“East, East, East Germany!” The (other) reunification of football fan culture and the roots of an east german exceptionalism

ABSTRACT

This article develops a counterintuitive view of the reunification of Germany. Normally, the unification process was shaped by the East followed the example of the West – but the example of football fan cultures shows the reverse process. In the “other reunification” of German football fan culture, affiliations were negotiated not only between East and West, but also in a transnational context. Regional, generational and gender-specific affiliations were closely interwoven with group- and club-related identifications. The renegotiation of often precarious masculinities in the fan milieu are described as a “subcultural hierarchy struggle” between different football scenes in East and West. In these conflicts the supporters of the sporting declassed eastern clubs often successfully portrayed themselves as “harder” or more “masculine” than the West German fan scenes. In the course of the 2000s, the East German groups studied finally turned their gaze away from the supposedly effeminate West and more strongly towards the violence-oriented ultra scenes in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe.

KEYWORDS:

• Germany
• reunification
• football fan culture
• identity
• violence

“We older Carl Zeiss Jena fans can tell you how to beat Valencia, Benfica, Ajax, AS Roma. The younger ones know how to lose against Pfullendorf, against Wehen, Elversberg, Sportfreunde Siegen” (Dieckmann 2001). This difference in the experience of two fan generations illustrates how far East Germany’s top clubs fell following reunification. FC Carl Zeiss Jena – first in the all-time standings of GDR football, many times GDR champion and cup winner, European Cup finalist – have been bobbing along in the fourth division for years. With the exception of Union Berlin, Jena share the fate of many traditional teams in the former GDR top division. For them, as for their fans, the period after 1990 was also a structural break in sporting terms. With the collapse of the East German economy and state organizations, the clubs¹ lost the sponsoring combines and institutions assigned to them, and the opening of the Wall marked both the beginning of the sale of their best players to the West and the collapse in spectator numbers. Not only did they lose their state-controlled funding base overnight, West German football also proved to be area difficult club to join, where all the places in the first and second leagues were mostly already taken. In the 1991/92 season, the last GDR champions Hansa Rostock and the runners-up Dynamo Dresden were granted access to the Bundesliga by means of a temporary increase in the number of teams in the league, and four other clubs were allowed to join the 2nd Bundesliga. The GDR’s only European Cup winner, 1. FC Magdeburg, even missed out on qualification for both leagues. No club was able to gain a permanent foothold in the top division. Very few were spared the fate of insolvency (Braun et al. 2021).

The difficult transition from the functionally controlled, dirigiste “state amateurism” of GDR football to the capital-dependent professional football reflected both the inertia of change in the ingrained association structures in West Germany and the economically permanently precarious sponsor environment of the East German clubs. - Especially for those affected by it, sporting reunification as a story of decline and sell-out is a narrative which further emphasizes the many inequalities within Germany in the process of reunification.

Another example of the completeness of this history is a the alienating experience that historian Dorothee Wierling recently recalled in her professional biography: when in Leipzig in the early 1990s, she felt that she was “granted power by the simple fact of West German origin […]” (Wierling 2022, 286). Such sweeping assumptions of West German competence were widespread in the early 1990s and were particularly effective in the immediate period of change, when East German football clubs rolled out the red carpet for even the most dubious investment saviours: the Hessian building contractor Rolf-Jürgen Otto, president of Dynamo Dresden in the early 1990s, is a prime example.

Parallel to the development in Germany, football as a globalized commercial consumer product gained momentum from the 1990s onwards. The liberalization of the European player market through the “Bosman ruling” of 1995, including the abolition of the limit on the number of foreign players in a team, as well as ever higher marketing prices proved to be catalysts of massive increases in the value of players and accumulation pressures for the clubs. Reunification was therefore not simply the continuation of the old Federal Republic, but was at the same time superimposed by global processes. The development of football in particular is seen as the pacemaker of a turn towards “neoliberalism” and “globalisation” - a massively accelerated commercialization in the 1990s that turned football clubs into companies of the (global) entertainment industry (Giulianotti and Robertson 2004; Jonas 2019; Sandvoss 2003). In short, these intertwined developments, cemented and prolonged the pre-1989 inferiority of GDR football vis-à-vis rival clubs from West Germany. This, in turn, manifested itself in a cultural imbalance in terms of remembrance: while Gerd Müller, Sepp Maier and Lothar Matthäus were and still are idols of the Federal Republic, East German achievers such as Jürgen Croy, Joachim Streich and René Müller were at best suitable for reports on regional television such as “Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk” (MDR) or as fixed points in a growing “memorial culture” within East German fan scenes (Braun et al. 2021, 696; Weiß 2021). In this reading, it is Dixie Dörner who is the “Beckenbauer of the East,” but not vice versa.

