In search of Berlin football: Part One
It's not all sex clubs, beatniks and techno in the German capital
This is Part One of a three-part series looking at Berlin’s football culture, originally published by MUNDIAL.
What you do with a rainy Saturday afternoon in the middle of Berlin’s notoriously grey winters reveals a lot about you.
A fair chunk of the city’s population are either in the midst of—or recovering from—a hedonistic plunge into the nether regions of Berlin’s famous techno and sex clubs. The avant-garde types will be soaking in the city’s art scene; the Hauptstadt is home to the most galleries of any conurbation in Europe. The normies are holed up in an independent cinema, a cafe, maybe their local kneipe—the corner bars that have remained untouched by creeping gentrification.
Me? I’m trying to jemmy open a chain-locked gate to get a better photo of Poststadion, a small municipal sports stadium that hosted football during the 1936 Olympics, for my newsletter on German football culture.
I need to crack on with my walk. I’m tracing one of the paths of Berlin’s Fußball Route, a self-guided tour that details the history of the sport in the city, and I have approximately eight more kilometres of pavements to traverse. I’m only on my second spot, but I’m already a bit pissed off at the seemingly non-existent information boards that are meant to landmark my journey. Rather than trudge on, I take a seat on a bench next to an astroturf where two grassroots clubs are plying their trade. I think it’s a post-winter break friendly, allowing the part-timers the chance to regain their fitness after a sedentary and gluttonous Weihnachtsferien. The standard is halfway decent, but when a portly right back is concussed by an errant diagonal ball from his own centre-half, I move on with my journey.
This rather mundane scene is a microcosm of Berlin’s wider football culture. In a city defined by its countercultural heritage and importance to modern global history, sport is something of an afterthought. Unless you really look for it.
I put that idea to football journalist, author and artist Musa Okwonga over a pot of lemon and ginger tea in a bougie hotel bar a stone’s throw away from the East Side Gallery, one of the remaining sites of the Berlin Wall. Already couching my feelings about football in Berlin, I stammer through a statement-cum-question.
“Football sometimes feels not incidental, but maybe less culturally significant in Berlin compared to Munich or the towns of North Rhine-Westphalia,” I say.
“No, incidental is absolutely the word,” Musa says. “I was living here in 2015 when Berlin hosted the Champions League final. If you weren’t in the centre of town or the area around the Olympiastadion, you’d have no idea the game was even on.
“This city is so vast, and it has so much going on, that it can take on an event of that size and carry on like nothing is happening.”
Jacob Sweetman, a writer who turned his obsession with Berlin football into a job leading Union’s English communications, strikes a similar tone. I’ve met up with Jacob a couple of times, once for a podcast interview conducted in the beer garden at the Stadion An Der Alte Försterei and again for this piece. Our second chat takes place outside a späti, the late-night convenience stores that are the heartbeat of the city. Both of us are off the sauce, so we sit on a bench outside the shop and crack open a couple of alcohol-free pilsners.
“Football has always slipped through the cracks slightly here despite everyone’s best efforts,” says Jacob over the throng of traffic and blaring ambulance sirens.
As with all big cities, pinning down a unifying idea of what Berlin is or what it means to the various groups of people that live there is difficult. In his book Made in Germany, Kit Holden writes:
“Change is the only constant in the history of Berlin. The city lies on a flat, unprotected plain in the heart of Europe, which has historically made it especially susceptible to dramatic, violent transformations…
“The relentless change means Berlin does not exude old power like other European capitals do. Vienna has its great palaces and concert houses; Berlin’s most famous cultural institutions are modernist theatres and fetish clubs. London and Paris are the economic lifeblood of the UK and France. Berlin, however, has a lower GDP per capita than most other major German cities … It is a place where nothing lasts, and everything is built on sand, where radical ideas are tested, and revolutions rise and fall.”
The ‘neatest’ summation of this town belongs to Klaus Wowereit. The long-time socialist mayor said Berlin is “poor, but sexy” in an often-quoted speech of 2006. That was probably accurate at the time, as the Hauptstadt was fifteen years removed from the fall of the wall. The sudden opening of space in no man’s land and cheap rents allowed artists and free thinkers to occupy prime real estate at little or no cost. When Jacob moved to the city, he spent the first few years living and working out of Kunsthaus Tacheles, an abandoned shopping arcade built in the 1900s that was used as a base for the SS during the Second World War, that eventually became one of the city’s most famous squats, containing bars, a cinema, a nightclub, studios and workshops.
Some 19 years have passed since Wowereit made that comment, and while you could still argue the “sexy” part applies—Musa says the genuine freedom you can enjoy in Berlin’s sex clubs beats any city in Europe—there’s a sense that original statement ignored the lived experience of native Berliners. Jacob sought out football as a way of feeling connected to actual Berliners, removed from the socially mobile and international art scene.
Football has always slipped through the cracks slightly here despite everyone’s best efforts
“That was all about this projection of what Berlin is that kind of ignores the 3.7 million people who just live here and have shitty jobs,” Jacob says.
