Interview: Stefan Szymanski and Silke-Maria Weineck, authors of "City of Champions: A History of Triumph and Defeat in Detroit"
Brenda Elsey discusses her hometown of Detroit with Stefan Szymanski and Silke-Maria Weineck, authors of "City of Champions: A History of Triumph and Defeat in Detroit." They breakdown the myths of the American melting pot and explore how social and political upheaval of the 20th century United States through Detroit sports legends like World Champion boxer Joe Louis and infamous Detroit Tiger Ty Cobb.
This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.
Transcript
Brenda: I am so excited to be talking about my hometown today, [French pronunciation of Detroit], or as Detroit as we’ve come to call it, with two fascinating writers. They have written a new book, City of Champions: A History of Triumph and Defeat in Detroit. The first author of this book that I wanna introduce is a longtime friend of the show, she’s been on before – Silke-Maria Weineck, professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Michigan. She is author of The Tragedy of Fatherhood: King Laius and the Politics of Paternity in the West, which is out with Bloomsbury in 2014. She’s currently working on an article called Ford’s Southern Strategy, about Joe Louis and the Ford motor company. She’s joined by her co-author, Stefan Szymanski, who’s a sports economist also at the university of Michigan. He’s the co-author of Soccernomics with Simon Cooper and he’s currently working on a book on cricket, which will make Shireen very very happy.
I wanna start out since we are in this post-election or ongoing election moment…We are recording just a couple of days after the vote in Detroit seems to have gone to Democratic candidate Joe Biden, and Detroit got a lot of attention during that period, particularly you could see the stark differences in the state of Michigan and that really centered on Detroit. I just wanted to ask either or both of you, what was your reaction to seeing Detroit politics front and center in this election? Silke?
Silke-Maria: Yeah, it made me deeply happy, I must say, to see the energy and see the numbers climb and to know that the votes of Detroit would deliver Michigan to the Democrats. If I look at the numbers, without the Detroit votes – which went 95% to the Democratic ticket – we would not have gotten Michigan. What was also absolutely fascinating was to listen to the right wing talk about the Michigan results and to hear the sneer every time the word ‘Detroit’ was mentioned, as if nothing more had to be said. So Detroit is coded as the enemy city along with Chicago and Baltimore, and I think soon to be joined by Atlanta for the right wing. I think that brings out a defiance and a pride in the city that was always already there, but I found it really joyful.
Brenda: Yeah. Stefan, how did you feel?
Stefan: Yeah, similar. I think we both love Detroit and we both love to see Detroit in the public eye and being acknowledged as the major American city that it is, it’s a pivotal city. But also as Silke says, this sense of those who hate Detroit and making Detroit sound like an alien city, like it’s not an American city, and I think that’s always fascinating that Detroit has this kind of symbolism as being, is it in America? Is it “other,” is it elsewhere? I think that’s part of the excitement of Detroit, it’s the ambiguity that you always find in the way that Americans at large react – some extremely positive, and some extremely negative.
Brenda: And it’s so rarely considered a border city, and you made that point in your book. I thought that that was really fascinating because I remember going back and forth between Windsor and Detroit as a kid, but in that national imagination I feel like it’s seen as not a border city. I don’t know if you think that’s an interesting angle to think about…
Silke-Maria: I think that’s exactly right. I think even the fact that it is by a large river and it’s really a city shaped by the river is lost on America. I came to Ann Arbor in 1998 and back then nobody went to Detroit – the students went to go to Windsor to drink because the drinking age is lower in Canada, but Detroit was hardly part of our cultural life, and that has changed over my now 22 years in Ann Arbor, it’s changed very dramatically. I think all the traces of Detroit as the capital of the 20th century are kind of rising again, becoming visible again, and I think the border city narrative is part of that but it’s still very underplayed.
Brenda: Yeah.
