too a history of philosophy]. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2019. ———. Der Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne [The philosophical discourse of modernity]. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988. ———. Nachmetaphysisches Denken [Post-metaphysical thought]. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992. ———. Nachmetaphysisches Denken II [Post-metaphysical thought 2]. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012. Handke, Peter. Ich bin ein Bewohner des Elfenbeinturms [I am an occupant of the ivory tower]. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972. Hösle, Vittorio. Die Krise der Gegenwart und die Verantwortung der Philosophie [The crisis of the present and the responsibility of philosophy]. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1997. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens—Vom Ursprung der Kutlur im Spiel [Homo ludens: A study of the play-element in culture]. Translated by H. Nachod. Frankfurt: Rowohlt, 2017. Kaube, Jürgen. Lob des Fußballs [In praise of soccer]. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2018. Kohl, Christopher. “Vereinspolitik im Fußball: Wie sich Mitglieder zu Demokraten entwickeln” [Club politics in soccer: How team members become democrats]. effzeh .com, 17 April 2019. Retrieved 11 February 2022, https://effzeh.com/vereinspolitikdemokratiemitglieder-analyse/ Möllers, Christoph. Die Möglichkeit der Normen [The possibility of norms]. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2015. Putnam, Hilary. The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomoy and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Rauterberg, Hanno. Wie frei ist die Kunst? [How free is art?]. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2018. Roach, Neil T., Madhusudhan Venkadesan, Michael J. Rainbow, Daniel E. Lieberman. “Elastic Energy Storage in the Shoulder and the Evolution of High-Speed Throwing in Homo.” Nature 498 (2013): 483–87. “Satzung” [Statutes]. dfb.de, Retrieved 14 Februrary 2022, https://www.dfb.de/filead min/_dfbdam/251192-02_Satzung.pdf Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge: Belknap University Press, 2007. “Vergleich der aktuellen Satzung und des Antrags auf Satzungsänderung.” [Comparison of proposed changes to club statutes]. 100profc.de, July 17, 2017. Retrieved 11 February 2022, https://www.100profc.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/100proFC-Satzungs vergleich-undErkl&C3&A4rung-170714.pdf Wellbery, David. “Contingency.” In Neverending Stories—Toward a Critical Narratology, edited by Ann Fehn, Ingeborg Hoesterey, Maria Tatar, 237–57. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Zeyringer, Klaus. Fußball—eine Kulturgeschichte. [Soccer—a cultural history]. Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag (2014).

CONCLUSION



“Fußball ist alles!”

Football’s Importance in German Society TIMM BEICHELT

Introduction

F

ootball (or sport in general) has not played a prominent role in social theory.1 Only a few scholars like Johan Huizinga,2 Norbert Elias,3 or Pierre Bourdieu4 have explicitly dealt with leisure activities, but most of the broader accounts of modern society have not touched on sports. With rationality serving as a core feature of modernity, the mixture of emotional and body involvement has kept theorists from focusing on sport as a main element of late modern life. In contrast to the weak coverage by social theory, football has gained enormous relevance in various layers of German and other European societies since the 1990s. Football serves as a major topic of the mass media. Its economic significance has grown immensely, and it has become a field for public debates. Football therefore plays an important role in collective identity building, and it has turned into an attractive playing field for various discursive actors. All of these developments have been distorted by the recent Covid-19 crisis, and it is hard to predict if football will be able to regain the importance it enjoyed before the pandemic. Written under the impression of the pandemic, the aim of this text is twofold. On the one hand, I try to offer a sociological framework which helps to understand the success of football in reflection of the German football nation—that is, the idea to understand societal developments through the lens of football. On the other, I adapt the same framework to the bond of football and society in the first year of the pandemic. In context of the growing relevance of football, various sociological approaches that reflect on the meaning of football can be leaned on. One source of inspiration is the rise of the adventure society,5 a society where lived experiences are

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primarily centered around fun and leisure and where football can be accredited a central aesthetic role.6 Another line of explanation centers around the evergrowing advent of (different forms of ) mass media and their increased need for personalization and heroization.7 A third interpretation focuses on the potential of football to integrate persons of different nationalities and origins into the majority society.8 Another line of explanation consists in identifying football as a hidden game in which important needs of late-modern consumerist societies are met in a particular way by the means of symbolic and material values.9 All these approaches bear some potential to grasp the meaning of football, and in this concluding chapter I focus on the last approach. However, the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic presents a considerable challenge. Has football not, like all major sports, suffered under a rapid decline of attention and symbolic weight? Should an analysis of the meaning of football not take into account diminishing numbers of TV spectators, the declining devotion of fans and observers, and the steep deflation of economic turnover? All of these developments happened in the summer and winter of 2020 when the restart of professional football took place under conditions that were completely different from the heydays of football in previous decades. While these developments could be seen as challenges to interpret football via its societal meaning, the perspective of enquiry can also be turned around. If certain factors have been accredited to cause a rise of cultural meaning, a decline of meaning in the absence of these factors can serve to support the interpretative framework. Against this background, the Covid-19 crisis can be used as a test case for the main argument of this text: the contradictions between individualism and communitarianism, which characterize many arenas of late-modern life, are recombined through the symbolic meanings of football. Football helps subjects to cope with opposing challenges. This argument, of course, only holds for societies in which football has become a “distinct hegemonic sports culture.”10 In countries where football has remained only one leisure activity among many, it may be other sports or other forms of cultural exchange that take over the societal function of football—namely, to enable late-modern subjects to be unique and to be a valuable community member at the same time.

The Crisis of Traditional Institutions Can social action be understood on the basis that subjects have to face cultural (or social) challenges? Such a thinking implies that social action is neither fully free nor fully determined by social situations or structures. Instead, it assumes (along with Max Weber) that human action takes place intentionally and with

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an eye on potential effects. In that tradition, two motives for social action can be identified. In one line of thinking, preferences of individuals can be understood as roots of human action. On the collective level, this means that societal aims grow out of individual interests, which are aggregated in order to satisfy social needs. This is the liberal paradigm as proposed by figures like Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, Mancur Olson, or John Rawls. In another field of reasoning, human action can be directed toward the fulfilment of societal norms. Emile Durkheim, Talcott Parsons, or Ralf Dahrendorf have presented theories that place the bonds of societies in various forms of interaction—and to a much lesser extent in individual preferences. In their views, cultures (or societies) have established collective rules of behavior to which subjects have to adhere in order not to be excluded from their respective groups. Such thinking centers on cultures, or communities, and presumes that human desires can be met only in social contexts; its most prominent contemporary schools are communitarianism and republicanism. Charles Taylor has prominently argued that modern identities cannot, and should not, be reduced to one of the two pillars. Rather, modern subjects and societies usually integrate both types of human needs into their structure.11 Indeed this is what makes modern societies ambivalent:12 subjects do not entirely adhere to traditional entities (such as families or villages) anymore, but there also exist motives that keep these same subjects from totally merging into individualist consumer society. Modernity drives individuals away from their communities, but these very same communities continue to pull individuals into their magnetic fields. From Marx to Durkheim, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel, sociologists have identified several institutions that integrate single human beings into larger entities of belonging. Their main categories were traditional work, traditional family, church, and the nation. In all these spheres, subjects are able to satisfy both their collective and their individual needs. Traditional work is organized in enterprises in which individuals are, even if in the framework of profit maximization, assigned different roles. Traditional families are widespread networks that rest on human commitment and economic aspirations to make a good private living. Churches are not only spaces of spiritual contemplation, but also mundane spheres of property collection and wealth redistribution. And, of course, the nation has been designed as a mass institution in which political will and culture are combined: “When general social conditions make for standardized, homogeneous, centrally sustained high cultures . . . , a situation arises in which well-defined . . . cultures constitute very nearly the only kind of unit with which men willingly and often ardently identify.”13 In recent decades, all of these institutions have eroded significantly. Work, in Germany as well as in other places of the world of the Organisation of Eco-

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nomic Co-operation and Development (OECD), is today fragmented, impermanent, and insecure.14 Families have often been reduced to core families due to the big wave of social mobility that started in the 1960s in West Germany and in the 1990s in East Germany. Even these core families cannot today be taken for granted when more than 30  percent of German marriages end in divorce.15 Churches have lost much of their impact with regard to both official church membership and attendance in church services.16 And, finally, European integration and globalization have put the nation-state and its systems of social security under strong pressure,17 while the European Union still lacks a strong basis of social identity. Therefore, it can be argued that those institutions that have traditionally been able to absorb the community-oriented needs of modern subjects are in severe crisis. If we turn to the conditions of the individual pursuit of happiness, we do not run into stable constellations either. The literature abounds with crises diagnoses. In times of neo-liberalism—that is, since about the 1980s—the subject has to deal with exhaustion and depression on a more or less regular basis.18 Fatigue has turned from an individual to a collective symptom.19 Many social milieus are characterized by the isolation and alienation of individuals not only in Europe, but also in the United States.20 In addition, the dissolution of nationstates has not only decreased a feeling of belonging, but also led to a sharp increase of inequality,21 which puts many individuals under economic and social pressure despite the fact that they have a stable job. It is not far-fetched to state that not only collectives, but also individuals must react to strong adaptation pressures on a more or less permanent basis. Because of this bundle of threats to preferences, roles, and identities, it can be assumed that subjects are open to cultural forms that are accessible and seem to shield them from competition, exhaustion, and the erosion of community. One of these is football. The growing relevance of football does not seem to be primarily linked to football itself. Other subsystems of society have created conditions for football to carry a collective meaning that has vanished in other strata of society. In a way, the German experience does not differ much from a good number of neighboring countries in which the relevance of the workplace (Great Britain), of the church (Italy), or the traditional family (Spain) have deteriorated because of the change of moral values and workrelated mobility. In comparison to these just named countries, the overshooting popularity of football appeared with a certain delay, which may be linked to the fact that a true crisis in the German labor market appeared only after the economic boom linked to the first years after German reunification. In turn, the omnipresent projection of societal meaning on football then coincided with the pan-European boost of professionalization in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

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Football: A Medium between Individual and Collective Challenges Why has football—and not track and field, gymnastics, theaters, or the movies—attracted the collective attention of the German football nation to such an extent? Two partial explanations come to mind. First, as Andrei Markovits and Lars Rensmann have argued, we can think of “hegemonic sports cultures” that represent “frozen spaces” within which resources are reinforced.22 In that sense, those sports become hegemonic that are most popular at a certain time. In the German case, football took over this position from gymnastics in the first decades of the twentieth century. The second reason has to do with football itself. In comparison to many other sports, the rules are simple, the entry barriers are low (not much more than a ball is needed), and it combines several ancient ideals like fighting, aesthetics, contest, and competition. By providing all these characteristics, football thus offers a whole bundle of connecting factors between individuals and societies that seek arenas of social exchange.23 In that sense, football holds the potential to respond to both individual and collective challenges that arise in late modern societies. A relatively obvious element is that football allows for individual display while the team offers the frame for success (or non-success). The history of football is full of examples that assign brilliant individual players like Franz Beckenbauer, Diego Maradona, or Zinedine Zidane to unforgettable teams. Their individual action has proven to be a precondition for sportive success. Collective achievements rely on players who are selfish and sometimes even push fairness toward its edge. Football is therefore a sport in which individualistic practices of heroic players make up a good part of the fascination as a poetic game.24 However, also the opposite is true. Successful football is, of course, a genuine product of eleven friends.25 Not only the players on the pitch, but also the fans in the stadium, form communities in which standing in for the other is essential. Core narratives of football can be related to both individualism and communitarianism in a convincing way; this does not refer only to the players themselves, but also to the broader public and its projections of football. The symbolic integration potential is especially vast if we make ourselves aware of the extreme forms professional football has taken. Football has become much more than a game of mates with markers of individualism. It seems fair to state that it has turned into an ultra-neoliberal business model. Salaries have grown beyond the imagination of ordinary spectators; children are hired as quasi-professionals in education systems of voluntary exploitation.26 Tickets and marketing products have increased in price, fans have turned into and are treated as consumers.27 For example, the official fan club of the German national team is aggressively promoted by Coca Cola.28 There is no element of professional football that is not heavily commercialized.

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Despite these imbalances, a number of factors indicate that the community building potential of football has not suffered. On the contrary, also the communitarian practices in the field of football have been taken to an extreme. The number of visitors to football games has increased steadily during the past 20 years, and tickets for most clubs of the Bundesliga were constantly sold out up to the 2019–20 season.29 Between 2008 and 2018, the most prominent German TV event of any given year was a football game. Seven of the ten most prominent German Twitter accounts and nine out of the ten most prominent German Facebook accounts are related to football. German public TV spends about 120 million euros (€) every year for football alone; no German household can escape the broadcasting fees of about €17 per month. Stadiums of (in fact) commercial football clubs are regularly subsidized by local taxes. And last but not least, the state tolerates that the highly commercial Deutscher Fußball-Bund (DFB; German Football Association) paid only about €3.7 million on taxes while its turnover added up to about €290 million in 2016.30 These developments are accompanied by fan routines that clearly show a communitarian character. Until lockdowns started in March 2020, most matches of the Bundesliga were well attended even on away games. Games usually featured extensive choreographies of fans who express identification with players, clubs, or national teams.31 The identification also has a financial side. A 2016 survey revealed that fans spend more than €1,000 per year for fan merchandise from their favorite club.32 All these practices together make for a type of fandom that “best compares to the emotional significance of the places we have grown to call ‘home,’ to the form of physical, emotional and ideological space that is best described as Heimat [homeland].”33 The ongoing relevance of communitarian elements, that seem to be stronger than in other football nations like England or Spain can probably be linked to the associational organization of football in Germany. Even if professional football is usually (not always) spun off legally, Vereine (clubs) are still at the core of most football teams. Certainly, several big business formations like RasenBallsport Leipzig (RB Leipzig) or Bayer Leverkusen compromise this principle. In the larger public and the media, however, these very examples are often treated as deplorable exceptions, which in turn strengthens the associative principle in most other Bundesliga clubs. For example, the commercial managers of professional divisions of the Vereine usually have to respond to meetings of members, and football divisions have to justify their activities to other sports within the same association. Taken together football has had, and potentially still has, a huge potential to resist challenges to its own core principles. Ideals of individualism have been pushed beyond what a community-oriented culture practice should have tolerated. Communitarian practices have persisted despite the fact that many prin-

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ciples of equality, respect, and appreciation have been violated. This refers not only to an excessive commercialization around clubs like RB Leipzig, but also to an often-lamented alienation of clubs from their traditional fan bases.34

The Pandemic as a Game Changer in the Perception of Football? If the suggestion to place football at the intersection of individual and collective challenges toward the self is correct, the Covid-19 pandemic offers an opportunity to observe the reactions within the field of football under a certain prism. The invasion of the Coronavirus into the practices of professional football opens an understanding to the broader significance of the relationship between the individual and the collective in German society. My argument is that the societal adaptations to the pandemic have strengthened a need for communityoriented symbolic action, which turned against the individualist-competitive dimension of football. Against the background of an exaggerated profit orientation in the field of professional football, the sport has no longer had the potential to bridge the gap between individualist and communitarian symbolic action. Already before the crisis, German football had increasingly taken over the function of a marker of collective identity in German society. Until German reunification in 1990, the West German team embodied the idea of a German football nation. The style of German national teams was seen as a symbol for the broader self-understanding of Germans, from the self-perception of hard workers like Berti Vogts to more cosmopolitan self-entrepreneurs like Jürgen Klinsmann. After World War II the World Championship of 1954 marked the first return of (West) Germany to the concert of respected nations in Europe. The era of Willy Brandt was said to be represented by an innovative team like the European champions of 1972, whereas down-to-earth Chancellor Helmut Kohl went along with stubborn heroes like Andreas Brehme—who scored an unjustified penalty to cement Germany’s victory in the 1990 World Cup.35 In more-recent years, the turn of the “sick man of the euro”36 in 1999 and the subsequent wretched performance at the 2000 Euro Cup to the Sommermärchen (Summer Fairy Tale) of 2006 can be linked to football. An attractive style led German teams to the semifinal of the 2010 World Cup and to the throne of the World Cup in 2014. However, the return to the front position also leads to problems of leadership, as can be seen in discontent with German hegemony in the socioeconomic sphere of the Eurozone.37 Of course, such interpretations are not plausible in the sense that they should be read as reality-based correlations. Their importance arises from the fact that the interpretation patterns are constantly reactivated in magazines like 11Freunde (11 Friends) or in the innumerable foray of social media.

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While the interpretation patterns around German football were marked by sportive success from about 2006 to 2016, more-recent interpretation patterns have taken place against a background of sportive decline, in particular with regard to the national team. After the team had been eliminated in the first round of the 2018 World Cup in Russia, a heavy debate on belonging to the German nation evolved around several players with a non-German ethnic background. Mesut Özil, a German of Turkish descent who is a practicing Muslim, appeared in a photograph with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan prior to the World Cup. After the team had been eliminated, some German media accused Özil of not having had the right spirit during the tournament. Instead of resolutely defending him, the then-DFB president Reinhard Grindel preferred to keep quiet. Manuel Neuer, the team captain, made things worse by openly questioning Özil’s national loyalty. Neuer’s most obvious interview dates from 2 August 2018—several days after Özil had stepped down from the national team: The DFB, according to Neuer, should make sure that “only those players should be recruited who are proud to be part of the national team and who give everything for playing for their country.”38 The “Özil case”39 formed the start of a crisis of meaning in German football. If even the highest representatives of German football were ready to question the identity of one of the most merited players of the national team, the offensive propagation of the commercial brand of the national football team Die Mannschaft (The Team) symbolized that the balance between community and individual had been severely damaged. While the “Özil affair” was particularly visible, there had been for a long time a debate on who exactly belongs to the football nation, in particular with regard to players of color.40 Therefore, the pandemic hit German football in a state of vulnerability. The sphere of meaning that concerned the individual was burdened by overcommercialization, and the community-oriented sphere of meaning suffered from a discrepancy between ideal and reality. What would have been needed was cutting back the competitive side of football along with a strengthening of more-credible forms of community life. Covid-19, however, imposed conditions on professional football that were not suited to regain a balance between individualism and group solidarity. On the contrary. At the beginning of the crisis, the discourses turned on the question of how the pandemic might endanger competitive fairness. The Champions League games between Atalanta Bergamo and Valencia Club de Fútbol (CF) (19 February 2020) as well as Liverpool Football Club and Atlético Madrid; 11 March 2020) had arguably contributed to the circulation of the virus in Europe.41 While mass gatherings of spectators became increasingly known as super-spreader events, the actors in the field of football had to choose between Scylla and Charybdis—namely, between facing enormous financial losses and facilitating a further dissemination of a yet unknown disease.

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On 7 March the top game between Borussia Mönchengladbach and Borussia Dortmund took place in bicycle distance from the first real Coronavirus hotspot in Heinsberg (North Rhine Westphalia). Football officials were torn between two competing aims—namely, to either stick to their framework of success and competition or to contribute to protecting a national community from disease. On 10 March Julian Nagelsmann, at the time the coach of RB Leipzig, insisted that a Champions League game against Tottenham Hotspur should be played in a full stadium: “It would be a disadvantage to play with visitors at Tottenham but without fans in Leipzig.”42 While Nagelsmann argued against a background of equal chances, Dirk Zingler, the president of 1. FC Union Berlin, came forward with economic arguments to insist on visitors being present during a game against Bayern Munich on 14 March 2020.43 Simultaneously, the Deutsche Fußball Liga (DFL; German Football League) and the DFB experienced pressure from politicians to act in a more responsible manner. In the German federal system, this happened under the context that sports and health mainly fall under the competencies of individual states. Therefore, regional actors from the field of football—who did not want to experience partial losses—had to rely on the federal level to set the tone. The DFL decided to interrupt the season on 16 March 2020. In the first days after the lockdown began, practices of solidarity covered the underlying worries that the business model of professional football had suffered tremendous external shock. In important interviews, Christian Seifert (at the time the managing director of the DFL) and Fritz Keller (the intermittent president of the DFB) acknowledged far-reaching nuisances of professional football that had accumulated. Seifert promised to take steps against horrendous salaries in order to regain lost confidence and Keller saw cringeworthy practices in aspects of professionalism.44 On a similar line, several clubs and teams took symbolic steps to cushion economic losses of (relatively) disadvantaged actors in the field of football. Bayern Munich, RB Leipzig, Bayer Leverkusen, and Borussia Dortmund—the participants of the 2019–20 Champions League—dispensed €20 million to the other teams of the DFL.45 Bayern Munich decided not to reimburse annual ticket holders, but instead to donate these (and further) funds to amateur football clubs in Bavaria.46 Further examples of beneficence could be named. In the end, however, these symbolic acts of solidarity were overshadowed by the economic necessities that rule professional football. Altogether, the cumulative losses in European football for the year 2020 have been estimated to add up to €4.5 billion.47 Not only single clubs and the professional departments, but also the system as a whole was in danger of slipping into distress. Instead of waiting out the pandemic, economic necessities dictated a quick return to business as usual. The running season could not be called off because this would have meant liability for damage: “If we would have done that,” commented

