Granta 165, page 9
Merchandising is a hot topic at St Pauli. The fans have long protested against money interfering with the club’s spirit. Many of the old guard think that the availability of a St Pauli x Rick and Morty T-shirt is a sign that the club has become too commercialised, a brand rather than a cause. The stadium gift shop supported this complaint. There are tubes of St Pauli sun cream, St Pauli rubber ducks, bibs and dummies, caps retailing at €30, and even a St Pauli toaster.
Outside the stadium there were lots of women. Dads with daughters sat on their shoulders and groups of teenage girls. I asked Antonia and Kim, two eighteen-year-old Hamburgers, why they’d come. ‘We feel safe in the crowds,’ Antonia said, taking a drag on her cigarette. ‘And the community is the right side, politically.’ As we spoke, the team arrived, but the reaction from the fans was surprisingly modest. No clamouring for attention from the players, just a few muted chants of ‘St Pauli, St Pauli’.
I went upstairs to the press centre where I met Sven Brux, the head of security. He was jittery with pre-match nerves, clutching a coffee and currywurst. Brux has had a hand in shaping the last forty years of St Pauli. ‘The politics kicked off with us,’ he told me. ‘We were punk rockers, I had green and grey spiky hair,’ he said, splaying a hand in the shape of a mohawk above his bald head. ‘Nowadays, it’s more organised. We were just a bunch of drunken lads punching Nazis,’ he said, smiling at the memory.
Brux acknowledged that St Pauli has changed since then. ‘Before, it was a tough, working-class area with a lot of harbour workers and the red-light district. But as society around has changed, so have the people in the ground.’
I watched the game from the press stands. The crowd didn’t seem rowdy. There were ultras for St Pauli at one end of the stadium and ultras for Karlsruher SC at the other. Even at this distance, the difference was visible. Most of the front three rows of Karlsruher fans were shirtless and while the Karlsruher flags were for their team, the St Pauli flags were a collage of left-leaning political slogans. There were more Che Guevaras, a picture of The Simpsons’s Chief Wiggum on an ‘ACAB’ banner and a flag that read women, life, freedom.
St Pauli scored a 57th-minute equaliser and then not much happened before full time. The crowd filtered outside into the evening sunshine.
I met Julia, Martina and Paul. Paul told me he never really cared about football back home, in Liverpool. ‘But this is more like a social thing.’ Julia, who comes from a small town in southern Germany, has been attending St Pauli games for sixteen years. She remembers being at Millerntor-Stadion, watching a 2011 game against Bayern München, when she realised she wanted to marry her now-husband, who originally got her into St Pauli.
Julia and Martina were both disappointed in the Karlsruher ultras. ‘I have a son who’s fourteen years old,’ Julia said, ‘and we talked about this kind of behaviour. You don’t take your shirt off. This is a safe space.’
I asked them what fans of other teams would say about St Pauli fans. They told me that the clichéd insult for a St Pauli supporter is a Zecke, a tick: an unwelcome species of football fandom.
They pointed me in the direction of Knust, a bar where St Pauli were throwing a free party for fans to celebrate the end of the season. On the way, I passed the Jolly Roger, and a woman placidly squatting down to pee by some shipping containers. Knust was busy. Supporters in their thousands thrummed around a stage in the venue’s courtyard where indie rock bands played. Middle-aged punks with refugees welcome drawstring bags had their kids slung round them as they queued up for bottles of Astra. A boy sitting on some pallets worked his way through a white sausage twice the length of his head.
I ordered myself a bratwurst and the nineteen-year-old serving them, wearing a ‘Cops R Toys’ T-shirt illustrated with a cartoon of a burning police car, noticed my notebook. I stood there holding a sausage for several minutes while he told me what the team meant to him. ‘It’s about politics,’ he said. ‘I grew up here. There’s only one choice of team.’ It turned out that you can’t pay by card and so I handed my lukewarm, uneaten bratwurst back to him.
I joined a long queue for the Portakabins. The man in front turned to me and said, ‘The toilets are too small for so many.’ He told me his name was Bernd and that he played for St Pauli in 1978. He prodded the two guys who were queuing ahead of me and told them something. They turned to me and one of them said, ‘If you want to go first it’s okay.’ I said no, thank you, and asked him why. Bernd gave me a significant look. ‘It’s St Pauli,’ he said.