Stefan: Yeah. I’ve been completely fascinated by this whole border nature of Detroit, and as you say the way in which it’s not noticed generally by Americans…I mean, this particularly stands out for me in terms of the Detroit Red Wings, which is, I say to my students here in order to prove, I say they’re basically a Canadian team aren’t they, right? Because 90% of the players and coaches who have ever played for the team are Canadians, right?
Brenda: [laughs] Yeah.
Stefan: Then, interestingly, Detroiters look back at you and say, “No! What are you talking about? It’s an American team.” So in some sense it's a complex web of, again, people not from Detroit, not recognizing that it’s a border town, and that people in Detroit also having this sort of strange affinity with Canada, which is again not often part of the discussion about Detroit, I think, something that I think we found very fascinating to look at in the book.
Brenda: So, I wanna start with the book and ask you, as a historian I was almost unable to read it in the order it is because I wanted to read it backwards. So, for those of you that will be reading this – and you all should – they tell a series of vignettes to open up broader questions about historical moments and race and inequality and gender. But it goes backwards! What made you decide to do that to us, to hurt historians in that way? Why? [laughs]
Stefan: So, I said this to another historian who said it gave him vertigo to read this book because of the way we did this–
Brenda: Yes! Yes. [laughs]
Stefan: Part of the inspiration for this was a book by William Dalrymple called City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, which is all about the history of Delhi, the city in India, but also told going backwards and thinking of Delhi in an archeological sense. So, archeologists work backwards too – they start digging at the top which is most recent, and they excavate down, and in some sense that gives you a very different perspective on this. The thing about Detroit is…I mean, one of the things I think it works particularly well with Detroit is that people approach Detroit from now. They think about what Detroit has been in the last 10, 20, 30 years, and more and more people forget what it was. In some ways it's better to get the now out of the way at the beginning of the book and actually in some ways you understand Detroit better when you see what it was, understanding what it became. Also, the other thing I think is to try and think about possibilities, and one way to understand possibilities is as you go back what happened was not inevitable, and in many ways what happened was both the glory and America and the disaster of America. In some ways neither of these things were inevitable and a lot of these things that happened in Detroit…We tried to get that perspective and say, well, what came later came later but let's get back to where we were at the time before all the sediments were laid on top of each other.
Silke-Maria: I also think that is the way you get to know a city when you fall in love with it. First you go, you know, what’s going on now, what’s today’s concert? Is there a good game on? What’s the best restaurant right now? As you connect more deeply to the city you want to know more and more about it – “How did this happen? Why is this here? How did this come about” – right? What used to be here? You see all these…Detroit right now is so structured and cut up by all these highways which were basically built to allow white people to work in the city and then leave very quickly for the suburbs in the evening, right? Then you start wondering, what was here before there was a highway? You learn, well, it was Black Bottom, for instance, which was a historic neighborhood that had a wealth of culture and knowledge and Black life that is gone forever because there is now a highway. I think this kind of going backwards actually reflects how we get to know about a city, even though I acknowledge and apologize for the pain we’re inflicting on the linear-chronology-minded.
Brenda: [laughs] Or even cyclical, for goodness sakes! You’re still linear, you’re just going the wrong direction. [Stefan laughs] But it’s good, it's good. It’s good. I wanna ask you a few things. So, I grew up mostly in kind of the middle part of the book, but certainly in my lifetime Detroit shrank. There was intense gentrification in the aftermath of what they called race riots which we now would prefer to call some other resistance and a respectful term, but it was a deeply segregated city. It was broke – the auto industry was in decline, the unions were basically totally decrepit and attacked, and also with a long history of racism themselves. You look at this bad moment, right? Let’s just go from the sort of worst of the worst. Why is sports helpful to understanding this story and this process that is really taking place in the 70s until maybe now, maybe not – the book makes some arguments there. But what do you think? Why sports? What does it get us?
