The quote, which is enshrined on a small brass plate in the cobblestone, strikes me with tremendous force. I am on Bebelplatz in Berlin, just off Unter den Linden, in what used to be East Berlin. A few hundred meters further west, the Brandenburger Tor is decorated for the occasion.
Berlin’s fan zone is ready for a new entry. Tonight, the area will be filled with happy and festive football supporters who will watch the semi-final match between the Netherlands and England, on the giant big screen that has been set up in front of the Brandenburg Gate.
The contrast between the folk festival in Berlin and what happened here on Bebelplatz nearly ninety years ago is enormous. On a rainy May evening in 1933, 40,000 people gathered to witness the Nazis’ carefully planned book burning. 20,000 books were burned, books that were mainly written by Jews and socialists, with content that the Nazi regime believed was harmful to the German people’s soul. The bonfire in 1933 and the European Football Championship in 2024 are in no way comparable events, but the contrast between them can, in a way, stand as a symbol of the violent fluctuations that have characterized Germany and Berlin over the past hundred years.
Berlin has been an economic superpower and a ruined city, democracy and dictatorship, and not least a hotbed for both destructive and Nobel Prize-winning ideas. No city has been so marked by world-historical events as the German capital. Two world wars were started from here, the last one also ended here. Not long after the last one ended, an iron curtain fell over the city and a wall of concrete and barbed wire was built, a wall that became the very symbol of the Cold War, dividing a city, a country and a continent in two .
Sachsenring #Zwickau & #EastGermany keeper, Jürgen Croy lines his wall during an #Oberliga fixture versus #DynamoBerlin at the Georgi-Dimitroff Stadion, Zwickau in April, 1980.
— Fussball Geekz (@fussballgeekz) February 9, 2025
The hosts would win 2-1, though the #Berlin club would take the title 1 point ahead of #DynamoDresden pic.twitter.com/wpgaIirDgH
Standing here on Bebelplatz, I think that Berlin is a city full of contradictions, and that it is a city unlike any other. Only Berlin is Berlin, even when it comes to the beautiful things in life, such as the most beautiful game of them all, football. Like the city itself, football in Berlin is also characterized by contradictions and important historical events. In the 1970s and 1980s, the East German regime’s football team, Dynamo Berlin, dominated a fearsome, blood-soaked team that played its European Cup matches at the Friedrich-Ludwig-Jahn-Sportpark in old East Berlin, against the likes of Nottingham Forest and Hamburger SV.
When the wall fell in 1989, so did Dynamo Berlin, and other teams took over. Hertha Berlin was Berlin’s best team for a long time, but today it is the cult team Union Berlin which is the city’s best and only team in the Bundesliga, a team which, with the success of recent years, has become both mature and a little more mercantile, but which still plays the games theirs at the worn and charming stadium An der Alten Försterei, in the suburb of Berlin-Köpenick.
For a Norwegian interested in football, football in Berlin is also a visit to the old Poststadion, a couple of kilometers north of the Tiergarten, where Magnar Isaksen from Kristiansund scored two goals for Norway and sent home favorite Germany headlong out of their own Olympics in 1936. 50,000 spectators were present, including Adolf Hitler and his entourage of high-ranking Nazis. Hitler left the arena in a rage, spat a few words that Isaksen was probably Jewish. Norway sensationally progressed to the semi-finals, eventually finishing in third place, and the legend of the Bronze League was born.
But football in Berlin is not only the European Championships, the Olympics, the Bundesliga and the former East German big teams, it is also the hoop football played by children and adults in all the green and lush parks around the city, and not least the football in Berlin is all the matches , the scores and the dubious offside decisions that are hotly debated over the tables in the brown bars around the city, and there are many of those discussions – no city in the world has as many gemütliche Kneipen as Berlin.
