Borussia Dortmund

Terry Duffelen

Description

From their humble beginnings to the present day, Die Schwarzgelben have always been at the forefront of German football. This book details their journey and how they became the key destination for young talent in the world game. The triumphs are celebrated here as we tell the history of one of the most celebrated clubs in Europe. Names you know, origin stories you don't, this book has them all. This is Borussia Dortmund, a history in black and yellow.

Informations

• Publié par: Distributed by eBookpartnership
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781839784781
• Langue: English

Extrait

Published by Ockley Books Limited, Huddersfield, England
First Published 2021
All text copright the identified author, the moral right of Terry Duffelen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form without prior permission from the author, Terry Duffelen , and the publisher, Ockley Books .
ISBN - 978-1910906248
eISBN - 978-1839784781
Layout and design by Chris Oakley, edited by David Hartrick.
Printed and bound by Biddles Printing, Kings Lynn.

Contents
1. Handbags, Beer and Birth
2. Revierderby
3. Der Klassiker
4. Champions, European Nights and Missed Chances: 1963-66
5. Nothing to see here
6. The Cobra Strikes and Nobby s Final Hurrah
7. Glorious Failure
8. The Italian Job
9. God Must Be a Borussia Fan
10. Ricken, lupfen jetzt!
11. Stones and Legs
12. What Happened Next
13. Clash of Civilisations
Postscript
Handbags, Beer and Birth
The creation of a football club in Borsigplatz
It is strange indeed that an institution so loved, so much a part of its community, so much a part the lives of so many all over the world, should be born, in part, from an angry confrontation in a bar. But our story begins with precisely that, six days before Christmas Day 1909, in a stairwell outside a room above a pub in one of the oldest districts in the city of Dortmund, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.
The pub in question was the Zum Wildsch tz in the district of Borsigplatz, which did and still does lie in the north of Dortmund, one of the larger conurbations in the industrial Ruhr area of Germany. In this bar a group of young lads, inspired by the working men s football clubs of England, in cities such as Sheffield and Manchester, gathered to set up a club for the purposes of playing football and having a few beers afterwards. You could be forgiven for thinking that such an undertaking, while far from straightforward, would be uncontroversial. However, in Germany in 1909 social clubs of this nature were not seen as being healthy. In fact, they were regarded by some influential people as injurious to the soul.
At the turn of the 20th Century, sports in Germany were organised along political and religious lines. The Arbeitersportbewegung (Socialist workers movement for sports) and the Turnerschaft (gymnastics movement) were prominent institutions. Sport did not exist for recreation, as such; that was more of an inevitable consequence. Moreover, sports clubs were just that. They incorporated multiple sports. Many of the more historic clubs in Germany started as gymnastic clubs. Dedicated football clubs were far from common in Germany at the turn of the century and the game of football was discouraged among the upper sections of German society. Indeed, in some quarters the beautiful game was regarded as the English disease . Eleven years prior to this meeting in Borsigplatz a gymnastics teacher in Stuttgart, Karl Planck, published the polemic Fussl mmelei - ber Stauchballspiel und die Englische Krankheit . In the pamphlet, he characterises football as dirty, anarchic and decidedly un-German. This view, while prevalent in the German establishment, did not stop the development of the sport in the latter part of the 19th Century.
In Britain, association football (abbreviated to soccer) had moved beyond its amateur roots in London to the industrial north. There, working men had professionalised the game under no small amount of resistance from the Football Association. Football in Britain was becoming a mass spectator sport and although the players were far from rich they were paid a wage for their labours. Professional football in Germany was decades away but the idea of football being more than a spiritual enterprise, something that people could enjoy playing and watching - especially when combined with beer - was catching on.
This would have been at the front of the minds of the young men who gathered in Borsigplatz on 19th December 1909. These men saw football as a social activity to be enjoyed among friends and they were not alone. They were far from revolutionary in this desire. No one in that room was breaking ground so much as being a symptom of social change, a reflection of the changing nature of working class agency and culture that was happening across much of Europe in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.