Stefan: That's a great question. One way I would think about it is one question I would think you’d always want to ask is what do we even mean by a city? What is a city? What makes a city? Part of the opening, we say that sports it the one thing that really glues together the cities nowadays as a collective. When we think of a city we almost always nowadays think about the sports teams, and there are very few things that cities do collectively other than root for the team. In some ways it’s true of Detroit, I mean, perhaps not uniquely, but I think more than a lot of other cities where so much else has fallen apart, and so much change has occurred in Detroit that the sports teams are in some sense the constant that have been there. The Tigers have been there since 1896 and they’ve always been the Tigers and the were at The Corner for nearly a century as well, and maybe they moved the stadium a mile away but still in some sense the Tigers are a continuum that have always been there. So sometimes if you want to look at the history of Detroit and see the changes in Detroit, you can measure that in some sense where the sports represent a measuring stick, a level against which you can see the changes that are going on. Even though it’s changing it's still the same city.
Silke-Maria: I would also say, we keep coming back to this question of Detroit as a very representative, deeply American city, where so many of the major developments of American society have occurred, right? From the birth of the car industry – I mean, it’s the American product, even if it wasn’t invented in America – to waves upon waves of migration both from Europe and then the great migration from the south, then later other migrations from Syria, from the Middle East, from southeast Asia and so on. So, at the same time sports I think has a similar relationship to cultural life as Detroit has to America. In some ways everything that happens in America also happens in sports and becomes very visible in sports precisely because sports is the greatest cultural practice – not the greatest necessarily in a valuative sense but in a sense of audience size – is the most visible cultural collective practice globally, I believe. Which kind of pains me to say! I wish it were literature, I wish it were poetry, I wish it were film. But it’s not.
If I may say this, I’ve now written two books on sports and I really don’t care much about sports, but I completely fell in love with the stories surrounding sports. I have developed such a relationship with Joe Louis, and we have nothing in common – I hate boxing, I think it’s a horrible horrible thing to do to each other, to people and so on – but the story of Joe Louis has so deeply moved and touched me. So, thinking about it, writing about it, to me sports is an entryway into these kind of iconic things. Of course race is all over sports and I think we do a good job with some of that in the book. I think in retrospect we underplayed the role of race in hockey, we were a little too optimistic about it, I think, because all the stories in hockey were just coming into view as we were finishing the book. But it’s not just race, it’s also city planning, urban renewal as urban removal, as James Baldwin would say; people moving in and out of the city, economics, who funds what, where does the money come from, right? So it really is entangled in everything that happens both nationally but also locally. As Stefan says, out sports teams are kind of now tasked with representing the city in a way no other group does.
Brenda: So, I want to ask what your favorite chapter to write was. This book has 30 chapters and they’re fascinating, but what was your favorite one to write?
Silke-Maria: For me it was Joe Louis. There are actually two Joe Louis chapters in the book, but he’s such a central figure. Fun to write is almost the wrong term because it was heartbreaking to write. I think it was fun co-writing the chapter on Malice at the Palace because that’s in some ways there’s more room for comic interludes in that one, let’s say. But the Joe Louis one was the one that meant the most to me in the end.
Brenda: Stefan, do you share that or do you have a different favorite?
Stefan: I think one of the things I think we found is that the Malice at the Palace chapter is the one that people find easiest to identify with and it’s a good way to get people into the book as well. I think that’s part of that. But again I agree that the Joe Louis-Max Schmeling fight was a very…I found that quite emotional writing about it. It triggered a lot of emotion in me to just read about it and try to write about it and express the deep injustice around it all was very powerful, but also the great glory of that moment. But a slightly more nerdy sports economics viewpoint, the chapters about the endless attempts of Detroit to bring the Olympics to the city were some of the most interesting for me, particularly the chapter writing about the attempt to bring the 1968 Games to Detroit, which took place in 1963, and the failure to win the Olympics in 1966 which occurred in 1949. Those were in some sense intellectually the most interesting for me.
Brenda: So you have a couple of vignettes on Ty Cobb, or short essay pieces. One of them is: is he really so terrible? I have to ask you, on the subject of race, what did you find out?