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Christian Seifert, “we would not only have lost our revenues, but we would have had to pay compensation fees.” In the end, he had to acknowledge, “football is a part of the leisure and entertainment industry.”48 The DFL tried to turn the tables by staging a quick return to professional football as a role model for the rest of the culture business. Already in April 2020, the DFL started to develop a concept to continue the season while respecting the most important life restrictions the pandemic brought about: physical distance on every occasion beyond the pitch, regular virus testing, and the exclusion of fans from stadiums. In technical terms, the return of the Bundesliga on 16 May 2020 was widely seen as a success. The restart was interpreted as a kind of pioneer endeavor—the Bundesliga was the first of the professional leagues to resume competition. Many other sports associations related their respective restarts to the German example and hailed the symbolism of returning to normal life in the field of sports. Furthermore, the DFL made sure that its extensive testing strategy did not cut into the general capacities that were needed to screen the dispersion of Covid-19 in the broader population.49 In that sense, the Bundesliga acted as a pacesetter for other public arenas that opened soon afterward. It seems questionable, however, to extrapolate this interpretation into the future. It is true that the status of the Bundesliga took another rise with Bayern Munich’s victory in the Champions League final in August 2020. On the other hand, the popularity of football within Germany experienced serious drops. When the Bundesliga attracted attention in international pay TV networks, the German TV ratings plummeted despite the fact that hundred thousands of spectators per weekend were not allowed to the stadiums anymore.50 Already the restart of the Bundesliga had been accompanied by prominent voices that doubted football’s potential to integrate society through television and internet alone.51 The popular weekly news magazine Der Spiegel even detected an “apocalyptic sentiment” among fans, players, club representatives, and federation officials that came along with the insight that large crowds would not be allowed into the stadiums until well into 2021.52 Beyond pure football outlets like Der Kicker or Die Sportschau, both the Bundesliga and the national team were accompanied by skeptical comments all across the German media landscape in the final months of 2020 and well into 2021, when the national football team Die Mannschaft dropped out of the European championship relatively early. On a closer look, the growing distance of the media to professional football goes along with a number of diagnoses that have increasingly questioned the integration potential of football due to its over-commercialization. The market machinery53 of football had been identified as one of the factors that push fans into fundamental opposition to the regime of sponsors and football functionaries that reign over football and its practices. In a first phase, the difficulties mainly concerned the national level against the background that the associa-

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tions DFL and DFB as well as (most) club leaderships gave priority to business and neglected the needs of fans and their lived cultures.54 In 2015 the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel revealed that the World Cup in Germany 2006 had been acquired through illegal payments. From then on, it became increasingly clear that German football politics had been well integrated into the international bribery regime of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA; International Federation of Association Football).55 In Germany, that led to a football manifesto that had the aim of unhinging football from those structures that emphasized commercialization.56 Altogether then, the pandemic has pushed football further into a crisis that had existed well before 2020.

Outlook: Football as a Field to Study Ambivalent Social Processes Assuming that the Covid-19 crisis will at some point turn from pandemic to endemic, German football will be in an ambivalent position. Until quite recently, football had developed into the single most prominent cultural practice of contemporary Germany. I elucidated the sum of symbolic bonds related to football, which have inflated it well beyond a mere arena of leisure, turning it into a focal point of the self-perception of the German football nation. One major symbolic interest in football consisted of its ambiguous potential to provide society with interpretations for the position of the (competition-oriented) individual in relation to various (local, regional, national, even transnational) communities. In more-recent years, the balance between these two interpretations has been damaged. The ever-growing economic potential of football has attracted persons and groups whose practices are alien to the character of football as a playful game as described, for example, by Johan Huizinga57 or Gunter Gebauer.58 I have argued that this shift in the symbolic integration potential of football has been aggravated by the Covid-19 crisis, which led power holders in the field of football to reactions that had to tackle economic problems. While one can certainly justify that the concerns of fans took a back seat in this situation, the identification potential of football underwent a further transformation in which the TV spectator—and not fans in and around stadiums—form the real frame of reference for economic decisions around football. In a way, the perception of football can be understood as a rise and fall of a specific field of cultural capitalism. As long as modernization and globalization offered their resources, ordinary people in shorts and jerseys were able to synergize symbolic attention. The accumulation of cultural capital was possible because sponsors and the media were increasingly able to transgress national borders, thus leading to an inflation of a few clubs in a few major leagues. The

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result was a concentration of economic, cultural, and symbolic capital that was hardly matched by any other social phenomenon of late-modern Germany. The Coronavirus changed this setting. Covid-19 not only curtailed economic prospects, but the rapid spread of the virus also strongly symbolizes the pitfalls of globalization as such. During the pandemic, the positive relationship between football and globalization59 has been to some extent reversed. If we link the diminished symbolic capital of football during the Coronavirus crisis to interpretation patterns beyond globalization, there is no need to completely rewrite the cultural history of football. The symbolic rise of football is linked to a specific setting of late modern societies, which is characterized by a deep ambivalence between human beings as individual self-fulfillers on the one hand and members of social communities on the other. On one side, the silent revolution60 from the 1960s onward has turned individuals into highly autonomous subjects that combine values of societal participation, the satisfaction of consumer demands, and a singularist construction of the self.61 On the other, many challenges of late-modern societies cannot be met by individuals, no matter how autonomous they are. Rather, as a whole range of social theorists argue, collective identities need to be cultivated in order to overcome societal atomization and collective problem-solving capacities.62 It is also interesting to note that the above-named institutions had similar difficulties to football in coping with the Covid-19 crisis in reconciling individual and community needs. Churches and families have been especially hurt with regard to their community function. Church services and family reunions, for example around Christmas or other festivities, have been identified as important drivers of the pandemic. Political decisions that restricted church- and family-related gatherings received much less opposition than plans to reduce face-to-face meetings in the sphere of professional work and labor. Germany and many other Western societies seem to have reached a consensus that collective well-being rests on the continuation of economic productivity—including the commercially lucrative Bundesliga—even at the expense of health, human life, and gatherings of friends and families. In the field of football, actors have taken a similar decision when faced with the unfortunate trade-off between communitarian retreat and ongoing competition. While it is up to future generations to judge the legitimacy of this choice, it can be concluded that the potential of football to absorb declining levels of community cohesion during the Coronavirus crisis has diminished as well. The field of football has developed along with other fields of cultural integration that showed major difficulties to fulfill their bonding roles in society. As the serious game it has turned into, football tells us that the overemphasis of competition and rationalization of social life entails a reversion to feelings of community and belonging.

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Author Timm Beichelt is professor of European studies, European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Germany). Dr. Beichelt is the author of multiple books focusing on European politics including Democratic Consolidation in Postsocialist Europe (2001) and Germany and Europe. The Europeanization of the Political System (2009). Within Viadrina’s Research Institute for European Studies, he continues to work on the emergence (and sometimes failure) of democracy in post-socialist Europe, on German European Union (EU) Policy, External Democracy Promotion, and more recently on football and power. His book Other Fields of Engagement: On Football and Power appeared in 2018 with Suhrkamp and deals with the power dynamics at play in the spheres of football and politics in Germany, France, and Russia.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

Groll, “Wir sind Fußball” [We are football]. Huizinga, Homo Ludens. Elias and Dunning, Sport im Zivilisationsprozeß. Bourdieu, Program for a Sociology of Sport. Schulze, Die Erlebnisgesellschaft. Gebauer, Poetik des Fußballs. Heinecke, “Der Medialisierungsgrad.” Klein and Meuser, Ernste Spiele. Blutner and Wilkesmann, “Hidden Games.” Markovits and Rensmann. Gaming the World, 14. Taylor, Sources of the Self. Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 55. Bude, Die Ausgeschlossenen. “Ehe im Wandel.” Pollack, Müller, and Pickel, The Social Significance. Scharpf, “Legitimität im europäischen.” Ehrenberg, La Fatigue d’être soi. Han, Müdigkeitsgesellschaft. Putnam, Bowling Alone. Stiglitz, Die Schatten; Stiglitz, The Price. Markovits and Rensmann, Gaming the World, 29. See Bausenwein, Geheimnis Fußball. Gumbrecht, In Praise; Gebauer, Poetik des Fußballs. One of the most popular books for adolescents of the Federal Republic of Germany is Elf Freunde müsst ihr sein by Sammy Drechsel, first published in 1955. The title of one of the most popular German football journals, 11 Freunde, directly refers to that book.

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26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.



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Calvin, No Hunger in Paradise. Mikos, “Mythos Fan.” See “Fan Club Nationalmannschaft.” Figures can be found on the DFB official website, https://www.dfb.de/bundesliga/ statistik/zuschauerzahlen/ All figures in this paragraph go back to Beichelt, Ersatzspielfelder, 25–26, 135, 140–46, 192–202. Giulianotti, “Supporters, Followers.” See “Fußballfans lassen sich Vereinsliebe.” Sandvoss, Fans, 64; emphasis added. See, e.g., Bleeker-Dohmen et al., ‘Sind wir so unwichtig?’ Many more examples can be found in Seitz, Doppelpässe. “Sick Man of the Euro.” Beck, Das deutsche Europa. “Manuel Neuer über Rücktritt von Özil.” Schulze-Marmeling, Der Fall Özil. For a well-written and well-researched account of the brothers Boateng, see Horeni, Die Brüder Boateng. The same was true in the summer of 2021 when the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) deliberately accepted Coronavirus infections in almost completely filled stadiums. Instead of even acknowledging that there might be a problem, UEFA president Aleksander Čeferin declared it to be irresponsible to accuse football of spreading the virus. See Rüger, “Keinen Beweis gesehen.” “Vorschau—Champions League Achtelfinale.” See “Kein Ausschluss der Öffentlichkeit.” “Interview Christian Seifert”; “Interview Fritz Keller.” Meyn, “Bundesliga und Pandemie.” Bayerischer Fußball-Verband, “FC Bayern Hilfe E.V. Spendet.” Sportschau, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVGeqeNiVes&ab_channel= Sportschau, minute 29:45. [video no longer available or set to private].

48. Sportschau, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVGeqeNiVes&ab_channel=Sports chau. [video no longer available or set to private]. 49. Meyer et al., “Medizinisches Konzept.” 50. Weis, “‘Sportschau’ am Samstag.” 51. Emcke, “Parallelwelt.” 52. Pfeil, “DFL berät über Spiele.” 53. Emcke, “Parallelwelt.” 54. Rasch, Rettet den Fußball! 55. Conn, The Fall of the House; Tomlinson, “FIFA.” 56. Gmünder and Zeyringer, Das wunde Leder. 57. Huizinga, Homo Ludens. 58. Gebauer, Poetik des Fußballs. 59. Markovits and Rensmann, Gaming the World. 60. Inglehart, The Silent Revolution. 61. Reckwitz, Gesellschaft der Singularitäten. 62. Benhabib, “Democracy and Identity”; Putnam, Bowling Alone; Fukuyama, “Social

Capital”; Fukuyama, Identity.

