“We do have fun, [but] sometimes it’s really hard.”

Schalker Fan Initiative has been a pioneer in combating bigotry and extremism around soccer

by Toby Axelrod

At a time of social upheaval in newly reunited Germany, a soccer fan initiative was born to combat racism, sexism, antisemitism, and xenophobia among sports fans in the city of Gelsenkirchen, in the heart of the Ruhr area in former West Germany.

The Schalker Fan Initiative, launched in 1992 as Schalker Against Racism (Schalker Gegen Rassismus), has grown and developed from the small group that marched with banners back then to a large group with many volunteers and programs today.

Sadly, the problems the initiative was created to combat have not gone away. But Susanne Franke, a current board member and former CEO of the initiative, doesn’t give up. “You cannot stop working. There’s simply no alternative,” says Franke, a lifelong soccer fan who has volunteered for SFI for nearly 25 years. “I'm not willing to stop for a day.”

Franke was born in November 1965 in the coal mining city of Gelsenkirchen. As a child, she would accompany her father to Bundesliga club Schalke 04 games at the now defunct Park Stadium, walking past coal mines on the way. Later, although she still loved the game, she avoided the stadium because she wanted nothing to do with some fans and their neo-Nazi ideology.

“The early '90s in Germany were terrible,” says Franke, who eventually earned a Ph.D. in English studies. “Houses where refugees were living were set on fire,” and bands of neo-Nazis would go around attacking asylum seekers — as well as hippies and punks — with baseball bats.

“The whole atmosphere separated me from soccer because soccer grew more like the enemy. Why should I go to a place where I have a fair chance to be verbally abused? Like: ‘You hippie piece of shit. What are you doing here?’ Stuff like that,” she says. “Only when the Schalker Fan Initiative was founded did a friend say, ‘Susanne, you can come back. There are good people.”

Created by Schalke 04 fans just over two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, SFI was a grassroots response to those troubled times. Its eye-catching logo, a soccer shoe kicking a swastika, was printed on a banner and carried through the streets of Gelsenkirchen on November 9, 1992, for the annual march commemorating Kristallnacht, the Nazi anti-Jewish pogrom of 1938.

“We were the first to use that symbol,” says Franke. “Now it's copied throughout Germany, but that's completely fine. Everybody should display that!”

The first major issues were quite simple, she says. “You had your neo-fascists and you had your racists. And of course, neo-fascism means antisemitism.”

As the group’s website explains, its founders wanted “to celebrate the club, soccer, and our city.” Their shared outrage at the explosion of hate and violence across Germany and above all in the stadium “did not end in inaction but in many projects, programs, and campaigns. On a voluntary basis, with lots of work — and fun!” 

“Of course, we do have fun,” says Franke. But “sometimes it's really hard.”

“Strength, energy, and courage”

The early volunteers concluded that they couldn’t save the whole country from these scourges. But they wouldn’t tolerate hate in their home. “And our home was the stadium. That means on the way to the stadium — in the street cars, the buses — as well as in the stadium itself,” Franke says.

So they would display their banners and scarves with their logo, and had “to figure out how not to get hit,” she says. The group made a splash. People elsewhere started to notice and ask: What's happening over there in Gelsenkirchen?

They needed “strength, energy, and also courage to do that,” she says. “In terms of strategy, it was simple: The more people who joined, the better.”

Schalke 04 “didn't like us too much” at first, Franke says. They sent a bill to the Schalker Fan Initiative for cleaning up flyers left lying in the stadium after a match. “[We] were staring at it and saying ‘3,000 bucks?’”

But then one day police caught someone who had set fire to a shelter for refugees. “And on the press photo, you saw that he was wearing a Schalke 04 shirt. What?! They changed their minds and said, ‘Oh, forget about the bill!’

“That was a huge turning point. And then some of the people from the club management but also players were told: ‘Hey, join them.’ So in the early, early years, some of the players would join in handing out flyers or [take part in] an info evening,” Franke recalls.

Today, the Schalker soccer team embraces fully the work of SFI, recognizing its founders as “supporters of our club.” They have been “active against antisemitism from day one,” and have “made Jewish life in Germany today and yesterday visible,” according to Thomas Spiegel, spokesperson for FC Schalke 04. “It is a successful example of how enthusiasm for soccer and social commitment can go hand in hand.”

Over the years, the SFI focus evolved beyond racism to include discrimination against homosexuals, Jews, Sinti and Roma, homeless people, and women. SFI became a role model for other initiatives in the sports community. 

Today, the initiative has 10 core volunteers, including Franke; some 400 members nationally; and a few international members. They work closely with the international organization Football Against Racism in Europe (FARE) and are part of the network School without Racism – School with Courage. (Schule ohne Rassismus – Schule mit Courage).

