Club Culture
The club is widely recognized as one of Germany's nonconformist "Kult" clubs, based on their very emotional rivalry with Dynamo Berlin in former GDR times. While Dynamo was affiliated with East Germany's Secret Service Stasi, Union Berlin was patronized by Eastern German Trade Union FDGB. This circumstance led them into an unofficial opposition against the socialist system and in Union's Stadion An der Alten Försterei the fans often were singing veiled chants against the political authorities.
In August 2009, Union Berlin severed a sponsorship deal with International Sport Promotion because it was revealed that the company's chairman, Jürgen Czilinsky, was a former Stasi agent.
Read more about this topic: 1. FC Union Berlin
Famous quotes containing the words club and/or culture:
“Mi advise tu them who are about tu begin, in arnest, the jurney ov life, is tu take their harte in one hand and a club in the other.”
—Josh Billings [Henry Wheeler Shaw] (1818–1885)
“The hatred of the youth culture for adult society is not a disinterested judgment but a terror-ridden refusal to be hooked into the, if you will, ecological chain of breathing, growing, and dying. It is the demand, in other words, to remain children.”
—Midge Decter (b. 1927)