No East
Berlin team has made it to the top division before and Union are determined not to let it change themIt counted as an emergency when, one day this summer, the Berlin district of Köpenick awoke to find itself daubed in blue. Overnight a group of Hertha fans had journeyed out here, to the German capital’s easternmost reaches, and made liberal application of their club colours. Such an affront required swift action. “It wasn’t good,” Marcel Smolka remembers. “Some of their ultras came down and put paint here, stickers there. But ours put it right with red and white when we saw what had happened. They made it better straight away.”
Everyone knew that what appeared an act of mild antagonism, a tickle on the belly from one set of fans to another, actually signified something greater. Hertha’s supporters had bothered to venture this far because Union Berlin now mattered again. They begin their first season in the unified Germany’s Bundesliga on Sunday, when RB Leipzig visit, and suddenly everything is up for grabs in a city for which top-tier football battles are a fading memory. No team from its old east has ever made it this high; history has been made and uncharted waters bring new tests.