However, the perspective from the fan terraces offers a more refined view of post-reunification society and especially of processes of demarcation and interconnectedness, of identification and belonging. Especially in the case of football as a “global game” (Giulianotti 1999), fan scenes are places of plural, contested, overlapping affiliations and are difficult to grasp in a purely national framework. This is precisely why they are interesting in this framework: we understand fan worlds as complex symbolic orders, structured by rituals, myths and symbols that mark affiliations and borders – both externally and as internal differences (Schmidt-Lux, Wohlrab-Sahr, and Leistner 2016, 162–176). The role that East-West differences and identificatory references and demarcations played in the history of East German fan scenes and how these changed is the subject of this paper. Firstly, it will trace the mutual references between (organized) fans in East and West and the dominant cultural pattern of a one-sided orientation towards developments in the West, beginning in the GDR and continuing into the 1990s. This gradually changed after 1989/90. At the latest with the emergence of the Ultras movement and an orientation towards Central Eastern Europe, which is interesting in terms of the history of integration, a reversal of status took place with regard to the well-rehearsed hierarchies between East and West – a self-mythologization, with consequences and an impact on society, that “the East” was tougher, rougher and more competent in violence.

“Udersleben at Kyffhäuser greets Bayern Munich” - the West in the East

The emergence of modern fan cultures is historically linked to the change of modern (mass) media and especially the popularization of radio and TV broadcasts in the second half of the 20th century. Media access widened the range of choices in terms of fan objects and fanhood. Football interest could now also be linked to a club far away, whose results and matches were reported in the newspapers, but later also on television. Ultimately, this access to topics and people also individualized fan interest; access to the fan object was no longer tied to its actual accessibility (Schmidt-Lux, Wohlrab-Sahr, and Leistner 2016, 169). Fan cultures were thus constituted as a complex structure of mutual observation. This was accompanied by the training of an awareness for the self-staging and cheering styles of other fans, but also a kind of competition of their own between the stands and scenes. In short – even across the Iron Curtain, one could be a fan of foreign teams or a fan of how other fans lived their passion. For the GDR, the charisma of international and especially West German football quickly became a problem and the “protection” of sporting events became a separate focus of the Ministry for State Security (MfS) from the mid-1960s onwards (Braun and Wiese 2005, 205).

In 1964, the official match day of the GDR’s premier league was even moved from Sunday to Saturday in order to compete with the Bundesliga and deprive it of its status in the GDR (Leske 2004, 162). This did nothing to diminish the fascination. Many football fans in the GDR still had a second club – in the West – with whom they shared the excitement or sometimes even tried to travel to the games in the “Eastern Bloc.” Between 1979 and 1981 alone, 5,000 spectators from the GDR attended matches of West German Bundesliga teams in “socialist foreign countries” - sometimes with self-painted posters: “Udersleben am Kyffhäuser grüßt Bayern München” (Braun and Wiese 2005, 206). Studies by the Leipzig Central Institute for Youth Research, which were kept under wraps, confirmed the importance of the West as a reference point for football attention:

It is also significant that such expressions of sympathy are not limited to GDR teams and that the choice of “favourite teams” from the international scene in individual groups even exceeds that of GDR teams. […] With a share of approx. 70–80 % of the mentions, a total dominance of teams from the FRG Bundesliga (represented above all by Bayern Munich and by far HSV) can be registered here. (Stiehler 1988, 7)

With regard to the self-stylization of fans as fans by means of flags or first stadium chants, the developments at the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s were still largely the same between the Federal Republic and the GDR. Later, the West became the pioneer, especially in terms of youth culture. Trends, forms of organization and also forms of expression of fan culture were usually first seen in the Federal Republic and then spilled over into the eastern part, often mediated via the “front city of Berlin,” and gradually spread (with a time lag) throughout the GDR. Both the “Kutte,” a jeans waistcoat with patches, and the organizational form of the fan clubs are examples of this. They appeared in West Germany from the 1960s onwards, while in the GDR they only became widespread in the late 1970s and especially in the 1980s – as an unauthorized form of group formation, they were under constant observation by the MfS, sometimes followed by measures to dismantle them. An MfS situation report from 1984 states:

A considerable number of the members of such “fan clubs” and also other “football fans” tend to glorify FRG teams and teams of other NATO countries. They often express this through sympathy messages or corresponding patches, banners, flags, etc. The perimeter advertising in the stadiums is often covered with such flags, some of which are metres long, so that our slogans and advertisements of socialist enterprises are completely obscured or distorted in their meaning. (Information on the situation on the football grounds of the GDR and suggestions for better guaranteeing order and security in connection with football matches, without date, Federal Archives/BArch, MfS-HA XX, No. 8145, 000003.)

The interest in the other, however, remained one-sided. As the Leipzig author Dieter Zimmer reported, it was easy to get football results from Portugal or Greece in the Federal Republic, but one often searched in vain for the results of the upper league in the GDR² (Martin 2009, 48–49).

