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:
“Of course we women gossip on occasion. But our appetite for it is not as avid as a man’s. It is in the boys’ gyms, the college fraternity houses, the club locker rooms, the paneled offices of business that gossip reaches its luxuriant flower.”
—Phyllis McGinley (1905–1978)
“Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing—he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)