LONDON, November 12, 2024 - Today is the 90^th anniversary of the death of an extraordinary football pioneer, Walther Bensemann, memorialised in the words of one of his biographers as “The man who brought football to Germany.”

Bensemann’s legacy lives on not only through German football in general but, in particular, in the Kicker magazine which he founded on July 14, 1920.

The son of a Jewish banking family in Berlin was not the first man to kick a ball in enjoyment in Germany but earned recognition through the obsession which created a host of clubs and regional associations in Germany and Switzerland as well as funding a first unofficial international.

Bensemann had been introduced to football by British fellow pupils as a 10-year-old attending a private school in Montreux, Switzerland. Immediately he was hooked. At 14 he and fellow students set up the Montreux Football Club.

Later Bensemann, despite fierce opposition from the powerful gymnastics movement, pioneered football in southern Germany. He founded the Karlsruhe Football Club which, he recalled later, “at first consisted only of schoolboys but which was soon joined by around 15 to 20 Englishmen.” Later he helped launch clubs which would evolve into Eintracht Frankfurt, Bayern Munich and 1FC Nurnberg.

Bensemann also set up a South German Football Union and was one of the founding fathers of the DFB. On October 7, 1893, he invited Swiss club Villa Longchamp to Karlsruhe for what ended in a 2-1 victory for his South German selection. Bensemann played centre forward in the first German cross-border match.

While studying in Strasbourg, then in Germany, Bensemann started a long-term friendship with 16-year-old Ivo Schricker who would eventually become secretary of FIFA. He also exchanged correspondence with Baron Piere de Coubertin about a possible football tournament at the fledgling modern Olympic Games.
 

Cross-border exchange

The year 1898 saw Bensemann take a team to Paris. Matches against White Rovers ended in victories by 7-0 and 2-1 but for Bensemann their significance lay not in the results as much as the events themselves less than 30 years after the end of the Franco-Prussian War.

The next year, in November 1899, saw the first representative Anglo-German meetings against an English FA XI in Berlin, Karlsruhe and Prague. The visitors won 13-2, 10-2, 8-0 and 7-0 but the overall winner was German football itself.

Bensemann returned to Switzerland in 1900 to start a teaching career which would take him on to Scotland and then England from 1902. He was on home leave in Germany when war broke out in 1914, preventing his return to England.

World War I strengthened Bensemann’s belief in the need for peaceful co-existence and he promoted this ethos after becoming founding publisher of Kicker. The first editions in 1920 were produced in Switzerland before it settled in Nurnberg. Bensemann encouraged contributions from beyond Germany and Kicker went from strength to strength.

That is, until Hitler came to power. Bensemann had already made powerful national socialist enemies in Felix Linnemann, the Hannover policeman who became DFB president, and Guido von Mengden, who would become a key figure in the sports office of the Third Reich.

"I am an old democrat and have no place in the latest ‘free’ democracy of Hitler, Goebbels, and Schacht. I have lived freely and want to die freely," Bensemann in one of his last letters.

His last article in Kicker appeared on March 28, 1933, in which he wrote: “For about six months now my doctors have been urging me to take a course of treatment [but] even in my absence the editorial staff of the newspaper is in good hands.” On May 30, his former assistant and successor Hanns J Müllenbach wrote: “As of today, the founder of Kicker, Mr Walther Bensemann, has left the editorial team of the newspaper.”

Bensemann fled to Switzerland. He did attend the 1934 World Cup in Italy at the invitation of FIFA but knew by then that his optimism about his magazine had been misplaced. Kicker had been quickly subsumed into the Nazi propaganda machine. In November it reported only: “Walther Bensemann, the co-founder of our newspaper, died on November 12 and will be buried on November 14 in Montreux (Switzerland).”

Gone but not forgotten. Bensemann’s name lives on in an annual award presented by Kicker to individuals who have made a special contribution to football’s spirit of international understanding. In May 2018, a memorial plaque was erected at Engländerplatz in Karlsruhe in his honour.

** Walther Bensemann: born January 13, 1873 in Berlin; died November 12, 1934 in Montreux (His birth was registered in Berlin as Walter; he amended it to Walther later).