It was all a little self-congratulatory. But it was difficult to begrudge them, because the atmosphere was genuinely convivial. The team themselves rolled up at about 8 p.m. If I was in England, people would be roaring and puking by now. People were a little drunk, but the worst behaviour I witnessed was some dude going to town feeling up his incredibly sunburnt girlfriend’s arse while the team captain, Jackson Irvine, a long-haired Australian midfielder who joined St Pauli in 2021 after playing for Hull City and Hibernian, addressed the crowd. Most people around me couldn’t hear what the footballers were saying, but they didn't seem to care. They weren’t really there to see the players, they were there to see each other.
As the night progressed, the children were taken home and Irvine took to the decks inside Knust and played an endearingly shoddy DJ set featuring ABBA hits. From across the courtyard, someone brayed ‘Phillip Schofield’ to the tune of Big Ben’s chimes. I found Joe, a QPR fan from Wandsworth, visiting Hamburg with his friends.
‘I like the counterculture obviously, it’s a good vibe,’ he said. One of his friends turned to us.
‘Nine out of ten women in Hamburg fancy Joe,’ he told me. ‘Is it hard to interview him because he’s so good-looking?’
‘Mate, shut up. The worst thing about it is that it’s not even true, it’s literally not true. Is it?’ he asked me. Joe and his friend then got into an argument about whether or not Joe went to private school. I asked him what counterculture means to him.
‘It’s being able to go to the football and have a fucking thick old beard. English football is nasty, it’s homophobic and racist. There’re no clubs like this in England.’
I wandered over to ask a pair of girls for a lighter. Jana and Paulina, art students in their early twenties, were both from Hamburg.
They told me about how the team shapes their social life in the city. This party made more sense to me – socialising and nightlife are an intrinsic part of what St Pauli means in Hamburg. If a bar has a St Pauli flag, they know they will find reliably leftish people inside.
I asked them whether there is any truth to the idea that some supporters wear the merchandise and claim a passion for the club in order to steal left-wing valour. They laughed.
‘Of course,’ Jana said. ‘We call them Maca. “Maca” is like . . . Left posers would be a rough translation. They have St Pauli on their shirts, but they don’t live it.’
What doesn’t impress her is St Pauli fans congratulating themselves when they march against fascism in Hamburg. The political composition of the city has changed a lot since Sven Brux’s youth. There aren’t really many neo-Nazis to punch any more.
‘We have such big leftist demonstrations in Hamburg, and they’re shouting “Anti Fascista! ” but to who? There are no Nazis,’ Jana said. ‘Go to the east and experience ten people demonstrating against three hundred Nazis.’
Next I met a group of friends in their early thirties, several beers down, who were not so keen to talk politics. They were there to have a laugh. Henning, a teacher, opened our chat with a poor imitation of an English accent. ‘I’m from London mate!’ he said. They saw Irvine DJ. ‘I think St Pauli are the only club whose players would DJ at the after-party,’ said Henning’s friend Lea. She gestured towards Irvine, who was dancing to Kylie Minogue.
When they discovered that I was at the party alone, they insisted I join them. The crowd on the dance floor lurched through the European canon – the Killers, Red Hot Chili Peppers – and at 4 a.m., Johnny Cash’s version of ‘Hurt’ began to play.
‘In Germany,’ Henning shouted in my ear, ‘this song means it’s time to leave.’
We did, for a late-night snack at KFC on the Reeperbahn.
‘All the clubs in eastern Germany hate St Pauli,’ Lea said.
‘We hate them too,’ Annika replied, putting her middle fingers up in the air.
‘Motherfucking Nazis,’ added Henning.
Once we’d eaten, we went our separate ways. Henning clapped his hands on my shoulders. ‘Welcome to St Pauli,’ he said. The myth-making continued.
The next morning, as if summoned by the St Pauli PR department to drive home how different a team they are, Irvine was at the gate preparing to board my easyJet flight. A security guard asked for a picture for his brother. Irvine obliged, before heading onto the plane, where he sat down in a normal, cramped seat, just like the rest of us.
