14 November 2003
(Football in Europe during the Second World War.)
The subtitle is more accurate than its more prominent relation. Although Ajax, the Dutch, the War is about the activities of the great footballing club and nation during the War, there simply isn’t enough material to fill a book about it — the book is, in fact, an updated version of the Dutch-only Ajax, de Joden, Nederland (er, actually, there is a translation for free online), also written by Simon Kuper. As he readily acknowledges, that was both rushed and ill thought-out ( ‘[s]oon after the book appeared, a Dutch friend told me she had found it ridiculously naïve…I had wasted my time restating a case made by many people before me’ ).
Despite — or perhaps because of — this, Kuper returned early this year with an English-language version of the book, more mature and substantial than the previous effort. Ajax are known by the rest of the Netherlands, especially the Feyenoord fans, as a Jewish club, much like Spurs in north London. And much like Spurs in north London, their fans are subjected to hissing at matches (gas chambers). But unlike Spurs, Ajax deny they have any Jewish connections. They don’t want to talk about the War.
Everyone trying to write about Ajax in the war receives the same treatment. The Ajax historian Evert Vermeer, though a club member himself, spent years just trying to find out whether anyone from Ajax had died in the war. ‘I asked various people, including [the archivist] Schoevaart,’ Vermeer told the former Resistance newspaper Het Parool. ‘They shrug their shoulders and mumble something, and never give a real answer. They’re really very mysterious about it.’
Ajax, the Dutch, the War: Strange Lies [I]
The curious thing, as Kuper notes through one of only two chapters (there are fifteen in total), is that ‘what [Ajax] is hiding is not what you might expect. Ajax’s war was both braver and darker than it admits today.’ The reason seems to have been that, noting the ‘darker’ aspects of the club’s history, the loyalty of the people at the club is to the club. The Netherlands has a culture of clubs, and not just sports clubs. They can become like extended families.
Like I said, it’s not all about Ajax, or the Dutch, or even the War. Or at least, not all three at once: no discussion of Ajax would be complete without mentioning the Cruyff era, and the discovery of Sparta Rotterdam’s astonishingly comprehensive and accessible wartime literature could not go unmentioned. It goes far further beyond its remit than that, though. Denmark is singled out for special praise over its achievements in not only saving most of its Jewish population, but persuading the Germans not to even try any more, that persecuting them was wrong. We hear about a Strasbourg player in the war whom the Germans tried to convince to play for them, as happened to Austrians and Poles. And there’s the Nazi salute.
Forgive me for dwelling on this, but it was for many the darkest moment in English football history. The whole team giving the Nazi salute, in Germany, and — despite later protestations to the contrary — under no great duress.
Sport in politics is a thorny issue, even now. Should England’s cricketers have gone to Zimbabwe during last year’s Cricket World Cup? On the one hand, sport is sport, politics is politics. On the other hand, Jesse Owens. Even with the exceptional circumstances, it’s hard to blame the players, although somewhat easier to blame them for their subsequent ‘we was forced’ revisionism.
Ajax, the Dutch, the War is a fascinating read, but — like Kuper’s last attempt — it feels rushed. The writing is sporadically awkward and clumsy, excusable in a newspaper column but less so in a book, and there are simply too many threads picked up and then dropped for a book of this size. Its biggest problem, however, is that it despite being to all intents and purposes a sports book, there’s not much discussion of sport in there. Naturally you won’t find — for example — television footage of the regional matches played in England at the time, but if Alex Bellos can take us back to matches at the start of the 20th century in Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life, then Kuper is more than capable of doing the same for the war years. If the point of the book is how football was in the war, then why aren’t we told how the football was in the war?
On a somewhat lighter note:
Hello Thomas…sorry but I want to make you a shitable comment:you seem like a chumbawamba playerand if you think that a night in a bologna’s bordello is better than a sunday in a stadium….ahhaaaaa you must study much more because two word in italian language you couldn’t accostate…ahhaa you think that i am stupid but I think that your future will be fantastic…come dite voi italiani AUGURI AUGURI AUGURI
— Source
Comment spam has nothing on that.