Table Of ContentFOOTBALL 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 off ers 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 refl ect 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 Volume 19
Football Nation: Th e Playing Fields of German Views of Violence
Culture, History, and Society Representing the Second World War in German
Edited by Rebeccah Dawson, Bastian Heinsohn, and European Museums and Memorials
Oliver Knabe, and Alan McDougall Edited by Jörg Echternkamp and Stephan Jaeger
Volume 24 Volume 18
What Remains: Responses to the Legacy of Dreams of Germany
Christa Wolf Musical Imaginaries from the Concert Hall to
Edited by Gerald A. Fetz and Patricia the Dance Floor
Herminghouse Edited by Neil Gregor and Th omas Irvine
Volume 23 Volume 17
Minority Discourses in Germany since 1990 Money in the German-Speaking Lands
Edited by Ela Gezen, Priscilla Layne, and Edited by Mary Lindemann and Jared Poley
Jonathan Skolnik
Volume 16
Volume 22 Archeologies of Confession
Beyond Posthumanism Writing the German Reformation, 1517–2017
Th e German Humanist Tradition and Edited by Carina L. Johnson, David M. Luebke,
the Future of the Humanities Marjorie E. Plummer, and Jesse Spohnholz
Alexander Mathäs
Volume 15
Volume 21 Ruptures in the Everyday
Feelings Materialized Views of Modern Germany from the Ground
Emotions, Bodies, and Th ings in Germany, Andrew Bergerson, Leonard Schmieding, et al.
1500–1950
Edited by Derek Hillard, Heikki Lempa, and Volume 14
Russell Spinney Reluctant Skeptic
Siegfried Kracauer and the Crises of
Volume 20 Weimar Culture
Names and Naming in Early Modern Germany Harry T. Craver
Edited by Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer and
Joel F. Harrington
For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website:
http://berghahnbooks.com/series/spektrum
Football Nation
Th e Playing Fields of
German Culture, History, and Society
(cid:4)(cid:5)
Edited by
REBECCAH DAWSON,
BASTIAN HEINSOHN,
OLIVER KNABE,
and
ALAN MCDOUGALL
berghahn
N E W Y O R K (cid:129) O X F O R D
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
(cid:2) CONTENTS (cid:3)
Introduction. Historical Perspectives on the German Football Nation 1
Rebeccah Dawson, Bastian Heinsohn, Oliver Knabe, and Alan
McDougall
Part I. A Border-Crossing Game:
German Football and International Cultural Exchange
Chapter 1. Th e Introduction and Integration of Football into a
Divided Society: Conservative and Socialist Football in
Germany from 1871 to 1933 23
Th omas Adam
Chapter 2. Fußball Internationale: Toward a Global History of
GDR Football 43
Alan McDougall
Chapter 3. Local Fans, Global Players: Contradictions in
Postindustrial Football 62
Stephan Schindler
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 83
Kay Schiller
Chapter 5. Commodifi ed, Corrupted, and Capitalist: Combatting
the Modern Athletic Machine in Melchior Vischer’s
Fußballspieler und Indianer 102
Rebeccah Dawson
Chapter 6. Controlling Defi nitions: Racism and German Identity
after Mesut Özil’s National Team Resignation 119
Kate Zambon
vi (cid:2) Contents
Part III: Forming Identities through Football:
Class and Gender in German Culture
Chapter 7. Th e Making of a Football Myth: Memory, Masculinity,
and the Media 143
Friederike B. Emonds
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 Th ird-Class Citizen: Football
Stadiums, Social Divides, and East German Identities in Andreas
Gläser’s BFC Is to Blame for the Wall 181
Oliver Knabe
Part IV: Th e Politics Beyond the Pitch: German Fandom and Spectatorship
Chapter 10. Educating the Spectator: Athlete-Fan Interplay in the
Early German Football Film Th e Eleven Devils by Zoltan Korda 201
Bastian Heinsohn
Chapter 11. Antisemitic Metaphors in German Football Fan Culture
Directed at RB Leipzig 218
Pavel Brunssen
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 240
Fabian Fritz
Chapter 13. Countering Contingency: Aesthetics and Fan
Codetermination in German Football 258
Alex Holznienkemper
Conclusion. “Fußball ist alles!” Football’s Importance in
German Society 276
Timm Beichelt
Index 295
INTRODUCTION
(cid:2)(cid:3)
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 foot-
ball 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
Th ere 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 experi-
ence. Th erefore, 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. Th ere 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
2 (cid:2) Introduction
Football nations, much like the societies in which they emerge and evolve, are
never static entities. Th is is certainly true for the history of the world’s game
in modern Germany. Th e quotations from Karl Planck, Gerhard Schröder, and
Kurbjuweit et al. in the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel chart football’s fl uc-
tuating place in German culture and society, from skepticism and hostility in
the Wilhelmine era to mass cultural and commercial power in the age of An-
gela 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. Th e sport arrived in Germany as it had in
many parts of the world in the fi nal 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 En-
glish Football Association in 1863. Th e 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 pow-
erful 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 confl icts 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 fi rst sounded. Founded in a time of the deep-
est 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, root-
less, 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 fi eld 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. Th e 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 creden-
tials, and emerged as an ambitious competitor on the patriotic grounds that the
Turnen had long claimed as its own. Th e DFB’s attempt to make football the
idealized representative of the German nation was far from unproblematic, but
Introduction (cid:3) 3
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 justifi cation that “football has
become the German national game.”7 Th ough cultural critics such as Th eodor
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 min-
ister of the recently formed Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD; Federal Re-
public 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 fi nal destination of Munich, more than fi ve
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 cul-
ture 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 ex-
clusively on their experiences in the Nazi era.9 Th e 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 Th ird Reich that, some critics
argued, downplayed the organization’s ideological commitment to Nazism. In-
deed, the skeletons of the Nazi past still rattle around club cupboards. Germa-
ny’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
(Nazifi cation) of football.10
Th e shadows of the Nazi past explain the complex German response to the
Miracle of Bern, which, in playing terms, marked the beginning of a transforma-
tion in the country’s international football reputation. Th e prevailing narrative
today is that 4 July 1954 marked “the real birthday of the Federal Republic.”11
Th is 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