ALLEGRO PASTELL
Leif Randt
translated from the german by ruth martin
1
Maundy Thursday, 29 March 2018. The Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof was flooded with mild evening sunlight, and the passengers waiting on platform 9 cast long shadows. At 18.30, Tanja Arnheim arrived on the 375 express from Berlin, punctual to the minute. When Jerome Daimler, who was holding a paper bag of fresh pastries, saw her get off from somewhere near the restaurant car, he wondered for a moment whether he should walk up the platform to meet her, but then decided it looked more charming if he just stayed where he was. Tanja’s straight hair was waxed flat against her head and tucked behind her ears. She was wearing headphones and wheeling her small suitcase straight towards Jerome without seeing him. Jerome couldn’t help but smile, and when Tanja finally spotted him among the milling passengers, she beamed as well, which was always something of a revelation for Jerome; you might assume Tanja Arnheim was someone whose expression never changed. And then, suddenly: lively, shining eyes; straight teeth. Tanja took off her headphones, and they kissed. ‘How’s it going – are you hungry?’ That was a question Jerome didn’t really have to ask; Tanja was usually hungry, and after a four-hour train journey she was sure to be.
‘I ate in the restaurant car. The Maultaschen were actually okay.’
They kissed again.
‘Do you want to go straight home? Or shall we get a drink somewhere around here?’ Jerome winked. And Tanja winked, too. ‘Let’s have a drink at home.’
They walked hand in hand towards the U4. In the past, it had been a rare thing for Jerome to hold a girlfriend’s hand as they walked through crowds. But with Tanja, he no longer thought twice about it. A small queue had formed in front of a stall selling freshly squeezed fruit juices, and there were still customers visiting the enormous newsagent next to Burger King to buy glossy magazines.
On her last visit, Tanja had told him that she thought it was much more fun to send short videos and photos from the periphery than from the capital city, which everyone had seen. She often took fast trains across Germany, Austria and Switzerland for work, and she tried to make at least one long-distance trip a year as well. She thought a lot of people wasted their potential by not leaving their own little worlds often enough. Jerome had agreed with her.
In the busy U-Bahn carriage they sat side by side and kissed with their eyes closed. Jerome was infatuated with the role of the blissfully happy heterosexual partner. One moment he was turning the eastbound U4 into his own personal movie set, and the next he forgot his surroundings completely. During a pause in the kissing, he placed his right arm around Tanja’s comparatively broad shoulders with an extravagant gesture and gave her a tender smile. He realised that he didn’t have full control over his facial expressions and took that as a good sign. Jerome liked the thought that if he could see himself from the outside, here on the U4, he might find himself insufferable. Liking a thought that would unsettle other people was typical of the new Jerome, who now drew a playful line between an inner personality that only he himself could know, and an outer personality assembled from qualities that other people attributed to him. He could recognise his outer personality in photos and in the mirror, where he automatically saw himself through other people’s eyes, through their assumptions and associations. His inner personality was something he felt most strongly when he closed his eyes once a day to pretend he was meditating. In the past eleven months, he hadn’t once achieved a state he would have described as ‘classically meditative’ – he had no interest in emptying his mind – but he still found his attempts at meditation worthwhile. He believed that the voice that spoke within him then, which reminded him of his laptop’s read-aloud function, was the voice of his inner personality. Since Jerome had come to know this voice, he’d almost stopped worrying about how other people saw him, and so there was nothing to stop him from occasionally sporting conspicuous accessories, like the orange vintage Oakleys he’d worn the Friday evening before last.
Jerome was surprised to see that comparatively few passengers in the U4 were looking at their phones. A teenage girl was staring at Tanja. She was noticeably well made up. ‘Do you think she follows you on Insta?’ Jerome whispered. Tanja had developed a sure sense for the attention of strangers. ‘She just likes my shoes,’ she said. Since Tanja’s short novel NovoPanopticon had been published three and a half years ago, the occasional person with an interest in the arts had started to recognise her face. Her book was about four male friends who have a meaningful virtual-reality experience in the dormitory of a disused rural school – and so, among other things, she had been invited onto Markus Lanz’s talk show as an expert in VR.
Tanja had accepted the misunderstanding with thanks, but once she was on the show, she’d pointed out that she only knew as much about VR as anyone else who had looked up the term. This was either coquettish and arrogant or refreshingly honest, depending on whom you asked. Liam, the main character in Tanja’s miniature novel, creates a mindfulness VR, through which his friends increasingly manage to control their addiction to sexual validation – at least until a jealous ex-boyfriend hacks the system and starts playing the protagonists off against one another. Jerome had laughed a great deal as he was reading it. He had only read the numerous critiques of the book once he’d got to know Tanja personally. It seemed that a lot of different people had found a lot of different things in NovoPanopticon. A few fans even went so far as to say that reading it had changed their lives. And those who didn’t like the book seemed weirdly proud of not liking it; a distaste for something that had been meaningful to other people gave them an obscure sense of superiority. Two women had written essays criticising the fact that Tanja was a woman writing about men. And there was an article by a junior professor which said that Tanja Arnheim, whose facial features were repeatedly described as striking, was a kind of icon for gay academics between the ages of twenty and forty-five.
