Christian Streich appears humble on this evening when he receives the honorary award of the Julius Hirsch Prize 2023. When the head soccer coach of SC Freiburg was told that he might win the award, he said: “Please don’t take me.” He doesn’t work on a voluntary basis – like the other award winners of the evening. And sometimes he only speaks politically because he “just wants to give journalists an answer.” So that they can “do their job”. But in this hall in Berlin-Mitte, about a kilometer from the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, around 250 people applaud Streich’s stance on political and social issues in football, which is also praised in the laudatory speech by actor Matthias Brandt.
The Julius Hirsch Prize has been awarded every year since 2005 by the German Football Association (DFB) for commitment to combating racism and anti-Semitism. In addition to the honorary prize, which is awarded irregularly, three prizes are awarded every year, each worth 7,000 euros. DFB President Bernd Neuendorf, DFB Vice President for Equality and Diversity Célia Šašić and Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) opened the event, which is probably even more important this Monday evening than almost six weeks ago. The war in the Middle East and anti-Semitism in Germany – including on the football pitches – are the most important topics this evening. “Never again is the case with sports now,” says Faeser.
“We have to be loud!”
Never again stories like Julius Hirsch’s. The person the award is named after was a Jewish football player. He played for Karlsruher FV, was a striker in the German national team – one of the only two Jews ever knowingly on the team – and took part in the Olympic Games. He fought for Germany in the First World War, was a convinced nationalist – and was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943 because he was Jewish. Even eighty years later, the Julius Hirsch Prize has not lost its importance. On the contrary.
It is Julius Hirsch’s grandson, Andreas Hirsch, who presented the award this evening to the President of Makkabi Germany, Alon Meyer, and project manager Luis Engelhardt. The DFB awards the Jewish sports association third place for the “Together1” prevention project. Educators and coaches from Makkabi visit clubs, associations, organizations and officials to introduce athletes to Jewish life. Even when training.
The project is about educational work, as Meyer explains. “So that our society is strong enough to resist these tendencies, to defend ourselves and to object.” Meyer also believes that education is the right way to deal with athletes who share pro-Palestinian posts on social media. However, they should not be excluded from gaming: “The hatred will only increase. That’s why it’s better to sensitize these athletes and, for example, visit the Anne Frank educational center with them.” This evening, Meyer demands one thing above all: “We have to be loud!”
Second place goes to Frankfurt, to SG Bornheim 1945 eV Grün-Weiss. Board spokesman Harald Seehausen has a motto: do it and “don’t just babble around”. His club was able to convince with a project that has already been implemented for many years: a children’s and family center on the sports field, where children can be supervised with their homework and parents can attend language courses.
Stefanie Sippel (text) and Lucas Bäuml (photos) Published/Updated: Recommendations: 5 A comment from Michael Wittershagen Published/Updated: Recommendations: 38 Stephan Löwenstein, Vienna Published/Updated: Recommendations: 4
It is not the club’s only project. “We have always been intensively involved in helping refugees,” says Jürgen Holzapfel, a member of the association’s management. In the “Skyline Soccer” project, SG Bornheim has been taking in young people since 2016 who had fled to Germany without their parents. Not only could they play football there – the club also helped the young people find training places.
The first place winners of the evening received their prize with a standing ovation: In the “#Home Game” project, the Chemnitz clubs Athletic Sonnenberg and ASA FF not only organized football tournaments, but also exhibitions, workshops and discussions about sport, its political aspects – and the problems with the right-wing scene. “The project wanted to show various football cultures in Chemnitz and make them tangible,” says project manager Frauke Wetzel.
“There is no homogeneous image in the stadium, no homogeneous right-wing scene. “But there are always incidents from certain circles of the fan scene,” she continues. “They walk around with Nazi salutes at away games in the Czech Republic.” There was no proper positioning for this for a long time. “We were missing that, but we are now seeing a big development in the Chemnitz football scene and especially at the club,” says Wetzel.
Christian Streich will be honored at the end of the evening. He says that he showed his players the speech by Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck (The Greens) on the Middle East war. He also explained terminology to them, “because not all young people know what the Holocaust is anymore,” as Streich explains. And he says: “Every player has his story. If someone receives the ball well, it doesn’t matter where it comes from.”
