In praise of...

About a year ago I visited an excellent museum exhibition chronicling the footballing relationship between East and West Germany during the years 1945-1990. As I was milling about and staring at replica ticket stubs from UEFA Cup games, I was approached by the man who had put the whole thing together. He was delighted to hear that I was English.

"In England they really understand that sports history is an important part of history itself," he told me. "Nobody cares about it in Germany."

But last week, as I sat reading reports in the weekly football newspaper Fußball-Woche about Berlin's biggest club Hertha BSC commissioning historians to examine their own club's role in the Nazi dictatorship, or stories of East German clubs being forced to merge in order to deal with the new economic and political situation after the fall of the Berlin wall, I began to wonder if he was right.

Like a snowball in reverse, Fußball-Woche's focus starts big and then descends rapidly into nothingness. After discussing the latest top-flight Hertha game in West Berlin, they move down to the Third Division North to cover 1.FC Union, the workers' team from the former East who still enjoy cult status as the anti-regime club from communist times.

Next up (or, rather, down) comes the NOFV Upper League, where the games are mostly local to Berlin and attended by average crowds of less than 500. This is the home of BFC Dynamo, the former East German secret police team who are now notorious for their large neo-Nazi fan base. The left-wing West Berlin club Tennis Borussia, or 'TeBe', also play here, attracting a small but politically right-on following. And pushing for promotion alongside Dynamo and TeBe is the largest immigrants' club Türkiyemspor, straight out of the legendary Kreuzberg district with its mix of punk rock and Turkish culture.

Moving down one division into the Association League we find TuS Makkabi, the official team of Berlin's Jewish community. Formed over 100 years ago, the club was disbanded by the Nazis in 1937 and then re-formed in 1970. Self-styled advocates for peaceful co-existence, Makkabi is recognised by the German government as having a status that 'transcends sport'.

That's a nice way of putting it, and I think we can steal the term. Because Berlin's football scene itself is about so much more than sport. It is, for better and for worse, about community, politics and history, and what happens when they collide each weekend on football fields around the city.

Every Monday there are people in Berlin meticulously documenting this continuous flow of social history, in its cunning disguise as just another pointless game. Maybe someday these old yellowing copies of Fußball-Woche will be used by historians as valuable primary sources, helping them to understand just what the hell we were all doing back then.

Not bad for 2 Euro.