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Bibliography Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity, 1991. Bausenwein, Christoph. Geheimnis Fußball. Auf den Spuren eines Phänomens [Secret football. On the track of a phenomenon]. Göttingen: Verlag Die Werkstatt, 2006. Beck, Ulrich. Das deutsche Europa. Neue Machtlandschaften im Zeichen der Krise [The German Europe. New power landscapes in the sign of crisis]. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012. Beichelt, Timm. Ersatzspielfelder: zum Verhältnis von Fußball und Macht. [Ersatz playing fields. On the relation between football and power]. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2018. Benhabib, Seyla. “Democracy and Identity.” In Demokratie—eine Kultur des Westens? 20. Wissenschaftlicher Kongreß der Deutschen Vereinigung für Politische Wissenschaft [Democracy—a culture of the West? 20th scientific congress of the German Union of Political Science], edited Michael Greven, 225–47. Opladen: Leske+Budrich, 1998. Bleeker-Dohmen, Roelf, Karl-Heinz Stammen, Hermann Strasser, and Götz Weber. “‘Sind wir so unwichtig?’ Fußballfans zwischen Tradition und Kommerz” [Are we that unimportant? Football fans between tradition and commercialization]. In Das Spiel mit dem Fußball [The game with football]. Essen: Klartext, 2007: 499–520. Blutner, Doris, and Uwe Wilkesmann. “Hidden Games. Vergemeinschaftungs- und Fragmentierungsprozesse im Profifußball.” In Ernste Spiele. Zur politischen Soziologie des Fußballs [Serious games. On political sociology of football], edited by Gabriele Klein and Michael Meuser, 175–99. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2008. Bourdieu, Pierre. Program for a Sociology of Sport 5, 1988. 153–61. Bude, Heinz. Die Ausgeschlossenen. Das Ende vom Traum einer gerechten Gesellschaft [The expelled ones. The end of the dream of a just society] Munich: Hanser, 2008. Calvin, Michael. No Hunger in Paradise. The Players, the Journey, the Dream. London: Random House, 2017. Conn, David. The Fall of the House of Fifa. London: Yellow Jersey Press, 2017. Deutscher Fußball-Bund (DFB; German Football Association). Retrieved 30 October 2020, https://www.dfb.de/bundesliga/statistik/zuschauerzahlen/ “Ehen im Wandel” [Marriages in flux]. Statistisches Bundesamt; Retrieved 14 July 2021, https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Querschnitt/Demografischer-Wandel/Hin tergruende-Auswirkungen/demografie-ehen.html Ehrenberg, Alain. La Fatigue d’être soi. Dépression et société [The weariness of the self. Depression and society]. Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1998. Elias, Norbert, and Eric Dunning, eds. Sport im Zivilisationsprozeß. Studien zur Figurationssoziologie [Quest for excitement. Sport and leisure in the civilizing process]. Münster: LIT, 1985. Emcke, Carolin. “Parallelwelt. Selbst ein Fußballjunkie kann sich nicht freuen über den Neustart der Bundesliga” [Parallel world. Even a football junkie cannot be excited about the restart of the Bundesliga]. Süddeutsche Zeitung. 7 May 2020. Retrieved 2 February 2022, https://www.sueddeutsche.de/sport/carolin-emcke-fussball-coronaparallelwelt-oeffnungskonzepte-1.4900238?reduced=true “Fan Club Nationalmannschaft.” Deutscher Fußball-Bund (DFB; German Football Association). Retrieved 30 October 2020, https://fanclub.dfb.de/fcn-start/ “FC Bayern Hilfe E.V. Spendet für Regionalligisten” [FC Bayern Hilfe e.V. donates for amateur club]. Bayerischer Fußball-Verband, 28 May. Retrieved 10 July 2020, https:// www.bfv.de/news/corona/2020/05/fc-bayern-muenchenspende-fuer-regionalligabayern-20.000-euro-je-verein

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 INDEX 

1. FC Kaiserslautern, 3, 216n58 1. FC Köln (Cologne), 66–68, 69, 71, 74, 224, 232, 271–72 1. FC Nürnberg, 205 11Freunde (11 Friends), 282, 288n25 1860 Munich, 3, 226 Abrahams, Harold, 86, 87 acculturation, 70 AC Milan, 9, 49 AC Sparta Prague, 106 action, social, 277–78 Adenauer, Konrad (Adenauer administration), 4, 147, 149, 150 Adorno, Theodor W., 3, 221, 222, 231 adventure society, 276–77 aesthetic experiences: introduction, 16, 259; art and, 267–68; and artistic autonomy and social practice, 265–66, 269; contingency and, 261; and football and sport, 261, 266, 268–70, 272–73; nature of, 264–65; spectators and, 270–71 Africa, 50–52 Ahmed, Sara, 120, 129 Ajax Amsterdam, 44, 49, 56, 220 Albus, Jannis, 251 Alexander, Peter: “Mexico mi amor” (Mexico, my love), 6–7 Algeria and Algerians, 44, 52 alienation, 104, 107, 116n12 Alternative für Deutschland (AfD; Alternative for Germany), 7, 68, 133 amateurism, 90–91 animal metaphors, 228–30, 230–31 anti-imperialist solidarity, 44, 50, 56 antisemitism: animal metaphors and, 229–30; anti-cosmopolitanism and, 225–26;

attacks against RB Leipzig, 16, 218–19, 220–21, 222–23, 223–26, 226–27, 228–29, 231–32; collective visual memory and, 230–31; within democracy, 221–22, 231; football and, 220; as ideology, 220; and life and nature metaphors, 223–25; Meisl against, 84, 94–95; Nazi physical education ideology and, 212; Other as both Jewish and Nazi, 227, 234n52; in post-WWII Germany, 219–20, 227; puppet imagery and, 226–27; ressentiment-communication and, 219–20, 223, 226, 229–30, 231–32; use of term, 232n2 Aquinas, Thomas, 259–60 Arbeiterfußball (workers’ football) movement, 212 Arbeitersportvereine (workers’ sports clubs), 212 Arbeiterturnerbund (Workers’ Gymnastics Association (later Arbeiter Turn- und Sportbund (Workers’ Gymnastics and Sports Federation))), 31, 32, 34–35 Arik, Ünsal, 130–31 Aristotle, 259 Arnold, Thomas, 25 Arsenal FC, 11, 46, 72, 73, 84, 92 artistic autonomy, 265–66, 269 Asamoah, Gerald, 12, 72 Assmann, Aleida, 144, 146, 148, 150 Assmy, Horst, 53 Atalanta Bergamo, 283 Ataman, Ferda, 133, 134 Atlético Madrid, 283 Austria: 1932 match against England, 91–93; football professionalization and club formation, 91, 105; vs. German football,

296



Index

7–8; Meisl brothers and, 86, 91; Wunderteam (1930s national team), 8, 83, 85, 88–89, 97 Bademsoy, Aysun: Ich geh jetzt rein (In the Game), 6; Mädchen am Ball (Girls on the Pitch), 6; Nach dem Spiel (After the Game), 6 Baldwin, James, 132 Ballack, Michael, 52 Bateson, Gregory, 166 Bauwens, Peco, 4 Bavaria, 70–71 Bayer Leverkusen, 67, 218, 281, 284 Bayern Munich: 1973 European Cup, 53; 2020 Champions League victory, 285; Covid-19 pandemic and, 284; Croatian coaches, 11; East German fans and, 46, 55, 56; fans and fan engagement, 65, 226; local identity, 70–71; management, 271, 274n11; membership, 233n22; national following, 216n58; Nazi era, 3; players, 69–70, 73; success of, 8 Beckenbauer, Franz, 6, 9, 54, 149, 159n25, 280; „Fußball ist unser Leben“ (Football is our life), 6; „Gute Freunde kann niemand trennen“ (No one can separate good friends), 6 Becker, Gary, 278 Benfica, 46 Bensemann, Walther, 11, 86, 88, 94, 203 Benzema, Karim, 125 Berger, Jörg, 53 Bergmann, Werner, 227 Berlin, Peter, 47 Berliner FC Dynamo (BFC; formerly FC Berlin): 1972 UEFA Cup, 55; African tour, 51; fans, 10, 181–82, 194; player defection, 54; rebranded as FC Berlin, 189, 191; referees and, 178n28; stadium security during games, 192. See also BFC is to blame for the wall (Gläser) Berliner Tageblatt (Berlin Daily News), 88 Bertram, Georg, 259, 265–66, 269–70 BFC is to blame for the wall (Der BFC war schuld am Mauerbau; Gläser): introduction and conclusion, 15, 182–83,

194; on agency of East German fans, 193–94; on author’s relationship with football, 181–82; on devaluation of East Germans post-reunification, 188–93, 196n49; reflections on GDR via imagined spaces, 183–88; on Stadionsterben (dying of stadiums), 196n42; on Western music, 195n23 The Big Game (Das große Spiel; Stemmle), 15–16, 201, 209–10, 213, 215n41, 216n50 Bild-Zeitung (Die Bild), 124–25, 127, 129, 247, 254n50 Black Lives Matter, 13, 123 Blecking, Diethelm, 145 Boateng, Jérôme, 5, 7, 12, 63, 72, 75n4, 76n53 Boateng, Kevin-Prince, 63 body culture (Körperkult), 84, 203 Bogs, Jürgen, 51 Borscht, Wilhelm Georg von, 2 Borussia Dortmund: Ciro Immobile and, 70; corporatization and management, 64, 271, 274n11; Covid-19 pandemic and, 284; fan hatred of RB Leipzig, 226, 229; fans and fan engagement, 10, 65–66; Nazi-era club history, 3; success of, 8 Borussia Mönchengladbach, 66, 67, 216n58, 271, 284 Borussia Neunkirchen, 48 Bosman Ruling (1995), 11, 64 Bourdieu, Pierre, 276 Brandt, Willy, 282 Braunschweig, 23–24, 27–31, 35–36 Brecht, Bertolt, 3, 5, 90, 104–5, 116n12, 204 Brehme, Andreas, 282 Bremen, 64, 105 Brennglas (magnifying glass), 251–52 British Zionist Federation, 86 Brüggemeier, Franz-Josef, 145 Brussig, Thomas: Leben bis Männer (Life until the men‘s team), 169 BSG Turbine Potsdam, 164, 170, 176–77, 178n23 Bulgaria, 47 Bundesliga: Covid-19 pandemic and, 285, 287; establishment and success, 8, 63;

Index fans and community support, 281; former Oberliga teams and, 9–10, 188, 190; international players, 12, 70; refugees and, 69 Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD). See West Germany Bündnis antifaschistischer Fußballfans (BAFF; Association of Antifascist Football Fans), 65 Buschner, Georg, 49 BZ am Mittag (BZ at Noon), 88 Cail, William, 26 Čajkovski, Zlatko, 11 Caligiuri, Paul, 45 Can, Ali, 132 cancel culture, 177n9 capital, cultural, 286–87 capitalism: commercialization of football, 63–64, 242, 280; COVID-19 pandemic and, 283–85; critique of in Fußballspieler und Indianer (Vischer), 103, 107, 112, 114–15; fans against commercialization, 64, 65, 242–43, 258; Habermas on, 242 Carr, Bill, 95 Čeferin, Aleksander, 289n41 celebrity culture, 120. See also Özil, Mesut Champions League, 62, 283, 285. See also European Cup Chaplin, Charlie, 204, 214n10 Chapman, Herbert, 84, 85, 86, 92 Chappel, James, 273n9 Chelsea FC, 12 Chemie Leipzig, 49 Chérif, Souleymane, 45, 52 children: in The Big Game (Stemmle film), 209–10; cinematic depictions, 206, 213, 214n17; in The Eleven Devils (Korda film), 206, 208–9, 210–11 Christian Democratic politics, 261, 273n9 Christian Social Union (CSU), 13–14 churches, 278, 279, 287 cinema: children in, 206, 213, 214n17; football and, 5–6, 201; Nazi regime and, 201, 209, 214n2; pop musical (Schlagerfilm), 165, 167, 168, 170, 178n16; in



