Nothing in Berlin is black and white. The city has been moulded and remoulded over time to represent a vast spectrum of German and international culture. It’s a bit like New York’s cooler, younger brother: not as glamorous or clean, but more bohemian, gritty and unpredictable. It is as varied as any capital in the world and every aspect of the city reflects a strand of its identity: the unapologetic architecture; the forest; the vibrant arts scene; the never-ending nightlife.
Berlin’s football is no different. When the German football association was established in 1904, nearly a third of the 86 founder clubs were from the capital city. Berlin hosts the German Cup final every year and it has hosted the finals of the World Cup final and Champions League within the last 20 years. Yet no club from Berlin has ever won the Bundesliga or reached the final of a European competition.
Two of Berlin’s biggest clubs – Hertha and Union – played each other in the Bundesliga for the first time last month, but that derby has never been particularly intense. “It’s not a real rivalry,” said one of the Dynamo fans we met in the city while shooting this documentary. “The real rivalry is Dynamo versus Union. We have a history of 50-plus games against each other. Every time there was conflict in East Berlin, this was the game.”
While the Berlin Wall stood, contests between Dynamo and Union were heated and confrontational. When Union were awarded a free-kick, Dynamo fans waited until their defence had built a defensive wall and then chanted: “The Wall must come down!” By contrast, the rivalry between Hertha and Union was known for its friendliness. While the Wall was in place, they would refer to each other as ““freunde hinter Stacheldraht (friends behind barbed wire).”
Hertha, the only club from the city to have competed regularly in the Bundesliga, see themselves as a “team for all Berliners”, but uniting the city is a tricky task. Berlin is a diverse and regionalised city, from the eastern working-class fringes of Kӧpernick, to the western affluence of Charlottenburg.
The city has not produced successful clubs, but it does have a lot of them. There are dozens of sides competing in the German football pyramid. Dynamo play in the fourth tier; Tennis Borussia Berlin – who take their name from a tennis and ping-pong club – are a division lower; there are Turkish and Balkan teams; there is a club called FC Polonia that was founded by Poles living in Germany; there is a Jewish club called Makkabi Berlin; and there is even a club called Tasmania Berlin – who, as the myth goes, were founded by a group of fans who were hoping to migrate to the island. Each of them represents a different dimension of Berlin society. No single club speaks for all of Berlin because each region has its own club, showcasing its own unique subculture.
“Hertha should be a football powerhouse,” says Jacob Sweetman, the founder of No Dice, a quarterly football magazine published in Berlin. “They are the flagship team in Germany’s largest city, in Europe’s richest country, but Berlin is a provincial town. There will never be one team that represents the city.”
Klaus Wowereit, the former mayor of the city, once remarked: “We might be poor, but we’re sexy.” His words sum up the city’s football culture perfectly. Berlin does not have a Bayern Munich or a Borussia Dortmund and its trophy cabinets are not laden with silverware from years past. But success has never defined Berlin. It is a city built on a fractured history, regional identity and cultural significance. And its melting pot football culture suits it perfectly.
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