Blau-Gelb unter dem Hakenkreuz - Book

 The latest book by Viennese historian Alexander Juraske is the first to examine the history of the First Vienna Football Club 1894 during the National Socialist era (1938 to 1945).

Austria's oldest soccer club was founded in 1894 in Vienna's Heurigen district of Döbling by a group of young sports enthusiasts from various nations and different faiths with the support of a Jewish patron from the Rothschild family.

The book explores the question of how Viennese soccer changed after the “Anschluss” of Austria to the German Reich, which logics the sport followed during the Nazi era and how the club's success was possible under the changed political and legal conditions. This success was unique above all because the club achieved a previously unattainable sporting rise despite the exclusion of a large number of Jewish players and officials during the National Socialist regime. Between 1942 and 1944, Vienna won its Gauliga and Bereichsklasse three times, reached the final of the German soccer championship in 1942 and won the Tschammer Cup in 1943.

In Juraske's book, important determinants of the peak phase of the game are worked out, breaks and continuities are shown, and the mechanisms of the club's adaptation to the framework conditions of the Nazi state are presented. At the same time, the fate of the persecuted and excluded Jewish members of the club is also addressed.

Manufacturer's address: Unrast Verlag, Fuggerstraße 13 a, 48165 Münster, DE, Email: vertrieb@unrast-verlag.de