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A cultural history
Wolfram Pyta
Culture and football
This contribution is based on the belief that football is a major cultural phenomenon (Tomlinson, Markorits and Young 2003). Football's triumphal march towards becoming Germany's most popular sport by far is due mainly to the fact that it contains a cultural creative power that can blossom under certain historical conditions. Before this can be demonstrated via a brief survey of the history of German football over the past 100 years, some preliminary issues have to be assessed. As a result of the renaissance of the term of âcultureâ in the humanities, the concept has lost its preciseness and has become an indefinable factor which has come to represent a conceptual cipher for very disparate facts. Hence a precise definition of the concept of âcultureâ that underlies this contribution is essential.
The following analysis is guided by reflections indigenous to a hermeneutics-orientated cultural sociology and philosophy (see in particular Andreas Reckwitz's brilliant studies of 1999 and 2000). According to this, culture is about collective forms of meaningful adoptions of the world. Culture results from hermeneutic processes during which subjects start a process of understanding and provide the world with a meaning. But this cognitive adopting cannot be achieved by an autonomous individual who, in doing so, creates to a certain extent the world of ideas out of his subjectivity. The subject's capacity for understanding can only be fully reached against the background of a collective inventory of knowledge and shared rules of interpretation. These webs of meaning structure the process of interpreting, and they define the conditions under which things can then have a certain meaning. But how are individual interpretation and the embedding in collective systems of meaning combined? Interpretive cultural theory refers in this case to the central significance of actions. It is always in actions that the adoption and translation of cognitive knowledge of order by the actor takes place. Understanding the world always has references to action â regular and routine actions indicating underlying systems of meaning. For this reason we have a concept of âcultureâ that includes practical expressions of collective systems of meaning: thus culture is âactionorientated configuration of meaningâ (Luckmann 1988).
In order to identify these cultural contents it is not sufficient to look to the inexhaustible pool of classical texts, in which man has formed the world according to his imagination. A cultural historian has to be especially attentive to those fields of action that show strong structures of meaning.
This brings us to football. Football as an ordered and constant mode of behaviour may be understood as one of these practices that has collective patterns of meaning embedded in it. During its recent history, football has extended its fields of action: initially a sport purely for enthusiasts of das runde Leder (âround leatherâ), it advanced to a spectator sport that fascinated tens of thousands who had never played it themselves under competitive conditions. Eventually, in the 1950s, it managed to become a mass-media phenomenon in Germany and was even used for political purposes. The reasons for âKing Football'sâ rapid territorial expansion can in essence only be understood from a cultural historical perspective. To do so, one has to ask the central question: why could football be used as a space of projection and place of expression for schemes of interpretation embedded in German history?
We can approach this core question by looking at the processes of cultural change with respect to the intrinsic power of social shaping. By understanding collective cognitive contents â i.e. culture â a high degree of integrating effects that are essential for constructing communities are released. The power of such collective interpretations of meaning for constructing communities has been impressively demonstrated by historicallyorientated cultural sociology (Giesen 1999). These findings suggest that football can carry and transmit non-sporting webs of meaning and become the focal point of processes of socialization. Football is a cultural phenomenon which is open to interpretation and in which diverse patterns of meaning have been recognized (Knoch 2002: 119â20). With football as the raw material, socializations of varying denseness and durability could be formed that were subject to cultural change.
Finally, German football has a very special attribute that has helped its development into a major cultural phenomenon: the capacity to have symbolic meanings. Symbols play a decisive role in constructing communities. They enrich the interpretation of behaviour patterns with a degree of aesthetic condensation that facilitates the communication of shared cultural contents. Symbols act as perceivable expressions of those cultural dispositions that circulate in communities. The development of a longlasting collective identity is not possible without the use of symbols, which form shared meanings and values and provide it with vital visibility (Giesen 1999: 17â18).1
Germany is probably the only country in Europe where football has managed to gain symbolic qualities in such great measure. The reason for this is the exceptional situation after the Second World War that left Germany in a situation of such symbolic devastation that football could fill the gap.
Origins and cultural meanings
At the beginning, it did not seem as though football in Germany could ever achieve such importance. Initially it was an import from England, played by young sportsmen who experienced enthusiasm for a dynamic and physical team sport as opposed to âGerman gymnasticsâ which they felt to be stereotyped and boring. Until 1914, football in Germany was a minority sport in a society that, to a considerable extent, regarded sport with contempt (Eisenberg 1999: 209â14). However, football had an enormous inherent potential for development. It was mainly discovered by the expanding new middle classes: by the growing number of young employees who had enough leisure and money to play football on Sundays (ibid.: 180â9). The breakthrough from a marginal to a mass sport came with the First World War. For the first time, millions of German soldiers came into contact with this sport when matches were arranged, mainly on (the more peaceful sections of) the Western Front to relieve the monotony of military life (ibid.: 319â21; Pyta 2004a: 13â15). In November 1918 they brought these experiences back home with them in their rucksacks. Therefore it is not surprising that the war was followed by a wave of the formation of football clubs, with football played in an organized way even in provincial backwaters.
The meteoric rise of football was only possible because football qualified as an expression for configurations of meaning which were mainly formed by the experience of the First World War. It is important to note that the war established a new attitude towards physicality. Without doubt the ubiquity of death lowered respect for physical integrity and led to a greater willingness for violence that manifested itself in excesses of unprecedented political violence (Ziemann 2003).
Sport was also an outlet for a new mode of bodily behaviour. The social association with the human body manifested in sports was not characterized solely by exhibitions of brute force and masculinity. A man's pure physical strength did not count for much â in comparison to abilities such as the dynamic use of the body or virtuoso interaction of body and military technique required to survive the war. Playful control of a football by a dexterous body that could be adapted to the speed of the game may therefore be seen as a social practice that expressed this new body culture.2
Football's ability to adapt to the mass cultural tendencies that were on the increase after 1918 was equally important. Rapidly growing industrialization and urbanization laid the foundations in Imperial Germany for the propagation of popular culture. Around 1900, popular arts and amusements characterized the everyday life of many Germans in large cities (Maase 2001: 9â28). After the end of the empire this trend also applied to the growing affection for sports. The increasing number of people interested in sports were recruited not only from active participants but also from those who did not actively take part in sports themselves but enjoyed matches as spectators (Saldern 1992, 1999). Football in particular profited from this development. During the Weimar Republic, it left all its rivals in the shade and became the people's most popular sport by far (Eggers 2001: 70â1).
In this respect football was class-independent. It was no longer the property of the middle classes. Rather, it was particularly popular with the working classes. The socialist labour movement went to great efforts to arrange football-playing workers into a socialist Workersâ Gymnastics and Sports Organization (Arbeiter- Turn- und Sportbund) to attract them away from the bourgeois Deutscher FuĂballbund (DFB). In the end all efforts to act against the class-independent maelstrom, driven by the cultural phenomenon football, were in vain. Most workers practised their sport in associations that were affiliated with the apolitical DFB. They did not wish to articulate their class-consciousness in a football match, wanting instead to play football in front of an increasing number of spectators. Financial aspects did, of course, play an important role for them. As a result of the growing number of spectators, football in the 1920s became a financially lucrative activity, in which considerable sums could be earned by prominent players. Although most of the DFB officials cherished the amateur ideal, they were not able to prevent covert payments to prominent players (Oswald 2004). Famously, the officials of the Westdeutscher Spielverband made an example of the workers' club, FC Schalke 04 from Gelsenkirchen in the Ruhr area, by suspending nearly the whole team due to violations of the amateur regulations. There was much hypocrisy in this decision, because other teams quietly paid their best players. However, the example of Schalke 04 shows that even miners â which most of the players were â were not immune to the temptations of the commercialization of football, which was nowhere more despised than in the socialist sports movement (Gehrmann 2004).
Football even conquered the religious boundaries which are so characteristic of German history. Although political Catholicism tried to integrate the expanding game of football into its differentiated organization of clubs and societies by founding a Catholic sports association, it was difficult to persuade football-loving Catholics to practise their sports exclusively within a Catholic microcosmos (PreiĂler 2004). In the end, football withstood all attempts to make it a compliant part of a socialist or Catholic organizational culture.
Yet why did tens of thousands of spectators throng into the stadiums in the 1920s to watch a match? Their need for spectacle is not in itself enough to explain why enthusiasm for this kind of sport created such a stir. The cultural power of football derived from the fact that spectators could interpret it in a non-sporting way. This inscription of a certain cultural signification propelled football in Germany towards a cultural mass phenomenon. Let us now go back to some thoughts that were articulated earlier and the question of how football could complement the processes of socialization in the 1920s and 1930s.
The secret of football's success was that it could amalgamate with extraordinarily strong local and regional cultural traditions. The German Empire had only been recently founded in 1871 as a national state â but this did not mean that the single states which existed until then ceased to exist. The structural principle of the Empire was characterized by a distinct federalism. Under the Bundesstaaten, which gained their territorial shape mostly in the early nineteenth century, older regional traditions remained intact and were diligently cultivated.
German âregionsâ are normally not geographically clear-cut entities but exist on the basis of cultural construction (Mergel 2000). âRegionâ as a cultural space needs a set of meaning carriers which act as regional trademarks and show affiliation to a region.
Football was predestined to adapt to regional traditions, because it heightened the impact of large cities in their metropolitan area. Such large cities provided services for a region; from the 1920s, sports in general and especially the flourishing sport of football formed a part of this. Football played an important role insofar as certain cities could be established as central locations.3
Football clubs were especially suited to acting as the figurehead and focal point of a large city and its metropolitan area because the teams usually consisted of players born in that city or region who spoke in local dialect and therefore achieved a high degree of identification. The most famous players of the dominant German football team in the 1930s, FC Schalke 04, were Fritz Szepan and Ernst Kuzorra, both born in Gelsenkirchen. And in the dominant team of the 1920s, 1. FC NĂŒrnberg, the legendary keeper Heiner Stuhlfauth and centre-half Hans Kalb, both from NĂŒrnberg, set the pace (Gömmel 2004). Enticed by under-the-table salary pay-outs, some leading players changed their clubs, but most remained faithful to their home teams. Compared to England, football was under-professionalized, but that acted only to strengthen club bonds and, consequently, the regional embedding of popular football clubs.
Big-city football clubs also connected with their regions because they had stadiums that could hold large crowds. In Stuttgart, DĂŒsseldorf and Cologne, but also elsewhere, top clubs profited from the fact that in the 1920s the communal authorities spent enormous amounts of money (Eggers 2004c: 97â8; Nielsen 2002: 601â8) on building multifunctional sporting arenas that offered space for 50,000 to 70,000 spectators. It was not only the local football clubs that profited from these communal services, because in these stadiums other major sporting events such as gymnastics and athletics could also take place. But as the finals (at the very least) of the German championship took place in these large arenas, successful clubs could play in front of huge audiences that could not be achieved in the course of ordinary league business.
Such stadiums were not only purpose-built, they also offered a unique experience in which communication between the masses and the players took place in an atmosphere that allowed the audience to share the playersâ enthusiasm. Famous stadiu...
