as Turnsperre, a dark period for the turnverein and Jahn himself – being imprisoned in Kolberg prison until 1825. After being freed, he was banned from giving gymnastics classes. After the 1840s, coinciding with the rise in political liberalism, the clubs were joined by craftsmen – many of whom were Jews, who helped radicalise them. It comes as no surprise, then, that some gymnasts participated in the 1848 revolutions, such as Gustav Struve in Baden, Otto Heubner in Dresden and August Schärttner in Hanau. Because of this involvement most of the clubs were closed down and their properties confiscated; their leaders were imprisoned or went into exile. It was not until the late 1860s – nearly a decade after German unification – that the turnverein could resume their sporting activity.
4. The influence of the army on the growth of practising sport was significant. Not surprisingly, after the debacle the Prussian troops suffered at the hands of the Napoleonic forces in Jena, General Gerhard David von Scharnhorst chose to thoroughly reform the institution. As part of his attempt to modernise the country and improve military training, Scharnhorst introduced physical education at school, based on the teachings of educator and philosopher Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths. Author of the book Gymnastik für die fügend (Gymnastics for Youth), GutsMuths counterpoised the idea of ‘the perfect man’ with the physical decline that he claimed humanity was undergoing.
5. Koch taught German, Latin and Greek at Brunswick’s Martino-Katharineum school from 1868 to 1911 – the year of his death. Aware that outdoor leisure activities benefited students’ development, he chose to organise, on top of the physical education they received, a ‘school games’, which included cricket, rugby and football. He was aided in this task by the institute’s gymnastics teacher, August Hermann, who would become a member of the Central Committee on Public and Youth Games in Germany. Bizarrely the first soccer games played at Martino-Katharineum used a rugby ball, which players could only kick. In 1875 Koch created the first school football team which, thirteen years later, played its first match off the school premises against teams from Göttingen and Hanover. In 1890, the Konrad Koch Foundation led to the founding in Berlin of the German Football Federation and Cricket League. Koch was also one of the pioneers of Raffball, the forerunner of modern handball and basketball. His life even inspired the film Der ganz große Traum von Konrad Koch (Konrad Koch’s Big Dream) that premiered in 2011. This was directed by Sebastian Glober and featured Barcelona-born actor Daniel Brühl in the educator’s role.
6. There is still today controversy over which was the first football match to be played in Germany. While some sources point to the one played by Dresden English FC, others cite as founding matches those held at Koch’s Martino-Katharineum school.
7. In 1898, Planck – gymnast and teacher – published an angry diatribe against Koch and football: ‘We believe that this English sport is not just unpleasant but absurd, ugly and perverted’ (quoted in U. Hesse–Lichtenberger, Tor! The Story of German Football (London: WSC Books, 2002), p. 26). Despite these criticisms, football was becoming more and more popular. Indeed, that year 5,000 spectators turned out for the match between Viktoria Berlin and Germania Hamburg.
8. At that time Prague, the Bohemian capital, was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It included a significant German community that had its very own team: DFC Prag, founded in 1892.
9. As well as the DFB, other associations were set up and organised their own football championships. Among these was the Arbeiter-Turn-und Sportbund (Workers’ Gymnastics and Sports Association, ATSB), which held different tournaments between 1919 and 1932. It even created a national squad that played 77 international matches. In 1928 the German Communist Party (KPD), thanks to an understanding between the ATSB and the Rotsport association (Red sport), organised its own football championship. In other sports similar initiatives took shape, such as the German Gymnastics Association and the Catholic Church’s Sports Federation.
2
Football Reaches Hamburg, Sankt Pauli is Founded
Football also emerged in the Hanseatic city in the late nineteenth century. As well as the aforementioned Hamburger FC being created in 1888, three other teams (Sports-Club Germania, Cito and Excelsior) had been founded a year before. It was the turn of the century, in 1899, a few months after the death of Otto von Bismarck (the Iron Chancellor) and during the Second Boer War. A group of enthusiasts for the new sport created a team, on this occasion through the games and sports section of Hamburg-St. Pauli Turnverein. Hamburg-St. Pauli was a male-only institution founded by Franz Reese1 in 1862 when doing gymnastics was booming on the right side of the city’s river Elbe2 (the area made up of the well-off areas of Karolinenviertel and Schanzenviertel). At that time St. Pauli had two clearly differentiated areas: the north (bourgeois and with a notably nationalistic character) and the south (close to the port and inhabited by workers).
Like other similar associations, Hamburg-St. Pauli Turnverein had two goals: promoting liberalism and spreading an intense nationalist sentiment. The first objective was in order to retrieve citizens’ morale after the humiliating defeats inflicted by Napoleon’s army in Jena and Auerstedt. This would be achieved by physically training the ‘perfect German’ for life and war. The French victory meant reforming the army, introducing the draft and introducing physical education in schools to optimise the performance of future conscripts. For this reason the institution developed a notably militaristic hallmark. The second aim was shown in its freedom of association, which allowed anybody that paid the corresponding membership fees to join the club. Both factors reflected the country’s socio-political reality, which was still being determined by the 1848 March Revolution, an unsuccessful flare-up that sought – as we saw earlier – to abolish the nobility and introduce parliamentarianism and a free press.
The organisation took its name from the area – to the north of the Elbe river – that the city annexed in 1247. Until 1833 this was known as Hamburger Berg (Hamburg mountain)3 as it was then the highest point in the area. Yet St. Pauli’s mountain relief changed as a result of the Thirty Years War (1618–48). Then, the Hamburg Senate ordered the building of defensive bastions and the levelling of walls by taking sand and mud from the mountaintop to feed the city’s brickworks. At that time St. Pauli was a kind of no man’s land populated by 2,000 people, located half way between the town of Altona – then under Danish rule – and the port for the boats that sailed along the Elbe.4
Until the seventeenth century the area was little populated beyond members of religious orders and gangs of pirates that went there from the river. It was then an unprotected area, a fact that did not favour settlement by a large community. The few that went to live there were day labourers, fishermen, businessmen and craftsmen, who had fled the city because of its high cost of living. Alongside them emerged businesses that were deemed ‘antisocial’ because of the noise, pollution and strong smells they made: for instance, those in which artisans refined whale blubber to produce oil lamps. One of the trades that undoubtedly became the most renowned in the area was rope making, due to the large demand for rope on the boats that docked at the port. This was an activity that required fairly wide spaces because while one rope maker held up a wheel the hemp was rolled around, a second had to stretch and twist the hemp: an impossible job in narrow streets or reduced spaces. Rope making has been immortalised in the name of an archetypal St. Pauli road today: Reeperbahn, which can be translated as ‘rope walk’.
The entrances to this suburb of craftspeople and foul jobs had three gates that allowed people and goods to circulate. One of these – Millerntor – has been documented as going back to 1246. Its name stems from its location, as it was the door between two others, a location that in old German was called milderdor or mid-dele-thor.5 Years later, the portal was removed and relocated as a result of the district’s demographic expansion. Indeed for years it was where tolls were collected for the goods that entered the town, making it a kind of customs office of its time. The gateway was open from 1 January
