FC Bayern Munich: Too Jewish for the Nazis

Konrad Heitkamp was taken aback by the extraordinary ordinariness present in the lobby of the Zurich hotel. In November of 1943, life in Zurich seemed unperturbed by the fact that the countries surrounding Switzerland were embroiled in one of the most devastating wars in the history of the world. Heitkamp realized that as the coach of the FC Bayern München soccer team, he was one of the privileged few who could bask in this oasis of normalcy for a few days before he would have to head back home to Munich. He surveyed the lobby and began waving his hand at some of his players standing across the vestibule. Hopefully, the Gestapo men watching him thought of this as an innocuous gesture, a soccer team coach acknowledging the arrival of his players and performing a headcount. But he could not bank on it.

The Gestapo must have known that for the past weeks, Heitkamp and his players were forward to the friendly match against the Swiss national soccer team because it would give them a chance to finally see their friend Kurt Landauer again. Before the team embarked on their trip to Zurich, the Gestapo had ordered all Bayern München players to attend a special "education" session in Gestapo headquarters of Munich. The team was informed that the Gestapo would accompany the team on their brief trip to Switzerland. The Gestapo explicitly forbade the team members to have any contact with German emigrants in Switzerland.

The Nazis were always weary of any potential contacts between Germans and German emigrants who were seen as traitors and collaborators of the Allied forces. But FC Bayern München was a special thorn in the flesh of the Nazi machinery. Nazis routinely referred to FC Bayern München as a "Judenclub" ("Jew Club"), because German Jews had held some of the key leadership positions. The club won its first German national soccer championship in 1932 under the leadership of the Jewish club president Kurt Landauer and the coach Richard Dombi, an Austrian Jew. Only a few months later in January 1933, Hitler came to power and soon all leaders of Jewish origin were forced to give up their leadership positions.

Kurt Landauer was one of the first to resign from the club presidency. He even lost his job as the manager of a Munich newspaper's advertising department, and was only able to find work in a textile shop owned by a Jewish family. In the wake of the anti-semitic pogroms in the night of the 9^th November 1938 (Kristallnacht oder Reichspogromnacht), this shop was attacked and devastated. Landauer was arrested and sent to the Dachau concentration camp. After a brief period of internment, he was released and he used this opportunity to emigrate to Switzerland and survived the Holocaust. Most of his siblings were less fortunate and were murdered by the Nazis.



Konrad Heitkamp and his wife Magdalena are about to walk towards their hotel room, when a bellhop appears in front of them and hands Heitkamp a note. It is a message from Kurt Landauer. Heitkamp tries to suppress his excitement , but it is already too late. Before he can even read the note, a man taps him on the shoulder and says "Gestapo. Give me the note. We know who it is from and we absolutely forbid you to have any contact with that man. We are watching you!"

For the remainder of the trip, the Gestapo closely walls off Heitkamp and his players, making it impossible for them to have any contact with Landauer. But the players still manage to embarrass the Nazis and the Gestapo. Immediately after the whistle is blown to start the game, the FC Bayern München players run up to the area of the soccer field in front of Kurt Landauer and greet their former president from afar.

The book "Der FC Bayern und seine Juden: Aufstieg und Zerschlagung einer liberalen Fußballkultur" (FC Bayern and its Jews: The Rise and Destruction of a Liberal Soccer Culture) by the German soccer historian Dietrich Schulze-Marmeling describes the prevalent culture of tolerance at FC Bayern München in the years prior to the Nazi takeover of Germany. Many members, players and leaders of the club were Jewish, but the question of ethnicity or religion was not even a real issue for the club. All that really mattered was whether or not you were a member of the club. Once the Nazis came to power in 1933, they tried to install their henchmen at leadership positions of all institutions, including sport clubs. TSV 1860, the other big Munich soccer club, immediately acquiesced to the new Nazi masters, allowing  SA men to take control of the club from 1934 onwards. Players and members of FC Bayern München, on the other hand, staving off Nazi leadership up until 1943. The Nazis were often frustrated by the recalcitrant "Judenclub" which resisted and delayed the implementation of Nazi ordinances.

