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To discover the origins of German football we must revisit the second half of the nineteenth century. It was a turbulent era. At the start of 1848, Europe witnessed a series of uprisings of a notably bourgeois and liberal hue that aimed to overthrow the ancien régime. Austrian and Prussian liberals followed the example of Italian and French revolutionaries – the first to rebel against the royal houses of Habsburg and Orleans – and rose against absolutist rule. Thus, in March that year, the March Revolution (Märzrevolution) began in German Confederation territories. Revolutionaries’ demands included drafting constitutions, introducing free speech and a free press, unifying the German homeland and holding elections to a constituent assembly. Together these measures threatened the power of the existing rulers, who predictably rejected them. Some concessions were wrung from King Frederick William IV, a member of the Hohenzollern dynasty, such as the creation of a constitution of rights for property owners (but not others). Yet in truth the revolution failed. The monarch responded to the rebels’ demands by mobilising the army to repress them. The counter-revolution’s subsequent triumph meant the reintroduction of absolutism and the failure of the attempt to unify and modernise the country.

In such a context, and as happened in other European states, sporting activity was restricted to the well-to-do. In northern Europe, unlike in the Mediterranean area, sport was encouraged by Protestantism: a religious doctrine that defended the cult of effort and saw physical exercise as an expression of such. In Prussia ‘physical culture’¹ became widespread from 1870. In 1806 its army – commanded by Frederick William III – had suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the Napoleonic troops in the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt. This was followed by the Fall of Erfurt and Berlin and the Prussian royal family fleeing into exile. After this, gymnastics became a priority and obsession in order for the country to avoid future failures. To avoid more humiliating defeats it imposed the ‘physical preparation of the German man for life and war’.² This explains why the gymnastics model adopted had a militaristic edge, based on discipline and order. Gymnastics spread across the country thanks to a wide network of sporting associations and educational institutions, which combined the sport with a glorification of the fatherland.³ Over the next half-century, physical education classes (including gymnastics, swimming and hiking) were introduced in all schools.

In 1874, just three years after the territorial unification that produced the German Empire (which itself resulted from France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War), the Dresden English Football Club was formed. This was the first football club in Germany. Sports clubs already existed, such as TSV 1860 Munich and SSV Ulm 1846, but these were multi-sport and did not include football until the end of the century. The pioneering role of Dresden English FC showed the British influence in the emergence of football in Germany – as in other countries. The club’s promoters were British citizens that lived and worked in the city – the capital of Saxony – or its surroundings. The entity’s name came from most of its 70-odd founding members being of British origin.

In April 1874, the Leipzig newspaper Illustrirte Zeitung published a report on a football match involving a Dresden team in which – according to its authors – ‘they knocked a ball around by moving their feet forward’.⁴ The newspaper was referring to matches that Dresden English FC was playing in a field near the Blüherpark. (This was land on which, in 1922, the Glückgas Stadion – later Dynamo Dresden’s ground – would be built.) Indeed, between 1891 and 1894 Dresden English played seven matches with a spotless record: no defeats and the enviable statistics of 34 goals scored and 0 conceded. The club’s first setback happened on 10 March 1894 when it was beaten 2–0 by Tor und Fußball Club Victoria 89. Four years later the team merged with another city club, Neue Dresdner FC, to form the Dresdner Sport-Club.

Over the next two decades the game spread to other cities and towns – particularly in north-eastern Germany. At first it had been considered an elitist sport. But by the last decade of the century football had become mainstream, with teams existing in places such as Berlin, Bremen, Hamburg, Hanover and Karlsruhe. The most prominent were Sport Club Germania (founded in 1887); Berliner Fußball-Club Germania 1888 – created that year in Berlin’s Tempelhof district; Karlsruhe Fußball Verein (1891); Hertha Berliner Sport-Club (1892); Stuttgart Fußball Verein 1893, Munich 1893 and Verein für Bewegungsspiele Leipzig (1893); Fußball Club Phönix Karlsruhe and Spandauer Sport Verein (1894); Fußball-und Cricket-Club Eintracht Braunschweig (1895); Deutscher Fußball Club Prag (1896); Freiburger Fußball Club (1897); Stuttgarter Kickers, Werder Breman, Turn-und Sportverein 1860 Munich and Viktoria 1889 Berlin (1899); and, in the first year of the new century, Fußball Club Holstein Kiel and Tasmania 1900 Berlin. In that period it was common to have more than one team in a city or town, as we can see from the list. Frankfurt housed the teams Football Club Germania (founded in 1894), Victoria Frankfurt (1899) and Kickers Frankfurt (1899).

A leading figure in the emergence of German club football was the educationalist Wilhelm Carl Johann Conrad Koch. A native of Brunswick,⁵ ‘Konrad Koch’ became one of the country’s most prominent promoters of the sport.⁶

After living temporarily in Britain to learn English, during which he discovered football, Koch returned to Germany with the aim of promoting the sport among his students and through it instilling ethical values such as discipline and cooperation. Thus, in 1874 he wrote the volume Rules for a Football Match, a treatise that regulated the sport for the first time in Germany. He also adapted footballing terminology to the German language in order to avoid accusations that football was ‘too English’ a sport.

It might seem surprising today but at the time Koch was thought to be mad because of his enthusiasm for football. He was even ridiculed by sporting peers such as Otto Jaeger and Karl Planck.⁷ In a context characterised by a Prussian education model based on obedience and punishment, Jaeger and Planck attacked football as a crude ‘English disease’ (which they also scornfully labelled lümmelei (loutishness)). The sport, they said, led to a decrease in moral standards among its partisans. Indeed they perceived football – despite being a team sport – as stressing a player’s individuality, unlike gymnastics that valued discipline and harmony. For this reason, playing football was forbidden and pupils and teachers caught playing it were thrown out of their educational institutions. In Bavaria this ban remained in place until 1927.

