Scheisse! We’re Going Up!: The Unexpected Rise of Berlin’s Rebel Football Club

A CITY IN FLUX. A CLUB ON THE RISE. THIS IS UNION BERLIN No football club in the world has fans like 1. FC Union Berlin. Perennial underdogs from the forests of East Berlin, they have stuck it to the Stasi, built their own stadium, and even given blood to save their club. But when they were promoted to the Germany’s top division in 2019, Union fans faced a new and terrifying prospect: success. Scheisse! tells the human stories behind the unexpected rise of this unique football club. Yet Scheisse! is not just about football. It also shines a light on the issues of gentrification, East West tensions and rapid social change which still define the German capital thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. As Union struggle to maintain their rebel spirit among the elite of modern football, their story mirrors that of modern Berlin, and its journey from divided Cold War battleground to European capital of cool. Scheisse! will appeal to readers who are captivated by sports biographies such as Raphael Honigstein’s Das Reboot and social history like John Kampfner’s Why The Germans Do It Better. AUTHOR: Kit Holden is a British-German author and journalist who lives and works in Berlin. He covers German news and sport for Agence France-Presse and is 1. FC Union Berlin correspondent for Der Tagesspiegel. His work has also appeared extensively in The Independent, the Daily Mail and Die Zeit.