Eastern football: Frank Willmann in the wild football east: A loser beer!

People often associate the date of their birth with the frivolous claim that they were born. As if this doesn’t last a lifetime. As if there wasn’t a constant question of how one comes into the world and at the same time comes to oneself. Coming into the world means having to come to your senses as soon as possible – which will relentlessly make you realize your saddest talent on earth: falling short.

So we are already in the East – of the country, of the world. And end up with the eternal reproduction of the same thing: life goes in circles, especially in a vicious circle. Existence is a district class, but at least: The ball is round everywhere – and it is particularly necessary where very little goes round.

»Forays through the wild football East« is the name of the book by Frank Willmann. It collects around 80 columns from around 20 years. Willmann is my favorite feature writer because he is the most juicy in the “nd”; his marginal columns do not suffer from having to infuse cultural observations with editorial instruction. He goes to football fields the way an adult enters what was once a child’s room: with his heart pounding and the wistful discovery that there are still remnants of dreams in the tidy corners.

Willmann, born in Weimar and emigrating to the West in 1984, stuck with the East, even though it was called the GDR for a while, a “mouse-gray nothing.” One of the realities of football was that “away fans were fair game”; Chants of hate chanted by “rough, red-nosed workers.” Willmann’s youth conclusion in Thuringia: “Nobody wanted Lenin and Marx… the Russian occupiers were unpopular.”

He writes rough and ruthless, all romance has harshness. But even in the roughest, the nastiest part of this football, social, dirt and beauty panorama, a sentence from the writer Robert Musil is confirmed: “Half of the world’s history is a love story.” Undisputedly, Willmann loves. “Coffee sex workers, red-cheeked Thuringian bratwurst eaters, Fischermann’s wife and Mr. Fischkoppen in MeckPommm…” His affection belongs to everything desert, soft and weatherproof. Literature not from the ivory tower, but from the shinbone battlefield. As a signal against any negligence when looking at the forces of existence. You first have to write a sentence like this: “The exciting thing about football takes place against the horizon of death.” Game is death: behind what elevates us, there is nothing worthwhile anymore. Life lasts 90 minutes. Some people lie to themselves and say it’s been years.

People write about the magic of the derby in Belgrade, about reading Nietzsche at half-time, about “Buschner’s boys” at the GDR Olympic victory in Montreal, about the sore patellar tendon, and the experiences of a BFC fan in the GDR are recorded: a strong “ruffle of scarves”. « with the opposing fans, then pre-trial detention and execution in Torgau. In Tirana, Willmann experiences the enchanting sounds of a Rammstein cover band. A mosaic of moments: clownish, macabre, hauntingly longing. Novi Sad and Mostar. Łódź and Wuhlheide.

The author likes the real football weather “nasty drizzle, wet snow”, he calls himself a “conservative anarchist”, knows “all the bus stations, dirty train platforms”, likes the groundhoppers of the sport; These are the guys who actually fall in love with “one-legged ladies in Bangkok”.

The characterization of the fourth division is magnificent, it is “all the amiable grind that fell by the wayside in the big fight and fight for a professional contract”; Willmann portrays “his” Jena team with minute-by-second precision: “the foot-sick Frank, the stupid Donald, the skinny Marc, the cent-counting Ken.” That’s exactly what Christoph Biermann, chief reporter for the magazine “11 Freunde”, writes in the foreword: “East as a landscape of the soul”.

The book is a work against the uncompassionate space, almost Bukowski-like in tone. Space of the provinces: From close to far away, for example in the Balkans, very durable threads of participation and cross-border interest float: How should one live? Right from the start, Willmann admits his passion for Russian poets, and I think his texts smile with pity, so to speak, about families in which football is not debated – there must be boredom there, like on Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya’s estate. So just get out! On to the next game!

Willmann does pray when it comes to victory »hisThe team is concerned with everything that “has rank and name in the idol cosmos between Allah and Santa Claus,” but, typical of Eastern Herz, the tears of those who have been unhappily defeated seem more human to him than any victor’s smile. Those who succumb to damage grow beyond those who conform in a licky way to the cold mechanisms of the growth society. Losers (see the European East!) are also more honorable in football than the gladiators without aura who are sold off around the world.

Willmann’s forays have a feeling for big moments in which something comes to a standstill. Proud moments, bitter and evil; stupid and pitiful ones too. But above all, stories about the power of failing with your head held high. To keep failing. Of course – as Samuel Beckett says – with a life-sustaining improvement: to fail better next time. Because: A “loser beer” tastes best.

Frank Willmann: Forays through the wild football East. Ventil Verlag Mainz. 293 pages, paperback, €20.

Book premiere with the author on April 11th at 7 p.m. in the Fanprojekt Berlin, Cantianstraße 25.