Workers' sport in Germany

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In the German workers' sports movement organized themselves since the end of the 19th century, athletes from the labor movement originated and where the German Gymnastics Association brought together (DT) civil sports clubs in the Empire were aligned too nationalistic. Soon after the socialist law was repealed (1890), they founded their own umbrella organizations, such as the Workers 'Gymnastics Association (ATB) in Gera on May 2, 1893 and the Workers' Cyclists Association Solidarity (ARB Solidarity) on May 24, 1896 in Offenbach am Main .

history

see main article History of the Workers' Sports Movement

The Workers' Gymnastics and Sports Association

Organizational development

The first issue of the ATB Arbeiter-Turnerzeitung said about his goals:

“The free-minded gymnasts will work diligently to eradicate an old rotten system with stump and handle, to tear down old ruins so that new life can blossom out of them. Only under these newly erected buildings will we be able to exclaim: We have peace, freedom, justice. No one is the other's servant. "

Another reason for workers' sport to join forces in its own organizations was the isolation of civil associations and clubs from workers at the time of the empire. A blatant example is the amateur paragraph of the German Rowing Association (DRV), which it adopted when it was founded on March 18, 1883: “An amateur is anyone who only practices or has done rowing for a hobby with their own means and has no prospect of any financial advantages or had neither earned his living as a worker through his own hands nor was employed in any way in boat building. "This paragraph was passed on the initiative of the Hamburger Ruderverband (General Alster Club) , where it had been in force since 1864 (until 1927) .

With the growing spread of football - that means: with the advance of this sport, which was initially mainly practiced in bourgeois circles , into the industrial workers - after the First World War , the ATB renamed itself in June 1919 to the Workers' Gymnastics and Sports Association (ATSB) um, in order to clearly distinguish it from the gymnastics movement through the name. Other sports such as gymnastics, cycling, track and field, and weight training were also practiced under this umbrella, but football was dominant. By 1930 the ATSB had around 1.2 million members; its president was the SPD member of the Reichstag, Cornelius Gellert , during the entire Weimar Republic (1919–1933) .

At the ATSB Bundestag in June 1928, the association leadership excluded all KPD supporters; In May 1929 they founded the interest group for the restoration of unity in workers' sport (IG), which in December 1930 was renamed the Kampfgemeinschaft für Rote Sporteinheit (KG) (short: Rotsport ) and which was particularly active in the Berlin area and in the heavy industrial centers (Saxony , Ruhr area, etc.) belonged to numerous associations. The Berlin workers' sports club TV Fichte , which was "revolutionized" by the excluded communist friends of nature, became particularly important . The ASV "Fichte" claimed to be the "largest red sports club in the world" (magazine: Kampfgenoss; the editor of Kampfgenoss was the former nature lover Hermann Leupold ).

As in politics, social democrats and communists, in sport, too, these two associations often had more to do with differentiating themselves from each other instead of emphasizing their common social and ideological roots in the face of increasingly anti-democratic political developments. German workers' sport must also be seen against the background of international developments, in which it was seen as a battlefield between social democratic and communist endeavors.
Counterexamples such as the fact that the footballers of Dresdner SV 10 became both ATSB and later also Rotsport champions remained isolated cases: The reason for this association change was a game against the Soviet champions from Kharkov , for which the Dresdeners punished by the ATSB with a longer game suspension were.

The organized workers' sports movement ended immediately after the Reichstag fire : the National Socialists dissolved the clubs and associations in February (Rotsport) and May (ATSB) 1933; many of its members were persecuted, imprisoned in concentration camps (including ATSB President Gellert) and not infrequently murdered. B. Ernst Grube , Werner Seelenbinder and the Dresden footballer Walter Petruschke . Some workers' athletes have tried to circumvent the ban, for example under a "less suspicious" club name or by joining a neighboring club; but others have also come to terms with National Socialism or even reconciled.

After 1945, a number of workers' sports clubs were re-established in the western occupation zones, in the Hamburg area for example FTSV Lorbeer Rothenburgsort , Bahrenfelder SV 19, Teutonia 10 Altona, FTSV Komet Blankenese , Ottensen 93 and others. a .; the idea of ​​a class-specific association had outlived itself at the latest with the economic miracle and a leveled medium-sized company in the 1950s.
In the Soviet occupation zone or GDR, the workers and farmers state , on the other hand, sports clubs were, so to speak, workers clubs per se - or, if they did not correspond to the ideal of the SED party leadership, were sidelined (e.g. the Dresdner SC ) . The Dresdner SV 10, for example, emerged again as BSG Tabak Dresden ; after German unification (1990) he played briefly again as Dresdner SV 10 , but renamed himself again a year later (SG Striesen) .

