Political Football: Matthias Sindelar

Matthias Sindelar, an Austrian who refused to play for Germany under the Nazis, joins Simon Kuper's Political Football First XI.

One January morning in Vienna in 1939, Austria's greatest ever footballer was found dead in bed with his girlfriend, the former prostitute Camilla Castagnola. She died in hospital the next day. "Death by carbon monoxide," said the police report.

The official story was that the apartment's stove had been blocked, driving the poisonous gas back into the room. People in the neighbourhood frequently died like that, and the verdict was plausible.

However, few believed it. Matthias Sindelar's death at 35, months after the Nazi takeover of Austria, remains a mystery to this day. His fate has become an allegory for twentieth-century Austria. In the month of the draw for Euro 2008, which Austria will co-host with Switzerland, Sindelar earns a posthumous place in our political footballers' XI.

The 'Man of Paper'

Sindelar's parents were poor Czech immigrants, who settled in the Viennese working-class district of Favoriten. His father fell in world war one, and the boy would live all his life in his mother's house.

He grew into a great but delicate forward, known as the "Man of Paper", who always played with a stocking over his knee to protect an old injury. He was courted by Manchester United, became one of the first footballers to feature in advertisements, and adorned Austria's Wunderteam.

Perhaps his finest moment was the team's 5-0 victory over Scotland - until then unbeaten on the continent - in May 1931. But the Wunderteam also hammered Germany 6-0 and 5-0, France 4-0, Hungary 8-2, etcetera. Their reign ended with a 1-2 home defeat against Czechoslovakia in April 1933, not three months after another Austrian, Adolf Hitler, had taken power in Germany.

Taunting the Nazis

When Germany seized Austria in the Anschluss of March 1938, Sindelar was asked to play for the new united national team. He refused, pleading old age. However, Germany's manager Sepp Herberger would later recall: "I almost had the impression that discomfort and rejection, linked to the political developments, had prompted his refusal. I felt I understood him. He appeared liberated when I told him so."

Certainly, writes the German historian Nils Havemann*, the Nazi authorities in Vienna had marked Sindelar down as "very friendly to Jews" and "fairly rejecting" of party meetings. When Sindelar bought a cafÈ from a Jew who had been forced to sell, he paid a fair price. In his Viennese dialect he told the old chairman of his club Austria Vienna, ostracized as a Jew: "The new chairman has forbidden me to greet you, but I, Herr Doktor, will always greet you."

Then there was the famous match to celebrate the Anschluss: a German select XI against Ostmark, the new name for the province that had once been Austria. Sindelar reportedly missed so many chances that he seemed to be taunting the Nazis, showing the crowd that the result had been ordered by the authorities.

Finally he did deign to score, and the Ostmark won 2-0. After the second goal, he danced before the main stand packed with Nazi dignitaries. Havemann notes that Sindelar might also have been disgruntled that the Nazis, by banning professional football, had taken away his livelihood.

A national hero

Ulrich Lindner and Gerhard Fischer argue in Sturmer fur Hitler**, their excellent account of football under Nazism, that though it may be unreasonable to expect footballers to have resisted Hitler when very few Germans did, other players could surely have followed Sindelar in not representing Nazi Germany.

No wonder that when Sindelar died, Austrians doubted it was an accident. A national hero in his prime simply did not die like that. Policemen told the Kronen Zeitung newspaper that the stove had been working fine.

It was suggested that the couple had been killed by the pimp Amerika-Maxi, or by the Nazis. Certainly Austria's world champion cyclist Albert Richter would die in a German jail a year later - the authorities claimed suicide - after being caught smuggling money to a Jewish refugee in Switzerland.

The most popular legend was that Sindelar and Castagnola had committed suicide together, unwilling to live under Nazism. The writer Alfred Polgar explained: "The brave Sindelar followed the city whose child and pride he was into death." His funeral drew a reported 15,000 mourners, and annual pilgrimages to his grave continued through the war.

Representing a lost Vienna

Virtually all other prewar footballers are now forgotten, but Sindelar lives on in Austrian memory. A stand in Austria Vienna's ground was named after him, he was voted Austrian footballer of the twentieth century, and last year the play Sindelar was performed on the Viennese stage - only the latest artistic tribute to him.

Nobody will ever know how he died. In a sense, that doesn't matter. His story lives on because the dead footballer has come to stand for three lost Viennas: the free city raped by Hitler; the cultural hothouse that produced Freud, Schnitzler, and Hayek; and the global capital of prewar football. Those latter two Viennas perished forever in Sindelar's bed that winter night.

Simon Kuper writes for the Financial Times

*Nils Havemann, Fussball unterm Hakenkreuz (Bundeszentrale fur politische Bildung, Bonn, 2005).

**Gerhard Fischer and Ulrich Lindner, Sturmer fur Hitler: Vom Zusammenspiel zwischen Fussball und Nationalsozialismus (Die Werkstatt, Gottingen, 1999)

See also: Simon Kuper, Ajax, The Dutch, The War: Football in Europe During the Second World War (Orion, London, 2003)

Send this article by email

Recipient's email address

Your name

More on this story

Channel 4 is not responsible for the content of external websites.