When the professionals from 1. FC Union were promoted to the first Bundesliga four years ago, the team from sleepy Berlin-Köpenick had long been internationally occupied. The captain, an Austrian (Christopher Trimmel), the top striker, a Dutchman with roots in Surinam (Sheraldo Becker), the goalkeeper, a Pole (Rafał Gikiewicz), and the promotion coach, a Swiss. It was Urs Fischer who occasionally had to show Gikiewicz, a funny, cheeky guy, his limits. Once he told the entire team that he would talk to Rafał personally, “otherwise I’ll explode.” Fischer didn’t raise his voice, writes Christoph Biermann in his Union book We will live forever: “But by his standards it was an emotional outburst.”
A coach who remains composed even in pressure situations, that fit well with the mentality of the East Berliners, who still have a strong influence on the club today. There are hardly any locals in the squad itself. But at the center of the Union brand is the club president Dirk Zingler, born in Königs-Wusterhausen right next to Berlin. And from the youth coaches to the people who distribute the materials, many come from the East.
Two weeks ago, Urs Fischer and Union parted ways after 14 games without a win. The Swiss and the club in the east of the city had an almost endless love, especially considering the unromantic relationship standards in the Bundesliga. That shouldn’t be surprising. Older Swiss and older Easterners, Fischer is 57, Zingler 59, both grew up in small island-like states. The GDR was behind the wall, and Switzerland was trapped by the obsession with representing a special case in history, which the writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt called “a prison”. And the GDR and Switzerland had the same opponent: Germany. Often called the imperialist foreign countries in the GDR, for the Swiss the Sauswabians lived there and were granted every defeat, especially in football. The neighbor on the other side of the material and spiritual wall always appeared more powerful. They were the ones with the big mouths!
The psychogeography of the island states of the GDR and Switzerland still leaves its mark today. You can even hear it in the language of older people. Fischer’s strong Swiss accent, his “Uh” and “Or?” were never a problem in Köpenick. All GDR heads of state mumbled beyond the standard language, which was secretly made fun of. But in the workers’ and peasants’ state it was never a disadvantage to have a dialectal coloring. Hanoverian High German is a Western ideal. Union President Dirk Zingler also presents his soft, urban Brandenburgish, which only connoisseurs can distinguish from Berlinerisch, with quiet pride. In the greater Berlin area, the natives speak almost as slowly as the Swiss. Rush? Let the newcomers.
This article comes from ZEIT No. 51/2023. You can read the entire issue here.
The Unioners like to emphasize interpersonal relationships, like many people who grew up in the GDR. They are trying to counter the social coldness of the West that spread after the fall of communism, when Easterners were dismissed rather than embraced. The fans call their stadium at the Alte Försterei their “living room”. You can’t imagine that in Munich or Hamburg. In the GDR, the real living room was the area in which one had to pretend less. The friendly caution of many Easterners is also due to 40 years of state surveillance, which could have drastic consequences. Leftists and foreigners suspected long before the scandal was exposed in the fall of 1989 that Switzerland was also a surveillance state until 1989 that stored around a million personal files with the so-called files. And people over 50 like Urs Fischer grew up in a country that was not yet almost completely urbanized, but had a rural character. Just like large areas of land in the East, where the following applies to this day: nowhere is social control greater than in the village.
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The familiarity between Swiss and Easterners was also evident in the culture. The writer Franz Hohler is still a close friend of Wolf Biermann, the most famous GDR songwriter, who was expatriated in 1976. And Emil, the art caricature of the clumsy and unexpectedly clever Swiss, was more famous in the GDR than in the Federal Republic of Germany. In the theater too, the power couple of the 1990s only marked an apparent opposite: Christoph Marthaler, the Zurich director of Slowness, was the second leading figure alongside the Easterner Frank Castorf at the Volksbühne on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin. No theater was more influential back then, and this still applies to nostalgics today. Externally, Castorf cultivated a much stronger directing style. But both spoke quietly and often ironically. Castorf is said to have often screamed (and drunk) during rehearsals, but never in interviews, as West director kings Claus Peymannn and Peter Stein did.
At Union, President Zingler didn’t want to let his coach Fischer go, even in the club’s biggest crisis. Fischer is said to have insisted on this so as not to cause any further damage to the club. His successor is Nenad Bjelica, a Croatian who became a successful coach in Austria, the third German-speaking state. That’s not a coincidence.
When the professionals from 1. FC Union were promoted to the first Bundesliga four years ago, the team from sleepy Berlin-Köpenick had long been internationally occupied. The captain, an Austrian (Christopher Trimmel), the top striker, a Dutchman with roots in Surinam (Sheraldo Becker), the goalkeeper, a Pole (Rafał Gikiewicz), and the promotion coach, a Swiss. It was Urs Fischer who occasionally had to show Gikiewicz, a funny, cheeky guy, his limits. Once he told the entire team that he would talk to Rafał personally, “otherwise I’ll explode.” Fischer didn’t raise his voice, writes Christoph Biermann in his Union book We will live forever: “But by his standards it was an emotional outburst.”
