Half a century ago, Borussia Mönchengladbach played Israel in Tel Aviv, a game which helped promote relations between the Jewish state and Germany. For DW’s Felix Tamsut, an Israeli, this game is of personal importance.
Without this football game, who knows if I’d ever have been able to become a football journalist in Germany. It has affected every aspect of my life in many ways since I moved here from Israel. But this game, a friendly, was played long before I was born.
Up until recently, I didn’t even know it had taken place.
Shadows of the past
It was 1970. Yakov was a 13-year-old in the greater Tel Aviv area when a European giant came to play a friendly against the Israeli national team. Being a devout football fan, he was excited by the prospect of seeing some of his heroes — whose names he knew only from newspapers — in real life. There was only one issue: That team was German. Borussia Mönchengladbach.
Despite Israel and Germany having established diplomatic relations five years prior to that game, many Israelis still saw the country as an enemy. The Holocaust was fresh in the memories of so many in the then-young country.
Protests took place and an attempt was even made to plant an explosive device in the Israeli Foreign Ministry. For many Israelis — and indeed, Jews — their state should not have any form of cooperation with the country responsible for the genocide of six million of their people in the Holocaust, despite Germany’s efforts to start anew with the Jewish state.
“I remember going to relatives in Tel Aviv, hearing on the radio that Germany lost the World Cup to England [in 1966],” Yakov told DW. “This made my father very happy. I asked him why, to which he replied: ‘The most important thing is that those despicable Germans don’t win’.”
The idea of Yakov attending a game against a German team was the topic of heated discussions at home. His father’s family, from Poland, were all murdered by Germans in World War II and his father, who moved to Israel before the war, was among those that refused to buy any German-made products.
