How can it be that Manuel Neuer, the captain of the two most important teams in German football, sings a song by a right-wing patriotic Croatian rock band on vacation? A band against which Switzerland imposed an entry ban in 2009 because of the glorification of Croatian fascists. A band against which the Croatian public prosecutor’s office investigated in 2003 for incitement. A band whose front singer operates with symbols of the fascist Ustascha regime.
A video of the German national goalkeeper and FC Bayern goalkeeper appeared on Sunday evening. It shows Neuer at a beach bar in Croatia. Beside him, men in T-shirts or topless. On the very edge of the picture you can see Neuers goalkeeper coach at Bayern, Toni Tapalovic. He was also Neuer’s best man. Neuer himself is in the middle. An accordion player plays a song, Neuer and the men sing out loud.
“Lijeba li si”, “You are beautiful” is the name of the song by the band Thompson. “When I remember, my tears come. Every piece of home and folk customs,” it says. Neuer is amazingly text-safe. But the content of at least one line and the author of the song are extremely delicate politically.
Official song of the Croatian national team since 2016
“The song that Neuer sings is a nationally patriotic song,” Dario Brentin told SPIEGEL. The 35-year-old is a social scientist at the University of Graz and researches national identities and sports in post-Yugoslav Croatia. Brentin says the Neuer case is complicated because the song and the band Thompson, on the one hand, are very problematic, but on the other hand are little problematic in Croatian society.
First to the song: “The main problem is because of one line: ‘Herceg Bosna proud heart’,” says Brentin. “This can be understood as a questioning of the statehood of Bosnia and Herzegovina and as a glorification of Croatia’s expansion efforts in the 1990s.” The Croatian Republic of Herceg-Bosna was the scene of civilian massacres, ethnic cleansing and looting during the Yugoslavia war. Croatian military and political leaders have been convicted of war crimes by the International Criminal Court.
But the song has another background: “There is a clear fusion of the song with the fan culture around the Croatian national team. Since 2016 it has also been the official song of the national team that is always played at games,” says Brentin. For the runner-up world champion, “Lijeba li si” is what “Black and White” by Oliver Pocher was for the German national team until 2019. There was no significant debate about the admissibility of this in Croatian society, says Brentin.
Hymn for a far-right party
The situation at the band Thompson is pretty clear. It is named after the nickname of the front singer Marko Perkovic and refers to the submachine gun of the same name that Perkovic is said to have used in the Yugoslav war. Perkovic says that he swore off fascist ideology, “but there are quotes and photos, especially from the nineties, that show him, among other things, with Hitler salute and other fascist symbols in the Ustascha context,” says Brentin.
The Croatian independence movement Ustascha came to power in 1941 with the help of the Axis Powers Germany and Italy in a newly founded state Croatia – and had quickly set about starting a genocide against Jews, Serbs and Roma in World War II.
In 2003 Perkovic is said to have sung the Ustascha song “Jasenovac i Gradiska Stara” at a wedding. “There is an audio recording of this.” Thompson claims today that it is an audio fake, “says Brentin. That he is devoted to nationalism is also evident from the fact that Thompson once wrote an anthem to the far-right Croatian Party of Law (HSP) .
The “Thompson” song “Bojna Cavoglave” is discussed more controversially in Croatia than his song “Lijeba li si”, says Brentin. It begins with the line “Za dom – spremni” (“Ready for home”) – the greeting of the fascist Ustascha regime. Courts in Croatia have dealt with this, but there is still no legal consensus: “On the one hand, the greeting from the Croatian Constitutional Court has been classified as unconstitutional. On the other hand, Thompson has already been acquitted of singing the greeting at other levels,” says Brentin.
There is also a connection to Croatian football here: At the 2018 World Cup, players of the Croatian national team sang the ultra-nationalist song “Bojna Cavoglave” by Thompson after the victory against Argentina in the cabin. Perkovic even took part in the national team’s open-top bus tour of Zagreb after it came home as runner-up. After that there was a lot of criticism internationally.
Dealing with Thompson seems to show that Croatian society still has difficulties dealing with its own history and crimes. Thompson himself has a 30-year tradition in Croatian pop culture, says Brentin. He is one of the most commercially successful artists in the country and is rarely viewed critically. There is still every reason to do so.
“At Thompson, little is really clear these days. He plays with symbolism. But he is clearly assigned to the right-wing nationalist spectrum,” said the scientist. Croatian-born journalist Danijel Majic, for example, points out the following on Twitter:
April 10 is the anniversary of the Ustascha’s takeover in 1941.
In this thicket of right symbols in the middle of folklore, Manuel Neuer entered when he sang the Thompson song out loud during his vacation in Croatia. Neuer’s management did not want to comment on the case with “Bild”, but pointed out that the national goalkeeper did not speak Croatian.
In his career, Neuer has never been noticed as a person with a right mindset. And yet the case now casts a bad light on him and German football, which he represents as captain. The DFB is committed (among other things with its own Julius Hirsch Prize) against anti-Semitism. Neuer has now sung the song of a singer using symbols from a group that murdered Jews in World War II.
So far, Neuer has always been cautious when it comes to positioning himself politically. When several artists initiated the “We Are More” concert in Chemnitz in 2018 to protest racism, the newcomer welcomed it.
After Mesut Özil’s resignation from the national team, including allegations of racism against the DFB, Neuer said: It is also about “having the players who are really proud to play for the German national team and do everything they can for their own country to play so that you can get back on track “. This implied that Özil was not proud to play for Germany.
The photo Özil took with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the time became a major scandal in Germany. It is still unclear what will become of singing along in Croatia.
The DFB did not want to comment on the case when SPIEGEL asked.
