Mapping Spaces Beyond the Football Pitch: Football Fandom and Coming-of-Age in Philipp Winkler’s novel Hool Bastian Heinsohn Bucknell University Abstract: This essay is an exploration of the nexus between hooliganism and literary fiction in Philip Winkler’s 2016 acclaimed debut novel Hool. The novel thematizes a violent form of football fandom and mixes fiction with real-life facts surrounding the professional German team Hannover 96� The novel uses football and fandom as important elements in a coming-of-age story, but it only moderately highlights the game itself, the team, its players, results, and tables� Hool is a protagonist’s search for identity and purpose in life and for whom football and hooliganism serve as temporary constants and spaces of belonging� Fandom, or rather its violent variant hooliganism, however, reveals itself to be only a transitory space of comfort that Heiko can hold on to for a limited time during his adolescence� A key undertaking of this study is the exploration of how the novel maps various spaces of combat and struggle inside and beyond the football field. Furthermore, this essay contextualizes Hool as a unique German-language novel within the current debates about the significant commercialization of football in Germany and across Europe� These trajectories have caused a surge of resistance from the common football fan, who is increasingly pushed into the role of an estranged consumer of an over-priced commodity� Keywords: football, hooligans, coming-of-age, consumerism, Winkler, Hannover 96, space, violence, vernacular German, fandom In the Fall of 2016, the German magazine Buchjournal announced the publication of Philip Winkler’s debut novel Hool, set in the world of football hooliganism, with a reference to the title of Michel Houellebecq’s 1994 Extension du domaine de la lutte which translates into English as “extension of the domain of struggle (Kahlefendt)�” 1 This reference captures well the essence of Hool well, consider- 52 Bastian Heinsohn ing Winkler’s novel extends the combat zones of a hardcore football fan in and around the stadiums to the peripheral areas away from any city and stadium and beyond, namely to the protagonist’s personal struggles growing up, finding the right friends and the right path in life� 2 Winkler’s Hool i s a novel about football fandom that mixes fiction with real-life facts surrounding the German Bundesliga team Hannover 96� The novel uses football and football fandom as important elements in a coming-of-age story, but it only moderately highlights the game itself, the team, its players, results, and tables� A key undertaking of this study is to explore how the novel maps various spaces of combat and struggle inside and beyond the football field. Furthermore, this essay contextualizes Hool as a unique German-language novel within the current debates about the significant commercialization of football in Germany and across Europe. These trajectories have caused a surge of resistance from the common football fan, who is increasingly pushed into the role of an estranged consumer of an overpriced commodity (Tyres)� The commercialization of football has caused fans to either become distanced from their beloved sport or to form critical protest and violent resistance, as evidenced by the rise in hooliganism and violent encounters between fan groups in Germany according to recent reports from both England and Germany (Ball)� In the area of football studies, hooliganism is one of the most popular topics and has been studied for decades as far back as the emergence of hooliganism in British stadiums during the mid to late 1960s� Hooliganism has been studied within historical contexts, sociological and psychological contexts, in a political dimension and also in light of sociocultural and economical trajectories whereby hooliganism can take the form of subcultural activities forcefully and violently resisting processes of commodification and commercialization of football� 3 Despite the mass appeal of the sport, a combination of football and literary fiction is surprisingly still a fairly rare phenomenon in German literature. England has had its fair share of football fiction, perhaps triggered by Nick Hornby’s novel Fever Pitch (1992) that showed football fans, as Cyprian Piskurek states, “that literature could be pushed from its elitist pedestal” (84)� John King’s Football Factory soon followed in the UK in 1997, revealing the overarching popularity of the athletic-literary combination� Compared to British literature’s embrace of football as a trope in fiction, German-speaking authors have so far neglected making use of the supposedly low-brow football world as a setting and a literary topic� The relative scarcity of football fiction in German literature is certainly one of the reasons why critics enthusiastically anticipated the release of a novel set in a German football hooligan scene� Critics agree that Hool is a highly accomplished literary achievement by a new and young literary voice� 4 The novel was subsequently nominated for the Deutscher Buchpreis in 2016 and shortlisted as one of the best new six books of the year� 5 Reviewers have identified Winkler, born 1986, as an authentic new voice in German literature, praising his extraordinary and artistically successful approach in making a die-hard football fan, a hooligan, the protagonist of his debut novel� This essay further examines if Winkler’s novel actually fits the category of a ‘football novel,’ a genre that Lee McGowan defines as “any work of fiction with a significant reliance on football as a central or substantive element, including but not restricted to narrative, voice, structure, setting