I have been an FC Bayern München fan all my life. My childhood home in Munich was just a ten minute walk away from the club's headquarters at the Säbener Strasse. It is not difficult to be proud of its achievements. In 2013, the club won every major trophy that it was eligible for - Bundesliga champions, the German soccer federation cup (DFB-Pokal), the European Champions League and the 2013 FIFA Club World Cup – thus underscoring its dominance as the world's best soccer club. But none of these victories made me as proud of my club as finding out about how my club defied anti-semitism and the Nazis.

Image: The headquarters of FC Bayern München in the Säbener Strasse (photo by J. Rehman)

Note: An earlier version of this article was first published on 3Quarksdaily.com.

Reference: Schulze-Marmeling, D. (2011). "Der FC Bayern und seine Juden: Aufstieg und Zerschlagung einer liberalen Fußballkultur". Werkstatt GmbH

Composites

"Shorter sentences and simple words!" was the battle cry of all my English teachers. Their comments and corrections of our English-language essays and homework assignments were very predictable. Apparently, they had all sworn allegiance to the same secret Fraternal Order of Syntax Police. I am sure that students of the English language all over the world have heard similar advice from their teachers, but English teachers at German schools excel in their diligent use of linguistic guillotines to chop up sentences and words. The problem is that they have to teach English to students who think, write and breathe in German, the lego of languages.

Lego blocks invite the observer to grab them and build marvelously creative and complex structures. The German language similarly invites its users to construct composite words and composite sentences. A virtually unlimited number of composite nouns can be created in German, begetting new words which consist of two, three or more components with meanings that extend far beyond the sum of their parts. The famous composite German word "Schadenfreude" is now used worldwide to describe the shameful emotion of joy when observing harm befall others. It combines "Schaden" (harm or damage) and "Freude" (joy), and its allure lies in the honest labeling of a guilty pleasure and the inherent tension of combining two seemingly discordant words.

The lego-like qualities of German can also be easily applied to how sentences are structured. Commas are a German writer's best friends. A German sentence can contain numerous clauses and sub-clauses, weaving a quilt of truths, tangents and tangential truths, all combined into the serpentine splendor of a single sentence. Readers may not enjoy navigating their way through such verschachtelt sentences, but writers take great pleasure in envisioning a reader who unwraps a sentence as if opening a matryoshka doll only to find that the last word of a mammoth sentence negates its fore-shadowed meaning.


Even though our teachers indulged such playfulness when we wrote in German, they were all the more harsh when it came to our English assignments. They knew that we had a hankering for creating long sentences, so they returned them to us covered in red ink markings, indicative of their syntactic fervor. This obsession with short sentences and words took the joy out of writing in English. German was the language of beauty and poetry, whereas English became the language best suited for efficient communication. By the time I reached my teenage years, I began to lose interest in writing anything in English beyond our mandatory school assignments. I still enjoyed reading books in English, such as the books of Enid Blyton, but I could not fathom how a language of simple sentences and simple words could be used to create works of literary beauty. This false notion fell apart when I first read "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe.

The decision to read "Things Fall Apart" was not completely arbitrary. My earliest memories of this world are those of the years I spent as a child in Igboland. My family moved from Pakistan to Germany when I was one year old, but we soon moved on to Nigeria. Germany was financing the rehabilitation of the electrical power grid that had been destroyed during the Biafra War. My father was one of the electrical engineers sent from Germany to help with the restoration and expansion of the electrical power supply in the South-Eastern part of Nigeria – the region which was home to the Igbo people and which had attempted and failed to secede as the Republic of Biafra.

We first stayed in Enugu, the former capital of the transient Republic of Biafra and then lived in the city of Aba. My memories of the time in Igboland are just sequences of images and scenes, and it is difficult to make sense of all of them: Kind and friendly people, palm trees and mysterious forests, riding a tricycle in elliptical loops, visits to electrical sub-stations. We returned to Germany when I was four years old. I would never live in the Igboland again, but recalling the fragmented memories of those early childhood years has always evoked a sense of comfort and joy in me. When I came across "Things Fall Apart" as a fourteen-year old and learned that it took place in an Igbo village, I knew that I simply had to read it.

I was not prepared for the impact the book would have on me. Great books shake us up, change us in a profound and unpredictable manner, leaving footprints that are etched into the rinds of our soul. "Things Fall Apart" was the first great English language book that I read. I was mesmerized by its language. This book was living proof that one could write a profound and beautiful book in English, using short, simple sentences.

 As the Ibo say: "When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk."
And so Okonkwo was ruled by one passion— to hate everything that his father Unoka had loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was idleness.
 Living fire begets cold, impotent ash.
A child cannot pay for its mother's milk.

It wasn't just the beautiful language, aphorisms, Igbo proverbs and haunting images that made this book so unique. "Things Fall Apart" contained no heroes. The books that I had read before "Things Fall Apart" usually made it obvious who the hero was. But "Things Fall Apart" was different. Okonkwo was no hero, not even a tragic hero. But he also was no villain. As with so many of the characters in the book, I could see myself in them and yet I was also disgusted by some of the abhorrent acts they committed. I wanted to like Okonkwo, but I could not like a man who participated in the killing of his adopted son or nearly killed his wife in a fit of anger.

Guns fired the last salute and the cannon rent the sky. And then from the center of the delirious fury came a cry of agony and shouts of horror. It was as if a spell had been cast. All was silent. In the center of the crowd a boy lay in a pool of blood. It was the dead man's sixteen-year-old son, who with his brothers and half-brothers had been dancing the traditional farewell to their father. Okonkwo's gun had exploded and a piece of iron had pierced the boy's heart.

Achebe was not judging or mocking his characters, but sharing them with us. He was telling us about how real humans think and behave. As I read the book, I felt that I was being initiated into life. Life would be messy. Most of us would end up being neither true heroes nor true villains but composites of heroism and villainy.  If I did not want end up like Okwonkwo, the ultimate non-negotiator, I needed to accept the fact that my life would be a series of negotiations: negotiations between individuals, negotiations between conflicting identities and negotiations between values and cultures. The book described a specific clash of cultures in colonial Africa, but it was easy to apply the same clash to so many other cultures. I tried to envision Okwonkwo as an Indian farmer whose world began to fall apart when Arab armies invaded the Sindh. I imagined Okwonkwo as a Native American, a Roman or a Japanese warrior, each negotiating his way through cultural upheavals. The history of humankind is always that of things falling apart and, importantly, that of rebuilding after the falling apart.    

As soon as the day broke, a large crowd of men from Ezeudu's quarter stormed Okonkwo's compound, dressed in garbs of war. They set fire to his houses, demolished his red walls, killed his animals and destroyed his barn. It was the justice of the earth goddess, and they were merely her messengers. They had no hatred in their hearts against Okonkwo. His greatest friend, Obierika, was among them. They were merely cleansing the land which Okonkwo had polluted with the blood of a clansman.

I read "Things Fall Apart" to find my past, but it defined my future. It helped me recognize the beauty of the English language and prepared me for life in a way that no book had ever done before.

Notes: All quotes are from "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe

Image Credits: Stack of "Things Fall Apart" (by Scartol via Wikimedia Commons), Photo of a porcelain insulator with a bullet hole probably from the Biafra war, Photo taken from the Presidential Hotel in Enugu 1973. 

Whistling Pigs: German Adventures with Google Translate

Bilingual or multilingual friends can be quite annoying. Especially if you’re stuck at a social gathering with the ones who repeatedly mention their language skills and utter phrases such as ”Well, if only you could read this novel in the original, you would have a much more profound understanding of what the author wanted to express…..”. Or the ones who like to cite French, German and Arabic language newspaper articles and then remind you with a thinly veiled pomposity that you may have a very narrow view of the world if you only rely on English-language news.

