Sunday April 11, 2021
“Not given with Hitler”
“Black eagles” prevented from flying
What does discrimination based on skin color feel like? Black footballers can painfully explain that. In a new documentary, former and current national players tell of their harrowing experiences with racism and exclusion.
Former Bundesliga professional Otto Addo tells how people pelted him with beer bottles. Guy Acolatse, who played for FC St. Pauli in the 1960s, says: “Sometimes they looked at me as if I was about to eat them.” And the former German national player Erwin Kostedde remembers the words: “Look at the Schwatte, that would not have happened with Hitler.”
The fact that black soccer players in Germany were insulted because of their skin color and mocked with monkey noises used to be part of everyday sadness. Some things have changed and improved, but players still experience discrimination today.
The documentary “Black Eagles”, which will be broadcast on Amazon Prime from April 15 and on ZDF on June 18, addresses the issue of racism in German football. The experiences of ex-professionals such as Erwin Kostedde and Jimmy Hartwig, Patrick Owomoyela and Otto Addo flow into the film by director Torsten Körner (“Angela Merkel: The Unexpected”) and producer Leopold Hoesch (“Kroos”, “Nowitzki”).
“Loved as a footballer, rejected as a person”
With the sentence “I was loved as a footballer and rejected as a person”, ex-professional footballer Ojokojo Torunarigha (Chemnitzer FC) described his work in Germany in the 1990s. His son, Hertha BSC kicker Jordan Torunarigha, experiences racism first-hand: During a Bundesliga game in February 2020 against FC Schalke 04, spectators called monkey noises in his direction.
At the beginning of the 90-minute documentary, Gerald Asamoah and the former national player Steffi Jones tell how proud they were of wearing the Black Eagle on their DFB jerseys. But they always had to experience the darker side. Many black national players and soccer players have experienced discrimination since the beginning of the Federal Republic.
The documentary describes the experiences of black children of German women and US soldiers – like the 74-year-old Kostedde, who recently reported on his experiences in a remarkable double interview with Gerald Asamoah in “Zeit Magazin”. Kostedde describes how soldiers returning home in the post-war period asked him what he was doing here as an “American” and remembers another terrible insult with the Hitler remark. Particularly shocking is his anecdote how he washed himself with soap for three hours as a child to try to turn white because of the refusal.
“The same problems as 20, 30 years ago”
The stories of the protagonists alternate with historical clips of how Germans expressed their disparagement towards blacks in a disturbing way on film and television in the 1950s and 1960s. Children of black US soldiers were considered a nuisance after the war. The 1952 film “Toxi” made it clear that these children are supposedly better off in America than in Germany.
Kostedde, who made his debut in 1974 as the first black player in the national team, always wanted to wear the eagle, but in retrospect he says he never warmed up in the team. Ex-national player Jimmy Hartwig also describes the feeling of not belonging. Hartwig tells how his grandpa called him a bastard and was an ardent admirer of Hitler.
In the course of the film, the viewer notices a change in the zeitgeist. Especially younger players like Jean-Manuel Mbom (SV Werder Bremen) report more positive experiences than black players in the decades before. “I think we’ve come a long way. My life is very different from the life of a black person,” says Mbom. But there is still a lot to be done.
Otto Addo sounds less optimistic: “I have a lot of contact with completely normal people. And these are the same problems as 20 or 30 years ago,” says Addo. Regardless of whether you are looking for an apartment or a job. Not much has changed, he says resignedly.
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