Stefan: So, the arc of the perception of Ty Cobb is really fascinating because, I mean, certainly in his own time he’s not thought of as a racist – he’s not very popular with his teammates and he’s not thought of as being a nice man, but “racist” is not really something that’s tied up with him. Then towards the end of his life and when he dies a number of books come out that tag him as a racist and point to some incidents that happened in his lifetime, and these incidents then get a lot of publicity and he becomes well known as this famous racist, amongst all the other things. Again there’s these various myths that grow up around this, and then a few years ago a guy called Charlie Leehrsen wrote a book which basically exonerated him from racism and said, well, no, he wasn’t really a racist, he was no more racist than anybody else and in fact he was in some ways more progressive. Firstly that’s a very interesting arc, and secondly it’s also about how self-serving people are in their presentation of these facts and evidence. So nobody noticed he was racist in the 10s, 20s, and 30s – well, okay, fair enough, racism was not generally considered a big deal, although plenty of Black newspapers were telling people that what was going on and were trying to raise people’s awareness.
But white people didn't wanna listen. Then when the information comes out still it’s tied to, “And here’s another thing about Ty Cobb,” it’s still part of, “We hate Ty Cobb and by the way he’s a racist,” and that becomes a convenient use. Leehrsen’s book, again, it’s been a bestseller, and I actually had a number of conversations with him by email, and he says a lot of things about him basically trying to deconstruct these instants and saying that they didn’t really happen or they didn’t happen the way people said. I just raised the question, well, is that really true and haven’t you exaggerated this and didn’t these things really happen? What’s your argument? Eventually he cut off the conversation with him telling me, well, if that’s your standard of evidence then we come from very different places, so basically sort of telling me that he knew what the facts were and why speculations shouldn’t be considered. I think that’s interesting about how we project our own desires and our own preferences onto historical figures and I think Ty Cobb is very much one of those people. There’s an awful lot of projection going on. I’m convinced he was pretty deeply racist, I think he was he was pretty deeply racist for his time, I think the times were very deeply racist and I think the idea that somehow we should disentangle this and say, “Well, you were a racist but everybody was a racist” – I think that’s a crazy argument. If he was a racist he was a racist, and that’s what should stand. In my view there’s plenty of evidence to support that claim.
Brenda: I’m good with that. I think at Burn It All Down we can get onboard with your revision of the revisionism. I do wanna ask, in a book that deals with professional sports largely it is a challenge – I know from personal experience – to include women front and center, but there are women that appear here and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your efforts to do that when they come in to play.
Silke-Maria: Yeah, we felt bad about it. We actually talked a lot about it, right, this is such a male-heavy book. Of course you can always say professional sports is very masculinist or has been until very recently. I also think Detroit…I don’t have good evidence for that, or literature, but my sense is that Detroit is a very masculinist city, that it doesn’t have a history of really famous women the way many other great American cities do. So we looked pretty hard for stories that would fit the model of the book without reverting to some kind of tokenism saying, “Oh, here, we found a woman,” right? Then the only really iconic story was the Tonya Harding story, and we felt like, is that what we wanna foreground seeing that they’re not really Detroiters? This happened in Detroit but its really not that tied to the city in the end and we decided against it. I do wish in retrospect I had written an entire chapter on the roller derby league. I think there’s a lot going on there, it’s an absolutely fascinating scene.
Brenda: Can you tell us a little more about that, the roller derby there?