297

Weimar Republic, 5, 204. See also The Big Game (Stemmle); Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA); Don’t Cheat, Darling! (Hasler); Germany: A summer fairy tale (Wortmann); The Eleven Devils (Korda); The Miracle of Bern (Wortmann) clubs. See football clubs codetermination, 261, 273n9. See also Mitbestimmung colonization, of lifeworld, 242, 250, 251–52 commercialization. See capitalism communitarianism, vs. individualism, 277, 279, 280–82, 286, 287 Connell, R.W., 144, 157 conservatism, 24, 32–33, 36, 68 contingency: epistemological and normative contingency, 260–61; and football and sport, 258–59, 261–62, 262–64, 270, 272–73, 273n8; vs. necessity, 259–60 Cook, Roger, 187 cosmopolitanism, anti-, 225–26. See also local identities Coulter, Kimberly, 149 Covid-19 pandemic, 276, 277, 282, 283–86, 287, 289n41 culture: East Germany and cultural exchange, 48–50, 56; football and cultural capital, 286–87 Cup Winners’ Cup, 9, 47, 49 Daffner, Carola, 154–55 Dahrendorf, Ralf, 278 Daily Mail (newspaper), 76n53 Darmstadt 98, 229 Das große Spiel (The Big Game; Stemmle), 15–16, 201, 209–10, 213, 215n41, 216n50 Das Wunder von Bern (Wortmann). See The Miracle of Bern (Wortmann) Dawson, Rebeccah, 215n41, 216n50 Debord, Guy, 6 Decker, Kerstin, 166 defections, 52–54 Delaunay, Henri, 84 Delmer, Sefton, 86–87 Denmark, 64

298



Index

De Räuber: “Denn wenn et Trömmelche jeht” (“When the drum starts”), 67 Der BFC war schuld am Mauerbau (Gläser). See BFC is to blame for the wall (Gläser) Der ewige Jude (The eternal Jew; propaganda film), 229–30 Der Kicker (magazine), 11, 86, 88, 94, 203 Der Schild (magazine), 94 Der Spiegel (magazine), 2, 4, 5, 285, 286 Deutsche Bahn (DB), 160n31 Deutsche Demokratische Republik (German Democratic Republic (GDR)): introduction and conclusion, 14, 43–44, 56–57; closed society myth, 44–45; cultural exchange during international tours, 48–50, 56; defections (Republikflucht), 52–54; devaluation of post-reunification, 9–10, 188–93, 196n49, 197n63; double burden of work and home, 171, 178n36; football and soft power, 50–52; forced volunteerism, 171, 178n38; gender equality, 167–68; golden age of football, 9; international and transnational football practices, 11, 45–47; Oberliga, 9–10, 11, 45, 54, 188, 190, 196n44; at Olympic Games, 9, 50–51, 178n37; Ostalgie (eastalgia), 183, 186–87, 194; parallels between border security and stadiums, 192; popularity of Western teams, 55–56; referees, 178n28, 181–82; self-image, 50; surveillance system, 45, 47, 53, 54–55, 56; Western music and, 195n23; women’s football, 173; Zonenkinder (Children of East Germany) generation, 182, 195n9. See also BFC is to blame for the wall (Gläser); Don’t Cheat, Darling! (Hasler) Deutsche Erinnerungsorte (Places of German Memory), 161n62 Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA; East German state-owned film studio), 164, 168, 172, 173, 178n16, 179n46, 214n17 Deutsche Fußball Liga (DFL; German Professional League), 12, 241, 271, 284, 285

Deutsche Fußballmeisterschaft (German Football Championship), 205, 214n14 Deutscher Fußball-Bund (DFB; German Football Association): 2006 World Cup corruption scandal, 156, 286; anti-racism initiatives, 5, 12–13; challenges integrating East German teams, 9–10, 190; conservative subculture and, 33; Covid-19 pandemic and, 284; diversity and internationalism of, 10–11, 12; Fanprojekte (projects for fans/supporters) and, 241; growth and success, 3, 8, 63, 105; nationalistic approach to football, 2; Nazi regime and, 212; Özil’s criticism of, 125–26; postwar reestablishment, 9; role in development of German football, 91, 212; state support for, 281; women’s football and, 145, 170. See also German football Deutscher Fußball-Verband der DDR (DFV; East German Football Association), 9, 11, 46, 53, 173. See also Deutsche Demokratische Republik (GDR) Deutsches Stadion (German Stadium), 205, 214n14 Deutsche Turnerschaft (German Gymnastics Association), 31, 32–33, 34, 35, 96. See also gymnastics (Turnen) movement Deutschland: Ein Sommermärchen (Germany: A summer fairy tale; Wortmann), 6, 146, 154–56, 158, 160nn48–49 Die Arena (magazine), 203 Die Bild (Bild-Zeitung), 124–25, 127, 129, 247, 254n50 Dieckmann, Christoph, 45 Die elf Teufel (Korda). See The Eleven Devils (Korda) Die Höhner: “Mer stonn zo dir FC Kölle” (“We have your back”), 67 Diem, Carl, 87, 96 Die Mannschaft (German national team), 6, 13, 283, 285 Die Neue Fußballwoche (magazine), 47, 51, 56 Die Tageszeitung (The Daily Newspaper), 127 Die Welt (newspaper), 127 digital (social) media, 13, 248

Index Distzl, Péter, 45 Doerck, Chris, 164, 166 Doerry, Kurt, 87–88 Don’t Cheat, Darling! (Nicht Schummeln, Liebling!; Hasler): introduction and conclusion, 15, 164–65, 176; critical reception, 165–66; feminist-sexist double bind, 166–67, 168–72; form-content double bind, 167–68; objectification of womxn, 174–76, 179n52; synopsis, 167 double bind, 165, 166, 177n13. See also Don’t Cheat, Darling! (Hasler) Draxler, Julian, 73 Drechsel, Sammy: Die Welt spielt Fußball (The world plays football), 147; Elf Freunde müsst ihr sein, 288n25 Ducke, Peter, 51 Ducke, Roland, 49 Durkheim, Emile, 278 Dynamo Dresden: 1967-68 Inter-Cities Fairs’ Cup vs. Rangers, 43–44; 1971 European Cup vs. Ajax, 44; 1972 UEFA Cup, 55; 1973 European Cup, 53; 1975 UEFA Cup, 49; 1977 European Cup, 43, 55; East and West German relations, 55; fan encounters with West, 55; international tours, 49, 51; players, 70; Stasi and, 45, 53, 55 Dynamo Kiev, 55 East Germany. See Deutsche Demokratische Republik (GDR) Edelman, Bob, 56 education: football and Braunschweig’s educational crises, 23–24, 27–32, 35–36; football’s appeal for students, 24, 26–27; football’s development at Rugby School and Eton College, 25–26; Schule der Freundschaft (SdF; School of Friendship), 52 Eggers, Erik, 87 Egypt, 50–51 Eigendorf, Lutz, 54 Einstein, Albert, 125–26 Eintracht Braunschweig, 3 Eisenberg, Christiane, 5



299

El Clásico, 64 The Eleven Devils (Die elf Teufel; Korda): introduction and conclusion, 5, 15–16, 201, 202, 213; children and intergenerational exchange, 202, 206, 208–9, 210–11, 213; class and social divisions in, 207, 212–13; on commercialization, 207, 215n22; comparison to The Big Game (Stemmle), 209–10; Film-Kurier (Film-Courier) and, 214n1; pedagogical lesson on facing challenges, 211–12; setting of, 207, 215n20; synopsis, 206–8 Elias, Norbert, 276 Empire Stadium, 185–86, 187–88, 196n26, 196n42 Empor Neustrelitz, 45 Energie Cottbus, 10 England, 91–93, 184. See also United Kingdom Epic Theater (Episches Theater), 104, 105, 116n12 epistemological contingency, 260–61. See also contingency Erb, Rainer, 227 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip, 72, 122–23, 124, 131, 156–57, 283 Erhard, Ludwig, 150 Erinnerungskultur, 222 Erler, Dieter, 51 Ernst Thälmann Vehicle and Hunting Weapons Factory (FAJAS), 49–50 Erzgebirge Aue, 226, 228 Esser, Fritz, 69 Eton College, 24, 25, 26 Europa League, 62. See also UEFA Cup European Championships, 8, 9, 11, 13–14, 18n34, 47, 282 European Cup, 8, 43, 47, 49, 53, 55. See also Champions League European Super League proposal, 64 Ewald, Manfred, 53 extraordinary, 263, 264, 272 fact/value dichotomy, 261 families, 278, 279, 287 Fanfreundschaft (fan friendship), 54–55

300



Index

Fanprojekte (projects for fans/supporters), 241, 243–44, 253n7. See also social workers, and football fans fans and spectators: of aesthetic events, 270–71; children as spectators and intergenerational exchange, 202, 206, 208–11, 213; club management and, 258, 261–62, 271–72; against commercialization, 64, 65, 242–43, 258; communitarian character of, 281; in East Germany, 46, 54–55, 56; fan clubs, 65–66, 75n30; female fans, 144, 157; Mitbestimmung (participation), 16, 258, 259, 261, 271, 272, 274n11; refugees and, 68–69; sociopolitical projects, 65; terminology and types, 65; ultra movement, 65, 218, 223, 232n1, 240, 242–43, 251; in Weimar Republic, 205–6. See also local identities; RB Leipzig; social workers, and football fans fanzines, 195n8 FC Barcelona, 49, 64 FC Bayern Munich. See Bayern Munich FC Berlin. See Berliner FC Dynamo FC Karl-Marx-Stadt, 52 FC Magdeburg, 9, 48, 49, 53–54 FC Prag, 105 FC St. Pauli, 65, 66, 226, 228. See also social workers, and football fans Federal Republic of Germany. See West Germany Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA; International Federation of Association Football), 12–13, 46, 62, 286. See also FIFA World Cup Fest, Joachim, 150 fetishistic scopophilia, 174–75 FIFA World Cup 1934 (Italy), 7, 11 1938 (France), 8 1954 (Switzerland): 2020 European Championship game against Hungary and, 13; ascendency of German football and, 8; Deutsche Erinnerungsorte (Places of German Memory) and, 161n62; Die Welt spielt Fußball (The world plays football; Drechsel),

