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| German Jews and football history
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Photo: TuS Makkabi
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FRANKFURT (EJP)---Like other German cities, Frankfurt and Berlin are transformed by football fever. And now even Jewish museums have excitement.
Together with the Jewish Museum of Fuerth, the Frankfurt Jewish Museum, Germany’s oldest, has put on the current special exhibit, “Kick it like Kissinger”. The exhibit highlights the role of Jews in the history of football. Its title refers to the former United States secretary of state, Henry Kissinger who was an avid footballer and a native of Fuerth.
Keeping the theme closer to home, Berlin’s Jewish Museum chose to commemorate 11 greats in German football with the exhibit “Honoured and Yet Forgotten – Eleven Jews in German Football”.
The Frankfurt exhibit is user-friendly and interactive, featuring historical photos of skull cap- wearing footballers, interactive quizzes as well as recordings of poetic odes to football greats.
Sponsorship
Non-Jews are also portrayed, with a display on Austrian football hero Matthias Sindelar. Sindelar’s refusal to play for Germany’s national team, after its annexation of his homeland Austria, is partly attributed to his rejection of Nazi policy towards Jews.
Most personalities featured in Frankfurt were not football players, yet they played an important role in making the sport what it is today.
One of Germany’s largest slipper manufacturers, the Schneider Shoe Company, was the primary sponsor of Frankfurt’s Eintracht football club, in the 1920s.
And what would international football be today without the participation of the German teams. The revival of German football was made possible by Gustav Mannheimer. The former American FIFA representative, voted in favour of letting Germany rejoin the organisation in 1950 after having been shut out for 11 years. At the following World Cup, Germany promptly won the championship title.
For almost a century, Bayern Muenchen has continued to be Germany’s best team. Its president, Kurt Landauer, ran the club from 1919 until the National Socialist’s rise to power forced him out in 1933. Another Jew, Richard Dombi, trained the team for three years. He too was forced to leave the team when the Nazis took over the country.
Both exhibits highlight roles that Jews played in Germany’s football history. The Berlin exhibit focuses on players. Some, like Hans Rosenthal, became legends in Germany’s post-war football and television history.
Pre-war legends
Rosenthal’s pre-war predecessors like Gottfried Fuchs and Julius Hirsch were honoured at both museums. Hirsch was the first-ever Jew to play on Germany’s national team. Fuchs scored a record ten goals in a single game for Germany, during the 1912 Olympic Games.
But what would football be today, if the details about it had not made its way into the homes of its millions of fans? Even the country’s widest read football newspaper, “Kicker,” was founded by a Jewish publisher - Walter Bensemann.
As fate would have it, Bensemann, died in exile in 1934. Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s propaganda minister, took over control of the magazine and in 1939 published an expose, remembering all players of Germany’s national team, from 1900 onwards. Of course, it made no mention of Fuchs and Hirsch.
For more information, see www.juedischesmuseum.de (Frankfurt) and www.jmberlin.de (Berlin)
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