This is a crowd of over 10,000 people on their feet, holding out their long mufflers as they cheer on Fussball-Club Kaiserslautern, or 1FCK, during their match against Mainz this last Saturday. How do I know these people are on their feet? Because their part of the stadium doesn’t have seats. Real fans don’t sit down. Ever. Seats would only get in the way of their yelling, chanting, singing, banner-waving, and jumping up and down. (You haven’t lived till you’ve seen 10,000 people jump up and down. It is, as my son-in-law would say, hardcore.)
I was sitting down, though, in one of the 32,000 seats the stadium has in addition to its 16,000 non-seats. I’m not hardcore. But I did have a lot of fun. Rainer has season tickets, and he and Heidi took Joe and me. We loved it. If we lived here, we would buy season tickets immediately. Good coordination with the public transit authorities makes getting to the game especially easy; your ticket to the game acts as a free pass on area trains and buses, and park-and-ride buses run every five minutes.
Kaiserslautern won 3-1. I took this photo just a second before one of their goals.
The thing that really impressed me about the game is the way we were left in peace to enjoy it. There was no Jumbotron, no annoying scrolling light display, no constant loudspeaker chatter. The video scoreboard kept strictly to the score, and the announcer came on only to announce goals or player substitutions. This left the fans on their feet at the end of the stadium free to organize their own singing and cheering. And we could all do what we were there to do: focus on the game.
With five minutes left to go, it was clear that Kaiserslautern would win. So all the Kaiserslautern fans pulled white hankies out of their pockets and waved them to the losing team while they sang, “Auf Wiedersehen, es war so schön”–“See you later, it’s been grand.”
Photos taken in September, 2011, in the Fritz-Walter-Stadion, Kaiserslautern, Germany. Text and photos copyright 2011 by Clare B. Dunkle.