147; German national identity and, 3–4, 143, 145, 282; male cultural memory of, 148–49; The Miracle of Bern (Wortmann) and, 149–50, 151–54, 158; political and popular responses to, 92–93, 146–48, 157 1966 (England), 184 1974 (West Germany), 4, 6, 8, 9, 46, 49, 145 1990 (Italy), 8, 9, 145, 159n3, 282 1998 (France), 11 2006 (Germany): ambitions and goals for, 149; corruption scandal, 156, 286; German national identity and, 4, 119, 133, 143, 145, 157, 159n3, 282; Germany: A summer fairy tale (Wortmann) and, 6, 154–56, 158; social marketing campaign, 161n56 2010 (South Africa), 119, 120, 282 2014 (Brazil), 4–5, 8, 145, 282 2018 (Russia), 123, 125, 156, 283 2022 (Qatar), 64 film. See cinema Film-Kurier (Film-Courier), 214n1 First Vienna FC, 105 Fisher, Jaimey, 214n17 FK Austria Wien (formerly Wiener Amateure), 85, 93 football: aesthetics and, 266, 268–70, 272; amateurism vs. professionalization, 90–91; antisemitism and, 220; appeal for students, 24, 26–27; as Brennglas (magnifying glass), 251–52; commercialization of, 63–64, 65, 242–43, 258, 280; contingency and, 258–59, 261–62, 262–64, 272–73, 273n8; cultural capital and, 286–87; cultural exchange and, 47; development at Rugby School and Eton College, 25–26; globalization of, 62; idealization of, 135n59; as integrative, 119, 132, 277; as living organism, 224–25; nationalism and, 23, 92; popularity of, 274n19; scholarship on, 23; soccer nations vs. sovereign states, 74n1; social theory and, 276; societal functions of, 276–77, 279; uniqueness of, 264. See also German football

Index football clubs: 50+1 rule, 64, 218, 271; fan participation in, 258, 261–62, 271–72; nicknames, 66; as quasi-natural beings, 225; sponsors, 228. See also fans and spectators; local identities; specific clubs football players: acculturation challenges for migrant players, 70; Bosman Ruling (1995), 11, 64; celebrity players, 120; commodification of in Fußballspieler und Indianer (Vischer), 107–8; hegemonic masculinity and, 157; local fan identities and, 64, 69–70, 71, 72–73; Muslim players, 71; racism against, 7, 72, 121–22 Football players and indians (Vischer). See Fußballspieler und Indianer (Vischer) Fortuna Düsseldorf, 67, 68, 71 France, 11 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), 127 Frauen-Bundesliga (women’s Bundesliga), 145. See also women’s football free agency, 64 Freiburg SC, 69 Freidman, Milton, 278 Freisler, Fritz: Der König der Mittelstürmer (The King of the Center Forwards), 201 Freud, Sigmund, 174 Friedemann, Felix, 95 Friedleben, Ilse, 95, 204 Friedrich-Ludwig-Jahn-Sportpark (East Berlin), 182, 192 Fritzsche, Rolf, 53 Fröhlich, Gustav, 5, 202, 204, 206 Frölich, Margit, 172 FSV Frankfurt, 70 Fußball (newspaper), 88 Fußballspieler und Indianer (Football players and indians; Vischer): introduction and conclusion, 15, 102–3, 115–16; Brecht’s influence, 104–5; on corrupting influences of modern, capitalistic football, 106, 110–14; development and publication, 103; “Indian” terminology, 116n2; Indian tribe in, 117n20; manitu, 110, 117n31; narrative absurdity of, 106–7; player auction and commodification, 107–8; rebel figure uncontaminated by



301

capitalist modernity, 108–10; scholarship on, 103–4; synopsis, 106 Fußball-Woche (Football Weekly), 88, 91 Gabriel, Michael, 243 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 258, 259, 261, 265, 267, 268, 270–71, 272, 274n27 Gängler, Hans, 250 Gans, Evelien, 234n52 Gauland, Alexander, 7 Gaus, Günter, 187 GDR. See Deutsche Demokratische Republik Gebauer, Gunter, 6, 286 gender: double burden of work and home, 171, 178n36; womxn’s issues as vehicles for critique, 173–74. See also Don’t Cheat, Darling! (Hasler); masculinity; women’s football Gerber, Fritz, 95 German football: introduction and conclusion, 14–16, 25, 35–36; arrival, 2, 10, 26–27; Braunschweig’s educational crises and football’s adoption, 23–24, 27–31, 35–36; cinematic representations, 5–6, 201 (see also cinema); communitarianism vs. individualism, 277, 279, 280–82, 286, 287; conservative subculture and, 24, 32–33, 36; Covid-19 pandemic and, 276, 277, 282, 283–86, 287; cultural capital and, 286–87; early adoption and cultural divides, 24–25, 31–32, 35, 36; future of, 14; Germanization of, 2, 36; German reunification and, 9–10, 188, 190; hegemonic masculinity and, 157; international influences, 10–11; LGBTQ+ communities and, 13–14; literature and, 106, 117n18; military preparation and, 201–2, 211–12; multiculturalism and, 4–5, 7, 11–12; music and, 6–7; national identity and, 3–5, 7, 119, 120–21, 133, 143–44, 145, 156–57, 282–83; Nazi regime and, 3, 8, 35; postwar divisions, 8–9; rise to stardom, 7–8; scholarship on, 25; socialist subculture and, 24, 34–35, 36; Weimar Republic and, 8, 11, 105–6, 205–6, 211, 212; women’s

302



Index

football, 144–45, 159n4, 164, 170, 172–73, 176–77, 178n37. See also antisemitism; BFC is to blame for the wall (Gläser); Deutsche Demokratische Republik (GDR); Deutscher FußballBund (DFB); fans and spectators; FIFA World Cup; football clubs; football players; Fußballspieler und Indianer (Vischer); Meisl, Willy; Özil, Mesut; racism Germany: A summer fairy tale (Deutschland: Ein Sommermärchen; Wortmann), 6, 146, 154–56, 158, 160nn48–49 Ghana, 51 Gibbs, Raymond, Jr., 231 Girard, René, 15, 165, 166, 177n13 Gläser, Andreas, 181–82, 195n23. See also BFC is to blame for the wall (Gläser) glocalization. See local identities Goebbels, Joseph, 209 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang: Truth and Poetry, 185 Goltermann, Svenja, 96 Göpel, Sascha, 152 Grabowski, Jürgen, 11 Grand Prix motor racing, 204 Grass, Günter, 3–4 Grau, Andreas, 241, 244 Grifo, Vincenzo, 70 Grindel, Reinhard, 125, 126, 283 Grobler, Sebastian: Der ganz große Traum (Lessons of a Dream), 6 Grosz, Elizabeth, 177n13 Grosz, Georg, 204–5 Guinea, 45, 51–52 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 259, 263, 264, 270 Gündoğan, Ilkay, 72, 73, 122–23 Guttmann, Béla, 85 Gyarmati, János, 45–46 gymnastics (Turnen) movement, 2, 24, 84, 95–96, 203. See also Deutsche Turnerschaft (German Gymnastics Association) Habermas, Jürgen, 241, 244, 251–52 Häfner, Reinhard, 43, 45, 49 Hajduk Split, 11, 44

Hakoah Vienna, 83–84, 93–94 Hall, Stuart, 122 Hallescher FC Chemie, 53 Hallstein Doctrine, 50 Halmstads BK, 56 Hamburger SV, 205. See also social workers, and football fans Hammarby IF, 86 Handke, Peter, 262–63, 264 Hannover 96, 105, 271 Hansa Rostock, 10, 45 Happel, Ernst, 47 happiness, pursuit of, 279 Harlan, Veit, 230 Hartwig, Jimmy, 45 Hasenheide Park, 206, 215n18 Hasler, Joachim, 164–65, 167; Heißer Sommer (Hot Summer), 164, 175. See also Don’t Cheat, Darling! (Hasler) Havemann, Nils, 2; Fußball unterm Hakenkreuz (Football under the swastika), 3, 5 Havertz, Kai, 12 Heartfield, John, 203 Hebestreit, Dieter, 51 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 259, 261, 264, 265–66, 267 hegemonic masculinity, 157–58. See also masculinity hegemonic sports cultures, 277, 280 Heimat (homeland, belonging), 68, 74, 121, 224, 281 Heinrich, Arthur, 150 Hellmann, Rudi, 53 Hennig, Falko, 182 Henschel, Ernst, 51–52 Herberger, Sepp, 8, 16, 146, 153, 160n40, 209 Hermann, August, 24, 28, 29–30, 31 Hertha BSC Berlin, 46, 55, 193, 205, 222, 224 Herzl, Theodor, 93 Herzog, Markwart, 3, 145, 215n41 Heuss, Theodor, 4, 147 Hillebrand, Karl, 26 Hippler, Fritz: Der ewige Jude (The eternal Jew), 229–30 Hitler, Adolf, 7, 35, 84–85, 95, 226–27

Index Hobsbawm, Eric, 92 Hoeness, Uli, 72 Hoffmann, Heinz, 166 Hogan, Jimmy, 85, 86, 92 Holland, John, 56 Holland-Moritz, Renate, 166 Holt, Evelyn, 207, 215n21 Honecker, Erich, 48 hooliganism, 10, 65, 220, 240 Hopp, Dietmar, 75n13, 272 Horn, Dara, 221–22 Hueppe, Ferdinand, 3 Hughes, John, 203 Hughes, Thomas: Tom Brown’s Schooldays, 26 Huizinga, Johan, 259, 263, 264, 268, 272, 274n14, 276, 286 human action, 277–78 Hungary: 1954 World Cup, 143, 146–49; 2020 European Championship match and LGBTQ+ advocacy, 13–14; East German football and, 45–46, 54 Hurst, Geoff, 184 Illichev, Yuri, 49 Illustriertes Sportblatt (Illustrated Sports Paper), 85 immigrants, 68–69, 126, 129, 131, 133, 156 Immobile, Ciro, 70 individualism, vs. communitarianism, 277, 279, 280–82, 286, 287 institutions, traditional, 278–79, 287 integration, 119, 132, 277 Inter-Cities Fairs’ Cup, 44, 47. See also UEFA Cup intergenerational exchange, 202, 208–11 Inter Milan, 46, 49 internationalism: socialist, 44, 50, 52, 56; sports, 84, 96 Iraq, 49 Islamophobia, 71. See also racism Jahn, Friedrich-Ludwig, 26–27, 96, 203, 215n18 Janowski, Maurycy, 167 Jews: Viennese football clubs, 93–94; Zionism, 84, 86, 94. See also antisemitism; Meisl, Willy