Football in the ATSB

The ATSB held its own regional and national championships during the Weimar period , there was a league system at district and district level, from 1924 a German ATSB selection (the designations national team or Reich selection were frowned upon) and workers 'athletes took part in the international workers' Olympics. As early as the 1919/20 season, 3,581 first teams took part in the ATSB game operations.

Many workers nonetheless remained members of a civil society; In 1923 the social democratic daily Hamburger Echo wrote: “Workers and employees! Do you know what you are doing? Do you know that you support your political and economic opponents as best you can? "

The basis of the ATSB, and later KG Rotsport, were the clubs that were founded in the working-class neighborhoods of the cities, occasionally playing in front of similarly large numbers of spectators as the "bourgeois" clubs affiliated with the DFB and deliberately setting themselves apart from them. The ATSB formulated its goals with the words: “We want to do popular sport; victory has only a subordinate significance, honor and reputation are much higher ”. At the same time, there was a high degree of identification with the local workers' association: after, for example, the dockworker Erwin Seeler (father of Uwe and Dieter Seeler ) moved from the proletarian SC Lorbeer 06 to Victoria Hamburg in the middle-class Hoheluft district (then part of Eppendorf ) in 1932, they left him the Rothenburgsort supporters, neighbors and teammates will feel their disappointment and anger over the “class betrayal” of the successful goalscorer and ATSB international for a long time.
In February 1932 the Hamburger Echo headed an article on this change of association with “Lost Proletarians!” And closed it with the words: “Laurel and the movement, however, don't cry tears after you; we are a mass movement and not a cannon breeding establishment! ”.

German championship finals

ATSB national championship

season master Runner-up Result spectator
1920 TSV Fürth TuS south forest 3: 2 5,000
1921 VfL Leipzig-Stötteritz Nordiska Berlin 3-0 5,000
1922 VfL Leipzig-Stötteritz BV 06 Cassel 4: 1 6,000
1923 VfL Leipzig-Stötteritz Alemannia 22 Berlin 1-0 8,000
Repetition VfL Leipzig-Stötteritz Alemannia 22 Berlin 3: 1 3,700
1924 Dresden SV 10 SV star Breslau 6: 1 9,000
1925 Dresden SV 10 SV Stralau 7-0 9,000
1926 Dresden SV 10 TuS south forest 5: 1 12,000
1927 Dresden SV 10 TuS Nürnberg-West 4: 1 10,000
1928 SC Adler Pankow ASV Frankfurt Westend 5: 4 12,000
1929 SC Lorbeer 06 Hamburg FT Döbern 5: 4 15,000
1930 TSV Nürnberg-Ost Bahrenfelder SV 6: 1 18,000
1931 SC Lorbeer 06 Hamburg SpVgg Pegau 4: 2 14,000
1932 TSV Nürnberg-Ost FT Cottbus 93 4: 1 7,400
1933 Competition canceled

Finals of the "Kampfgemeinschaft für Rote Sporteinheit" (KG, Rotsport)

  • 1931 Dresdner SV 10 - Sparta 11 Berlin 3: 2 (10,000 Z.)
  • 1932 FT Jeßnitz - BV Gelsenkirchen 8: 0 (4,000 Z.)

Number of members of the "Kampfgemeinschaft für Rote Sporteinheit" (selection):

  • July 1930: 52,500
  • June 1931: 100,790 (including e.g. Naturefriends Opposition: over 10,000)
  • February 1933: 268.480

The most successful clubs in the ATSB

For 1919/20 only the 4 final round participants are known, from 1920/21 the best 8 teams and from 1924/25 all 16 district champions who were eligible to participate.

About the abbreviations of the club names: the F usually stands for “Free” (e.g. FT = Free Gymnastics Federation ), rarely for “Football”; A stands partly for "general", partly for "worker"; the B for "ball", not for "operating".