Since the 1980s, violence and “rowdy behaviour” in and around the stadiums of the GDR have played a greater role, not as a new phenomenon, but now more organized. This phenomenon could also be observed elsewhere in Eastern Europe (Kossakowski 2017; Zeller 2015) and was regularly portrayed by state authorities as being controlled by the “hostile West.” Although the propensity to violence was definitely “national,” the specific habitus and confrontational style of English hooligans – again mediated via the West German fan scenes and “West media” - played an orienting role. This development was mixed with the emergence of skinheads in the GDR and the growth of a right-wing extremist youth culture. Fan clubs and joint stadium visits in particular played an important role in shaping structures, which continued to have an effect beyond the collapse of the GDR. This went so far that in 1985 right-wing extremist football fans in the environment of a GDR football club tried to organize themselves along the lines of the right-wing terrorist “Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann” in the Federal Republic and pondered the procurement of weapons (Federal Archives/BArch, Archiv der Zentralstelle, MfS – HA XXII, Nr. 618/5).³

The fact that the West was also the point of reference for subcultural developments cannot be equated with the propagandistic interpretation of an externally controlled development. This was even disputed by GDR studies – which were kept under lock and key. For example, the study commissioned by the Ministry of the Interior in 1988, “Determining the Political Essence of Negative Groupings and Their Relevance to Security Using the Example of Skinheads in the GDR,” stated that “the empirical material [did] not provide any convincing evidence that this international influence was a kind of condition of existence for the groups. It looks as if they would be capable of growth even without this channel of connection” (Süß 1993a; 1993b, 39). At least implicitly, the study also names causes for the home-grown “capacity for growth” of right-wing extremist subcultures in the GDR. They referred positively to moral values of socialist society such as “order” and “cleanliness,” were involved in pre-military organizations such as the GST (Society for Sport and Technology) and represented classic right-wing extremist resentments: “The main enemy was ‘the foreigners,’ who allegedly ‘took living space away from GDR citizens, reduced the supply of industrial goods through their speculative purchases, brought AIDS into the GDR’” (38).

Reunification as a subcultural hierarchy struggle

With the fall of the Berlin Wall – as described at the beginning – GDR football came to an end. The reunification of sporting politics cemented the disparities between clubs in West and East Germany that have persisted to this day. At the level of the fan scenes, the upheaval was more complex and tended to follow the overarching pattern of competitive rank struggles for the larger following, the better atmosphere, but above all for the more competent use of violence (Leistner 2010). The resulting lines of conflict were also related to overarching East-West differences, but were not identical to them. Initially, there was an explosive outbreak of violence, which was enabled in part by overstretched security and control authorities. Even as the SED state was disintegrating and, in its disintegration, was also overburdened with maintaining order at football matches, East German fans flocked to their West German idols and West German hooligans to the adventure playground of the “Wild East.” Friendships also developed, such as that of the Magdeburg fans with the supporters of Eintracht Braunschweig. In Berlin, where the chant “Hertha and Union – one nation” was already present in the fan stands in GDR times (Braun and Wiese 2006, 117), the initial post-reunification friendship euphoria quickly faded and developed, at the latest in the 2000s, into a strong rivalry.

However, the violence initially escalated between the East German fan scenes. In the 1990/91 qualifying season, 14 clubs in the GDR-Oberliga fought for the few places in the first and second Bundesliga and thus for sporting survival. The season was overshadowed by violent fan riots, the sad highlight of which was the fatal shooting of Mike Polley, a fan of FC Berlin, formerly BFC Dynamo, by a policeman in Leipzig in November 1990 (Klose 1992).

The integration of the six former Oberliga clubs into the first and second Bundesliga created regular contact and conflict zones between fans from both sub-societies. The differences were initially obvious and, as in other areas of society, gave rise to mutual stereotyping. Visually alone, hooligans from West Germany initially differed from their East German counterparts: not only did the former, with their Lacoste, Replay and Chevignon clothing, distinguish themselves from the denim jackets and weekly market bomber jackets of the latter, they also sometimes made fun of their “brothers.” And they won the first street fights. That was soon to change – as a hooligan from Dynamo Dresden recalled in 2008:

In the second year of the Bundesliga, we were a real unit. In the first year, we were more like scoring or running. In the second year, we knew how things worked, and from then on we got better and better. At first, the West laughed at the stupid Saxons with their stupid dialect. But from ’92/93 onwards, they stopped laughing more and more. At some point we were so good and united that the West gangs didn’t even confront us in their own cities. Sometimes we literally came begging, but they were scared shitless. From the second or third Bundesliga season onwards, we gained a nationwide reputation for being good and not backing down when the going got tough. (Pätzug 2008, 109–110)

West German hooligans also confirm this “new wind” in the scene (Claus 2017, 33). A look at the fan scenes shows the complexity of the convergence of East and West: On the one hand, the 1990s in East Germany were marked by structural collapse, declassification, deindustrialization and de-securitization. On the other hand, on the level of competitive violence of fans, a symbolic order “at eye level” quickly emerged, where not primarily people from East and West met, but first and foremost men as men (Meuser 2015). This development is embedded in the transformation of East German masculinities and contrasts with images of a frustrated, broken, passive-aggressive masculinity (Borges and Wiest 2021; Scholz 2004). Hooligans from the East quickly became a permanent fixture, and those who were thought of the “best” hooligans in Germany from the mid- and at the latest by the end of the 1990s came from BFC, Magdeburg, Dynamo and VfB Leipzig, rather than Essen, Hamburg or Dortmund. The East German hooligans became a brand and emancipated themselves from the former role models, but without completely leaving the frame of reference. They set themselves apart from the West German hooligans, but without completely rejecting their attitude or contact. Instead, the East German hooligans were able to claim for themselves within these conflicts of rank that “the” East was suddenly someone again and, above all, that it was different. This superiority and self-confidence was not fed solely by the German-German showdown, but also by the specific experiential space of a violent hegemony within East German society: Emerging spaces of violence and opportunity structures, which today are described with the term “baseball bat years” (Bangel 2022), also overlapped with fans and hooligans outside of football matches. In the stadiums and on the streets, the right-wing extremist culture of dominance was effective for a long time, and fan crowds were also places of political socialization. The everyday nature of violence – at that time not yet practised through regular training – led to an unintended but everyday professionalization of violence, from which not least the East German hooligans profited.