and character development” (222). Winkler rarely mentions specific game results and the position of Hanover’s team in the national league table, yet the issue of passionate fandom and absolute loyalty to the team paired with physical encounters and clashes with fans from other teams elevate football to the substantive element in the novel that McGowan seeks in football novels� Winkler’s Hool captures the Zeitgeist in the sense that its release falls into a time when the debates about the commercialization and media exploitation of football had reached new and previously unimaginable frontiers. Brazilian football star Neymar was transferred from Barcelona to Paris Saint-Germain in 2017 for the record fee of an estimated 222-million Euros and a new TV deal in England in 2016 earned each member of the Premier League large sums of money that put the British football in a powerful economic position in comparison to its European counterparts� Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit in spring 2020 and brought professional football around the world (save for Belarus) to a sudden halt wielding significant impact on teams and national leagues alike, the novel reflected the Zeitgeist in football fandom at a time when fans began to voice their opposition to their status as consumers of a commodified and high-priced modern football industry. In recent years, football fans have become increasingly vocal and powerful in raising concerns about the current trajectories in their beloved sport� Whether as visitors in the stadiums or viewers in front of the TV, football fans today constitute a unique critical voice that asks forcefully to be heard by the clubs, national federations and international as well as global federations such as UEFA and FIFA� While ultras and hooligans constitute distinct fan groups, it is telling that die-hard fans like the ultras movement have been the most vocal against a premature restart of the Bundesliga in May 2020� Moreover, it was primarily the fans and their threats to boycott professional football that let the European top teams’ plans of a European Super League collapse within days of its announcements in April 2021 (Panja)� Professional football is at the crossroads today following the dramatic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on teams and the sport as form of entertainment as we know it, with increasingly powerful fans voicing Mapping Spaces Beyond the Football Pitch: Philipp Winkler's novel Hool � 53 54 Bastian Heinsohn their rejection of commercialized football� Winkler’s novel Hool was born into a time just prior to the real debates and clashes, fought with arguments and silent protests, between fans and professional football in Germany� Within the wider context of recent contemporary literature in Germany, Winkler’s novel fits into the recent reemergence of a trend: namely giving a literary voice to young, marginalized groups; to outsiders and characters whose voices are otherwise rarely heard, such as immigrants, the unemployed and people left behind for various reasons� While giving a voice to those without in society-to Außenseiter -has a long tradition in German literature, the degree of recent novels by young German authors that are marked by a first-person narrator’s heavy use of colloquial German rather than Standard or High German is striking� This form of German, called Alltagsdeutsch, can be found in stories set at the fringes of urban spaces and at the lower strata of society, for example in Felix Lobrecht’s Sonne und Beton (2017), Clemens Meyer’s Als wir träumten (2006) und Im Stein (2013), and Wolfgang Herrndorf ’s Tschick (2010)� The use of Alltagsdeutsch, however, does not necessarily indicate a lack of education or a migration background on the part of the protagonist� Instead, it increases the authenticity of the language, the novel’s characters and the plot� Within this context, Hool has been widely praised as an authentic presentation of the world of football hooliganism and allegiance to a German Bundesliga team� 6 To achieve the ‘authenticity,’ Winkler uses an intensity and immediacy in the language that catches the atmosphere of a certain milieu, namely football hooligans, and places the reader right in the center of the action� In Hool, the world of football serves as a transitory space and a surrogate home in a what can be considered a coming-of-age story of a young adult trying to find his place and role in society. Most of the plot is in fact set far away from the pitch and the stadium-so offside or im Abseits, to use a football term� ‘Matches’ take place in offside spaces as well. The term ‘matches’ does not refer to Bundesliga games, however, but instead is a slang word commonly used among hooligans for fights off the pitch. The fights are meticulously planned with the other Bundesliga teams’ affiliated hooligan groups and are executed like rituals with a fixed set of laws setting boundaries to the violent physical encounters� This essay explores the novel’s numerous ‘spaces’ with a particular focus on the landscapes off the pitch frequented by the hooligans and the spaces of memory that are closely connected to the protagonist’s upbringing� Similar to Nick Hornby’s seminal football novel Fever Pitch, Winkler’s Hool is ambiguous about its fictitiousness, as it frequently references true events in Hannover 96’s club history including the suicide of goalkeeper Robert Enke, a key match in the German Cup against rival Eintracht Braunschweig and a relegation play-off game� Consequently, critics have suspected Winkler of being an active or former member of the hooligan scene who writes from lived experience, which Winkler has consistently