Via Bert Kaufmann (Creative Commons license)

However, this latter group is becoming more rare, possibly because a formidable foe is taking the wind out of their sails: Google Translate. The excellent book “Is That a Fish In Your Ear” by David Bellos has a chapter entitled “The Adventure of Automated Language-Translation Machines”, which is especially thought-provoking, because it explains some key concepts about Google Translate and the future of automated translation.

If a user enters a text into Google Translate, the linguistic search engine scours the Internet for multilingual texts, ranging from official documents posted by the European Union to articles and books that are available online in bilingual or multilingual versions. Using pattern recognition algorithms and statistical methods, Google Translate matches words and phrases contained in the user-entered text with those found in the large online repository of previously translated texts.

The underlying assumption of Google Translate is that any new text requiring translation contains phrases and word patterns that have been adequately translated in the existing online collection of bilingual or multilingual texts. Anyone who has used Google Translate can appreciate the success of this approach. While old-fashioned automated word-for-word translation often resulted in garbled paragraphs, the pattern recognition method of Google Translate does a rather impressive job of creating intelligible translations within seconds. For better or worse, this tool permits news-addicts to follow international major news stories in real-time as they develop by reading Google Translate’s renditions of local media, without having to wait for translations by bothersome multilingual friends. Google Translate allowed us to receive up-to-date information from the Japanese media as the Fukushima catastrophe in Japan was unfolding, and it also allowed us to read newspaper articles and editorials written in Arabic by journalists in Egypt or Tunisia during the Arab Spring.

I have often tested Google Translate by letting it translate newspaper articles from my native German into English and found the translations to be remarkably accurate. The English translations not only convey the gist of the original German article, but also include lucid and accurate translations of details contained in the original articles. However, most of these German newspaper articles are fairly functional and terse in terms of the vocabulary and phrases that are used. The few times that I’ve entered German essays or editorials written by linguistically gifted authors into Google Translate, the outcomes have been rather comical, especially if the German texts contained idiomatic expressions, puns or proverbs.

This may not come as a big surprise, because the efficacy of Google Translate is heavily dependent on the presence of consistent patterns of translation in the bilingual text repository that it accesses. Figurative expressions and idioms may not be that common in the existing catalogue of Google Translate texts. Even if figurative or idiomatic expressions are present in the Google Translate database, the translators may have used very context-specific methods to translate the expressions. German idioms often reflect historical events or cultural traditions, often reaching back to medieval history. It can be challenging to translate these idioms into a language with a different set of idioms which reflect a distinct history or culture. Some translators may choose to translate an idiom in the German text with a matching idiom in the target language. Other translators, on the other hand, may instead focus on translating the imagery or historical associations evoked by the idiomatic expression. Inspired by Bellos’ book, I decided to choose some of my favorite German idioms and see how Google Translate would translate them into English.

The judgmental staff

• German original: Du kannst doch nicht den Stab über ihn brechen!
• Google Translate: You can not break the rod of him!

The literal translation of the German phrase would be “You cannot break the staff over him!“ and is not too different from the one suggested by Google Translate. However, without the proper historical context, the translation appears to be rather incomprehensible. The German idiom refers to the medieval tradition of a Stab (staff or rod) being a symbol of power, especially in a courtroom. A judge would hold the staff during a trial, but if the defendant was sentenced to death, the judge broke the staff, possibly indicating that the defendant’s fate was now beyond the judge’s hands. The expression is used today if someone pronounces a negative judgment or condemns a fellow person. This expression is used to emphasize the importance of necessary caution before making pre-emptive judgments that may have irreversible consequences. In our contemporary culture and immediate access to online information, we are often tempted to judge the words and actions of fellow humans. I like this German idiom because invoking the image of a judge breaking a staff and pronouncing a death sentence may help promote the ideas of restraint and introspection.