Silke-Maria: So there’s a very active roller derby league in Detroit and one of my favorite things about it is it plays in the Masonic Temple, which is one of these grand old buildings that still characterize a lot of Detroit, right? These real palaces, of marble facades, three story high ceilings in the lobby, beautiful decorations. You take an elevator up to the third floor of the Masonic Temple and there is in one of these ancient ballrooms the roller derby league. We went, we had a lot of fun, it’s a great scene. It’s a contact sport, as everybody knows, right? It’s a rough sport, it takes itself not that seriously while also being an incredibly athletic enterprise. If you just look at the names of the teams for instance, the Detroit Pistoffs, right? There’s a lot of punning going on. So I love the energy of it. It’s a pretty white sport, again, right? It brings in a lot of women from the suburbs to Detroit. In the end I felt I would’ve had to spend a year really learning about it to responsibly write about it. There wasn’t enough for me to just digest. We watched a movie, the famous one. We went, we talked to some people…In the end it just didn’t come together, but it’s a shame. The only chapter that really focuses on women is the one about the league, the World War II women’s league like A League of Their Own type of story. Sadly there weren’t too many Detroit women in that league. We did a lot of digging, a lot of archival work. Again, Detroit women were not that prominent in there but we still felt that that story went so well together with the role women played in industrial Detroit during World War II. We felt there was a very clear way of tying those two cultural moments together, because in all the chapters we tried to talk about sports’ iconic moments but also tie them sometimes more closely, sometimes less closely to other important things that are happening. So I like that chapter a lot but in the end I can say, yeah, we’re guilty as charged. As you say you’d like to see more women in this book, I could only say I agree with you, my bad. Maybe Stefan has something to add?
Stefan: As you say, we thought long and hard about various individuals. I mean, perhaps the most famous women’s sports figure that I could think of in Detroit is Jean Hoxie who was a very famous tennis coach from the 40s and 50s and did an enormous amount to raise the profile of tennis in Hamtramck. She trained a couple of players who went on to be extremely successful, and that’s a level of success but when you think of Detroit you don’t really think of tennis and I’m not sure that it’s big enough. I do think that perhaps more research might pay dividends into Detroit and baseball, softball, in the sense that one of the things about the League of Their Own – all of those teams were really based around Chicago, but a lot of the players were Canadian and a lot of the softball leagues around Detroit were Canadian women playing in works teams, playing in teams that represented factories. A number of the players who played in those leagues may have…Some of them definitely came, like Gwen Stefani, came through Detroit, and there may have been more. There is some reference to some tensions between the works teams in Detroit during the war who didn't want to lose the amateur women to go play in the professional leagues, and some question of poaching. There’s some interesting questions and I think there’s also a question going back even further about bloomer leagues in the early 20th century and to what extent there may have been women players in Detroit. But sadly the research we did couldn’t really come up with enough to carry an entire chapter, but I think it’s possible that that might bear some fruit if some PhD student at some point wants to follow that up.
Silke-Maria: Second edition, baby!
Brenda: Yeah! There you go. There you go. Get to work.
Silke-Maria: Roller derby league chapter.
Brenda: That would be fantastic. There’s a question I have, which is a little more abstract, but growing up one of the things that I didn't really ever reconcile…I delivered the newspaper, the Detroit Free Press, and I played softball and other things in Detroit, and I was obsessed with sports. I guess it always surprised me how many African American sports heroes there were – for me in that moment it was Barry Sanders; I’m waiting for that chapter as well as the Lemon chapter, so please, I’m just putting those in there for the next edition. But how is it that it stays so virulently racist? How is it that you can have posters of Barry Sanders and feel perfectly fine definancing Black school districts and perfectly fine segregating the UAW and union work. Did you feel that at all during the writing and thinking?
Silke-Maria: So much so. In some ways that is such a…I would say that’s one of the guiding questions of the book. Race became…I mean, the more we wrote and the more we researched the more it was clear that was probably the central theme, right? That is again why Joe Louis again came to mean so much to me because what’s happening there, first Joe Louis becomes a really deeply meaningful and beloved figure in all kinds of Black communities, right? Maya Angelou has written about him, Lena Horne, Langston Hughes, they all talk about what Joe Louis meant. Then in ’38 you have the Max Schmeling fight which gets coded as a fight for democratic virility vs Nazi Germany, but of course it’s really a fight between two versions of white supremacy, right? So for the first time ever America is forced to root for a Black man, and they do, they do, and they celebrate him, and there’s a lot of talk. “Oh, here you have the first Black American hero,” in Joe Louis. But then there’s also a sense that America never forgave Joe Louis for being forced to root for him, and when in ’48 he tries to retire from boxing because he knows he can’t do this much longer, right? He’s been champion for 10-11 years by then.