Football is part of Berlin’s pulse, but even though Berlin is football, the European Football Championship is not necessarily a natural part of football in Berlin. The European Football Championship is a championship completely unlike the football that is usually part of Berlin’s soul, the bohemian, rebellious football that kicks hard up in the system. The European Football Championship is just a quick visit, it’s not Germany and Berlin’s event, it’s UEFA’s invention, and UEFA is not brown bars and bratwurst on white cardboard plates, UEFA is Coca Cola, McDonalds and Visa, it’s the smell of money and pamps and men in suits pretending to care, when the supporters complain that all the tickets are given to sponsors and VIP guests. and not to the fans, and that the prices of the few tickets offered to ordinary people are far too high.
Because even though the football European Championship in Germany is set to be a gigantic success, both in terms of the number of visitors and jingling coins in UEFA’s already well-filled pockets, I think that when all this is over, Berlin will find its own rhythm again, and his own football. Then football will again be Union Berlin at An der Alten Försterei, or Hertha Berlin at the Olympiastadion, the grandiose concrete block erected by the Nazis to show the world who the gentlemen were, built at a time when Germany loved the monumental and concrete architect Albert Speer was ordered to build so big and heavy that he had to lie to Hitler’s face to tell him what was possible and what wasn’t, many of the projects were not feasible at all, they were too heavy, Berlin was built on sandy soil and simply could not withstand not the weight of all the concrete, but the Olympic Stadium was built, and it still stands there, as a reminder of everything that went wrong with Germany, but also as a symbol that something good can come out of evil.
The first time I saw football in Berlin was at the Olympic Stadium, on a frozen February day with icy gusts of wind from the east, all the way from the Siberian steppes. Despite the bitter cold, the stands at the Olympic Stadium were packed. The home team Hertha was second in the table, the opponent was the team that was in the front, the team that almost always leads the Bundesliga, Bayern Munich. Early in the match, Miroslav Klose sent the visitors from Munich into the lead, and 1-0 stood at the break. For us spectators, it was time to get something warm in our bodies, perhaps a cocoa, a coffee or a small gluhwein? But no, Berlin football fans don’t do that, instead they warm themselves with ice-cold beer, served in large liter mugs. The beer is enjoyed standing, close together above the huge exhaust fans that are embedded in the ground around the Olympic Stadium. Warm air and cold beer – both must have helped, because in the second half the atmosphere rose to new heights, and with the fans at their backs, the home team turned the game around. On-loan Voronin scored two, Hertha took over the top of the table and sent Bayern down to second place. The atmosphere inside the stadium! It was as singularly beautiful as it always is, when little brother is rarely able to send a dominant big brother to the ground.
I look away at the Brandenburger Tor, at UEFA’s gaudy fan zone. I feel a childish desire to protest, thinking that the next time I visit the Olympic Stadium, I will seek out one of the sausage stands by the Olympic Stadium’s subway station, and buy myself a juicy, freshly grilled bratwurst. Maybe I top it off with a liter mug of beer, it’s way too much, I can’t drink it all, but it doesn’t matter, I’m doing it as my own little protest against my money going straight into the pockets of UEFA, like they do inside the Olympic Stadium, where a Bitburger is sold for 8 euros in a plastic cup, and a Snickers – the smallest – costs 5.
I smile happily at my little invention, until I wake up from the trance and think that there will be a way, and that now there will be enough whining and complaining that everything was better before, and that the Bundesliga is so much better than the Euro’s. I am a grown man who finds myself in the middle of Berlin, in the middle of summer, in the middle of the Euro’s, equipped with a press card and a place in the stands. Still, I can’t quite help it. Next time, Olympic Stadium! In the winter, I will come to visit, freeze my hands off in the first half, take the stairs down during the break, find myself an extractor fan and lift the mug of ice-cold beer to blue-frozen lips. What will I dream about? Most likely about the Euro’s that was, and in the summer of 2024, where everything was warm and good and friendly and the best football teams in the whole world were gathered for a one-month party in Berlin and Germany.
Everything was better before, also in the future, just wait and see.
Author; Geir Jacobsen
CHECK YOUR FOOTBALL RESULTS
WATCH MATCH HIGHLIGHTS
A TRUSTED SOURCE ON GOONER NEWS
Leave a Reply