The 1998 World Cup in France was a turning point for the fan scenes. Apart from the poor performance of the German national team, it was overshadowed by one event in particular: Lens. There, several German hooligans knocked down the gendarme Daniel Nivel and maltreated him while he was lying on the ground, so that he had to fight for his life and was left with severe physical injuries. In addition to prison sentences for many of those involved, there was not only a tightening of the law, but also more surveillance and more repression in the stadiums. Football, now positioned as a product on the market and targeting broader sections of the population, could no longer afford such negative headlines. As a consequence, hooligans were pushed out of the stadiums. Competitive violence shifted to so-called third-place fights – i.e. arranged “field fights,” either in fields, forests, meadows or car parks. Compared to violence in the vicinity of football matches, this form of violence is more preconditional. For those involved, match days and stadiums constitute spatio-temporally limited, defined situations: with few exceptions, highly regulated and ritualized. On the one hand, this severely limits the possibilities for the use of violence; on the other hand, it opens up a space of opportunity for the ritualized stagings of aggression, based around showing oneself and being seen, which are typical of the comparatively low-violence everyday life on match days. This form of violent situations presupposes boundaries such as fences or police lines (which are themselves regulated by tactics) and other security measures. They prevent direct confrontations and mark out the “playing field” for the thoroughly serious displays of willingness to use violence (throwing objects such as Bengalos or simulated storming of the opposing fan block) and for the symbolic communication of strength and aggressiveness. The clashes between opposing fan camps appear spectacular – which is reflected not least in dramatizing media reports – but they usually remain calculable in terms of course and intensity for all those involved and are attractive for all those who shy away from an immediate use of violence (Leistner 2008). The situation was different in the case of third-location conflicts: Those who went along here really had to fight and not just run alongside. Here, too, the East German scenes remained the ultimate for a long time. The differences manifested themselves and the symbolic rankings shifted in favour of East German hooligans.

This was reinforced by the fact that security policy restrictions were tightened and new security standards were concentrated primarily on the higher leagues and thus those competitions in which East German teams hardly played a role. Traditional clubs with large hooligan scenes played in the lower leagues, where the public interest in prosecution was less high, sometimes even non-existent, the regulations just described were less frequent and violence was more often real than merely a staged ritual. Serious riots, such as a big brawl on the pitch like the one between Dynamo Dresden and 1. FC Magdeburg in 1999, had almost no consequences compared to today. The violent excess between Dynamo Dresden and VfB Leipzig in 2001 also had no consequences. During the match, both groups of fans fired flares at each other. In the ensuing interruption of the game, hooligans from both clubs stormed the pitch and only the quick intervention of the police prevented a clash. This in turn took place outside the stadium after the match. Away from the sporting rivalry, the violence-related difference in attractiveness shifted to the opposite: “Actually, West Germany is boring. They talk a lot and celebrate their traditions, but there’s hardly anything going on. By comparison, over here, the soup is still boiling” (Pätzug 2008, 79).

The loss of importance and the ousting of the hooligans from the stadiums in the aftermath of Lens 1998 opened the field for a subculture which was new to Germany but long established elsewhere: that of the Ultras. This is a group of football fans that stands out and distinguishes itself in terms of role and significance. They (re)interpret the fan movement particularly intensively and rigidly, so that they are the most active and in many places the dominant group within the local fan scenes. Typically, they compete with Ultras of different clubs to outdo each other in areas such as creative cheering techniques, but also in terms of violence and the staging of violence (Roversi 1991). The subculture of football fans that originally emerged in Italy in the 1960s and its rites, symbolism and modes of action did not arrive in Germany, which had long been fixated on England as a model, until the mid-1990s. Here, too, processes of change in media history played a certain role – with hard-to-get magazines like the Italian Supertifo or private special interest channels like Eurosport and its Eurogoals programme, the stage for international fan scenes expanded significantly. These media channels allowed youths and young fans fascinating insights into the styles of representation of southern European fan scenes in particular.

The new stylistic devices such as choreographies/tifo or, although less new, pyrotechnics and new chants attracted the young people who were more interested in what was happening around the game. Whereas in the past they would have joined the hooligans, they now found themselves where there was still or again something going on – with the Ultras. And once again, the west of Germany developed into the first testing ground and space for action. Although the first Ultras groups were also founded in the east in Erfurt in 1996 and in Zwickau in 1997, it was not until the turn of the millennium that the great East German Ultras founding period took place. West Germany and groups active there such as Ultras Frankfurt, Wilde Horde Cologne or Commando Cannstatt from Stuttgart became pioneers and in some cases role models. As with the fan clubs, clothing and hooligans, the West was initially the frame of reference for the East. People looked “over” or “up” (not only because of league membership), they went there – and very quickly adopted practices or chants.

