Party outsiders, hippies, hooligans and other ideologically alien types sang anarchic songs: during the GDR era, Union became a magnet for people who wanted little to do with official ideology. The club offered a counter-model to East Berlin’s BFC Dynamo and to Vorwärts, the army club that first dominated East German football and was later relocated to Frankfurt an der Oder. Union fans sang lines such as “Better to be a loser than a stupid Stasi pig.” That was known even in the West.
What is less widely understood is how deeply this anarchic blend of underdog feeling and resistance to authority still shapes Union’s fan scene. A classic Union chant that emerged in the early 2000s and is still sung today captures exactly that spirit: the father dead in prison, the mother dying in bed, the sister turned prostitute – what am I supposed to do alone in this world? Union above all, Germany’s most immortal team.
Union will never fall apart. Eisern Union from Berlin.