and convincingly denied� 7 His novel mixes facts and fiction in ways similar to Nick Hornby in Fever Pitch, which has been considered an autobiographical account; however, there are fundamental differences between these two novels putting football at their center. Winkler’s first-person narrator Heiko Kolbe is a football fan, but in contrast to Hornby’s protagonist, a character trait such as obsession does not properly define Heiko’s stance towards the club. Winkler rarely shares any game results, gives no crucial information about the importance of upcoming matches and the psychological extreme situations fans endure in stadiums during games, no information is gained on the manic behaviors in the stands, nor the extreme moments of joy or sadness that are inherent to any die-hard fan who is ‘obsessed’ with a team� Winkler’s protagonist Heiko does not experience any such emotions, except for the adrenalin that kicks in when he and his hooligan friends are on the way to the violent clash with the other fan groups away from the stadium� Despite the fact that one can place the novel in the realm of coming-of-age stories, there is, tragically, little to no significant learning outcome for Heiko in the end. Winkler’s novel uses football as a sport and its impact on the protagonist perhaps more in the subtle, yet forceful way Peter Esterhazy uses football in Keine Kunst (2010) or the way Don DeLillo weaves in baseball into his masterpiece Underworld ( 1998) . The first pages in Hool describe the encounter of Hannover 96 with FC Köln hooligans and it is Winkler’s language that puts the reader into the mind of protagonist Heiko� The narration provides intimate access to anything Heiko sees, feels and even smells in what is a tense and physical scene of a violent encounter between two hooligan groups. The novel’s first paragraph below describes the minutes immediately before the fight begins. Ich wärme meinen neuen Zahnschutz in der Hand an� Wende ihn mit den Fingern und presse ihn etwas zusammen� So mache ich es vor jedem Kampf� Das Gelmaterial bleibt stabil, gibt nur wenig nach� Das ist ein Top-Ding� Was Besseres kann man nicht bekommen� Individuell vom Zahntechniker hergestellt� Keines dieser Billoteile aus Massenproduktion, die man nach zwei Wochen gleich wieder in die Tonne kloppen kann, weil dir die Kanten ins Zahnfleisch schneiden. Oder weil man wegen der beschissenen Passform und dem chemischen Kunststoffgeruch andauernd einen Würgreiz kriegt. Bis auf Jojo mit seinem mageren Hausmeistergehalt haben wir inzwischen fast alle so einen Zahnschutz� Kai, der immer den feinsten Shit haben muss� Ulf� Der kann das mal locker aus der Portokasse zahlen� Tomek, Töller� Und einige unserer Jungs, die entsprechende Jobs haben� Onkel Axel sowieso� Der hat den Zahntechniker vor ein paar Jahren aufgetan� Hat sich auf Kontaktsportarten spezialisiert und versorgt Kampfsportler in ganz Deutschland� Wie man hört, sollen auch welche von den Frank- Mapping Spaces Beyond the Football Pitch: Philipp Winkler's novel Hool � 55 56 Bastian Heinsohn furtern zu dem gehen und einige Jungs aus dem Osten� Aus Dresden und Halle, die Zwickauer� Müssen bestimmt ihren Monatssatz Hartz IV dafür hinblättern, denke ich und fahre die durchgestanzten Atemlöcher mit der Fingerspitze ab� (7) The fight takes place far away from any stadium and even far away from the team’s home cities of Hanover and Brunswick� The novel follows Heiko on longer journeys by car into the periphery via the Autobahn, through towns and villages, and through remote forests pathways to spaces that are in some ways neutral and indistinct territories to stage the fights. The hooligan groups on each side discuss and agree on rules before they actually meet and clash on their designated battle fields. The fights appear like games with set rules that are to be followed no matter the degree of hostility and rivalry between the fan groups� Winkler includes spatial markers to map the journey that takes the hooligans along the Bundesstraße ‘B 55’ and through remote towns such as Olpe and onto dirt roads into forests and abandoned parking lots� The hooligans wear T-shirts in specific colors, for example red in the opening sequence, as if wearing a uniform, dressing like a sports team before a clash or even showing allegiance to and membership of a gang ready to violently confront a rival gang� Setting these fights far away from the stadiums in the cities of the respective home teams, Winkler creates a counter-landscape that consists of faceless urban spaces such as the labyrinth-like architecture of former open-air shopping malls and of entirely remote and rural areas. Winkler’s first-person narrator Heiko muses that the abandoned Ihme-Zentrum, a failed shopping and business center building project in Hanover designed and erected in the 1970s, is the ideal spot for a post-game fight with rival hooligans. “Es ist der perfekte Ort für ein Match in der Stadt. Genug Platz und Bewegungsspielraum für ein Aufeinandertreffen von 40, vielleicht sogar 60 Leuten” (250). Ironically, the purpose of these fights is to put Hanover on the map, but not in the sense that the city of Hanover deserves to be recognized, but in order to rank the hooligans of Hannover 96 among the leading hooligan groups of Germany’s football teams� 8 The ranking of these notorious fan-or rather hooligan-groups therefore differs greatly from the teams they support� Hannover 96 and Magdeburg, for example, replace major cities on the German football map such as Munich and Dortmund and perhaps even Leipzig today� Winkler draws an alternative map of Fußballdeutschland, namely a map from below and from the viewpoint of a hooligan� 9 The hooligans