The North-East German Football Association - Football within the borders of the GDR

At the same time, the new Ultras culture developed in East Germany under very specific conditions. For years, the special features of sport-political association structures and the economic framework conditions forced a spatially limited, interactive consolidation between the East German fan scenes. Since the dissolution of the GDR Football Association (DFV) and the founding of the North-East German Football Association (NOFV) and its entry into the DFB in November 1990, match operations in the east have been organized by this association. These institutional conditions supported the fact that fan scenes reproduced and stabilized within regular phantom borders of the former GDR (von Hirschhausen et al. 2019). The fact that the majority of East German traditional teams played below the first and second leagues, but also the common association and league structure, ensured that the former GDR clubs repeatedly met and thus constantly renewed and maintained rivalries. Under these conditions, from the turn of the millennium onwards, a common space of experience emerged among all the East German Ultras groups, which, especially in the first few years, exchanged ideas intensively and in some cases, despite enmities and rivalries, supported each other, for example in the procurement of materials for choreographies. The East German Ultras virtually formed their own particular lifeworld, which began to emancipate itself from the West German role models from 2002 onwards. The reference framework of West Germany was lost. Instead, a generation emerged that only knew the east of the NOFV or, better, only wanted to see the east. In Magdeburg, they called themselves the “Generation Amateurfußball.” Accordingly, they still sing and chant: “We’ve never been to Paris – We’ve never been to Madrid/We’ve seen you fight and win – in East Germany!” [“Wir warn noch niemals in Paris – Wir warn noch niemals in Madrid/Wir haben euch kämpfen und siegen sehn – in Ostdeutschland!”]

Pseudokibicow⁴ - the other east

For the (fan)cultural self-referentiality in the meantime, fanzines played a major role alongside personal contacts with each other. As media produced by fans themselves in DIY style, they had a scene-building function of self-assurance.⁵ Fans’ fanzines about their own club, made for other fans, are a mixture of (scene) diary and photo album, with reports on match days and fan activities, whereby the focus is rarely on the course of the match, but rather on their own “performance.”

In addition to the scene’s own information magazines, which were sold or distributed in small numbers within the fan stands (mostly at home matches), and the nationwide magazine Erlebnis Fußball, so-called groundhopping magazines were of great importance. Groundhopping is a specialized fan activity that could only be inadequately described as football tourism. Rather, it is a time-intensive leisure activity with the aim of visiting as many and as remote international football stadiums or “grounds” as possible. The resulting ground-hopping magazines are media for the niches of specialized attention – reports on trips to games of foreign teams with subjective insights into the respective fan scenes and “country and people.”

In the process, the geographical focus also specialized. From 1999 onwards, Pseudokibicow, a zine produced in East Germany specifically for Polish fan scenes, appeared. There was also the Beziehungskiste. Later, other, more elaborately produced and distributed magazines such as Der Grenzgänger were added. Italy was no longer the only country with “the” fan culture. Serbia and Yugoslavia, Croatia, Romania, Hungary and last but not least Poland became the focus of young, organized football fans in East Germany.⁶ The frame of reference thus shifted from the West far in the direction of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. Around 2002, Poland in particular became a kind of role model: jogging trousers instead of jeans, no-name hoodies instead of casual and brand-name fashion – at least that’s how it was propagated. Poland was still original, rougher, more authentic and, above all, more competent in violence – this was the style that the East German ultras quickly proclaimed for themselves and still do to some extent today (Kossakowski, Antonowicz, and Jakubowska 2020). The fanzine Blickfang Ost and its predecessor Offside were central to these transnational appropriations of Central Eastern European self-stylizations. For a time, all the larger East German Ultras groups wrote their semi-annual reviews of the season, provided information about current problems, answered surveys – and repeatedly set themselves apart from the West German scenes, where the magazine – incidentally – had particularly high sales.

Even though there were very bitter rivalries, different opinions, political positions, styles and forms of expression in the East German Ultras groups at that time, the magazine popularized an offer of identification that referred to East-West differences. However, to deduce from this the formation of a homogeneous East German “identity” in the context of football fan scenes would be over-interpreted: For all the symbolic charging of internal differences, the commonality of belonging to a transnational subculture remains unaffected. The reasoning behind the East-West demarcation was multi-sensual. First, the magazine project and the restriction to East German scenes were justified pragmatically: “The suggestion to let different fan groups have their say came from Poland. But it would have been too much to cover the whole of Germany with reports, so we limited ourselves to the East. You know the people, and there is always something going on here” (Man sollte diesen Ost-Hypenicht überbewerten 2005, 24). At the same time, implicit reference was made to East Germany’s special position in sports politics: “you know each other” refers to the community of fate of traditional lower-class clubs and precarious club existences, but also to actual networks. In the quote, “Immer was los” refers to the formation of myths and the staging of differences between East and West with regard to the scope of the use of violence. In this context, the magazine functioned as a medium in which collective identities were negotiated, but not fixed, and had an important function for communalization within the experiential space of East Germany. Developments and experiences in the scenes were documented and specialized knowledge systems were established. People read each other’s insinuations, inside jokes or reproduced knowledge about their own uniqueness and above all their specialness compared to the West, also by looking into the GDR past. At that time, a cliché image of the West German ultras was drawn, who generally left the house with New Balance shoes, Umbro jumpers, bucket hats and fur-collar parkas. It was important to clearly distinguish oneself from this image:

Somehow they all look clichéd with their Wessi clothes like Umbro or Troublemaker. That alone is a visual difference, and the appearance and presentation are also noticeable at first glance. There’s a lot of shouting, but often nothing works out in the end. You experience some strange things. Maybe a few in the East are wearing sweatpants at the moment, but there is no dress code. […] Most of them tend to go to Eastern Europe, like Poland or Hungary, where the propensity to violence is higher and things are tougher. (24)

Such East-West distinctions were present, but the internal logics of the fan scene were not suspended, especially not the exclusivity norm (“everyone does their thing”) and the internal East German differences. While on the one hand the commonality of the East was emphasized, at the same time it was insisted upon that the old enmities between the East German groups were not thereby abolished, but on the contrary much more intense and violent than in the West.

As can be read from the example of Blickfang Ost, the theme of violence was constitutive. The aforementioned “playground East Germany,” which was less restrictively secured during this time and under the conditions of low class, offered more favourable opportunity structures for actual violence or for its staging.

Within the organized fan scene, the “wild East” was discussed throughout Germany. The East German Ultras managed to create a common image, a myth that made an impression. In line with the Polish role models, they presented themselves as more authentic, stronger, more masculine, with greater cohesion – in other words, as the “real” Ultras. They created an image that followed the development of the hooligans, that of the strong, authentic East German who had emancipated himself from his West German role model and who, at least in the fan curve, had overcome the condition of the “whining East German.” The image of the “authentic East German” is still cultivated to some extent today. Or as they sing at Hansa Rostock: “We will beat the opponent, chase the Wessis, forward HRO.” [“Wir werden den Gegner schlagen, die Wessis jagen, vorwärts HRO.”]

The group identities were so strongly influenced by the discourse about East Germany and the demarcation from the West that the Ultras tried to integrate conditions that contradicted this into their own lifeworld and thus protect it from possible attacks from outside or inside. In an interview, for example, an Ultra from the “Diablos” from Chemie Leipzig described his friends from Eintracht Frankfurt as “not typically West German,” saying this was also one of the foundations of their friendship (Der Kampf um Leipzig 2005).

In addition, many fan groups turned to their own club history and even more to their own fan history during this time. Pride in the “old days” was developed, and a series of books on the history of clubs and fans in the GDR and during the transition process emerged from the fan environment (Franke and Pätzug 2006; Pätzug 2005, 2008, 2014).⁷ Thus, the fan stands became sites of communicative memory and an anchor of East German self-confidence, for which there was otherwise no echo either on the pitch or in society. The clubs and even more the (transformation) history of the fan scenes themselves became places of remembrance in cultural memory. In these offers of identification, the West was constantly co-negotiated as the Other:

Fucking Westerners’ is a normal opinion in East German society. The East is lagging behind everywhere, and people want to turn that around in the stadium and the football environment. But in Dresden they certainly respect the Frankfurt Ultras, who have already got things going and in a way distance themselves from the “Wessi Ultra” mentality. (Stadionwelt 2005, 26)

During this time, an exceptionalist identity offer of a more authentic, rougher and more masculine avant-garde of violence emerged in the East German fan corners, which broke with the subcultural hegemony of a supposedly soft West. This was closely linked to specific images of masculinity that had an impact beyond football and into other popular cultural spheres. It became popular to clarify identity negotiations in the direction of a “masculinisation” of East Germany. Examples can be found, for example, in the songs of rapper Joe Rilla (aka Hagen Stoll), who himself comes from the BFC Dynamo hooligan scene (Lux 2022, 318). In his song Der Osten rollt (The East Rolls) from 2007 it says:

And I am the pride of these records

I stand for guys who never had a fair chance here

Times are changing. No one walks bent over here any more

Here, 16-year-olds show you how to pick apart cupboards/[…]

Hope is a foreign word here, they write in the press/[…].

And every Easterner – damn it – in the country knows what I mean’/[…].

Rilla sums it up because the East has something to say

I’m tired of complaining, I’m putting all my eggs in one basket.

And feel like 89 on the street.

Und ich bin der Stolz dieser Platten

Ich steh für Jungs die nie eine faire Chance hier hatten

Zeiten ändern sich. Niemand läuft hier mehr gebückt

Hier zeigen dir 16jährige wie man Schränke zerpflückt/[…]

Hier sei Hoffnung ein Fremdwort schreiben sie in der Presse/[…]

Und jeder Ostler – verdammt – im Land weiß was ich mein’/[…]

Rilla bringt es auf den Punkt, weil der Osten was zu sagen hat

Ich hab das Klagen satt, setz’ alles auf eine Karte

Und fühl mich wie 89 auf der Straße.

Similar developments occurred in the mixed scenes of hooligans and organized right-wing extremists. From the mid-2000s onwards, their exercise of violence became professionalized through “sportisation” through systematic and methodical martial arts training. Local martial arts events such as “East Germany Fights” in Leipzig or the “Fightclub Karl-Marx-Stadt” in Chemnitz emerged (Claus 2017; Fight Club Sachsen 2005).⁸

In youth and subculture, therefore, a status reversal took place in relation to the well-rehearsed hierarchies between East and West, which – to stay with the subject matter – also had repercussions for football fans in West Germany.