Moreover, they were frustrated with what they perceived as unfair treatment by the clergy. At this time football was not the most popular sport among the establishment. Other sports such as gymnastics were regarded as a healthier diversion for the young. Even then football had a bad reputation. The men who gathered in Borsigplatz were angry with the Church s attitude towards them as footballers and decided it was time to form their own club, independent of the Church. To that end they assembled. They sunk a few beers and started planning. On his way, however, was a potential obstacle in the form of a man of the cloth. Father Hubert Dewald was, according to Christoph Bausenwein in Das Grosse Buch Vom BVB , the local chaplain and head of the local youth group from the Holy Trinity church nearby. He got wind of the meeting and was having none of it. He hot-footed it over to the bar, prepared for an angry confrontation and with the intention of breaking up the meeting.
In 2015, a film documenting this meeting was made by Marc Quambusch. It is called Am Borsigplatz Geboren (Born on Borsigplatz) . In this film there is a dramatisation of that meeting and of Dewald s unwelcome intervention. The clergyman is full of righteous fury and purpose as he enters the pub and bounds up the stairs. He bursts into the room and demands that the meeting stop at once.
Some of the group allow themselves to be intimidated by Dewald who, as a man of God in a country very much deferential to the Catholic Church, represented power and demanded respect. But most in the room will not be cowed. One man - his name was Franz Jacobi - emerges from the crowd. He bustles Dewald out of the room as a nightclub bouncer would an unwelcome patron wearing the wrong shoes. There are more harsh words and some pushing and shoving. At first it was a bit of handbags, to use the modern parlance, but the confrontation escalates as neither are willing to back down. In the end Dewald s attempts to re-enter the room are halted by Jacobi, who pushes him down a short flight of stairs.
In the film there is a dramatic pause. Dewald looks up at the triumphant Jacobi, who glares down upon his defeated foe. Perhaps the moment is meant to symbolise the decline of the role of the Church in German civil society. Perhaps Jacobi is just making sure he s not badly injured a priest in a moment of beer-soaked rage. Either way, the moment passes and Jacobi turns on his heel, walks back into the room and closes the door, forever shutting the Church out of their affairs. However, Dewald s intervention was not entirely unsuccessful. There were 40 people in that room before it all kicked off. Only 18 remained afterwards.
Their names?
Franz Braun
Paul Braun
Henry Cleve
Hans Debest
Hans Kahn
Paul Dziendzielle
Hans Kahn
Gustav M ller
Franz Risse
Fritz Schulte
Hans Siebold
August T nnesmann
Heinrich Unger
Robert Unger
Fritz Weber
Franz Wendt
Not forgetting, of course, Julius and Wilhelm Jacobi and their brother, Franz.
Some of those that departed perhaps saw the error of their ways. Perhaps others felt that the whole affair was more trouble than it was worth. More still may have thought that it wasn t worth getting into a dust-up with a priest over. What we do know is that those who stayed agreed upon a course of action and decided to form a football club. What was missing was a name for this fledgling club. It so happened that they were drinking a certain brand of local beer, and that beer would form part of the name of this new football club.
Dortmund was a city built on heavy industry: steel and coal. By the turn of the century the city s population had swelled to around 200,000 people. A significant number were immigrants from eastern Germany and Poland. Approximately 2.3 million Germans from East and West Prussia, Silesia, and Posen moved to the Ruhr, as did about 600,000 Poles. Others came from France and Great Britain. They took advantage of the demand for labour as the region industrialised and transformed both it and in turn the city of Dortmund forever. The Hoesch family set up an iron and steel works in the city in 1871. From there the firm became one of Dortmund s major employers. Indeed, Borsigplatz sits in the centre of what was known as the Hoesch Quarter, a district then populated almost entirely by immigrant workers employed by that firm. The rapid expansion of the city and the influx of workers meant many more wage packets. With that came a desire to pursue leisure activities during the workers time off.
Beer also played a very big role in the city. Dortmunders were excellent at drinking it and exceptionally good at brewing it. Indeed, the hop is a big driver of the origins of the football club that was formed that night in Borsigplatz. In addition to iron and steel, Dortmund was a commercial brewing centre and exported beer to neighbouring regions in the Ruhr. Breweries such as Brinkhoffs, Dormunder Union and Dortmund Actien Brauerei endure to this day. However, the industry is very much past its peak as, according to the European Beer Guide , a number of breweries merged and consolidated in the 1990s. Although not among the most popular in Germany, the Dortmund brewing process has been replicated by other breweries as far away as Canada. One of those breweries, which sadly no longer exists, was called Borussia. It was an advert displayed in that room above the Zum Wildsch tz in Borsigplatz that was the inspiration for the name of the new venture they conceived that day:
BV Borussia Dortmund 09.
The