303

Johnston, Basil, 117n31 journalism, sports, 86, 87–89, 203, 204 Jürgens, Udo: “Buenos Dias Argentina” (Good day, Argentina), 6 Juventus, 49, 71 Kahlow, Heinz, 167 Kaiser, Manfred, 51 Kant, Immanuel, 259, 261, 264, 265, 266, 267 Karlsruher SC, 228 Kathöfer, Sven, 244 Kaube, Jürgen, 263–64 Kaznelson, Siegmund: Juden im deutschen Kulturbereich (Jews in the German cultural orbit), 95 Keller, Fritz, 284 KFC Uerdingen, 66 Khedira, Sami, 12 Kirsch, Frank-Michael, 187 Klasen, Brigit, 164 Klasen, Heiko, 164 Klein, Gerhard: Berlin—Schönhauser Corner (film), 214n17 Klinsmann, Jürgen, 6, 155, 282 Klose, Miroslav, 12 Klüger, Ruth, 165, 166 Koch, Johann Konrad, 28 Koch, Konrad, 2, 24, 28, 29, 30–31, 36 Kohl, Helmut, 6, 282 Köhler, Steffen, 55 Konik, Bernhard, 45 Korda, Zoltan, 201. See also The Eleven Devils (Korda) Körperkult (body culture), 84, 203 Kostedde, Erwin, 12 Kotthaus, Jochem, 244 Kracauer, Siegfried, 3 Kramer, Andreas, 104, 117n18 Kroos, Toni, 12 Kurz, Georg, 95 Kurz, Oskar, 95 Lamprecht, Gerhard: Somewhere in Berlin (film), 214n17 Landsberg, Alison, 144, 154 Lang, Fritz: Metropolis (film), 202, 204, 214n11

304



Index

Leeds United, 49 Leipzig, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35. See also RB Leipzig Leitkultur (dominant culture) debate, 72 Lemke, Willi, 128–29 Lesebühne Chaussee der Enthusiasten, 182 Lewis, John, 132 LGBTQ+ communities, 13–14 life reform movement, 90 lifeworld, 242, 243, 249, 250, 251–52 Lindenberg, Michael, 250 Lineker, Gary, 4 Lipsia, 33 literature, and football, 106, 117n18 Littbarski, Pierre, 11 Liverpool FC, 43, 55, 62, 71, 71, 73, 283 Lobo, Sascha, 133 local identities: introduction and conclusion, 14, 62–63, 73–74; 1. FC Köln and, 66–67; and anti-cosmopolitanism and antisemitism, 225–26; Bayern Munich and, 70–71; club nicknames, 66; against commercialization, 64, 65, 242–43, 258; fan clubs, 65–66, 75n30; football players and, 64, 69–70, 71, 72–73; Heimat (homeland, belonging) and, 68, 74, 121, 224, 281; racism and, 72; refugees and, 68–69; sociopolitical projects and, 65 Lokomotive Leipzig, 56 Löw, Joachim, 5, 6 Lukaku, Romelu, 125 Lutz, Tilman, 250 Maccabi World Union, 86 Mainz 05, 71 Manchester City FC, 73 Maradona, Diego, 280 Marcus, Sharon, 120 Markovits, Andrei S., 157, 225, 234n52, 280 Marschik, Matthias, 92 Marshall, P. David, 120 masculinity, 146, 148–49, 151–52, 153, 155, 157–58 Mateschitz, Dietrich, 226–27, 228, 272 Matip, Joël, 73 Matthäus, Lothar, 125, 128

Mauerbau (Gläser). See BFC is to blame for the wall (Gläser) May, Theresa, 124 McDougall, Alan, 170, 172–73, 178n28, 181, 188 media: 1954 World Cup and, 146–47, 148; celebrity culture and, 120; counterhegemonic solidarity with Özil, 126–27, 132–33; coverage of fan violence, 244, 247–48, 250, 252; Covid-19 pandemic and football coverage, 285; digital (social) media, 13, 248; hegemonic repair against Özil and allegations of racism, 127–31; myth-making and, 157–58; Özil’s criticism of, 124–25; prejudicial media and double bind, 165, 166; sports art and journalism, 86, 87–89, 203, 204–5. See also cinema Meidericher SV, 66 Meisl, Hugo, 83, 84, 85, 86, 91, 93, 94 Meisl, Leopold, 85 Meisl, Rose, 86 Meisl, Willy: introduction and conclusion, 11, 15, 83–85, 96–97; 1932 Austria-England football match and, 92–93; on amateurism, 90–91; against antisemitism, 84, 94–95; background, 85–87; Der Sport am Scheidewege (Sport at the crossroads), 85, 90, 91, 202–3; on gymnastics and Nazism, 84, 95–96; on Sechstagerennen (six-day bicycle race), 203–4; Sie turnten zur Macht (They seized power through gymnastics), 84, 85, 95–96; Soccer Revolution, 87; on sports, 90–91, 102, 202–3, 204; sports journalism and, 86, 88–89; Viennese football and, 93; writing style, 89; Zionism and, 84, 86, 94 memory: collective visual memory and metaphors, 230–31; cultural memory of 1954 World Cup victory, 148–49, 150–51, 154, 161n62; cultural memory of 2006 World Cup, 154–56; hegemonic masculinity, football, and cultural memory, 158; prosthetic memory, 154 Merkel, Angela (Merkel administration), 6, 12, 14

Index Messerschmidt, James W., 144, 157 metaphors: of animals, 228–30; antisemitism and, 223, 231; collective visual memory and, 230–31; of life and nature, 223–25 #MeToo movement, 123, 132, 177n9 #MeTwo movement, 123, 132 Mielke, Erich, 10, 190 migrants. See immigrants military, 29, 201–2, 211–12 The Miracle of Bern (Das Wunder von Bern; Wortmann): box office success, 6, 160n33; gender representation, 151–52, 153, 158, 160n40; on Germans as victims, 151; marketing poster, 153, 160n44; memory transmission and myth-making, 5, 146, 154, 158, 161n61; premiere, 149–50, 160n31; Rahn’s portrayal, 151, 152–53, 160n43 Mitbestimmung (codetermination, participation), 16, 258, 259, 261, 271, 272, 274n11 Mitläufer (follower), 226, 234n45 Mitropa, 191, 197n57 modernity, 260–61, 262, 276, 278 Modeste, Anthony, 74 Möllers, Christoph, 274n12, 274n27 Mozambique, 51, 52 Müller, Gerd, 65 Müller, Marion, 225 Müller, René, 53 Müller, Tanja, 52 Müller, Thomas, 69–70 multiculturalism, 4–5, 7, 11–12 Mulvey, Laura, 173, 174, 175 Museum of Jewish Heritage (New York): Auschwitz exhibition, 221–22 music, 6–7, 195n23 Musil, Robert, 90 Muslim players, 71 Nabokov, Vladimir, 46 Nachtwieh, Norbert, 53 Nagelsmann, Julian, 284 Naidoo, Xavier, 7; “Danke,” 161n53; „Dieser Weg“ (This path), 7, 155–56 Natan, Alex, 90, 95 national anthem, 122



305

Nationales Konzept für Sport und Sicherheit (NKSS; National Concept for Sport and Security), 243, 245, 249 nationalism: football and, 23, 92; football and German identity, 3–5, 7, 119, 120–21, 133, 143–44, 145, 156–57, 282–83 nature metaphors, 223–25 Nazi regime: analogical comparison to Jews, 227, 234n52; animal metaphors and antisemitism, 229–30; cinema, 201, 209, 214n2; collective visual memory and, 230–31; Das große Spiel (The Big Game) film, 15–16, 201, 209–10, 213, 215n41, 216n50; Der ewige Jude (The eternal Jew) propaganda film, 229–30; football and, 3, 8, 35; Meisl on gymnastics and, 84, 95–96; Meisl’s efforts against antisemitism in, 84, 94–95; physical education and, 212; Reichsschriftleitergesetz (Reich editors’ law), 89. See also neo-Nazism Neeskens, Johan, 49 Neiman, Susan: Learning from the Germans, 219 neoliberalism, 73, 279. See also capitalism neo-Nazism, 10, 65, 72, 220 Nerz, Otto, 8, 11 Netherlands, 64 Netzer, Günter, 43 Neuberger, Hermann, 4 Neuendorff, Edmund, 96 Neuer, Manuel, 13, 14, 283 Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), 90 Neues Deutschland (newspaper), 51 Neues Wiener Sportblatt (New Vienna Sports Paper), 86 Nicht Schummeln, Liebling! (film). See Don’t Cheat, Darling! Nietzsche, Friedrich, 260, 262 Noldner, Jürgen, 49 Nora, Pierre, 144 Nordau, Max, 84 normative contingency, 260–61. See also contingency normativity, 262, 272, 274n12 Norway, 64 Oberliga, 9–10, 11, 45, 54, 188, 190, 196n44

306



Index

Odonkor, David, 12 Oertel, Heinz Florian, 185, 196n26 Oktoberfest, 70–71 Olson, Mancur, 278 Olympic Games: 1936 Berlin Summer Games, 7, 95; East Germany and, 9, 50–51, 178n37; Meisl and, 89, 95 Optik Rathenow, 191, 193–94 Orion (London football team), 33 Osiecka, Agnieszka, 47 Ostalgie (eastalgia), 183, 186–87, 194 Oswald, Rudolf, 4 Özil, Mesut: introduction and conclusion, 15, 119–20, 133–34; counterhegemonic solidarity with, 126–27, 132–33; vs. fans’ local identities, 73; hegemonic repair against, 127–31; as national symbol of integration, 4–5, 120–21; othering of, 121–22; racial backlash after Erdoğan photo-op, 72, 122–23, 156–57, 283; research methodology, 120; resignation from German national team over racism, 7, 119; statements against racial backlash, 123–26 Pahl, Jürgen, 53 Paisley, Bob, 43 Palmowski, Jan, 170 Paris St Germain, 73 Parsons, Talcott, 278 Pelé, 184 Pesser, Hans, 8 physical education, 26–27, 29, 212. See also gymnastics (Turnen) movement Pie Kei, 226–27 Pinczower, Felix Daniel, 95 Planck, Karl, 1, 2 play, 263, 272 players. See football players Podolski, Lukas, 12 Poland, 46, 47, 48, 50, 54 police: conflicts and tensions with social workers, 243–45, 248–49, 249–50; formal cooperation and informal interactions with social workers, 245–47; media and, 247–48, 252 politics, and fans, 65

pop musical (Schlagerfilm), 165, 167, 168, 170, 178n16. See also Don’t Cheat, Darling! (film) Porto, 49 Poschardt, Ulf, 129 Postone, Moishe, 220 Pozzo, Vittorio, 84, 85 Prenn, Daniel, 95 Putin, Vladimir, 125 Pütter, Norbert, 244 Pyta, Wolfgang, 145 Raab, Stefan: “Maschendrahtzaun,” 197n54 racism: counterhegemonic solidarity against, 126–27, 132–33; against football players, 7, 72, 121–22; in Germany, 7, 133; hegemonic repair of, 127–31, 134; initiatives against, 5, 12–13; #MeTwo movement, 123, 132; white supremacy, 119–20, 127–28, 132, 134. See also antisemitism; Nazi regime; neo-Nazism; Özil, Mesut; RB Leipzig Radeke (Stasi lieutenant-colonel), 192 Rahn, Helmut, 150, 151, 152–53, 160n43 Raithel, Thomas, 145 Ranc, Julijana, 219 Rangers FC, 44 Rapid Vienna, 8 Rathenow: Stadion Vogelgesang, 189, 191–92, 193–94 Rauge, Dieter: Sportland DDR (documentary), 57n4 Rauschenbach, Thomas, 250 Rawls, John, 278 RB Leipzig: introduction and conclusion, 16, 220–21, 222, 231–32; animal metaphors and, 228–29, 230; background, 233n22; collective visual memory and, 230–31; Covid-19 pandemic and, 284; fan anger against commercialization and management, 64, 75n13, 226, 271, 272, 281, 282; foreign players, 69; hatred of as antisemitic ressentiment-communication, 16, 218, 219–20, 222–23, 223–26, 226–27, 228–29, 231; and life and nature metaphors, 223–26; puppet imagery and, 226–27