It is particularly interesting that during this period the East of Germany became the reference object for parts of the West German fan and ultras scenes. While some scenes – such as the one from Cologne, which appeared in Dresden with a large banner saying “Made in West Germany” - initially tried to demonstrably distinguish themselves, other groups tried to be more “East German” than the East Germans themselves: An example of this is Münster, where in the cosy student city and at that time “most liveable city in the world,” “jogger riots,” i.e. fights in jogging trousers, were suddenly the order of the day. It was as if Münster was suddenly located in the Silesian Voivodeship, the Polish coal and industrial centre – or at least between Zwickau and Chemnitz. But above all, the violent actions of the East German Ultras also put pressure on the West German groups. No matter how much the “wild East” was now also mythical self-dramatization and self-aggrandizement, whoever wanted to assert themselves in the game of the Ultras had to play along (Leistner et al. 2017). The majority of West German groups, or at least some of their members, gradually broke away from the long-held maxim of only using violence when attacked by others and became proactive agents of violence themselves. Violence became an integral part of the Ultras culture throughout Germany. The habitus marked as “East German” and coded as male was the prelude to a professionalization of football violence that continues to this day.

Differentiation and outlook – the scene after 2009

In the years 2007 to 2009, the consensus of the East German groups broke down, an increasing differentiation took place, and the magazine Blickfang Ost ceased to exist in 2008 - also after internal disputes. The scene in the whole of Germany changed, the view widened to include the whole of Germany, and Blickfang Ost became the all-German Blickfang Ultra. Although the magazine had already existed as an irregular publication since 2007, the editors – who were the same who had worked on Blickfang Ost – adopted the concept of a season review for the whole of Germany from 2010/11 onwards. Moreover, from the 2010s onwards, violence was no longer a distinctive and unique feature of the East German scene. Even if this narrative could still be found in representations such as stickers or chants, the West German fan groups caught up with their “backlog.” In doing so, they benefited from a general professionalization of the violent actors through martial arts and training (Claus 2017).

The topic of repression was the main unifying factor, and networks that had previously been separated in the East and West came together, at least partially. Groups that previously refused to cooperate with each other or with “Wessis” marched together on a large demonstration for fan rights in 2010, fought under the slogan “Respect emotions, legalize pyrotechnics” for the legalization of setting off pyrotechnics in the stadium or organized themselves under the slogan “War on the DFB” against the association and its fan and security policy. The fact that a scene like Dynamo Dresden was in charge of the latter campaign illustrates the contradictions inherent in fan culture, which are not always easy to understand, but which make it so interesting as a field of research.

Dynamo Dresden in particular stands like no other club in East Germany for a continuous display of East German origins, GDR symbolism and demarcation from the West. As early as 2004, they presented a flag in Wuppertal with stolen fan scarves and the inscription “den Wessiultras aufs Maul.” The same flag was also displayed at the beginning of April 2023 against Rot-Weiss Essen, supplemented by another “Wessi Ultras” flag made of scarves from Essen and Borussia Dortmund fans, who maintain a longstanding friendship with one another. It was a double symbolic degradation of the opponent, through the display of stolen fan articles and the devaluation as “Wessi Ultras,” with which a certain fan style is associated. However, the fact that the Esseners presented scarves with the inscription “West Germany” and inflatable bananas in the visitors’ block is also part of the narrative and shows how such reciprocal attributions are cultivated in certain fan scenes. The following weekend, for the match in Saarbrücken, Dynamo Dresden celebrated its 70th birthday. In large letters on the fence: “The Icon from the Zone.” In the stands: a large GDR flag on which the hammer and compass had been replaced by the Dynamo logo. In the block, isolated supporters wore a uniform of the People’s Police – Dynamo’s supporting organization in GDR times. Depictions like this keep both the GDR origin and the staged East Germanness present in people’s minds.

Although Dynamo Dresden’s fan scene represents a special East German habitus, other clubs also line up behind it and present GDR symbols, their East German origins or clearly distinguish themselves from the “West.” This is the case with Hansa Rostock or 1.FC Magdeburg. Rot-Weiß Erfurt also regularly displays a GDR flag – but only at away games in the West, including West Berlin.

Other clubs, such as Chemie Leipzig or Union Berlin, do not have such representations. Their identity and mythologization as oppositional “underdog” clubs in the GDR are too deeply rooted, and the stories of the experiences of repression before 1989 are too present. Nevertheless, the appropriation of GDR history also plays a role at such clubs, as the use of the term “travel squad” as the motto of Union Berlin’s away trips in the 2022/23 European Cup season illustrates (Mennicke 2023).

Examples like these make it clear how differently the treatment of East German origin has developed since the end of Blickfang Ost. However, they show that the common space of experience has not been completely dissolved. Thus, experiences of devaluation are still present and the terms “Wessi,” “West German” or “Wessi ultras” are associated with negative ascriptions. They are used in internal communication and in some places also externally, but are embedded in subcultural logics of representation. The staging of “being East German,” even in clubs where it has great significance in the self-image, always has something playful, ironic, folkloristic, knowing about the provocative effects on outsiders. Think of the legendary “East-East-East Germany” chant of Dynamo Dresden at away games in West Germany. A masculine-martial demonstration of self-confidence aimed at the affective outrage effects.