ATSB international matches

Between October 11, 1924 (3-0 against France in Paris) and December 26, 1932 (4-1 against Poland in Leipzig; European Championship qualification) there were 77 international games of the ATSB selection; Record: 45 wins, 8 draws, 24 defeats. The internationalism of the labor movement (organized supranationally in the social democratically oriented Lucerne Sports International , LSI for short, and in the Communist Red Sports International, RSI for short) can be demonstrated in the two games mentioned above: against France, the "arch enemy in two wars" (1870 , 1914), a DFB selection did not take place until 1931; and UEFA did not even manage a European championship until 1960.

The opponents of the German selection:

  • Austria 15 games (the team was considered Europe's best)
  • England 11
  • Finland 10
  • Belgium 8
  • Czechoslovakia 7
  • Switzerland, Norway 5 each
  • France 4
  • Poland 3
  • USSR, Denmark, Palestine each 2
  • Estonia, Latvia, Hungary 1 each

Belgium and Finland each sent three regional teams to the field. The ATSB also competed three times with a regional team and the very first game the German selection consisted of 11 players from Dresdner SV 1910. These games were still counted as international games.

Finals at the Workers' Olympics

  • 1925 (Frankfurt / M.) Germany - Finland 2-0 (40,000 Z.)
  • 1931 (Vienna) Austria - Germany 3-2
  • 1937 (Antwerp) Soviet Union (represented by the professional team from Spartak Moscow) - Norway 2-0. Event without official German participation

Definition of terms

The DFB-remote workers' clubs from the period up to 1933 should be distinguished from those clubs in which, until the late 1950s, there was also a social identity between spectators and players, because their players were predominantly recruited from the working class and, for example, in the Ruhr area mining industry Days worked. But even if the sports fields z. T. on the mine site were such. For example, the Stimberg at the Ewald colliery ( SpVgg Erkenschwick ) or the SV Sodingen stadium at the Mont Cenis colliery in today's Herne , the club chairman was often the colliery director or a senior employee, at least no longer a worker - and above all these clubs were members in the DFB.
Other clubs such as FC Schalke 04 still had individual miners (“miners”) in their ranks, but the club itself was already working secretly around 1930 under professional conditions that were still forbidden at the time.
Works clubs such as Bayer 04 Leverkusen and today's company sports associations such as Rot-Gelb Hamburg ( Shell Group ) do not fit under the heading of "workers' sports " even if, for example, at Bayer in the early 1960s the vast majority of players were workers or employees of the Bayer factories: this was increasingly just a pseudo-employment and often served more to be able to offer a financial incentive for good players beyond the contract player salary.

Workers' Cyclists Association "Solidarity"

The Arbeiter-Radfahrerbund was founded in 1896 and was the largest cycling association in the world with several hundred thousand members during the Weimar Republic. As an association with special tasks, it is now a member of the DOSB . From 1904 there was also the Workers 'Cyclists' Association "Freedom" based in Berlin.

"Central Commission for Workers' Sport and Personal Care"

It was founded under this name on November 17, 1912 in Berlin and later renamed the "Central Commission for Workers' Sport and Body Care". Not all workers' sports associations joined it; Fritz Wildung was the managing director . It formed the German section of the International Workers 'Association for Sport and Physical Culture (also known as Lucerne Sport International (LSI), since 1928 Socialist Workers' Sport International (SASI)).

Other associations in the Central Commission

In addition to the ATSB, there were, among others, the following workers 'sports associations in the "Central Commission for Workers' Sport and Body Care" (status: 1929):

Workers' Olympics

The Frankfurt Workers 'Olympics from July 24 to 28, 1925 was an important sports festival for the German workers' sports movement.

Spartakiad

In 1931 the combat group for red sports units prepared the 2nd international Spartakiad of the RSI in Berlin. After it was banned by the Social Democratic government of Prussia, parts of its program were carried out under the name “International Summer Festival of the Workers' Sports and Culture Cartel”. In the end there was a communist mass rally in the Post Stadium.