Index Real Madrid, 12, 46, 64, 71, 72 Reck, Friedrich, 30 Red Bull, 218, 225. See also RB Leipzig referees, 178n28, 181–82 refugees, 68–69. See also immigrants Reichelt, Julian, 130 Rensmann, Lars, 225, 280 ressentiment-communication, antisemitic, 219–20, 223, 226, 227, 229–30, 231–32 Ribéry, Franck, 71, 76n53 Riefenstahl, Leni, 212; Olympia, 216n59; Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), 209, 216n59 Rinke, Andrea, 173–74 Rojek, Chris, 120 Rotation Prenzlauer Berg, 48 Roth, Joseph, 90 Rot-Weiß Erfurt, 45 Rous, Stanley, 86, 87, 91–92 Rüdiger, Antonio, 12 Rugby School, 24, 25–26 Ruppert, Willi, 159n4 Rürup, Reinhard, 220 Saarländischer Fußball Bund (SFB; Saarland Football Association), 9 Sachse, Horst, 36 Sachsen Leipzig, 45 Sachsenring Zwickau, 48 Sahebi, Gilda, 133 Sammer, Klaus, 43–44 Sammer, Mathias, 9 Sander, August, 204–5 Sané, Leroy, 12, 73 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 220, 226 SC Brandenburg, 45, 52 SC Charlottenburg, 90 Schalke 04, 11, 66, 72, 73, 205, 216n58 Schediwy, Dagmar, 10 Schiller, Kay, 5, 145 Schily, Otto, 150 Schlagerfilm (pop musical), 165, 167, 168, 170, 178n16. See also Don’t Cheat, Darling! (film) Schmeling, Max, 89, 204–5, 209 Schmidt, Jochen, 182



307

Schöbel, Frank, 164, 166 Schoeps, Karl-Heinz J., 104–5 Schön, Helmut, 8 Schönefelder Fußball Club 03, 34–35 Schröder, Gerhard, 1, 2, 3, 5, 12, 149, 150 Schule der Freundschaft (SdF; School of Friendship), 52 Schwad, Jan Tilman, 165 scopophilia, fetishistic, 174–75 SC Union Oberschöneweide, 205 Sechstagerennen (six-day bicycle race), 203–4 Seehofer, Horst, 68 Seifert, Christian, 284–85 Selig, Erich, 95 Seybold, Eugen, 88 Simpson, Kevin, 212 Slavia Prague, 105 soccer. See football; German football social action, 277–78 socialism: football and, 24, 34–35, 36; socialist internationalism, 44, 50, 52, 56. See also Deutsche Demokratische Republik (GDR) social (digital) media, 13, 248 social theory, 276 social workers, and football fans: introduction and conclusion, 16, 240–42, 250–52; confidentiality concerns, 243–44, 249, 251; conflicts and tensions with police, 243–45, 248–49, 249–50; dilution of the profession and, 251; formal cooperation and informal interactions with police, 245–47; future research possibilities, 250; media and, 244, 247–48, 250; research methodology, 245 Soós, Károly, 45 Sow, Noah, 127 Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD; Social Democratic Party of Germany), 2, 14, 145 Sparta Prague, 105, 106, 108 Sparwasser, Christa, 54 Sparwasser, Jürgen, 48, 54 spectatorship. See fans and spectators Spiess, Adolf, 26–27 sport: aesthetics and, 264–65, 266, 268–70; Brecht on, 104, 116n12, 204; contin-

308



Index

gency and, 262–64, 270; Fußballspieler und Indianer (Vischer) on, 103; hegemonic sports cultures, 277, 280; integration and, 119, 277; Meisl on, 90–91, 102, 202–3, 204; popularity in Weimar Republic, 102, 202–4; social theory and, 276. See also football; German football Sportfimmel (extreme and uncontrollable passion for sports), 203, 206 Sport im Bild (Sport in the Picture), 87, 203 Sportland DDR (documentary), 57n4 sports internationalism, 84, 96 sports journalism, 86, 87–89, 203, 204 Sport-Tagblatt (Sports Daily Newspaper), 86 Stadion Vogelgesang (Rathenow), 189, 191–92, 193–94 Stahl Helbra, 47 Stahl Hettstedt, 47 Stangl, Paul, 185 Stasi (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security)), 45, 53, 54–55, 56, 181, 188 Staudte, Wolfgang: The Murderers Are Among Us (film), 214n17; Rotation (film), 214n17 Stein, Harry, 95 Steinbrück, Peer, 150 Steinhoff, Hans: Hitlerjunge Quex (Hitler Youth Quex), 209 Stemmle, Robert Adolf: Das große Spiel (The Big Game), 15–16, 201, 209–10, 213, 215n41, 216n50 Streich, Joachim, 48 Süddeutsche Zeitung (South German Newspaper), 127 Super League proposal (Europe), 64 surveillance. See police; Stasi SV Sandhausen, 224 Tanzania, 51 Taylor, Charles, 278 Teilhabe (sharing or taking part in), 258 Terkessidis, Mark, 132 Torberg, Friedrich, 93–94 Torpedo Moscow, 49, 56 Toshack, John, 43 Tosun, Cenk, 122

Tottenham Hotspur, 220, 284 Townly TSG Hoffenheim, 64, 70, 75n13, 218, 271, 272 TSG (Turn- und Sportgemeinschaft) Wismar, 48 Tucholsky, Kurt, 202 Turnen (gymnastics) movement, 2, 24, 84, 95–96, 203. See also Deutsche Turnerschaft (German Gymnastics Association) TuS Dornberg, 48 Twitter, 132, 248 UEFA Cup, 47, 49, 55. See also Europa League; Inter-Cities Fairs’ Cup Ugi, Camillo, 11 Uhry, Else, 214n16 Ujpest Dozsa, 47 Ullstein (publishing company), 84, 86, 88 Ullstein, Leopold, 95 ultra movement, 65, 218, 223, 232n1, 240, 242–43, 251. See also fans and spectators; RB Leipzig; social workers, and football fans Union Berlin, 10, 54–55, 69, 226, 284 Union of European Football Associations (UEFA): anti-racism initiatives, 13; Champions League, 62, 283, 285; Covid-19 pandemic and, 289n41; Cup Winners’ Cup, 9, 47, 49; East Germany and, 46; establishment, 47; Europa League, 62; European Championships, 8, 9, 11, 13–14, 18n34, 47, 282; European Cup, 8, 43, 47, 49, 53, 55; financial fair play rules, 64; German representation post-WWII, 8–9; Inter-Cities Fairs’ Cup, 44, 47; UEFA Cup, 47, 49, 55 United Kingdom, 86–87, 240. See also England United States of America, 134, 218, 258 University of Leipzig football team, 33 Urbanczyck, Klaus, 51 Valencia Club de Fútbol (CF), 283 VEB Energiekombinat (Energy Combine), 164. See also BSG Turbine Potsdam

Index Verband Mitteldeutscher Ballspielvereine (Association of Central German BallGame Clubs), 33 Verein für Leibesübungen Leipzig-Südost (South-East Leipzig Association for Physical Education), 35 VfL Osnabrück, 228 VfL Wolfsburg, 218, 225, 226, 229 VfR Aalen, 223 Vietnam, 46 Vinnai, Gerhard, 225 Vischer, Melchior, 103–5, 106; Sekunde durch Hirn (Second through brain), 102, 103, 104. See also Fußballspieler und Indianer (Vischer) Vogts, Berti, 282 Voigt, J.A., 26 Voigts, Manfred, 105 Volk, use of term, 224 Volkswagen (VW), 225 Völler, Rudi, 150 Vorwärts Berlin, 53 Vossische Zeitung (newspaper), 84, 86, 88, 90, 92, 94 voyeurism, 175 Wagner, Ernst, 26 Walter, Fritz, 4, 150, 153, 159n25 Warneke, Lothar, 174; One Short Life (film), 174 Weber, Max, 277 Weimar Republic: cinematic depictions of children, 206, 213; class and social divisions, 212, 213; critique in Fußballspieler und Indianer (Vischer), 103, 112, 115–16; film industry, 5, 204; football and, 8, 11, 105–6, 205–6, 211, 212; sport and, 102, 202–4; sports journalism, 87–89, 203, 204. See also The Eleven Devils (Korda); Fußballspieler und Indianer (Vischer) Wellbery, David, 259–60, 270 Wembley Stadium, 183–84, 187, 196n39 Wende, definition, 18n26, 195n15 Werder Bremen, 72 Werner, Ernst, 88 Werner, Timo, 12



309

Westdeutscher Damen-Fußballverband e.V. (West German Lady’s Football Club), 159n4 West Germany: 1954 World Cup, 3–4, 92–93, 143, 145, 146–48, 151–54, 157, 158; 1966 World Cup, 184; 1974 World Cup, 4, 6, 8, 9, 46, 49, 145; East German encounters, 48, 49, 54; football and, 8, 9, 11 West Ham United, 84, 93 white supremacy, 119–20, 127–28, 132, 134. See also antisemitism; Nazi regime; neo-Nazism; racism Wick, Uwe, 215n41 Wicker, Wigbert: Libero (Sweeper), 6 Wiener Amateure (later FK Austria Wien), 85, 93 Wiese, Ludwig, 26 Wieser, Gustav, 10–11 Willett, John, 204 Willmann, Frank, 10 Winands, Martin, 241, 244 Winkelmann, Adolf: Nordkurve (North Curve), 6 Winterbottom, Walter, 49 Wismut Aue, 45, 55 Wolf, Konrad, 173; Der Geteilte Himmel film adaptation, 179n46 Wolff, Christa: Der Geteilte Himmel, 179n46 women’s football, 144–45, 159n4, 164, 170, 172–73, 176–77, 178n37. See also BSG Turbine Potsdam; Don’t Cheat, Darling! (Hasler) womxn, 173–74, 177n1. See also Don’t Cheat, Darling! (Hasler) work, traditional, 278–79 World Cup. See FIFA World Cup World Sports (magazine), 87 World War I, 85 World War II, 86–87 Wortmann, Sönke. See Germany: A summer fairy tale (Wortmann); The Miracle of Bern (Wortmann) Wulff, Christian, 121 Zebec, Branko, 11 Zeyn, Julia, 243

310



Index

Zidane, Zinedine, 280 Ziegler, Jean-Pierre, 132 Zimmerman, Herbert, 147 Zindler, Regina, 197n54

Zingler, Dirk, 284 Zionism, 84, 86, 94 Zonenkinder (Children of East Germany) generation, 182, 195n9