Itchy ideas

• German original: Du hast ihm einen Floh ins Ohr gesetzt.
• Google Translate: You have him put a flea in his ear.

Google does a fine job of providing a literal translation of this German idiom, but it does not necessarily convey its meaning. The idiom is used to describe an idea or thought that we may have heard and are unable to let go. I enjoy the image of the “itching flea” in the ear, because I often obsess about certain ideas and I feel that I cannot easily disassociate from these “itching” thoughts. I have occasionally seen the translation of this German idiom with the English expression “bee in the bonnet”, however, the sensation of “itching” is perhaps a more intimate and painful description of an obsession rather than the buzzing within a hat.

Illicit stupidity

• German original: Er ist dümmer als die Polizei erlaubt.
• Google Translate: He is dumber than the police allowed.

Let us be very upfront about this: It is not (yet) a crime to be stupid in Germany. We currently do not have Colonel Klink-type policemen patrolling the streets and administering IQ-alyzers to weed out potential offenders, even though this idiom may suggest that we do. In everyday parlance, this idiom expresses the frustration resulting from someone’s ignorant behavior or actions.

The joy of stealing horses

• German original: Mit dir kann man Pferde stehlen!
• Google Translate: With you is a good sport!

The literal translation of this German phrase is “I could steal horses with you”, and it denotes great friendship and trust. The punishment for being caught stealing horses in medieval times was quite severe and one would only undertake such a task with a truly trustworthy friend. It also implies that this particular friend is open to exciting adventures, and this may be the reason why Google Translate suggests the “good sport” translation. However, “good sport” misses the core ideas of deep trust and friendship that thieving comrades would need to plan the grand theft of horses. The English expression “thick as thieves” may be a more suitable match.

It comes down to the sausage

• German original: Jetzt geht es um die Wurst!
• Google Translate: Now it comes to sausages!

When describing critical decisions, we Germans do not strive for world domination as some Hollywood movies would like you to believe. The expression literally translates to “Now it comes down to the sausage!” and it conjures up images of our not-so-elegant cuisine which primarily consists of meat and potatoes. During traditional German county fairs and folk festivals, games were held in which young men or boys would compete for the coveted Grand Prize: a large sausage. The allure of this prize created this expression which refers to crucial life-defining moments.

Whistling pigs

• German original: Ich glaube, mein Schwein pfeift!
• Google Translate: I think my rocker!

This German idiom literally translates into “I think my pig is whistling” and is meant to signify tremendous surprise (i.e. “I am really, really surprised!”), because most German pigs do not have a habit of whistling. The Google Translate choice of “rocker” probably refers to the English expression “off my rocker” and is an example of the search engine’s pattern recognition of this German idiomatic expression, which may have been translated using the English language idiom “off my rocker” in some texts. However, “off my rocker” may not be the best choice, because it not only avoids the endearing images of whistling pigs but also because “off my rocker” tends to have a connotation of transient insanity, confusion or craziness, more than a state of marked surprise.

Mysterious Bohemian villages

• German original: Für mich sind das böhmische Dörfer.
• Google Translate: For me, the Bohemian villages.

The literal translation of the German phrase above is “These are Bohemian villages for me” and this German idiom is used to indicate a state of confusion, comparable to the English “This sounds like Greek to me”. This phrase was popularized during the Thirty Year War (1618-1648) which engulfed a large portion of Europe. Bohemia, which is now referred to as the Czech Republic, has always had a long-standing multi-lingual tradition due to the linguistic and ethnic diversity of its citizens. While Czech was the language of the majority population, German became a second official language and was widely spoken in Bohemia. The Bohemian Revolt is considered to be one of the triggers for the Thirty Year War. During this devastating war, armies marched through and destroyed numerous European towns and villages. Large portions of the civilian population were uprooted and forced to settle elsewhere. Amidst this chaos, many German-speaking soldiers or refugees ended up in Bohemian villages which had signs that were printed only in Czech, and thus may have had difficulties deciphering them. This wartime upheaval probably gave birth to the German idiom about mysterious or confusing Bohemian villages.