gather im Abseits, away from the big money football and also away from big cities in geographical terms, as this novel does not mention Berlin, Hamburg or Munich, but instead Hanover, Brunswick, Olpe, and anywhere in between� Winkler focuses on regions in Germany that are located in between large urban areas in Germany and can be considered transit spaces� Here, spatial geography matches the protagonist’s current stage in life between adolescence and adult life� Heiko, who is in his late 20s and therefore similar in age to Winkler when he wrote the novel, longs for acceptance and stability and his football fandom provides him with like-minded friends and Hannover 96 fans� Football and his friends seem to be the only constants in his life� A closer look at the excerpt above, the novel’s first paragraph, reveals how well Winkler includes some of the novel’s key elements and themes� The reader learns about the following: a) the adrenaline that rushes through Heiko before ‘matches’ against other hooligan groups; b) the danger inherent to the fights and the necessary preparation for the encounters; c) Heiko’s friends and their social backgrounds with most seemingly coming from a working-class background; and d) Heiko’s environment of fitness studios and martial arts. The map of Fußballdeutschland in this novel also varies greatly from the geographical map of Germany in which cities like Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and Munich stand out in size� The map that Winkler’s novel draws contains major sites with significant fan, or rather hooligan, bases for example Frankfurt, Dresden, Halle and Zwickau� Except for Frankfurt, these are cities that are not at all key cities on a map of Germany nor on the map of Fußballdeutschland. These alternative sites are the spots where fans meet and clash before or after the games and the connector of these locations is a car� Car scenes are frequent in Hool, leading to and from violent encounters or at times merely emphasizing the sense of disorientation in space without major identifiers and sights. The location of this introductory sequence above takes place inside a car and Heiko is traveling with his friends to a remote location to meet the fans of FC Köln for a fight. In the novel, the Kampfzonen (combat zones) are located outside the stadiums, shifting the focus away from the game itself and its players towards the fans and their physical encounters beyond the stadiums� On match days, states Heiko’s uncle, who functions as his mentor and surrogate father figure, fights should take place in the city but not in the stadium: “Am besten nicht zu weit vom Stadion� So wie es früher war� Bevor alle Kameras, Richtmikrofone und Überwachungssysteme installiert waren� Im Stadion selbst wird das nichts, da müssen wir uns gar nichts vormachen� Aber außerhalb des engeren Polizeiradars� Irgendwo in der City” (244)� ‘Irgendwo’ does not translate to ‘anywhere’ in the sense of ‘no matter where,’ but the term refers to a location in the city that is non-descriptive and bleak and could be anywhere, a faceless ‘non-place’, to use a term coined by Marc Augé� Augé defines a non-place as follows: “If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place” (63)� Augé’s definition of a non-place could be applied to the hooligan’s battlefield Mapping Spaces Beyond the Football Pitch: Philipp Winkler's novel Hool � 57 58 Bastian Heinsohn spaces as well, as these remote spaces have no inherent relation to the club nor the city and are not filled with history or identity, like for example a marked battle ground that has seen previous encounters between hooligan groups� The novel’s characters have difficulty finding such remote battlegrounds, which alludes to the fact that these spaces indeed have no history or identity within the context of the story� For example, protagonist Heiko ponders the space he finds himself in before a hooligan fight: “Dann waren wir also draußen. In der Walachei. Mitten in der Nacht” (75). The expression “Walachei’ refers to a remote region in Romania and has been commonly used in the German language figuratively meaning “middle of nowhere”. Heiko continues, stating: “Es war kalt. So kalt, wie es Anfang November nun mal ist, wenn man nachts, wasweißichwo, in der Pampa steht” (77)� 10 The term “wasweißichwo” is best translated as “what do I know where” and implies a sense of disorientation in a non-descriptive and faceless space. A later fight takes place in a desolate space within the city limits when hooligans meet in a labyrinth-like outdated and quasi abandoned 1960s shopping center� Heiko states: Es ist der perfekte Ort für ein Match in der Stadt� Genug Platz und Bewegungsspielraum für ein Aufeinandertreffen von 40, vielleicht sogar 60 Leuten. Dabei durch die labyrinthartige Struktur und den Sichtschutz, den die Hochhäuser und leerstehenden Ladenpassagen bieten, versteckt genug, um das Ganze ohne vorzeitige Polizeiauflösung durchzuführen� (250) Heiko’s goal is to represent the city of Hanover and its football team with ‘honor’ and to put Hanover ‘on the map’ in the hooligan scene� A successful placing of new markers on the counter-map of Germany in its identical national borders is decided on the hooligan’s battle fields in the non-descriptive peripheries of any urban center or any traditional marker on a map� Except for the novel’s last fight placed towards the end of the story and again set in a no man’s land, all fights follow strict rules in regard to the number of participants on each side, the use or banishment of weapons and do’s and don’ts, for example not hitting an opponent once the opponent is on the ground� Winkler emphasizes the details of the