BarcelonaOn June 18, 1914, the president of Barça, Francesc de Moxó, arrived at the station in France to receive a group of Germans. For the first time, a German team arrived to play three friendlies against FC Barcelona. The rival was the Stuttgarter Kickers, now a Fifth Division club, but then a powerhouse in southern Germany. Moxó was suffering because the fans were not happy with the team, which had not won any titles that year, and he hoped to lift his spirits with the visit of the Germans. What the players who came from Stuttgart did not expect was that while they were returning home everything would change with the outbreak of World War I. The Great War, in fact, froze Barça’s relationship with Germany, which was very close in the first 15 years of the club’s life.
From 21 to 24 June, Barça faced Stuttgarter Kickers three times with the title of champion of southwestern Germany under their arm. At that time, it was normal for Barça to travel abroad to play friendlies, as well as to have French, Swiss or Belgian clubs in Catalonia. Friendly to test, to learn and, if possible, to make money. The first Germans were the Kickers, who lost two games and won one. The most prominent player of the visitors was captain Eugen Kipp, an international with Germany at the 1912 Olympic Games. first of three games played on Industry Street field, with the Stuttgarter Kickers winning 0-2. In the following matches, the Englishman Jack Grenwell and the Barcelona player Gabriel Bau led the victories of a Barça pressured by the fans, since a few days before an English professional club had arrived in the city for the first time in the city, the Notts County, who won all three games he played. One of them, by 3-10. Against the Germans, therefore, Barça saved a little of their honor in a difficult season in the field of sports.
the great war
Just as the Stuttgarter Kickers were returning home on June 30, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the alleged heir to the Austrian crown, was assassinated in Sarajevo. And the Great War broke out. “Moment of anguish: the European war is a fact”, it appeared on the front page of the newspaper The Catalan People. A war in which Eugen Kipp ended up enlisted in an infantry regiment that went to the very hard battle of Ieper. The footballer lost his right leg below the knee and a French bayonet shattered his jaw. A second bayonet pierced his shoulder and left him with an immobilized arm for the rest of his short life. But he survived and received the Empire’s main war decoration, the Adlerplakett.
The First World War, in fact, turned Barcelona into a city full of spies, with Mata Hari herself walking along the Parallel. And with the people divided between those who supported the allies and those who trusted the great empires. Although Spain was neutral, the people were divided in favor of each other. And Germany had little sympathy, as intellectuals such as Rovira and Virgil, Prudenci Bertrana, and Santiago Rusiñol sided with the French and British. At the end of the conflict, being a Germanophile was no longer well regarded and one of the first players in the history of Barça, Otto Maier, resigned from German citizenship to become a Spanish citizen. Nearly a thousand Catalans enlisted as volunteers in the French army, in which some former Barça players took part, such as René Victor Fenouillère. Once it became clear that the Allies would win, Barça played friendly matches against a team made up of footballers from Germany’s enemy states in the war, with French, Belgian and British players. A former German Barça player, Walter Rozitsky, also went to war. His figure was recovered by historians Eugen Scheinherr and Fernando Arrechea in the publication CIHEFE. Rozitsky was a Barça player from 1911 to 1913, before leaving for work in Madrid, where he would play for Real. At the end of the war, he sent a letter in German to Joan Gamper informing him that he had survived four years in the trenches. For years it was thought that Rozitsky might be Polish, but he was actually German and Jewish.
Barça’s relationship with Germany cooled after the war, although little by little good clubs returned. In 1922 the Greuther Fürth arrived in the city to play two friendlies and a few months later, the Nuremberg. Greuther, a Bavarian like Nuremberg, would return twice more in 10 years, an exception, as it would be very rare to see German clubs in Barcelona until the 1950s. And that foreign clubs came to play friendly, but with Germany it was cold, partly because of the political instability of the 1920s, partly because of the rise of Nazism to power in the 1930s.
With the birth of international competitions, however, German clubs became great opponents of Barça, with 20 different rivals, some of them under the GDR flag. In fact, the country where we find more different clubs that have faced Barça in an official match is Germany. In 1961 came the first official duel, against Hamburg. Since then, a lot of teams have paraded around Barcelona, and some have left a good memory of losing key matches, such as Düsseldorf’s Fortuna in the Basel final or Kaiserslautern. Others, like Bayern, have a bad memory. The latest is this Frankfurt Eintracht that will arrive accompanied by thousands of fans.
One of the 12 apostles
Barça’s relationship with German football is as old as the club’s, in fact, because a German was part of the group of twelve apostles, as the club’s founders were christened by journalist Daniel Carbó, also known as Corredisses. . This is Otto Maier. A Bavarian from Heidenheim, he had come to the city in 1888 to work for a sanitary ware company and never left his homeland. Maier would also be a player for the club, scoring a few goals during the first years of Barça’s life and also being a manager. It was even rumored that he was the one who decided the club’s Barça colors, as they were from the Heidenheim club. Maier, who could speak German with Barça’s Swiss, like Gamper, fit the profile of sportsman of the time. A young man from a good family who wanted to play as many sports as possible, such as tennis, in which his son Bubi Maier excelled, becoming a Wimbledon champion in mixed doubles.
The first goal in Madrid, the work of a German
Maier, however, could not play the first game in the club’s history, on December 8, 1899 against a group of Englishmen at the Bonanova Velodrome with a total of 10 players, because 11 players could not meet. One of those 10 pioneers was also German: Eduard Maria Schilling, who ran a well-known gun shop in the city center. Schilling, a member of a German Jewish lineage who had converted to Catholicism, played just one match for Barça, the first since he was 47 years old. Maier and Schilling were part of the group of Germans who played for Barça in those early years of the club’s life, where Catalans joined foreigners who had come to the city to do business and stayed. Players such as the famous Udo Steinberg, the author of Barça’s first goal for Real Madrid in 1902, Julius Muller and Emil Walter. Then it took many years for other Germans to arrive, such as Bernd Schuster, Robert Enke, Marc-André ter Stegen and Kevin-Prince Boateng, as well as coaches such as Hennes Weisweiler and Udo Lattek. In the 1970s, the whole of Europe was debating whether to bet on the German school or the Dutch school. At Barça, Weisweiler and Lattek left the memory of being very professional and tough. But the model that would succeed with Johan Cruyff was preferred.
