The social and cultural history research of recent years has tellingly described the culturally constructive potentials of sports, in particular soccer. Soccer produces “cultural patterns” and “social identities”, which reach deeply into the area of memorial culture. After all, the history of numerous soccer clubs dates back to the 19th century. In Great Britain a highly differentiated sepulchral culture has developed, which even provides for the burial of deceased club members in stadiums. Clubs rich in tradition can look back on soccer history that spans several generations. This conference shall therefore deal with highly diverse spheres of remembrance:

– Remembrance policies and the cultural memory of the clubs and associations, as are pursued through honorary publications, fan initiatives, archives and museums, etc.
– Media such as photography and film, obituaries and death notices, which document, illustrate and visualize sports and team history, as well as uniform logos with the biographical data of stars and idols and websites that eternalize memorable events.
– Forms of communication such as the conversations between team-mates in the club house or restaurant starting with “Do you remember back then...?”.
– Devotional objects, trophies, awards, etc. and the trade thereof as an essential aspect of the everyday material culture of the soccer fans scene.
– Rituals for commemorating the dead on certain occasions and dates.
– Memorial sites such as war monuments, memorial stones, epitaphs, and player gravesites.
– The problem of the reliability of memories of sports results.
– The conventionalization of history as a fundamental part of the “corporate identity” of contemporary soccer clubs (“working class club”, “Jewish club” etc.), as is documented in the naming of sports facilities after old-day heroes.
– Founding history and founding myths of soccer clubs, legendary founding figures, who were with their respective teams at their very origins.
– Cemeteries for fans and players and their role in the history of the funeral industry.
– Remembrance is often subject to forgetfulness, which means that substantial research is occasionally required, for example to reconstruct the biographies of important sportspeople at that time.
– There are also attempts at intentional silencing. For example, the German National-Socialist Party (NSDAP) attempted to eliminate Jewish athletes, their names and achievements from public awareness. This remembrance policy known as “damnatio memoriae” will also be addressed.

The aim of the conference is to elaborate in depth for the first time on memorial and sepulchral culture and the trans-generational and collective integrative forces of associational soccer. It is the tenth interdisciplinary conference in the series “Dying, Death and Belief in the Hereafter”.

The conference provides for contributions of max. 30 minutes followed by 15 minutes for discussion. Working titles, max. one-page project outlines, and short CVs are to be submitted to the Swabian Academy of Irsee by 31 January 2010. The final conference program will be compiled from the proposed conference themes and published in the spring of 2010. The conference will take place from Friday through Sunday 12-14 November 2010. A publication of the conference results is planned.