Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

The 2024 Euros Final in the Olympiastadion in Berlin tomorrow reminds me that when I spent the summer of 1987 in West Berlin with my university friend Caroline and her sister Sharon, one day we happened upon the stadium and just walked on in, because we could, and took in the view that spectators had had at the Olympics only 51 years before. Like the football stadia in England at that time, it was run down and all but abandoned.

It seems that Hertha Berlin played their Bundesliga games there up to 1986, but then spent three years at the much smaller Poststadion because their attendances weren’t large enough to justify staying at the Olympiastadion. (A similar fate befell my own team, QPR, when they spent a few years – 1931 to 1933 and the 1962/63 season – at the 1908 and 1948 Olympic stadium, White City, although, conversely, their record attendance, 41,097, was set there for an FA Cup game against Leeds in 1932. Curiouser still, their record attendance at Loftus Road was also against Leeds – 35,353 in 1974.)

I can’t claim that we felt the days of the Wall and the DDR were imminently numbered, but there was perhaps a sense that change was within reach. As a capitalist island within East Germany, West Berlin was a strange, anomalous place, and at any party we went to, there always seemed to be someone who’d escaped from the East. I thought I knew everything then.

Of the two poems I’ve written and had published about that summer, the following, from The Evening Entertainment, is the one I like the most.

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