“It’s just home for them, and I think football still represents them, as opposed to the experimental art scene or techno culture. It’s still more grounded in the people who actually live here.
“Football has always operated outside of that. There’s never been that crossover of ‘culture’ in the same way you might get in London or Paris.”
It’s undeniable that German football’s ‘power’ resides outside of the country’s capital. North Rhine-Westphalia, the country’s most populous state by a significant margin, has produced the most players, buoyed by historically significant clubs like Schalke and both Borussias, Dortmund and Mönchengladbach. Bayern are the ever-present power, harnessing the massive influence of Bavarian businesses like adidas, Allianz and Audi to win 34 Bundesliga titles.
Since the modern league was founded in the 1960s, no Berlin team has lifted the crown. Hertha were last German champions in 1931, when the national title was decided by a tournament phase held between the winners of regional leagues. The most decorated club from the Hauptstadt, Dynamo, won their ten Oberliga titles during the separation of the country. Their success was propped up by the chicanery of the East German state; Eric Meilke, the tyrannical leader of the Stasi, routinely pilfered rival clubs for their biggest stars and was accused of match-fixing during the 70s and 80s.
That lack of success furthers the idea that football isn’t that important to Berlin. But dig into the history, and you’ll find that Berlin was massively important to football.
The ‘English game’ first came to Germany in the 1870s, roughly ten years after the formation of the Football Association. It was treated with massive suspicion. Early writings on the game present the upper classes’ fear of the “loutishness” and the over-competitive nature of the sport, which stood in stark contrast to the individualistic and morally pure ideals of gymnastics and personal exercise pioneered by the nationalist didact Friedrich Ludwig Jahn. ‘Turnvater Jahn’ (Gymnastic Father Jahn) ushered in a programme of exercise that championed a nationalist duty to physical activity in order to push forward German supremacy. It’s not hard to draw a line between his teachings and certain political philosophies, which I try with every inch not to mention in every piece I write about the history of German sport.
Learn more about Turnvater Jahn in our piece tracing the Berlin Fussball Route on a rainy and dreary German Unity Day
This distrust didn’t stop a number of young men banding together to form the first unified clubs. BFC Germania 1888, founded by Max, Fritz, and Walter Jestram, is the oldest German football club still running today. A few years later, they became founding members of the Bund Deutscher Fußballspieler (BDF), the first local football association in Germany. Their efforts formed something of a prototype for other states around the country, eventually playing a role in the first national tournament in 1903.
“The Berlin clubs played a prominent role in the organisation of national competitions,” says Daniel Küchenmeister, a historian of Berlin football and co-curator of the Berlin Fußball Route. “Even though they did not yet represent Germany as a whole at the time and were more like Berlin competitions, they had a high sporting value because in no other city or region were there so many stable football clubs and almost permanent match operations. In other words, the Berliners were the championship pioneers of football in Germany.”
Those pioneers achieved early success. Union 92 Berlin, Viktoria Berlin and Hertha all lifted the German title before the ascension of the Third Reich in 1933. After the Second World War and the partition of Germany, including its capital, into East and West, the fractious nature of life in the Hauptstadt inevitably led to a drop in living standards, a paucity of investment and, in turn, a turbulent period for the majority of football clubs in the city.
West Berlin, surrounded by the German Democratic Republic (GDR), became a counter cultural hub, buoyed in part by the promise that inhabitants would be exempt from military service. That inevitably attracted beatniks and artists, most notably David Bowie and Iggy Pop, who shared a flat in Schöneburg during the 1970s, but it also housed refugees fleeing communist rule as well as immigrant populations, particularly people of Turkish descent.
That milieu saw the foundation of grassroots immigrant clubs such as Turkieymspor and Hilalspor and an attempt to grow the top level of the game through financial support towards Hertha, the biggest club in the city. In 1966 the Old Lady were relegated from the inaugural Bundesliga season after a scheme to recruit players from the East was uncovered.
Meanwhile, in the East, the ‘people’s club’, Union Berlin, was developing an identity as a rebellious force against Dynamo and the state. While that identity is somewhat apocryphal, Die Eisernen’s countercultural bona fides saw them develop a friendship with Hertha. At Hertha and Union games, cries of “there are only two clubs on the Spree, Hertha and Union” and “the wall must fall” whenever a free kick was awarded, spoke of a relationship between a divided city that was bolstered by football.
All of these political circumstances waylaid any chance of genuine sporting success, furthering the notion that Berlin was a football backwater that persists to this day. Daniel rankles when I put that to him over email.
“Football plays a big role and is played everywhere, whether in the big stadiums, the cages of the city centre, in schoolyards or in the parks.
“And football is always a topic of conversation among colleagues and friends. In Berlin, the passion for football is just a little different than in comparable cities. We must not forget that Berlin has always been a “transit space”—people come and go. And people often come to their youth as a fan of a club. Personally, I don’t find it particularly problematic at all. I think diversity is also the city’s strength in terms of football enthusiasm.”
