Battalions of Fear

10 days ago I went to Verl with some of my friends. The reason for our visit was not the pure curiosity about how this small West-German town looks like - who would want to know about that? Our journey's main purpose was to watch an away game of our favorite football club, which for some unknown and incomprehensible reasons currently plays in the same league as does SC Verl from said town.

Of course even we had already heard about how many Dynamo Dresden fans tend to visit even the away games in far away suburbs of Bielefeld. We felt this could be an interesting experience for us and so we rented four places in the fan bus to Verl and found ourselves entering the bus on Saturday morning at 6 a.m. along with a whole bunch of other fans. Obviously they were better prepared than we and had brought lots of beer which soon found its way to the bus' cargo bay. During the day we learned that we should have done the same but this way we were able to experience the whole day without our thoughts being blocked by drugs. On into the storm we went.

Around 7.30 a.m. the first bottle of Vodka had been emptied, but everything was still fine. Below us the highway flew by and most of the guys on the bus were still sleeping. Around 10 we had a small break on a roadhouse somewhere near Kassel. First experience: all the cars entering the area after us and seeing the bunch of yellow-coated pseudo-hooligans immediately pushed the gas pedal and left for the next rest stop. People can be soooo funny. ;)

At 1:00 p.m. we finally reached Verl and found ourselves on a real sport field in a real village. I spent some time searching for a house more than two stories high but finally had to give up. Welcome to the contrast of third-league football. Degenerated top-class football teams (whose good times admittedly are already 20 years in the past) meet upcoming (and over-valued) teams from the more agricultural areas of our country. On the game went and not much happened on the field and besides.

In half-time break I made my way to buy some drinks and directly witnessed how overstrained village policemen failed in crowd control. Some drunken fans had started to insult policemen in a stand and these policemen found it a good idea to arrest one of these guys. So far, so good. That's their right. However, this resulted in the "usual suspects" (tall, not much hair, sunglasses even on a cloudy day, lack of fan implements) arranging themselves in front of the policemen which were definitely outnumbered now. Beer cans flew into the stand and the policemen now felt that this was a good time to demonstrate their self-defence skills. This ended by some of them spraying their defence spray aimlessly into the crowd, thereby also hitting those who just stood in the wrong place at the wrong time. One may understand that this did not improve the situation. 5 minutes later some 20 more policemen (of the type that looks like turtles) arrived and cleared a way to "rescue" their comrades.

Don't get me wrong. I don't argue that these things were okay and the fans had a right to attack the police. However, my experience from matches here in Dresden shows me that there are much more clever ways for policemen to handle such situations (e.g., ignoring insults...) that don't play into the hands of the provocateurs.

I also noticed with dismay how the guy standing in front of me in the line stole some bottles of lemonade from the drink guys (who were also not used to serving 1,500 people at the same time). This is totally stupid and surely one of the reasons why people outside the Dynamo community view us as battalions of fear.

After the game ended (Dynamo scored the 1-1 in the final minute) we went to go home. Most of the bus inhabitants now were really drunk and we had some crazy 6.5 hours going back to Dresden. Now both busses drove together, so we finally reached a bus stop near Gotha and around 100 guys tried to enter the tank stop in parallel. Sure, the woman there made good business this night, but she surely looked a bit frightened even though nothing happend. Battalions of fear, again.

In Dresden, a final shock waited for us. On the same day a large Nazi demonstration had taken place and had of course attracted the usual crowd of anti-fascists. Some of them obviously don't make a difference between football fans and Nazis and furthermore seem to think that violence _is_ the solution to all of their problems. So when we were driving from Postplatz to the stadium, finally some guy ran along with the bus with something in his hands that looked frighteningly like a molotow cocktail. Fortunately he wasn't able to burn it and so we went by without being hit. We had the guardian of the blind with us. ;)

And then there was silence.