See also

literature

  • Klaus Achilles: “It's about the people when we seem to play” - workers' sport in Bremen. In: Harald Braun (Hrsg.): Illustrated history of gymnastics and sport in the state of Bremen. A socially critical contribution to cultural history. Schintz, Bremen 1999, ISBN 3-9801388-8-7 .
  • Patricia Arnold, Dagmar Niewerth: Comrades! The workers' sports movement in Altona in the Weimar Republic. In: Arnold Sywottek (Ed.) The other Altona. Results, Hamburg 1984.
  • Erik Eggers: Football in the Weimar Republic. AGON, Kassel 2001, ISBN 3-89784-174-6 .
  • Rolf Frommhagen: The other national soccer team. Federal selection of German worker athletes 1924–1932. The workshop, Göttingen 2011, ISBN 978-3-89533-807-6 .
  • André Gounot: The Red Sports International 1921-1937. Communist mass politics in European workers' sport . LIT, Münster 2002, ISBN 3-8258-6411-1
  • Hardy Greens : Encyclopedia of German League Football. Volume 1: From the Crown Prince to the Bundesliga. 1890 to 1963. German championship, Gauliga, Oberliga. Numbers, pictures, stories. AGON-Sportverlag, Kassel 1996, ISBN 3-928562-85-1 .
  • Hartmut Hering (Ed.): In the land of a thousand derbies. The football history of the Ruhr area. The workshop, Göttingen 2002, ISBN 3-89533-372-7 .
  • Oliver Kersten: The Friends of Nature movement in the Berlin-Brandenburg region 1908–1989 / 90. Continuities and breaks. Dissertation. Free University of Berlin 2004. Leisure and hiking, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-925311-31-4 .
  • Arnd Krüger & James Riordan : The story of worker sport. Human Kinetics, Champaign, Ill. 1996, ISBN 0-87322-874-X
  • Werner Skrentny: The solidarity was everywhere! In: Project Group Worker Culture Hamburg: Forward - and don't forget. Working-class culture in Hamburg around 1930. Frölich and Kaufmann, Berlin 1982, ISBN 3-88725-110-5 .
  • Werner Skrentny: When Laurel was still German champion. In: Hamburger Fußball-Verband (Hrsg.): 100 years of football in Hamburg. Hamburg 1994.
  • Werner Skrentny: The other national team: Workers' athletes on the ball. In: Dietrich Schulze-Marmeling (Hrsg.): The history of the national soccer team. The workshop, Göttingen 2002.
  • Werner Skrentny: Forgotten Football History: The Workers' Sport Movement. In: Gerhard Fischer, Ulrich Lindner: Striker for Hitler. On the interplay between football and National Socialism. The workshop, Göttingen 1999, ISBN 3-89533-241-0 .
  • Eike Stiller: The sailing sport of the labor movement. On the history of the Free Sailing Association (FSV) 1901–1933. Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-89626-406-0 .
  • Eike Stiller (Ed.): Literature on the history of workers' sport in Germany from 1892 to 2005. A bibliography. Berlin: Trafo, 2006, ISBN 3-89626-419-2 .
  • Hans Joachim Teichler : 75 years of the ATSB Federal School in Leipzig. In: Förderverein Sächsisches Sportmuseum Leipzig e. V. (Ed.): Sportmuseum aktuell , 3, 2001.
  • Hans Joachim Teichler, Gerhard Hauk (Hrsg.): Illustrated history of workers' sport. Dietz, Berlin a. a. 1987, ISBN 3-8012-0127-9 .
  • Christian Wolter : Workers' football in Berlin and Brandenburg 1910–1933. Arete Verlag, Hildesheim 2015, ISBN 978-3-942468-49-7 .
  • Herbert Diercks : Hamburg Football under National Socialism , Hamburg 2016. Publisher: Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ General competition regulations, §8, in: Supplement to "Watersport" , 1883, p. 145. Here quoted from: Horst Ueberhorst : Hundred Years of German Rowing Association . Albrecht Philler Verlag, Minden 1983, ISBN 3-7907-3100-5 , p. 31
  2. ^ Arnd Krüger & James Riordan: The story of worker sport. Human Kinetics, Champaign, Ill., 1996, ISBN 0-87322-874-X
  3. ↑ “The Seelers and the Dörfels. From "class traitors" and classless heroes "in Jens R. Prüß (Ed.): Bung bottle with flat pass cork. The history of the Oberliga Nord 1947–1963 , Klartext Verlag , Essen 1991, p. 33ff .; ISBN 3-88474-463-1
  4. ↑ Christian Wolter: lawn of passion . The football fields of Berlin. 1st edition. edition else, vierC print + mediafabrik, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-00-036563-8 , statistical part, p. 260 .
  5. ^ Gerhard Beier : Labor movement in Hessen. On the history of the Hessian labor movement through one hundred and fifty years (1834–1984). Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-458-14213-4 , pp. 271-275.
  6. ↑ André Gounot: The Red Sport International from 1921 to 1937. Communist mass politics in European workers' sport . LIT, Münster 2002, ISBN 3-8258-6411-1 , p. 183-188 .