Football in Berlin

Babylon Berlin, first season, episode six, the TV-series that portrays Weimar-Berlin in such a vivid way. The journalist Samuel Katelbach offers the detective Gereon Rath a ticket for a match between Hertha Berlin and Holstein Kiel at the Plumpe. “Where?”, asks Gereon, who is from Cologne and uthus not a Berliner.  “At the Gesundbrunnen stadium”, explains Katelbach, himself a Viennese but more knowledgeable than Rath about the German capital.

The Gesundbrunnen stadium was located in the north of Berlin, 4 km from the city centre. It was built in 1923 and used as the home stadium of Hertha BSC. It also hosted some matches during the 1936 Summer Olympics. It was popularly known as Plumpe, meaning “water-pump”, probably due to the existence of one such pump close to the stadium.

Football in Germany after the First World War was very regionalised, with the top clubs playing in local competitions with rivals well below their own strength. Those clubs would then only truly be challenged during the German finals round (Deutsche Meisterschaft). Attempts to build a national « Reichsliga », like in other countries, was resisted by the powerful regional associations. Yet an example of the strong federal structure of the country, with powerful regional states, a structure that prevails even today.

The DFB (Deutscher Fußball-Bund) was founded in 1900. The Arbeiter-Turn- und Sportbund (ATSB or Workers' Gymnastics and Sports Federation) was a national organization active between 1893-1933. It promoted leftist political views, though, as it happened also in national politics, it finally split in a social-democratic and a communist section. Despite its popularity, the ATSB never managed to break the dominance among workers of « bourgeois » clubs (those of the DFB). The Deutsche Meisterschaft was played between teams belonging to the DFB.

The format of the Meisterschaft was a knockout competition, between the winners and the seconds of each of the country's top regional leagues, sixteen teams in all.

Hertha was founded in 1892, and it took its name from that of a ship on which one of the young men who founded the club had just taken a trip. The name Hertha refers to a fertility goddess in Germanic mythology. The Berlin club was Germany's second most successful team during the inter-war years, the first one being FC Nürnberg. The blue and white Hertha played its way to the German championship’s final six times but could only win the title in 1930 and 1931.The other important club in Berlin was Tennis Borussia.

Hertha, German champion 1930

Holstein Kiel was founded in 1900. They played three times the final, winning it only once, in 1912.

As Hertha played in the Brandenburg League and Holstein Kiel in the Northern League, they could only meet each other in the knockout phase, which started in May or June. In 1929, when the action of Babylon Berlin takes place, Hertha played its four knockout matches in June and none of them was against Holstein Kiel. They won the Meisterschaft that year, against FC Nürnberg. And, when in Berlin, they played in the Poststadion, not in Gesundbrunnen.

Hertha and Holstein Kiel did meet each other in the 1930 final, but not in Berlin but in Düsseldorf, the 22th of June. It was a dramatic match, which Hertha won 5-4, though Holstein led the score most of the time.

There was, as far as I can make out, only one play-off match being played at the Plumpe during those years. It was on July 12^th 1928. between Tennis Borussia Berlin and FC Wacker München.

So that, one may wonder to which match Katelbach was offering Gereon a ticket?