The Fan Initiative headquarters is a “fan shop” on the “Schalke Mile.” It opened in 1996 as a meeting place for all fans before home games. The fan shop is where they host small events; sell merchandise; and collect donations for Ukrainian refugees, for example. It also serves as the organization’s office. 

At first, Franke was just another member, hanging out in the fan shop. Eventually, she was “hijacked” to help the initiative raise funds and build a leadership team, she says. “Somebody said, ‘Yeah, you would be the right person.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but I'm living in Cologne. I'm working full-time’” for an IT company.

Nevertheless, in 2006 she jumped in and took charge as CEO, a position she held through 2014. Today, she is a member of the board of directors. In her day job she is head of corporate cooperation for Don Bosco Mondo e.V., an international aid organization based in Bonn. 

The commitment to learn from the past led SFI to look into the history of Jews at Schalke 04. Their research expanded into educational work on the Nazi era, in close cooperation with the local Jewish community. 

SFI has helped publicize the history of Jewish life in Gelsenkirchen and the fate of its Jewish community during the Holocaust. The Fan Initiative has sponsored the installation of a stumbling stone memorial in Gelsenkirchen, dedicated to Jews whose property was purchased at a fraction of its value by a player for FC Schalke 04 in 1938, as part of the Nazi “Aryanization” program.

“We also had a Jewish player, Ernst Alexander, who was no longer allowed to play and was eventually murdered in Auschwitz after a long odyssey,” says Judith Neuwald-Tasbach, honorary chair of the Jewish Community of Gelsenkirchen, Gladbeck, and Bottrop. “By remembering these people, we counteract forgetting and ensure that we learn lessons from the past for the future.”

“We wanted to talk”

Recently, a joint project with the Institute for City History in Gelsenkirchen (Institut für Stadtgeschichte) has led to the creation of online biographies and podcasts about people who were targeted for persecution by the Nazis, and whose graves are in the 125-year-old Westfriedhof cemetery. Called Running Memory (Laufend erinnern), the project includes a memorial stone engraved with the names of these individuals; the podcast currently has eight episodes. 

In the podcast, the volunteers and experts discuss the biographies and share their experience as they uncovered this history. “We wanted to talk,” after spending so much time “staring at these bloody Nazi papers. I was close to crying every few days,” says Franke, who managed the project.

They are now planning to research the history of a wartime slave labor camp for producing armaments in the North Schalke district, she says.

The Schalker Fan Initiative hosts many events, from readings and film screenings to lectures, workshops, and soccer matches, all aimed at promoting integration and fighting racism. The initiative also recently conducted a campaign against sexual assault on public transport in connection with major soccer events.

Their educational work reaches members of the community that might otherwise have little or no contact with history, notes Stefan Schirmer, a leader with FC Ente Bagdad, a 2023 Obermayer Award winner. FC Ente Bagdad (the Ducks of Baghdad Football Club) is an amateur soccer club in Mainz that, among other projects, conducts anti-racism programs and helps in the integration of immigrants through sport. Schirmer says the Schalker Fan Initiative has long been a leader that other organizations, like his, look to for inspiration. 

Other accomplishments of the Schalker Fan Initiative include:

• Initiating an anti-racism paragraph in the FC Schalke 04 statutes and stadium bans for members of right-wing extremist political parties

• Launching campaigns and projects for integration and against racism, antisemitism, discrimination, sexism, and homophobia

• Establishing media connections on the subject of anti-racism in soccer

• Working with youth and with refugees in Gelsenkirchen

• Holding readings, film screenings, lectures, panel discussions, workshops, and soccer tournaments

And much more.

Franke fears such problems as antisemitism will never completely disappear. That makes it all the more important, she says, to keep up the effort to bring out the best in society in general and soccer fans specifically.

And her partners and friends agree.

“I know how difficult it is to get people from the fan scene interested in politics outside the stadium,” says Stephan Lahrem, chairman of Gesellschaftsspiele (Society Games), a Berlin-based organization dedicated to building a positive soccer culture, counteracting prejudice and discrimination. 

“Anyone who … succeeds over the years not only in winning over soccer fans for one-off campaigns, but also in working with them continuously on remembrance policy projects…; [helping] turn a resentment-laden environment such as a soccer stadium into a place where human dignity, respect, and tolerance become binding and respected values” deserves recognition, Lahrem says.

Notes Neuwald-Tasbach, honorary chair of the local Jewish community, “Especially in this day and age, it is so important to stand together and fight for our common goal of peaceful, tolerant, and fair coexistence and to clearly show the red card to all incipient racism, discrimination, and antisemitism. And it's really good to have the Fan Initiative at our side.”

— Obermayer Award recipient 2025