regulated fight to a degree that the fights almost appear choreographed from beginning to end� In certain ways, a more violent version of the sport the hooligans use for their rivalries, replaces the sports on the pitch� Heiko proudly states that his uncle praised Heiko’s preparations for a hooligan fight with fans from Cologne: “Tatsächlich lobt er mich für die gute Organisation des Köln-Matches. […] Hat ja auch alles geklappt, im Endeffekt. Wir haben einen Sieg eingefahren� Keine Bullen� Unterm Strich schon ein Erfolg” (45)� The novel rarely gives attention to matches, players, performances, and results� Match descriptions happen in flashbacks and reference legendary games or in episodes in the present with his father, when both visit a game in Bremen’s Weserstadion and sitting on neutral seats� Actual football match descriptions are sparse in Hool, which stresses the fact that Winkler gives the clashes outside the stadiums and far away from the cities a much stronger emphasis� The post-game hooligan matches boast a flair of playful, yet violent, attempts to redraw the map of Germany to achieve an alternative geography, a map of Fußballdeutschland f rom the viewpoint of its hooligan fan base� The narrative structure of the book switches between past and present as well as between spaces connected to Heiko’s world of football and friends and spaces linked to his family home. The family home appears in flashbacks and in episodes set in the present� Winkler portrays the protagonist’s broken childhood full of hardships with an absent mother-the reasons for her absence are never explained in the novel-and a disengaged and alcoholic father� The father’s new wife, a woman from Thailand called Mie, remains ghostlike in the novel and is more absent than present in the novel’s passages that describe Heiko’s occasional visits at home� His sister Manuela and her young family are busy with their own lives and estranged from the family. Domestic space has a significant impact on Heiko and provides him with a balance to the spaces of football and combat� The family home is a space of memory that alternates between being a space of comfort and a space of trauma due to Heiko’s shattered childhood and a nostalgic place of loss� Memories of his grandfather connected to the family home give him comfort and respite and he feels a sense of belonging in the memories of his past� His grandfather introduced him to the world of football by playing football together in the garden when Heiko was little� The feeling of Geborgenheit that Heiko finds in his memories, however, is more or less absent in Heiko’s present� In fact, in the family home episodes, Heiko repeatedly feels imprisoned and uncomfortable very quickly� For example, after feeding the pigeons his father keeps in a pigeon house in the garden, Heiko states: “Ich knalle die Tür zu. Lassen den Futtereimer einfach neben dem Stall stehen. Nur noch weg hier” (58)� The constant switch between episodes and locations throughout Winkler’s novel, separated like mini numberless chapters, emphasizes the fact that Heiko is seeking a space he can call home without truly finding it. The episode with the pigeons is followed by Heiko’s escape to a fitness studio called Wotan Club where Heiko occasionally helps out and works out as well� The studio is run by his uncle Axel, mentor, and surrogate father� Axel initiated him to the world of hooliganism during his adolescence� The family home and the gym, despite its questionable clientele of gang members and criminals, are also spaces of comfort for Heiko and provide a constant in his life that he can otherwise only find in his loyalty to the football club and in the close bond to his hooligan friends� Towards the end of the novel, his life as a hooligan begins Mapping Spaces Beyond the Football Pitch: Philipp Winkler's novel Hool � 59 60 Bastian Heinsohn to crumble as his friends turn their attention to other things in life such as job and family, whereas Heiko does not have any other alternative in his life as a constant other than his allegiance to the football team� Facing the loss of the remaining fixed points in his life, Heiko explodes in the end of the novel in an orgy of violence: “Der Tunnelblick setzt ein� Ich sehe nur noch dieses Gesicht vor mir� Alles herum verschwindet in einer schwarzen Wolke� Da ist wieder Axels Stimme� Er ruft uns etwas zu� Bei mir kommt nur ein dumpfes Wummern an. Ich stoße mich vom Boden ab” (303). Following the violent episode are flashbacks to Heiko’s childhood and his spaces of comfort and belonging, but the novel does not offer any solution for its protagonist’s longing for acceptance and a solid plan for the future� In fact, Hool dwells on the past by emphasizing spaces of memory and loss throughout the novel� The novel links the protagonist’s personal sense of lost Geborgenheit he once experienced at home to disappearing spaces of comfort in football, for example when Heiko remembers the names of previous Hannover 96 star players and calls the team’s stadium by its old name, the Niedersachsenstadion. (70) The novel’s relative lack of football game descriptions and overall nostalgic mood throughout must also be read as a deliberate rejection of what commercialized football has become today� Protagonist Heiko clings to remnants from the past in a short passage that shows that Winkler’s first-person narrator considers himself a true football fan: “Ein echter Fußballfan legt Wert auf Tradition, auf das Althergebrachte. Nichts verkörpert das besser als unsere Hannoveraner Stammkneipe, der altehrwürdige Timpen in der Calenberger Neustadt” (86 — 7)� Examining the notion of fandom as portrayed in this novel shows a