“East, East, East Germany!” The (other) reunification of football fan culture and the roots of an east german exceptionalism

This article develops a counterintuitive view of the reunification of Germany. Normally, the unification process was shaped by the East followed the example of the West – but the example of football fan cultures shows the reverse process. In the “other reunification” of German football fan culture, affiliations were negotiated not only between East and West, but also in a transnational context. Regional, generational and gender-specific affiliations were closely interwoven with group- and club-related identifications. The renegotiation of often precarious masculinities in the fan milieu are described as a “subcultural hierarchy struggle” between different football scenes in East and West. In these conflicts the supporters of the sporting declassed eastern clubs often successfully portrayed themselves as “harder” or more “masculine” than the West German fan scenes. In the course of the 2000s, the East German groups studied finally turned their gaze away from the supposedly effeminate West and more strongly towards the violence-oriented ultra scenes in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe.