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When the German national soccer team lines up, the national anthem plays and the cameras study their faces before kick-off, it goes without saying that the players today have very different biographies. They are united by their pride in playing for Germany and competing against the best in the world. Their heraldic animal is the black eagle that they wear on their shirts. However, the eagle, which today suggests unity, also had an exclusionary message for a long time, because the German soccer hero was thought, dreamed and worshipped as white.
The feature-length documentary SCHWARZE ADLER lets black players of the German national soccer team tell their personal stories. What path did they take before they got to where we cheer them on? What hurdles did they have to overcome? What prejudices and hostilities were they exposed to - and what was it like in the past and what is it like today? Accompanied by rarely shown archive images that are sometimes as unexpected as they are disturbing, director Torsten Körner lets different generations of players have their say in his film. From Erwin Kostedde, the first black player to make his debut for the national team in 1974, to Jimmy Hartwig and Steffi Jones, from Gerald Asamoah to Patrick Owomoyela and Cacau to Jean-Manuel Mbom: their stories not only tell of what it means to be subjected to racist hostility in front of thousands of people in the stadium and millions in front of the television. They also shed light on how spectators, the media and German society deal with the issue of racism - and how slowly, from today's perspective, something has changed in this approach in recent decades.