fragmentation among fans, in this case the fans of Hannover 96 as fictionalized in the novel� Heiko considers the fans that identify themselves as ultras as immature fans preoccupied with choreographies and the game itself, whereas the hooligans seem to care much less about the game and more about the clashes with the hooligans of the other team� Towards the end of the novel and leading up to its climactic sequence, the orgy of violence mentioned above, Heiko considers an upcoming DFB-Pokal match against archrival Eintracht Braunschweig mainly as an opportunity to clash with the Eintracht hooligans rather than as a good opportunity for Hannover 96 to advance in the cup competition� While Heiko and his hooligan friends in the novel are overall apolitical, they do take a firm stand in clearly distancing themselves from neo-Nazi groups among the Hannover 96 fans� For Heiko and his friends, the game itself and its results are not immensely important and rarely mentioned in the novel� What matters is solidarity, camaraderie within the group, reliability, and letting off steam physically while also adhering to the rules of the clashes with other hooligan groups� Through the voice of the first-person narrator, the novel distinguishes between the fragmented fan groups, particularly between ultras, hooligans and racist right-wing fans� Scholarship on football fandom equally emphasize the diversity of football fans and divides fan groups by their varying intentions and support, ranging from expressing passion for the team through tireless support in the stands, following political agendas and staging protests addressing trajectories in modern football as well as utilizing the stadium and the anonymity within the masses as a forum to express radical right-wing and racist views� Spaaij and Testa define football hooliganism as “a distinctive subculture among predominantly young male partisan fans and their engagement in a collective violence which is primarily targeted at opposing fan groups with whom there is often a history hostility and confrontation” (365)� Hooliganism is perhaps the least political of all fan sub-groups, and Winkler’s novel confirms the shifted priorities of hooligans away from supporting the team, from saving modern football from commercialization and commodification (it is safe to say that this is a fight football has been losing since at least the late 1990s), and also away from attacking groups for political or radical reasons� This is not to say that radical leftist and right-wing viewpoints are entirely absent in football hooliganism, but violence for the sake of violence tends to be the primary force in hooliganism� The group of ultras, infantilized in Winkler’s novel through Heiko’s remarks that also serve to distance himself as a hooligan and primarily also in an attempt to assure himself of maturity and masculinity, are preoccupied with team support in the stadium and with strengthening the role of fans during the transformations of modern professional football into an entertainment industry� “Their basic function,” as Spaaij and Testa note about ultras, “is to provide expressive and colourful support to the team, and therefore they are not necessarily concerned with defeating or humiliating their rivals through intimidation or violence” (365)� It must be noted here that the ultra movement in Italy has historically been different than in the rest of the European continent with a significantly higher proclivity to exercise violence in stadiums and beyond and expressing racist and fascist views in the stadium openly and for everyone to see through banners, clothing and gestures causing severe problems for the reputation of teams and the national league� 11 Returning to the aspect of space in connection to football fandom as portrayed in Winkler’s novel, it is conspicuous that the various groups of fans also have distinct spaces they inhibited for their activities� The common fans share the stadium space with the ultras who focus on supporting the team in the stands during the 90 minutes of the game� The right-wing and tentatively violent hard-core supporters increasingly operate between stands and spaces around the stadium to threaten supporters of the other team� As aforemen- Mapping Spaces Beyond the Football Pitch: Philipp Winkler's novel Hool � 61 62 Bastian Heinsohn tioned, hooligans, however, are preoccupied with clashes outside the stadium and therefore occupy spaces that are primarily further away from the football grounds, which is reflected in Winkler’s Hool. The spatial shift of hooliganism towards areas away from football grounds and their surroundings must also be attributed to the increased policing and surveillance of fan behavior inside and near the stadiums� Public spaces that are disconnected to professional football’s private spaces under surveillance allow transgressive behaviors not tolerated and severely fined in the arenas. Remote areas where hooligan groups meet have become uncontrolled arenas of danger and violence, thus creating its own form of spectacle in response to the increasingly controlled sports spectacle in the stadiums� The commercial and critical success of Winkler’s Hool, and its wider appeal and marketability, also stems from the fact that football-related violence exhibits a voyeuristic appeal� 12 Winkler’s stylistic means to begin the novel with a vivid description of a violent clash from the point of view of a hooligan is appealing to the reader and football-interested fan because media coverage of violence in professional football has subsided in the past decades as the game itself has become increasingly family friendly and free of fan disruptions in its coverage