Tor!: The Story Of German Football

by Ulrich Hesse-Lichtenberger

The first true German football club still in existence today is FC Germania Berlin, founded in April 1888.

There were few sports fields in Germany, and most of these were controlled by the gymnasts, who refused to share them with the kicking traitors to the Fatherland (that’s not a joke – footballers were really described and treated as such). The gymnasts also had access to most of the public parks, and they used their clout to persuade the authorities to drive away footballers.

more than once play had to be stopped to allow coffins to be carried across the field. In Cologne, a shepherd called the police because the local football club used his grazing land, thereby ruining the grass.

Borussia is neo-Latin for Prussia.

The founders of the Dortmund club picked Borussia because their inaugural meeting took place in a pub where a large enamel plate advertised the products of the Borussia Brewery. And the people who formed Fortuna Düsseldorf were discussing which name sounded appropriate when they were passed by a vehicle delivering goods for the Fortuna Bakery.

ropes, and

Walter a few problems later on, when he married a gorgeous

The story of war is that of nations, but the stories of war are those of individuals.

‘The inmates’ inner organs were weakened through malnutrition in the Jewish ghetto, so that they couldn’t take the good and plentiful food in the concentration camp.’

Echa baadu

Under these circumstances, the footballers who had been prohibited from turning professional for so long suddenly made a living out of playing the game in a very literal sense. The bigger teams with better known players went on tour, meeting small clubs in return for meat and vegetables. Max Morlock’s legendary 1. FC Nürnberg travelled to tiny Altötting because they had been promised a butchered sow. The pig made the bus journey back to Nuremberg packed in towels and lying between the feet of the players, who later carved it up themselves. The result, says the writer Hans Dieter Baroth, ‘looked as if the animal had been hauled to kingdom come by a tractor’.

Kits were also scarce. That is why a large number of teams suddenly took to playing in red strips, often with the addition of neatly cut holes. Because while fabric and cloth were valuable possessions, there were flags and banners in abundance that nobody seemed to want any more. With a bit of dexterity, they could be made into football kits once you removed the swastikas.

In mid-February, two Cologne clubs – Sülz 07 and BC Köln – merged to form 1. FC Köln. It was by no means the ‘first football club’ in the city, but the members’ hubris proved not to be misplaced. The new club would go from strength to strength, and its president Franz Kremer was to become known as the ‘Father of the Bundesliga’.

The escalation of a silly family row in the small town of Herzogenaurach, some 16 miles north of Nuremberg, hardly seemed that important at the time, but its repercussions are felt to this day. The brothers Rudolf and Adolf Dassler came from a working-class family. Their father worked in a shoe factory, their mother ran a small laundry.

Adidas

In 1926, Adolf made the first running shoes with spikes (back then, actually nails). Two years later, athletes at the Amsterdam Olympics began wearing his designs, and in 1936 Jesse Owens would win four gold medals in Berlin running in Dassler shoes.

Rudolf returned from the war in late 1946 and found his brother healthy, content and on excellent terms with the American occupiers. It is sometimes suspected that the seeds for the later drama were sown here, though other people think the quarrels began over a woman. Nobody knows for sure, as the Dasslers have never once in half a century explained exactly what happened during the first months of 1948.

For all we know, Adolf and Rudolf never spoke to each other again after April 1, 1948. However, before going their separate ways they agreed on one thing: neither of the brothers would use the family name for his company. Rudi settled on ‘Ruda’, until an advertising expert told him that sounded a bit like ‘Puma’, which would be a much better name anyway. Adolf, whose first name now had some uncomfortable connotations, started calling himself ‘Adi’ and attempted to save part of his surname by christening his business ‘addas’. Ten months later, that was changed to adidas (always written by the company with a small ‘a’).

you lack belief in what you can do, you will always fall short. But if that belief becomes arrogance, you will overreach and stumble. In other words: if you are ahead, don’t showboat; if behind, don’t whine.

‘The Spirit of Spiez’ entered German football parlance as a synonym for comradeship.

Walter was ineffective on hot, sunny days. He loved rain, though, and a steady downpour is still called ‘Fritz Walter weather’ in Germany.

Not as regards the team and the coach, that would not come until the 1970s, when political writers discovered football as a topic and argued that Herberger mirrored Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in his paternal conservatism and that the players were subservient yes-men. (Werner Liebrich, for one, would not have appreciated this characterisation, since his family was considered politically untrustworthy by the Nazis and his father had twice been imprisoned in a concentration camp.) Besides, they claimed, Germany had only won the match with a lot of luck. All of which was somehow true, and yet not really and anyway completely beside the point.