In the late nineteenth century the first associations linking clubs were formed. These included the Bund Deutscher Fußballspieler and the Deutscher Fußball und Cricket-Bund. Yet it was not until 28 January 1900 that 86 teams – including some foreign clubs – met in Leipzig to form the Deustcher Fußball-Bund (DFB, the German Football Federation), the main regulating body for German football. Its main promoters included Walther Bensemann, who represented the clubs in Mannheim, E.J. Kirmse, president of the Leipzig Football Association, and Ferdinand Hueppe, president of Prague’s Deutscher FC Prag.⁸ Hueppe was chosen as the first DFB president.⁹

Two years before the founding of the DFB, a first football championship was organised by Verband Süddeutscher Fußball Vereine (Association of Southern German Football Clubs). This brought together many of the clubs in this area of the country. It was not until 1903, however, that the first nationwide football tournament – won by VfB Leipzig – was held. Five years later, on 5 April 1908, a first international game involving Germany was played at Basle’s Landhof Stadion. There the national squad took on Switzerland, who ended up beating the home team 5–3. Included in die Mannschaft (the Team’s) historic line-up were the footballers Ernst Jordan, Walter Hempel, Karl Ludwig, Arthur Hiller, Hans Weymar, Gustav Hensel, Fritz Förderer, Eugen Kipp, Fritz Becker and the brothers Fritz and Willy Baumgärtner.

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1. [Translator’s note]: health and strength training.

2. M. Petroni, St. Pauli siamo noi: Pirati, punk e autonomi allo stadio e nelle strade di Amburgo (Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2015), p. 81.

3. One of gymnastics’ main advocates was the educator Friedrich Ludwig Jahn. Known by his followers as Turnvater (the father of gymnastics), Jahn was the creator of the turnverein (gymnastics clubs) movement in which athletics fused with politics. He believed that physical education was the cornerstone of national health and that its practise strengthened the German character and identity. Jahn opened his first gym in 1811, in Berlin. Eight years later, most gyms were closed because of the murder of journalist August von Kotzbue by the young student Karl Sand. This initiated what was known as Turnsperre, a dark period for the turnverein and Jahn himself – being imprisoned in Kolberg prison until 1825. After being freed, he was banned from giving gymnastics classes. After the 1840s, coinciding with the rise in political liberalism, the clubs were joined by craftsmen – many of whom were Jews, who helped radicalise them. It comes as no surprise, then, that some gymnasts participated in the 1848 revolutions, such as Gustav Struve in Baden, Otto Heubner in Dresden and August Schärttner in Hanau. Because of this involvement most of the clubs were closed down and their properties confiscated; their leaders were imprisoned or went into exile. It was not until the late 1860s – nearly a decade after German unification – that the turnverein could resume their sporting activity.

4. The influence of the army on the growth of practising sport was significant. Not surprisingly, after the debacle the Prussian troops suffered at the hands of the Napoleonic forces in Jena, General Gerhard David von Scharnhorst chose to thoroughly reform the institution. As part of his attempt to modernise the country and improve military training, Scharnhorst introduced physical education at school, based on the teachings of educator and philosopher Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths. Author of the book Gymnastik für die fügend (Gymnastics for Youth), GutsMuths counterpoised the idea of ‘the perfect man’ with the physical decline that he claimed humanity was undergoing.

5. Koch taught German, Latin and Greek at Brunswick’s Martino-Katharineum school from 1868 to 1911 – the year of his death. Aware that outdoor leisure activities benefited students’ development, he chose to organise, on top of the physical education they received, a ‘school games’, which included cricket, rugby and football. He was aided in this task by the institute’s gymnastics teacher, August Hermann, who would become a member of the Central Committee on Public and Youth Games in Germany. Bizarrely the first soccer games played at Martino-Katharineum used a rugby ball, which players could only kick. In 1875 Koch created the first school football team which, thirteen years later, played its first match off the school premises against teams from Göttingen and Hanover. In 1890, the Konrad Koch Foundation led to the founding in Berlin of the German Football Federation and Cricket League. Koch was also one of the pioneers of Raffball, the forerunner of modern handball and basketball. His life even inspired the film Der ganz große Traum von Konrad Koch (Konrad Koch’s Big Dream) that premiered in 2011. This was directed by Sebastian Glober and featured Barcelona-born actor Daniel Brühl in the educator’s role.

6. There is still today controversy over which was the first football match to be played in Germany. While some sources point to the one played by Dresden English FC, others cite as founding matches those held at Koch’s Martino-Katharineum school.

7. In 1898, Planck – gymnast and teacher – published an angry diatribe against Koch and football: ‘We believe that this English sport is not just unpleasant but absurd, ugly and perverted’ (quoted in U. Hesse–Lichtenberger, Tor! The Story of German Football (London: WSC Books, 2002), p. 26). Despite these criticisms, football was becoming more and more popular. Indeed, that year 5,000 spectators turned out for the match between Viktoria Berlin and Germania Hamburg.

8. At that time Prague, the Bohemian capital, was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It included a significant German community that had its very own team: DFC Prag, founded in 1892.

9. As well as the DFB, other associations were set up and organised their own football championships. Among these was the Arbeiter-Turn-und Sportbund (Workers’ Gymnastics and Sports Association, ATSB), which held different tournaments between 1919 and 1932. It even created a national squad that played 77 international matches. In 1928 the German Communist Party (KPD), thanks to an understanding between the ATSB and the Rotsport association (Red sport), organised its own football championship. In other sports similar initiatives took shape, such as the German Gymnastics Association and the Catholic Church’s Sports Federation.