of games� For example, television stations attempt to avoid showing fan violence and illegal pyrotechnics in the stands or images of fans invading the pitch during the game� As Alan McDougall writes “[i]n safer, family-friendly stadiums, with better football and tighter security measures on display, violence has fewer places to hide� Fighting fans increasingly staged confrontations far from the stadium, in prearranged meeting places” and therefore, McDougall concludes, “violence had been displaced, not eradicated” (165)� Winkler’s novel shows precisely this emphasis of on spaces far from the stadiums, in remote places in rural Germany at night as spaces where football fans clash� By ridding the game itself of any internal and external disturbances, fan violence has entered the realm of professional football’s underbelly as a darker side marked by transgression and violence that is absent from the surface of professional football� Many of the described violent encounters between hooligan groups in Winkler’s novel take place at night in remote areas and are quite literally taking place in dark spaces unseen by the wider public� It is a “spectacle of violence” that has shifted from the stadiums, perhaps best exemplified in football hooliganism in the 1960s to 1980s in England, to physical spaces away from the sport arenas to geographical and mental spaces increasingly free of any references to the sport itself� 13 Gunter Gebauer detects an interrelation between a highly regulated and increasingly violent-free football spectacle in the stadiums on the one hand and the violent clashes of hooligans around the stadiums and beyond on the other hand� “[Hooligans] verfolgen die Absicht, Gewalt im Fußball wieder zu einer realen Gefahr zu machen: ein beherrschtes in ein wildes, unkontrolliertes Spiel ausufern zu lassen, das eine Gefahr für Leib und Leben darstellt” (151)� Gebauer argues that hooligans attempt to reinsert violence into football to turn a controlled game into a wild and uncontrollable game that poses a danger for people (151)� Gebauer states that evil in the form of football-related violence is a media event and provides what he phrases as “Bilder einer extremen Fremdheit” within a commodified and family-friendly football industry today (158). Hooligans, as representatives of a football subculture, are “producers of images of evil” (“Bilderproduzenten des Bösen”) feeding a public that is literally expecting images of deviance and transgression as part of modern-day football coverage (158)� Representation of football-related violence, whether it is in recent literature such as Winkler’s Hool o r media reports on violence at football events such as international Champions League games and World Cups, form modern football’s counter-images of a transgressive subculture that media coverage is unable to repress entirely� Subcultural behavior could perhaps be defined as a transgressive response to forms of oppression and regulation� In modern football, hooligans represent a subcultural deviant response to a sport shifted towards excessive media and commercial exploitation that demands regulation and mass market appeal, thus eliminating any forms of aggression which are not part of the sport competition in the pitch itself� In a linguistic context, subcultural behavior counters the standard language used through more colloquial and substandard forms of verbal communication� Winkler’s Hool has been praised for its unique and raw language, for the “authentic sound,” as journalist Sabine Peschel calls it, of a world surrounding football and hooliganism� The language spoken by the characters, and particularly by protagonist Heiko, who serves as the novel’s first-person narrator, is Alltagsdeutsch with a high percentage of direct speech ranging from the colloquial and the vulgar to the poetic� He, for example, describes a scene in a car as follows: “Axel war gerade dabei, den synchron nickenden Kai und Töller einen Einlauf zu verpassen, was der Mist da sollte, nach einem Match noch sonen Aufriss zu machen, und wer ihnen eigentlich ins Hirn geschissen hätte” (17). Specific vocabulary is used to describe the world of hooliganism, for example “matches” for the violent and physical encounters with other hooligan groups. The first-person narrator’s use of colloquial German is occasionally interspersed with highly reflective narration that borders on the poetic when observing and commenting on landscapes and atmospheres, for example, exemplified in sudden and somewhat surprising use of poetic Sprachbilder describing the beauty of the natural landscape� Winkler’s narration, particularly in passages describing the hooligans’ violent physical encounters such as the novel’s introductory passage discussed above, has been praised and compared to the Mapping Spaces Beyond the Football Pitch: Philipp Winkler's novel Hool � 63 64 Bastian Heinsohn energy and fast pace of live sports commentary from a subjective point of view� As Journalist Andreas Plattenhaus describes: “Winkler schreibt im erzählenden Präsens, es hat den Sog einer Sportskommentierung, aber ohne jede Objektivität.” The narrative pace and the language style varies constantly, reflecting the vernaculars used in the novel’s many spaces, from the hooligan’s battlefields, the social spaces shared with friends such as passages that take place in gym named after the mythical Nordic God Wotan, scenes in the car, to the spaces of memory surrounding the domestic spaces of Heiko’s family� Reviewers like Die Zeit’ s David Hugendick have pointed out the numerous stylistic and linguistic variations in Hool and consider the language the novel’s major weakness� Yet, one can argue that Winkler