 The yoke of the yolk

• German original: Das ist nicht das Gelbe vom Ei!
• Google Translate: That’s not exactly brilliant!

Once upon a time, people used to love egg yolks. The egg yolk was considered to be the most nutritious and tastiest part of an egg. The German phrase “Das ist nicht das Gelbe vom Ei!” literally means “This is not the yellow of the egg” and is used as a way to express dissatisfaction, because the essence or the best part (i.e. the egg yolk) is missing. This idiom is still often used in contemporary German, but I wonder whether future generations will retain it. Since the adverse effects of high cholesterol on cardiovascular disease are highly publicized, many of us suppress our desire for cholesterol-rich egg yolks and instead opt for egg white omelets with a side of organic tofu.

Schadenfreude

Schadenfreude is a German word that probably needs no translation since it is commonly used by English speakers. It refers to the Freude (joy or satisfaction) that one feels in light of someone else’s Schaden (damage or misfortune).  It is by no means a purely German emotion. Most people have probably experienced Schadenfreude at some point in their lives, but perhaps it takes German bluntness to give this universal human emotion an actual name. I have to admit that I felt quite a bit of Schadenfreude, when I saw that Google Translate was giving rather inadequate English translations of the German idioms. I think my Schadenfreude about Google Translate’s failings is based on the fact that it does such a good job with most texts that it makes people who take some degree of pride in their bilingual or multilingual skills feel superfluous. When we see that Google Translate struggles with figurative and idiomatic expressions because they elude the statistical pattern recognition algorithms of Google Translate, it allows us to feel that human translation skills aren't obsolete yet.

While Google Translate’s algorithms may be able to perform the grunt work of translation, we still need quite a bit of human creativity to translate puns, jokes, puzzles and idioms. In its present format, Google Translate offers multiple potential translations of phrases and words. The English translations I chose for the German idioms above were among the most suitable options that Google Translate offered, but even these were not able to properly convey the meanings of the idioms. However, Google Translate is still in its infancy. It is very likely that its repository (or that of other pattern recognition based automated translators) will be substantially expanded over the course of the next years as increasing amounts of bilingual literary texts will be available online. Once this repository incorporates a variety of translations of literary texts, it may become more adept at offering appropriate translations of challenging idioms and figurative expressions.

My initial Schadenfreude about Google Translate’s failings is gradually being replaced by a sense of anticipation in regards to the evolution of online translation. We often enjoy reading translations of books, but we have to keep in mind that superb translations usually represent a composite piece of literary art, co-created by the author of the original text and the translator. When I compare multiple translations of an original text, I not only marvel at the creativity of the respective translators but I also appreciate how different translators interpret the original text by way of choosing how to translate the original. Offering a gamut of potential translations for certain phrases may give the reader a much better sense of what the author of the original text may have wanted to convey.

Instead of mainly awaiting the evolution and improvement of automated translators such as Google Translate, one could also consider exploring another possible avenue for online translation: The creation of collaborative translation platforms. Such a translation platform could build on the success of Wikipedia, where individual users are able to edit encyclopedia entries. Challenging literary texts or essays that are rife with idioms, puns and humor would be excellent candidate texts for a collaborative translation. An automated translator such as Google Translate could create a rough draft which would serve as a starting point. The Wikipedia-like platform would then allow multiple bilingual or multilingual users to edit the translations, ideally offering multiple translations of the more challenging expressions and phrases. As with Wikipedia, these collaborative translations would be performed on a volunteer basis. Original texts that are either in the public domain or are freely accessible to the public would be very well suited for such a platform, and the collaborative translations could be made available under a Creative Commons License.  Such an integration of automated translation and collaboration between numerous users would likely create a plethora of translations of beloved literary texts.

This article was originally published on The Next Web