Where there are enemies, there are often friends. What is quite unknown outside Berlin is that during the Wall years, Hertha and Union supporters felt genuine sympathy for one another. As Berlin landlubbers connected by water, the ones in the far West and the others in the far East, they expressed it like this: “We hold together like wind and sea – blue-and-white Hertha and FC Union.” Another urban legend has Hertha cult fan Pepe Mager sewing special patches celebrating this friendship.
Today that old sympathy has long since curdled into antipathy. Why? Because there can be only one.
Tennis Borussia and BFC Dynamo have long ceased to be opponents on equal terms for Union. Hertha, by contrast, provides the ideal counter-model. Hertha with Lars Windhorst as investor and Jürgen Klinsmann in the supervisory board and then in the dugout wanted to be seen as the metropolitan club and number one in the capital.
Union styled themselves as the ambitious neighbourhood club from the East, built on heart, warmth and feeling. With considerable success. Hertha still had more members in late 2019, around 37,000 to Union’s 32,000-plus, but Union were growing far faster and were developing a cult appeal of their own that reached well beyond East Germany.
Union stood for a kind of new-old Berlin, while Hertha kept being associated with the old West Berlin of a supposedly functioning sector, mixed with foolish spending, mediocre management and misplaced hubris.