convincingly changes tone and style throughout the novel and adapts language to the situation his protagonist is in and the people he is communicating with in the respective passage� In an interview soon after the novel’s release, Winkler stated that he envisions his protagonist as an educated person who may not be eloquent, but who is not dumb either� Youth language mixed with northern German dialect and region-specific expressions are dominant in interactions with his friends. Here, Heiko uses extreme examples of foul language, for instance “Scheiße”, and “Wichser” at numerous occasions both in direct speech and narration� In a radio interview with Swiss station SRF in November 2016, only a few weeks after the novel’s release, Winkler points out that beauty can be found in vulgar language as well and that the language he applies in the novel is a collection of different components (Münger). Language changes when Heiko interacts with his family to a more intimate and relatively polished speech pattern marked by regional dialect, for example “Vadder” and “weißte datt, mien Jung? ” Winkler hereby links a warm sense of comfortable rootedness to domestic space by letting his protagonist speak more dialect and use casual expressions, whereas the language used in the interactions with his friends is casual, yet edgy, confrontational, and filled with expletives in line with the violent encounters the group has with other hooligan groups� The complexity of language used in the novel serves the protagonist to adapt to his changing surroundings� Colloquial language, whether it is the vernacular marked by dialect at home or by foul language among his buddies, provides Heiko with a space of comfort and a retreat� The sudden shift in the plot towards the end of the novel, when the bond between his friends begins to fall apart as they seek to pursue alternatives to football and hooliganism in their lives significantly threaten his space of comfort� It is time for Heiko to come to terms with real life, and to realize that the time with his hooligan friends and ersatz family was only a transitory space and time for him. “Heiko, raff es mal”, advises his uncle Axel bluntly towards the end of the novel, “Das wars für mich� Und du solltest auch endlich im wahren Leben ankommen” (253)� Winkler’s novel is a protagonist’s search for identity and purpose in life and for whom football and hooliganism serve as temporary constants and spaces of belonging� However, football fandom, or rather football hooliganism, reveals itself to be only a transitory space Heiko can hold on to for a limited time during his adolescence� When this space begins to crumble, he needs to find a constant in his life other than football, fandom and hooliganism. A step that the protagonist has yet to take at the rather hopeful and optimistic end of Hool. In the process of entering a new phase in life of his protagonist, Winkler’s novel leaves open to speculation how Heiko’s alliance to the football club Hannover 96 and the nature of his fandom will develop further� Notes 1 Houellebecq’s novel Extension du domaine de la lutte was published in English under the title Whatever � 2 Philipp Winkler’s Hool has been translated into various languages including English and was adapted to the theatre stage in 2017� In several interviews, Winkler has indicated that plans exist to adapt the book to the movie screen. As of August 2021, a film project has yet to be announced. 3 See for example Anastassia Tsoukala, Football Hooliganism in Europe: Security and Civil Liberties in the Balance (2009); Steve Frosdick and Peter Marsh, Football Hooliganism (2005); Gary Armstrong, Football Hooligans: Knowing the Scene (1998); Eric Dunning, Patrick Murphy, and John Williams, The Roots of Football Hooliganism: An Historical and Sociological Study (1988)� 4 See for example Daniel Knipphals’ review “Sich festhalten am falschen Leben�” 5 Eventually, Bodo Kirchhoff’s novel Widerfahrnis won the Deutscher Buchpreis 2016 award� 6 See for example Julia Encke’s review “Die Null, die alles entscheidet” in the FAZ and Gerrit Bartels review “Der Traum vom Tiger” in Tagesspiegel � 7 In his interview with SRF radio interview, Winkler states that he was not a hooligan and wrote his book after researching the hooligan scene for roughly a year� 8 This essay uses the spelling Hanover for the German city and Hannover to refer to the football club Hannover 96� 9 The term ‘Fußballdeutschland” is commonly used in newspaper articles and in debates surrounding football and fans in Germany (“Lockerungen in der Corona-Krise�”) 10 The italics in this quote were added by the author of this paper to emphasize the specific word elaborated on in the subsequent sentences. Mapping Spaces Beyond the Football Pitch: Philipp Winkler's novel Hool � 65 66 Bastian Heinsohn 11 On the history of ultras and their support in Italian football, see for example: Carlo Podaliri and Carlo Balestri’s “Ultras, Racism and Football Culture in Italy�” 12 See Crabbe’s “The public gets what the public wants: England football fans, ‘truth’ claims and mediated realities�” 13 Crabbe uses the term ‘spectacle of violence’ and argues that hooliganism and football-related violence is an essential part in the consumption of the wider commercial enterprise of football today (418)� I use the term ‘mental space’ here in relation to internal motivations behind violent behavior and sociological reasons to engage with other hooligan groups in physical encounters� Works Cited Armstrong, Gary� Football Hooligans: Knowing the Scene. Oxford: Berg, 1998� Augé, Marc� Non-Places. An Introduction to Super-Modernity. 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