High quality contributions about German football, culture and society

Mats Franzén
Institute for Housing and Urban Research, Uppsala University

A common critique of anthologies is for lacking a common thread bringing the separate contributions together, making sense of them in some comprehensive – if not uniting – way. Neither this anthology, Football Nation, on German soccer, delivers a common thread within its thirteen chapters, despite both an introduction to them, and a conclusion. However, its merits lie elsewhere, and there are plenty of them.

Football Nation is published as Volume 25 in a series of Berghahn Books named “Spektrum, publications from the German Studies Association”, a North American (mainly U.S.) organization. Thus, most of the authors are not sport scholars, but have an interest in football, for some reason, as teachers of German. Now, football seems to be a fruitful prism delineating a series of telling aspects about German culture and society, past and present, more generally. In fact, the anthology is not directly about football practice, about how the game is organized and played in the field, but rather about various aspects around the game as such.

Indeed, the subject of several anthology contributions relates to representations of football in German literature, drama and film. So, Rebeccah Dawson brings to life Melchior Vischers’s absurd drama from 1924, Fuβballspieler und Indianer, an absurdist Dada play, delivering an early critique of professional football for being too commodified, corrupt and capitalist, reminding us of the rich and experimenting culture of the Weimar years, the primitivism in Modernist culture, and closing with a warning for a future fascist takeover.

What is special with fandom in Germany is that supporters are not satisfied with ‘playing a constitutive part of the game for ninety minutes’, as Holznienkemper puts it.

Kaleigh Bangor develops a critical feminist analysis of Joachim Haslers GDR football musical picture Nicht Schummeln, Liebling! from 1973, when women football was yet at its very beginning. Hasler’s film aims at criticizing both the lack of gender equity and corruption in the authoritarian state, an ambition difficult to take home given the chosen genre of the musical. Unsurprisingly, the immediate impression of the movie is its ambiguity. Now, Bangor approaches this ambiguity, analyzing the film’s dialectical dramatic irony as a case of a double bind (Girard), which makes it possible to critically reveal both its progressive and prejudicial sides. This is a most fruitful approach, opening questions to the film’s sexist remarks: do they deride women football or just show the obstacles it has to break through? In the end, however, given the double bind, the progressive moves seem to have difficulties in taking the lead.

Also about GDR is Oliver Knabe’s analysis of a novel from 2002 by Andreas Gläser, Der BFC war schuld am Mauerbau (BFC is Berliner Fuβballclub Dynamo). Knabe gives us an intriguing analysis of Gläser’s novel, where Gläser is the protagonist, particularly illuminating the so called Ostalgie phenomenon, challenging common prejudices to it in contemporary Germany, but without any longing to return to the Stasi state. Moreover, Gläser’s double awakening is telling, confronted as he is both with the losses due to his Post-Wende life, and to his misconceptions of life in the West before the Wende. And what about football? Well, the football ground is the space where all these complex feelings are expressed and held together in the narrative.

Two significant German football events, the World Cup win in 1954 – The Wonder in Bern – and the Sommermärchen 2006 when Germany hosted the World Cup, were soon turned into national myths, and established as central parts of the German cultural memory – and thus also of forgetting. Scrutinizing two football films by Sönke Wortmann from 2003 respectively 2006, Friederike B. Emonds carefully analyses how those myths are being constructed. She points at football as more than a hegemonic sport; here is hegemonic masculinity at work too. This way, women are marginalized on the football turf, in parallel with a reduction of the national. Now, the Sommermärchen and the later World Cup Win established a new image of the German – football as nation. Yet, the question is what Mesut Özil’s resignation from the Mannschaft, and the following debate, implies for this image.

Kate Zambon goes deep into the questions raised about racism and German identity through the handling of Özil’s protest, a protest he directed first of all to an international public. Now, she does not try to come with any simple answers to the question, but brings it to us in its full complexity, analyzing Özil as a celebrity.

The real racist stigma, however, of the German nation is antisemitism. Pavel Brunssen brings us a careful analysis of antisemitism in the vehement critique by Ultras of almost all football clubs in Germany, directed at RB Leipzig, where RB stands for Rasen Ball – but is intended to be read as Red Bull – as the club is controlled by the owner of the Austrian company Red Bull GmbH, controlling several other sport clubs in the West with names like Red Bull Salzburg, aimed at selling the sport drink. Brunssen identifies a series of anti-Semitic tropes directed at “the most hated club in German football”. Yet, he is cautious to note that those common antisemitic tropes used are not being used for antisemitic purposes. Nevertheless, they seem to be reproducing antisemitism. With Adorno, he notes that antisemitism in a democracy is potentially more menacing than in Nazism. Brunssen does not, however, scrutinize all arguments delivered against RB Leipzig, thus denying us the full picture.

What is peculiar with German football is the strength of its fans, and the fans are many – attendance figures being higher in Germany than in any other country in Europe. They demonstrate for more traditional values in football, going against its currently strong commercialization. Two contributors delve into issues relating to this situation. In his article with the telling title ‘Local Fans, Global Players’, Stephan Schindler brings us a glocalizing analysis, revealing several paradoxes of the game, looking into contemporary German fandom, using the fans of F.C. Köln (Cologne) as exemplum. Here is not the place to recall all the ways in which local traditions are developed by the fans, however remarkable they may be. But let us listen to Schindler’s closing words: ‘Perhaps it is precisely the constant negotiation of frictions inherent in the glocal that make (sic) football, at least in part, such an attractive game.’

In his contribution, Alex Holznienkemper discusses Mitbestimmung (codetermination) by the fans in German elite football. His approach is specific, treating sport, particularly football, as embracing contingency, transforming it ‘into aesthetic forms that resonate on a deep level with modern cultures.’ Following Aristotle, the contingent here being that which is possible otherwise; focus is on epistemological and normative contingency, on the pitch and more generally. Now sport, and football in particular, is ‘a paradigmatic example of removal from the ordinary and predictable’. Aesthetically, football is not ambiguous, yet it inspires action in light of unpredictability, on the pitch and the stands in symbiosis. What is special with fandom in Germany is that supporters are not satisfied with ‘playing a constitutive part of the game for ninety minutes’, as Holznienkemper puts it. Thus the craving for Mitbestimmung, and it can be seen as successful, at least compared to many other European football leagues. Also special, and often overlooked, is the engagement of social work with supporters. Such Fanprojekte are founded federally and state by 50 percent and 50 percent by the German Football League. Fabian Fritz gives us a close analysis of one such project, relating to FC S:t Pauli in Hamburg. In particular, Fritz scrutinizes the clash of rationalities here between the life world of fans and the system, with the social workers as a kind of middle men.

This presentation of Football Nation not being exhaustive, I hope nevertheless to have demonstrated the width of the contributions, their very different problem formulations and approaches to their subject. The anthology gives a broad picture of German culture, history and society through the prism of football. Thus, this book is to be recommended for a double readership, for both those with a broader interest in sports and football in Germany, and for those with a more general interest in modern German culture and society. This recommendation has to be underlined by the generally high quality of the contributions. A specific quality of most of the contributions is also that they, by the way, approach their subjects using mainly German theoretical literature, a quality that has to be noted too.

Copyright © Mats Franzén 2023