He tries to become a respectable ur-American middle class businessman and open a car dealership in Chicago. Ford II, who had taken over from Henry, sends out a query to the regional dealers all over America, saying, “We have this query here, Joe Louis wants to become a Ford car dealer. What do you think?” I found that correspondence in the Henry Ford archives and those letters coming back, they break your heart. I mean, they’re so awful. It’s all this, “We must keep car dealing a white man’s business. If that ever happens I won’t come to the dealer’s conference, I won’t share a table with a Negro,” and so on. But it’s also fascinating that in some of these letters there’s this kind of bad conscience coming out when they say, well, from a business perspective we can’t do this, we would never sell another car in the American south. If it were about civil rights we might want to reconsider but really it’s about the bottom line. So in ’48 it’s a fascinating moment in American history, right? You have Truman, you have the Dixiecrats splitting off in the south, you have the military being desegregated, you have huge uproar against that – and that too was in the correspondence: “If we give Joe Louis a car dealership we will be seen to side with Harry Truman and the communists,” which is kind of a really mind-blowing thing to say, right?
So this constant first celebration, but in a very very narrowly allocated spot, and the complete betrayal the moment the Black athlete tries to leave the very very narrow spot, right? I think this happens over and over and over again. So I don’t know if that answers your question, but what’s shocking is it’s still happening. I mean, “shut up and dribble” is something we heard just this year or last year, right? The way people talk about LeBron James or any other Black athlete who speaks to anything other than how to dribble, right? And of course the same hatred goes to Megan Rapinoe when she tries to talk about something non-soccer, when she does talk about something non-soccer. So this kind of “stay in your lane, stay in your place” is very much I think part and parcel of the way racism has developed in sports, has been overcome in sports up to a point, then always returns despite sports, with sports, right? I mean, Stefan and I often talk about the fact that the owners of sports teams get handed the trophy when a team wins, which to a European is the weirdest thing! I mean, they didn’t score any goals, right? [laughs] These things are all connected. The place of the athlete is still so tightly policed. It is horrible.
Stefan: I just wanted to add to that, I mean, I think also that you can see this evolve in the history of Detroit, and it’s very clearly visible when you think of the stories in sports. This has a very long history and it’s tied very much to the melting pot theory of the United States and it comes up again and again in Detroit. It’s a wonderful, scary example of that in some ways. If you go back to the 1850s you can see that baseball when it’s emerging as a sport is a sport to be played with gentlemen but not to be played with the children of the immigrants. Back then Germans, Irish, they’re coded immigrants there, they’re the “wrong” kind of people. Throughout the history of Detroit you can see in many ways the melting pot worked through sports, though people being able to play sports, and so the Irish become Americans, the Germans become Americans, the Italians become Americans in some ways through boxing, you can see that. You can see Hank Greenberg, Jewish people can become Americans. You can see all these ways in which America integrates and everybody gets to join the melting pot – but never Black people, they’re never allowed to be part of the melting pot, and that’s the thing that stands out in sports and it stands out in the history of Detroit. That’s where instead of allowed to become a part of the melting pot they are punished with segregation endlessly. A lot of the ways we work we base ourselves on the work of Thomas Sugrue, whose history of Detroit is such a seminal, powerful work, because it tells about how this segregation of Detroit is do deeply rooted in the history of the city and not a recent phenomenon at all.
Silke-Maria: Yeah, and that’s something, for instance, there’s this narrative of the rise and fall of Detroit, which of course we also again think it’s a really powerful way of structuring it, but it has huge problems because what is seen as the high point, the rise of Detroit at it’s highest glory, it was also a deeply racist, misogynist, anti-Semitic place, right? And the rise and fall narrative is sometimes explicitly, often implicitly tied to Detroit becoming Black, right? That is then meant to be the decline of Detroit, and so we also tried to push back against telling the story that way. I think the telling it backwards actually helps a little bit with that.
