Leipzig vs Union in the DFB Cup: East Berlin vs. Salzburg North – Sport
For a brief moment Domenico Tedesco would even have been bought from the Saxons. “If you hear the employees talking,” said Leipzig’s coach at the press conference before the cup semifinals, you have the feeling that you’re still an Eastern club. Tedesco, who was born in Italy and grew up in Swabia, said the first part of the sentence in broad Saxon, but by no means in the aping tone with which the Leipzig dialect is sometimes imitated. It sounds more like a homage to him: “I like the people here, they have a big heart.”
Tedesco has actually already got to know the mentality of the East, in the narrower and broader sense. First at Erzgebirge Aue, where the atmosphere was so familiar that the bookkeeper hugged every player before the game, then later at Spartak Moscow. Seen in this way, Leipzig is his third Ostbahnhof, says Tedesco, half jokingly. He likes the way employees identify with the club, but he also likes the Union Berlin fans who will be traveling to Leipzig on Wednesday: “They’re in a good mood.”
It would actually be a nice story to tell this game on Wednesday. For the first time since 1994, two clubs from the geographical east of the country are in the semi-finals of the DFB Cup, back then between Dynamo Dresden and Tennis Borussia Berlin (from the western part of the city). This cannot take place in a direct duel, but no romance can be stylized: Neither RB Leipzig nor Union Berlin tells the story of the famous return of East German football to the highest ranks of the Bundesliga and possibly to Europe.
The coach Zorniger still remembers the first duel between RB and Union
Even those who have accompanied the rise of the club from the regional league are aware that RasenBallsport Leipzig is not a credible representative of East German football tradition. In any case, Alexander Zorniger was repeatedly reminded by opposing fans that he works for a club in the East – but not for one that corresponds to the traditionalists’ idea. Zorniger was a coach in Leipzig from 2012 to February 2015, at a time when he reports that “some of our fans didn’t wear RB jerseys when they traveled to the games because of the hostility”.
Zorniger experienced the phase in which the weekly trips through the eastern regional league for RB meant significantly more adventure than Tedesco’s current European Cup excursions. “In my first year we still played against the second team from Union Berlin in the regional league,” says Zorniger. He still remembers how he and the then RB sports director Ralf Rangnick once found themselves in a snowstorm at a sports facility on Berlin’s Bruno-Bürgel-Weg and there “were repeatedly insulted from behind” by the Union fans. Zorniger does not want to explain how exactly the choice of words turned out; He still remembers that RB striker Daniel Frahn made it 2-1 with a Panenka penalty.
At the end of the season, Leipzig rose, and in 2014 Zorniger experienced RB’s first second division defeat against Union: “At the Alte Försterei we felt for the first time how painful the fire that opposing fans kindled – and that we we can let it throw us off course.” Nevertheless, Leipzig asserted itself in a playful way, promotion to the first division became the image success of a fizzy drink company and a football system that Zorniger attributes primarily to Ralf Rangnick.
A lot has happened culturally in Leipzig since then: there is a joint fan project for all Leipzig clubs, the former central stadium is now called the Red Bull Arena and is well filled, fans can buy jerseys in the store in Leipzig’s Petersstraße and then wear them without having to reckon with hostilities on the tram. The only question that cannot be answered unequivocally is how exactly this has helped East German football: Leipzig regularly plays internationally, the traditional clubs are spread across the lower tiers of the second Bundesliga, third division and the regional league.
“Who can’t be bought by the West”: Not everyone sings along
Little has changed in the attitude towards the RB Leipzig club among the alleged fan base. “Leipzig isn’t East German football, it’s Fuschl-am-See football,” says Oliver Jauer, for example. Jauer is an author at the Union Blog Textile Offense and fan of the club. Based on the experience of numerous visits to the stadium in Leipzig, he says that the intensity of the protest against “North Salzburg” has not changed in recent years: “As long as there is an active fan scene in the stadium, we will always position ourselves against the RB construct.”
However, Jauer is deliberately reluctant to speak for everyone, Union fans are known to be a heterogeneous group. Elsewhere in the east there are left and right fan curves and scenes for and against GDR, at Union many are more reluctant to take extreme positions. This is also due to the history of the club: In the GDR Oberliga, they played the antagonists to the regime’s favorite club, the BFC Dynamo – but somehow they were still part of the system in Köpenick. If you want to assign the fans a little to the camps today, you have to listen carefully to the club anthem: “Who doesn’t let the West buy them,” sings Nina Hagen. It’s a line that some Unioners enthusiastically join in – and others consciously omit.
Jauer says he doesn’t sing along with the sentence: “For me, that’s not the line from the anthem that is decisive.” From his point of view, Union is not about an image, but about values like the four basic stadium rules (never whistle, don’t leave earlier, don’t look for a scapegoat, be hoarse at the end of the game): “I think that in our own consciousness we have never been a real Ostverein, but rather come from Berlin.” The Ostvereine are Dresden, Rostock , Cottbus and Leipzig (locomotive and chemistry, mind you), but not Union.
You don’t even need to stylize a rivalry between RB Leipzig and Union Berlin, says Jauer. In terms of sport, the two clubs are only separated by two places in the Bundesliga, both could represent Germany in the coming season in Europe. two clubs meet on Wednesday evening, which can explain well why they are not suitable as an example for East Romance.