This Tuesday marks 85 years since the mysterious death of Matthias Sindelar, known as ‘the Mozart of soccer’a legendary Austrian attacker of the 1920s and 1930s, famous for his elegance on the field and, according to legend, for his resistance to the regime Nazi.
On January 23, 1939, Sindelar, shortly before his 36th birthday, was found dead in his bed with his girlfriend, Camilla Castagnola, of Jewish descent, who died a day later without regaining consciousness.
The autopsy indicated that it was carbon dioxide poisoning, but doubts about whether it was an accident persist to this day. The police file of the Nazi authorities disappeared.
Sindelar, like many Viennese of Czech origin, grew up at the beginning of the 20th century in the working-class neighborhood of Favoriten. He very soon showed an enormous talent for football, which he practiced whenever his job as a locksmith’s apprentice allowed it.
Starting in the 1924/25 season, Austria had a professional football league, of which Sindelar was one of its great stars. He was so popular that already in the 1920s he did advertising for brands of watches or yogurt.
The paper man
The Austria Vienna midfielder became a vintage footballer, as good at scoring goals as he was at giving assists thanks to fine technique and great vision of the game.
The fans named him “Der Papierene”something like ‘the paper man’, for his ability to get rid of his defenders with elegance and ease. It was also an allusion to his light physique.
The chronicles of the time stated that ““floated” either ““I danced” on the grass and when he had the ball the unprecedented could happen.
Sindelar’s style of play – elegant, technical and short passing – suited Austria Vienna, linked to the Jewish intelligentsia and the city’s middle class.
Sindelar was also the brain of the so-called ‘Wunderteam’ the Austrian ‘dream team’ of the 1930s, which could have played the final of the first World Cup on European soil if they had not met the host, fascist Italy, in the semi-finals in 1934.
The Austrians lost 1-0 in a match dotted with irregularities and with a goal after a foul by forward Giuseppe Meazza on the Austrian goalkeeper, according to the visitors.
The Anschluss
When Austrian football was at its best, the so-called ‘Anschluss’ arrived in 1938, the annexation of the country by Nazi Germany, with which the team and the league were dissolved and Austria Vienna, considered a “Jewish club”, intervened.
The new board prohibited club employees from greeting the dismissed Jewish president of Austria Vienna, Michl Schwarz, but Sindelar contravened that order.. “They have forbidden us to greet him, but I always will”Told him.
The footballer also refused to play with the Nazi Germany team and refused to play with the new team in the 1938 World Cup.
On the occasion of the annexation, a “fraternization match” was organized in April 1938, in which the former Austrian team faced the German national team.
Austria won 2-0. Sindelar, Austria’s captain, held a mocking celebration in front of the Nazi grandstand after scoring the first goal.
A few months later, Sindelar died. “As far as we know, an accident is most likely due to a boiler failure. “It is true that the police file disappeared.”explains Roman Horak, football historian at the University of Vienna.
“But dying in an accident is not very spectacular and some writers launched the idea that he had committed suicide because he could not stand the Nazis or even that he was murdered,” adds Horak in statements to EFE in Vienna.
A myth
“That is a myth created in the postwar period – that of the anti-Nazi Austrian patriot – at a time when Austria needed popular figures who opposed the Nazis,” points out.
After the abolition of the Austrian professional league by the Nazis, Sindelar bought in August 1938, well below market value, a café from its Jewish owner in Favoriten.
The owner of the cafe, Leopold Simon Drill, was pressured to sell his premises and ended up murdered in a concentration camp.
“It is evident that it is not very anti-fascist to buy a coffee to ‘Aryanize’ it, but that aspect was overlooked for a long time because Austria needed myths of resistance,” Horak says.
“Sindelar was a simple person, without deep political visions, and he thought he saw an opportunity in that cafe. It is true that his working-class origins marked him and that he did not like the Nazis, but it is not the anti-fascist myth that was built later.”, summarizes the historian.
Source: Gestion
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