Brenda: Yeah, yeah, I can see that. I wanna wrap up but there’s just a couple quick questions. One is I was in a mental fight with Mitch Albom my entire life, who I wrote letters to as a child, and let me tell you why. It was because I felt that there was something in Detroit sports that was xenophobic and the fact that soccer was never written about by him was actually part of that, that he refused. He wrote articles about how he hated soccer and to this day…Mitch Albom, if you’re out there, my entire career is dedicated to defeating you morally, ethically and intellectually at this point. [laughter] So…I think he is still out there, you know creeping around and knocking soccer. So, in the book you talk about a hopeful future through this soccer club. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Silke-Maria: We love DCFC! Stefan, as a member of the board, why don’t you start us off?
Brenda: Woo!
Stefan: So, yeah, one of the things that when we were writing this…DCFC, Detroit City FC, came before that. Part of our involvement in the city in the last 10 years really has come through DCFC and our love of the team and what they stand for. One thing that’s very powerful about the team is, first, obviously it’s a community team, it’s not the traditional American way. They’ve now opened up the ownership to the fans and it’s more like the way that many soccer clubs around the world are community-owned teams and they represent their community, they don’t represent the interests of an owner, and that’s ideologically such a powerful, strong model I think, particularly for a city which has its problems. Of course the other thing about it is they bring together the communities in Detroit, and it’s not just about Black Detroit – it’s about Mexican Detroit, it’s about Arab Detroit…One thing DCFC does is it brings them all together and really creates a path for bringing people together, and to have this sort of centered in Hamtramck now and around this iconic stadium at Keyworth, it’s a wonderful institution and it's a great way to think about the new future for Detroit.
Silke-Maria: I gotta add, I grew up with soccer in Germany so it’s the only sport I really understand, right, where I feel like I can tell who’s good and who’s not so great. They’re not so great, but the culture they have built around the club I think is really quite wonderful. Their fans are a little crazed, they have a fan club called the Northern Guard – which sounds a little fishy, but they’re actually completely wonderful even though slightly insane people. So there’s always multi-colored smoke machines, there's always rainbow flags, there’s always ‘FUCK MLS’ flags, so it’s a kind of European but not right-wing crazed soccer atmosphere, which I think is very lovely. The closest model I think in Europe would be FC St. Pauli, which also understands itself to be a left-wing club with a very strong and engaged and, again, slightly insane fan base. So if you go to a DCFC game it’s a festival. There’s a liturgy of taunting the enemy, there’s Slows BBQ you can eat, there's margaritas you can drink along with Stroh’s beer. It’s kind of what we Germans used to call a Gesamtkunstwerk, it appeals to all the senses.
Brenda: But please tell me they’re gonna have Vernor’s! Just as a…Do you have Vernor’s?
Silke-Maria: Of course they have Vernor’s, and they have really nice Polish kielbasa.
Brenda: Well I’m a vegetarian, but the Vernor’s’ll work.
Silke-Maria: You must come and visit us!
Brenda: I know, I must. I must.
Stefan: Yeah, definitely. Come see a game, come to a game.
Brenda: Well on behalf of Burn It All Down I wanna congratulate both of you on this new book which is truly fantastic, and if you’re interested in Detroit – which you all better be! – it is a wonderful read. It’s called City of Champions: A History of Triumph and Defeat in Detroit. I think that given what's happened this past week there’s not a better time to run out [laughs] and get yourself a copy at The New Press. Thank you both so much for being here, it was a real pleasure.
Silke-Maria: Thank you, this was great!
Stefan: Thank you for having us.
Silke-Maria: What a pleasure to talk to a Detroiter about this book. That’s really fantastic, thank you.
Stefan: Thank you.