However, such representations also refer to public debates about identity and a “consciousness of the East” of some kind. For example, the fence flag “Third Generation East Germany” regularly hangs at Dynamo Dresden – alluding to the name of the initiative of the same name that came into being around 2009 and lobbied for more public presence of the generation born between 1975 and 1985 in the GDR. At the same time, this allusion also has a sociological core, as it is precisely this generation from which many of the founders of the East German Ultra scenes come. The reversal of East-West German hierarchy in fan culture is tied to this generation. And even though this reversal is limited to a subcultural segment of society, it turns typical images of the reunification process that shape public perception upside down. However, these offers of identification remain embedded in a transnational subculture – the marker of difference “East German” is usually much less effective than the perceptions of commonality as Tifosi, Pseudokibice and Ultras. Last but not least, fan-political mobilizations against the developments that overlapped the sport-political reunification and have been co-creating a common space of experience for decades formed from the organized fan scenes across the countries: the securitization and commercialization of football. At the same time, in the inner-German context, the offers of identification and formulas that emerged in the subculturally framed context of the fan scenes have taken on a life of their own. The chant “Ost-Ost-Ostdeutschland” (East-East-East Germany), intoned self-confidently and ironically by Dynamo Dresden fans, was also increasingly heard at the protests of extreme right-wing actors in East Germany since 2022. An appropriation that detaches itself from the context of origin and now transfers the football fans’ reversal of rank to the street as a political arena. That the East is different now becomes a declaration of war on political institutions.⁹ What effects this will have will certainly occupy us in the future.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Kit Holden for his thorough reading of this paper and helpful comments.

The text was first published in German in the “Jahrbuch Deutsche Einheit” 2023. With kind permission by Aufbau Verlage in Berlin. © Aufbau Verlage GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin 2021. (Published under the imprint Ch. Links; »Ch. Links« is a trademark of Aufbau Verlage GmbH & Co. KG)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was published in the framework of the research project “The Contested Legacy of 1989” (2019-2023), funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under Grant No. 01UJ1803AY, and in the framework of a PhD project, funded by the Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Eastern Germany.

Notes on contributors

Alexander Leistner

Alexander Leistner is project leader for the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) research network “The contested legacy of 1989” (www.erbe89.de.) and the taskforce “Ways across the country – democracy in transforming landscapes” (Volkswagen Foundation www.waysacrossthecountry.de) at the Institute for the Study of Culture (University of Leipzig).

Alexander Mennicke

Alexander Mennicke is a PhD student at the Institute for the Study of Culture, University of Leipzig (Scholarship from the German Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Eastern Germany).

Notes

1. In fact, the East German “Spielgemeinschaften” and football clubs had nothing in common with bourgeois clubs. Instead, they were state-organized corporations. However, the term “Verein” was retained colloquially.

2. Zimmer speaks from the perspective of someone who fled with his family to the Federal Republic of Germany and was unable to see the GDR clubs. After 1989/90 and in the course of internal migration, the East German clubs had large “diaspora” fan groups in West Germany.

3. The case was taken over and dealt with by HA XXII of the MfS, responsible for counter-terrorism, after half-hearted activities by the responsible district administration.

4. “Pseudokibice” (pseudo-fans), term for football fans in Poland who – in contrast to the “Pikniki” - are not only concerned with the sporting event itself.

5. An apt definition – albeit with a view to punk fanzines – understands fanzines to be a “mostly black-and-white sheet of publications, not archived anywhere in an acceptable form, neither accessible in libraries nor available in magazine shops. […] [F]or the interested reader, the purchase of a single zine is usually enough to infiltrate the distribution system, since almost every fanzine reviews other zines […]. If one takes into account the low circulation, irregular publication, the difficulties of getting hold of fanzines as an outsider, as well as the main topics of the often very personally coloured articles, one gets the impression of gaining insight into diary excerpts or a larger correspondence.” (Lau 1992, 102–103)

6. With their journeys to Poland, Hungary, Serbia, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Transnistria, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Albania, the ground hoppers achieved a shift in perspective that Karl Schlögel promoted largely unsuccessfully in his collection of essays Die Mitte liegt ostwärts (The Centre Lies Eastwards) - or as the title of a hopper zine put it: Eine Reise dorthin, wo der Osten schon wieder Westen ist (A Journey to Where the East is West Again) (Martin Czikowski 2008). See also the text by Michael Fritsche (2017), clearly affected by the Polish stadium atmosphere.

7. Pätzug 2005, 2008, 2014) Franke and Pätzug (2006), among others. In a way, the many books and contributions by Frank Willmann since the 2000s paved the way for these books.

8. From these developments within extreme right-wing mixed scenes, a line leads to a fundamental change in the meaning of hooligans in the course of the PEGIDA movement – which also emerged from the football context (Erhard, Leistner, and Mennicke 2019).

9. On the growing importance and relevance of GDR nostalgia for political mobilizations, see Leistner and Garitz (2022).