Even the president of the Republic, Theodor Heuss, reprimanded the official: ‘Bauwens seems to think good football is good politics. That’s not necessarily so.’

Others, however, didn’t give a damn about radiant signals and didn’t much like the idea of driving around the countryside with a trunk full of Adidas boots.

The new one-tiered nationwide league was to kick off on August 24, 1963 – 34 years after Italy’s Serie A and Spain’s Primera Liga, and 75 years after England’s Football League.

On August 13, the GDR began building the Berlin Wall, practically cutting off West Berlin from the rest of the world. An isolated but not lonely island, West Berlin would now take on a symbolic meaning in the struggle between East and West and was granted a special position in all walks of life. And that included football.

Max Morlock was still there with Nuremberg – which made him the only player who saw action in the Gauliga, Oberliga and Bundesliga eras.

Then there was 1860’s coach, the idiosyncratic Austrian Max Merkel. When he first took charge of 1860, he called the club ‘the most beautiful corpse in the league’, the second time around, he told the president, a politician: ‘You know nothing about football, I know nothing about politics. Let’s make a deal: you don’t meddle in the team’s affairs, and I won’t enter parliament.’ That might give you an idea why, despite his success, he never stayed too long at any one club.

That’s the sort of thing sociologists and political scientists come up with when asked to explain popular culture, while reality is usually a lot simpler. There were two players, and Netzer was the sexier.

hindsight is perfect but useless vision.

When it’s over, you always know what you should have done.’

It was a cruel joke indeed. The only World Cup East Germany ever qualified for was the one played on West German soil. As if to extend the punchline, the two teams were then drawn in the same group to play the last match of the preliminary round against each other.

It would take a sociological tome to discuss them, and too many trees have already lost their lives because somebody set out to do just that. Most of those investigations fall short, because the tempting idea to link hooliganism with society at large poses

more problems than it solves. After all, hooliganism intensified in many countries at around the same time, regardless of the peculiarities of their respective football histories or social mores, regardless of whether they had conservative or socialist, stable or chaotic governments.

November 9, 1989 marked the end of the four-decade history of East Germany. And, of course, the four-decade history of East German football.

Most of the things that happened in and around East German football seem utterly bizarre and often downright incredible to someone who has grown up in a completely different society, which invariably invites misconceptions.

Six of the eight clubs went under immediately, creating the surreal situation that for the next 20 years, the GDR’s ice hockey championship was fought out between only two teams.

Or what about Frank Lippmann? In late 1985, he drove home from a party, rather drunk. He crashed into another car, panicked, and fled the scene of the accident. Unfortunately, he’d rammed a police truck transporting prisoners. Naturally, the police presumed the collision was an attempt to help the convicts escape and ordered a large-scale man-hunt for poor Lippmann that involved tracker dogs, helicopters and the secret police. (Lippmann was a marked man from that day on. He sought political asylum in West Germany the night after Dresden’s disastrous 1986 match in Uerdingen.)

Schuster arrived at Leverkusen with five fighting dogs, ten bodyguards, 15 horses and legs that were now 33 years old. For

After a game between West Germany and Brazil in Stuttgart in May 1981, Hansi Müller invited the squad to his house to celebrate his birthday. The only player who did not attend the party was Schuster, who immediately boarded a flight back to Barcelona. Asked why, he said: ‘I don’t like Hansi Müller.’ He could have said that he had to get back to Spain to prepare for a match, and that would have been equally true. But Schuster was like that. He

Six years before Euro 96, Franz Beckenbauer had remarked: ‘I have always wondered why people read so many different aspects into a football match. In England, war correspondents seem to get their say whenever their team plays us.’

Second, the squad contained only one strong, somewhat unpopular character – Oliver Kahn. And he was disliked in many quarters essentially only because he played for Bayern Munich and because his will to win bordered on the unhealthy. (Kahn once agreed to take part in a penalty shoot-out for charity in which he faced children who could collect money for an orphanage by putting one past the famous pro. Then he saved every single spot-kick because he couldn’t stand to be beaten.) Even the team’s biggest star, Michael Ballack, was affable and modest.

For a man who hates losing so much he won’t even allow kids smaller than a corner flag to score against him, it must have been an irritating moment.