Tennis Borussia Berlin: Making a Racket
A lower-league German football team is perhaps not the subject matter you might expect of an article in The Saint. However, during my time as a British Council assistant last year, I found myself falling for a football team with a backstory worth sharing.
TeBe (pronounced ‘tay bay’), as the fans affectionately know their club, was originally founded as a racket sports club (hence the name), only later adding football to the curriculum. Until the late seventies, the side regularly played their home matches in the 75,000-capacity Olympiastadion in Berlin. Designed by Nazi architect Albert Speer, this ‘Colosseum of Sport’ is most famous for Jesse Owens’ heroics during the 1936 Summer Olympics.
On a sunny August evening in Berlin’s Tiergarten, I met up with Carsten Bangel, the club’s stadium announcer, DJ, and bassist of an in-house punk band (yes, you read that correctly), to talk about what makes Tennis Borussia Berlin such a special club.
“TeBe has always attracted people who are a little bit different from the mainstream,” recounted Bangel, who attended his first game in 1977. “I was intrigued by the club’s unusual name and purple-and-white strip.” Bangel has been involved with the club and its unorthodox fan scene ever since.
“The TeBe scene was trailblazing in addressing homophobia in German football, at a time when clubs, the media, and the DFB turned a blind eye to it,” added Bangel.
The club founded the ‘Football Against Homophobia’ initiative in 2011 — a movement which has since spread across the continent. Banners displaying the campaign’s slogan could be spotted from South London to South America. One even made an appearance at the Champions League final.
In 2017, TeBe hit the headlines when the club’s former chairman forbade them from hanging a rainbow flag in front of their stadium. Rather than storming the club’s offices, the fans came up with a creative way of tackling the situation.
After deciding to boycott their home matches, the TeBe faithful advertised in a local football magazine as ‘fans looking for a club to support.’ They were inundated with responses, including an invite to watch Germany’s most successful water polo outfit, Wasserfreunde Spandau 04.
“It was a creative way to deal with the situation, but behind it, there was a deep sadness. We had lost our club,” said Bangel. “That season we made it to the Berlin Cup Final. It was so hard not to go.” Instead, the club hosted a game between past legends.
As well as supporting the LGBTQI+ community, TeBe proudly celebrates the Jewish heritage of many of the club’s original members.
“The spirit and the passion of the Jewish pioneers of the club, and also of our late president Hans Rosenthal, were a key part of the club’s success,” emphasised Bangel. “As a result of this, TeBe has been confronted with antisemitism a lot, especially during the 90s.” The club proudly displays a Star of David on its banner in solidarity with its Jewish history.
“We are football fans. We like to win and get promoted, but not at any price,” Bangel emphasised. In a time when money and commercial success in football tend to overrule ethics and conviction, a club that sticks to its fan-oriented principles the way Tennis Borussia Berlin does is surely one to admire.