Jerome had parked his one-year-old rented Tesla at the Kruppstraße U-Bahn station, not far from the Hessen-Center – an indoor shopping mall on the outskirts of the city, which held countless, largely positive childhood memories for Jerome. He had often gone for Chinese food there with his mother at the start of the school holidays, though the Chinese restaurant was now a thing of the past. Jerome thought he’d last had lunch in the dimly lit restaurant with the aquarium in 2004. It was a place from another age and yet Jerome’s memories of it were very much alive. During Tanja’s last visit, they had wandered through the Hessen-Center together, and he’d talked to her about how much the mall had changed, and the extent to which these changes reflected a transformation of consumer behaviour in general. In the 1990s, a visit to an out-of-town shopping centre still had a certain attraction even for well-off city-dwellers, which meant that the Hessen-Center was able to house more upmarket boutiques, as well as restaurants you wanted to spend more than half an hour in. In the course of his monologue, Jerome had uttered the words crispy sweet-and-sour duck in a way that suggested a kind of burning nostalgia, and as he was speaking, it occurred to him that he sometimes told Tanja things that weren’t necessarily of any interest to her. Tanja had replied that this was precisely what she liked about him. So few people, she said, dared to talk about genuine memories, since by their nature those stories were short on punchlines – and she thought this was part of a structural problem that was closely tied to the global economy. ‘But my boyfriend Jerome Daimler is evidently immune to problems of this sort,’ she said in the Hessen-Center, smiling at Jerome. Jerome felt a warm sensation in his belly and kissed Tanja on the lips.
Jerome had never felt immune at any point in his life. He had always been preoccupied with the world around him. But in the noughties, when he was in his early to mid-twenties, other people’s concerns had begun to weigh more heavily on him. When he used to see a mother arguing with her child, he would first consider how he would react as a child, and shortly thereafter, what arguments he would make as a mother. He’d found considering both these things debilitating. But now Jerome didn’t think about anything when he saw a mother and child arguing. He had the confidence to distance himself from these situations, though without sacrificing empathy – quite the reverse: he now found it easier to understand other people’s troubles, he was fairer and kinder, but he no longer suffered along with them. Jerome always reminded himself of this improvement in his general attitude towards life when he was on the point of getting nostalgic. Nostalgia was just a sad reflex that sprang from a lack of ideas – his mother had told him something along these lines, in English, a little over ten years ago.
Jerome would have liked to know how many Teslas were on the roads in the Rhine-Main area, but he’d never attempted to research it – he wasn’t quite that keen to know. He had already been given a customer loyalty discount at Jenny Köhler’s Electric Rental, a new institution on the Hanauer Landstraße, although this was only the third time he’d rented a car there. Coloured pennants in the American style fluttered above its car park, and the company was staffed exclusively by young women in loose, sometimes oil-smeared uniforms. From the Tesla’s rear-view mirror hung a green air-freshener tree, printed with the loops and flourishes of Jenny Köhler’s signature. Jerome didn’t even consider moving the air freshener from his field of vision. He liked using things exactly as they were presented to him. In the same way, he’d always been a fan of subletting furnished rooms and of restaurants whose menus consisted of just a few regularly changing dishes. For a long time, he’d misconstrued this attitude as modesty, but it was rooted in a longing for order and structure, which to some degree had also sparked his interest in design. Jerome believed the drive to design was closely tied to the compulsion to tidy things up. And when everything was already specified and therefore couldn’t be tidied, it came as a huge relief. Jerome was able to trace most of his characteristics back to his own biography – even as a child, he had liked to line his toys up on the rug – but he wasn’t a fan of classic psychological approaches in general. The facts of his life were easy to state: Jerome Daimler, freelance web designer, born in November 1982 in the Holy Spirit Hospital, Frankfurt am Main, grew up a few kilometres away in Maintal, studied in Düsseldorf and The Hague, began his career in Offenbach, now once again resident in Maintal.