There are tangible signs of that enthusiasm growing. Union have gone from the brink of oblivion in the early 2000s to begrudgingly becoming a global brand—Jacob insists the club has never been preoccupied with being “cool”—because of the throwback feel of the Alte Försterei and coverage of their community-first approach exemplified by events such as their Christmas Carol service. The club now boasts 70,000 members, and their women’s team recently pulled 20,000 fans to watch them lift the 2.Bundesliga title. Meanwhile, Viktoria Berlin’s women’s team have shown that an investor–first model can succeed in the conservative and sometimes parochial attitudes of German football and that the grassroots game is a home for people from all walks of life, be that explicitly coded through the multitude of immigrant teams representing diaspora from Croatia, Turkey and Poland to name a few.
Musa’s eyes light up when I ask him about Unicorns, the Friedrichshain club he joined in the mid-2010s. Founded as an offshoot of SFC Friedrichshain, the club is home to 53 players from 22 countries and is proudly diverse.
“Our coach, an Australian called Andrew Weber, who is a very good player in his own right, by the way, set it up,” he tells me as he pours another cup of tea. “Its principles are basically anti-racist, anti-Fascist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic. Everyone is welcome.
“The ethos is just incredible. The football is incredible. The culture attracts the most amazing people: at one point, the back five was composed of two singer-songwriters, and one of them was named the singer-songwriter of the year by a prominent music magazine.”
And for every Unicorns, there’s many more traditional clubs that house generations of history. Jacob tells me of one club in Lichtenburg where officials still call each other “sport-komrade” during AGM meetings.
In that way, Berlin reflects the wider attitudes of German sport and culture. Germans love clubs. Eingetragener Verein (registered associations) run this country. Essentially, not-for profit affiliations that can spring up around any shared interest, be that football, knitting, rambling or ‘beard and moustache culture’ (yes, really). If you love something, you find other like-minded people, and you join the club. If it doesn’t exist, make it yourself.
That’s even more important in a city like Berlin. A lot of the city can feel shut off to outsiders. You’ve heard of those two-hour-long lines outside of Berghain (I’ve still not made it through those impregnable blast doors). In many ways, it’s getting harder.
Wowereit’s definition is becoming less useful by the day. Berlin is no longer poor if you go by a capitalist’s definition. Those spaces that were taken up by artists after the fall of the wall are now the playthings of multinational companies. A few minutes up the road from where I met Musa now stands the Amazon Tower, the city’s tallest structure besides the TV mast. Investment in the city has accelerated, thanks in part to the growth of a startup scene in the late 2010s.
That brings with it the typical symptoms of gentrification. Rents are ballooning; finding a flat is nigh-on impossible. An already volatile and transient place is becoming stratified as outside investment pushes its lifelong inhabitants, and indeed well-heeled immigrants, to the sidelines. Simultaneously, the creeping rise of anti-immigrant rhetoric is infiltrating the city walls. Berlin might have leaned left in the recent election, but the surrounding areas in the disaffected former East of Germany have swung violently towards the AfD.
Change is the only constant in the history of Berlin
In his novel In The End, It Was All About Love, Musa says that eventually “Berlin will punch you in the stomach”. He felt that more keenly than most. As a prominent black and bisexual man living in the city for over a decade, he’s seen the place change. He laments that the city seems to be embracing a “capitalist future” and the increasing “visibility of Nazis” moving through his neighbourhood.
Throughout our conversation, where we detail all of its many flaws, it’s clear he hasn’t fallen out of love with the place entirely. He says it’s a place of the highest highs and the lowest lows.
“The lowest lows come from alienation. If you’ve come here and you have progressive politics, and you’re queer, you’re non-white, actually just progressive, you’re very isolated. It’s a difficult place, I think, because it’s a hard place to get momentum for your career as an artist from within the city.
“The higher highs? If you meet good friends, good artists, it’s constantly inspiring. I’ve not been as inspired in my adult life as when I moved here.”
Some of those highs came directly from his involvement in the city’s football scene. In particular, when Unicorns won promotion.
“It felt more exciting than anything I ever felt playing Sunday League football. I played for Middlesex County at a really good standard but didn’t feel like we were going anywhere when we got promoted.
“[With Unicorns] It felt like we were climbing up the pyramid. We felt we were connected to a wider footballing infrastructure; you were part of something bigger. And I think because of 50+1, because so many players cut their teeth in amateur before moving up and going and becoming internationals, you felt connected.”
I’ve felt that connection. The first time I stood on the terraces at the Alte Försterei after the Covid lockdowns, I felt it. When I schlepped to the arse-end of nowhere to watch Viktoria Berlin’s women’s team mount their promotion push, I felt it. When I saw that ropey diagonal ball career off your man’s face on that overcast mid-afternoon, I felt it (not as much as he did mind).
In a city that presents an image of aloof cool, of constant movement and transience, the ultimate reward is earnestly digging in and finding your tribe. Football is no different; in fact, it might be the ultimate example of the rewards this city can provide. That might not sound all that sexy, but you’ll be all the richer for making the effort.