The Ballad of Matthias Sindelar (Or How World War II Robbed Austria’s Golden Generation)

The name Matthias Sindelar should be familiar to football aficionados everywhere – as well as historians, for that matter. But, by and large, it isn’t. Chris Woolfrey elaborates on an iconic symbol of Austrian football:

In his book Inverting the Pyramid Jonathan Wilson writes that “the modern way of understanding and discussing the game was invented in the coffee houses of Vienna,” and in the realisation of an aesthetic of Austrian football formed by Hugo Meisl’s Wunderteam and their iconic forward Matthias Sindelar, a nation patronisingly deemed by some as too lowly for its role as co-host of the 2008 European Championship contributed perhaps more to the development of football than most so-called ‘major’ sporting nations ever have.

In the 1930s Austria were a team to be feared. Reaching the semi-final of the World Cup in 1934, that side might just be one of the best never to win the Jules Rimet trophy. Indeed, though their powers were perhaps waning, hope still rested on their ability to win the competition in 1938.

Coached by the revolutionary Meisl, who practiced passing over power, considered thought over passion, they were proponents of an intelligent game that went above and beyond a number of their counterparts in an evolution of the sport that would be much mimicked. And Matthias Sindelar, their outstanding and much-celebrated forward, had become a symbol of that aesthetic, with a formidable reputation for flair and intelligence; figurehead of a team heralded by fans and critics alike as representative of a style of football that was artistic, even a kind of poetry.

He was a national icon, the sporting counterpart of pioneering Viennese artists and thinkers like composer Arnold Schoenberg and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Germany, Austria and the Anchluss

And yet in that World Cup year of 1938, as Hitler’s Germany expanded into Europe, the fortunes of that ‘golden generation’ were cut short by the Anchluss, in which Austria was invaded and occupied, annexed and subsumed, so that the Austrian nation, henceforth, would constitute one part of a Greater Germany. Austria was forced to withdraw from the competition; its players told that if their international careers were to continue, then it would have to be as part of the German team.

Players, not to mention fans, were incensed; reports including Wilson’s have come to show that this destruction of Meisl’s Wunderteam ran deeper than sporting ties and for a large proportion of the Austrian population, the move was a political act, and representative of the larger political framework.

As with the Anchluss, Hitler’s Germany, the rolling mechanic behemoth, flattened the flourishing artistic and bourgeois world of Vienna and its surrounding country; subjugated Austrian art, music, political and social thinking, and sport, to German domination. That was only further played out by the sublimation of Austria’s beautiful, middle-class, “coffee house” football to Germany’s cause.

Of this the Nazi party were well aware. So, as a gesture of seeming goodwill between the nations, and as a piece of well-planned propaganda, a ‘reconciliation match’ was arranged, in which – so reports go – the sides would score one goal apiece, finishing the match in a politically satisfying draw.

Sindelar, the darling of Austrian football, could only ever have shone; the narrative of myth and nostalgia dictates it. Scoring the opening goal, he defiantly celebrated in front of the box containing Nazi officials when, counter to plans, Karl Sesta scored to secure a 2-0 win on what would become Sindelar’s final match for his country.

Matthias Sindelar as Myth-Function

After retirement Sindelar, through his elevation to heroic status – and because of his refusal to continue playing meaning his reputation as an excellent footballer remained unsullied, even perhaps heightened for his ‘lost potential’ — remained a focal point as a symbol of the pre-Nazi Austria, in which his tendency to play intelligently rather than physically, letting head rule heart, became synonymous with beauty, meditation, enquiry, the open-minded chatter of the coffee house.

Holding out against the Nazi aesthetic through his symbol, Sindelar’s was a time in which sport, as much as art – at least embodied in the football played by the Wunderteam, whereby sport maybe was an art – could and did represent the most potent symbol of a political will, of a collective identity, of a shared history, and of dissidence.

For many Austrian citizens, that aesthetic lived on through the player until his death in 1939, at the age of 35. And like so many figures, without a living defence with which to defy those who propagate such myths, his death was used as further strength for the notion that with the Anchluss a certain Austria was lost. Found dead in his flat, a rumour grew – and remained, for some to this day – that the gas leak that had caused Matthias Sindelar’s untimely passing had been the work of Nazi conspirators.

Austria, Matthias Sindelar, Politics and Society