New Germany almost fit to be hugged

Locker Room: We're in Potsdam, a weird little Disneyfied town where Churchill and Truman and Stalin once stood for that famous post-war photo, two of them smoking as they discussed how to carve up Europe so that Potsdam itself would become a Soviet garrison.

Myself? My business is nothing as auspicious. In the spirit of further linguistic misadventure I have just inadvertently ordered myself a plate of four raw herring and some onion-laden potato salad. Bravely I am eating it with the apparent relish of a guest at Babette's Feast.

(If we may digress from business World Cup for a moment, this miracle of the spuds and the fishes is not the worst gastronomic mishap to have occurred in the past month. This occurred at Hanover railway station one hot afternoon after an arduous day's work and another epic train journey. Your whacked correspondent took a seat in the shade of an outsized umbrella provided by the large restaurant which runs along one half the frontal width of the station. From under the umbrella he gazed out at the busy square and surveyed the menu, of which he understood very little.

Being both parched and starved he played safe and ordered a spaghetti carbonara and - deviating here from a lifelong rule of never trusting things whose names are deliberately misspelt - chose an expensive-sounding drink called a Kalifornia.

The Kalifornia was selected because from the list of ingredients he was able to divine that it contained Orangensaft, which is full of vitamin C, and Curacao, which sounded just right for a man who could just then have eaten a cao.

Order given in conversational German - 18 words is conversational, isn't it? - weary traveller sits back and surveys the world.

This philosophic reverie is brought to an alarming halt when traveller notices bystanders in the square pausing and gathering as if traveller is about to give a performance of some kind. People are grinning and look as if they are about to burst into applause.

Now from the left two waiters, both groaning like sherpas - they send out small men of course, just to heighten the comic effect - have emerged from the kitchen entrance of what we know now to be an ice-cream-only restaurant. The first waiter, on the point of collapse from carrying the weight of the thing tosses down the "spaghetti carbonara", which is in fact an alpine range of assorted ice-cream scoops covered by tendrils and pipings of frozen chocolate and cream which drape artfully over the side of a bowl in which one would normally keep a large quantity of fruit.

As if this humiliation weren't enough, his sweating comrade almost tips the table over as he plonks down what looks like the Leinster hurling trophy, except that it's made out of glass. This - this edifice - has been filled by placing an inch of orange juice at the bottom and then adding 24 inches of whipped cream and ice cream. All this comes burgeoning upward toward an orifice which erupts volcanically but camply with a cathedral dome of apricot-coloured ice cream. Large slices of melon, pineapple, mango and any other fruit you can think of cling for dear life to the rim of the vessel.

The whole effect is tastefully accentuated by the presence of an outsize cocktail umbrella, a dayglo straw the length of the port tunnel and a spoon of dimensions not dissimilar to Joe Deane's hurley.

The main square in Hanover stops its business now to see just how Lilliput caters for Gulliver. Gulliver, who is already the chief suspect in football's ongoing inquiry as to the pies and who ate the entirety of same, asks quietly for the bill to be brought.

He ostentatiously leaves a large note covering ice creams and medical expenses for the sherpas and assistant hod carriers. He stands up from the table shaking his head slowly as if to say, those darn pranksters. He disappears back into the station, there to establish a counselling centre for tourists who suffer the same experience.

End of digression. Half a column used up already. Fantastisch, as we say in Germany.)

Anyway, back to Germany. Which is where I have gone this past month. Twenty-six years ago (lordee) myself and best mate spent seven or eight action-packed days in Germany. There was some drink and some dames and between us we got beaten up by Germans seven or eight times in the course of the week. Mainly I got the thumps because I was mistaken for a Turk.

We wound up trying to flee the country (okay, small bit of melodrama; hopping on a train is what we did) and getting thrown off the Munich train in the middle of the night and in the middle of nowhere. Other people will say there must have been two sides to the story but for a quarter of a century or so I have blamed the Germans and returned only once, when it was unavoidable for work reasons and I was heavily disguised.

The month just gone past has been a quiet revelation then. No bruises apart from those received fighting for a place on the shuttle bus, no arguments, no real stories of nightmarish German intransigence.

Every country leaves its own scent on the World Cup it hosts, and Germany can be pleased with what it brought the World Cup and what the World Cup brought Germany. Nobody knows if the scenes of unbridled happiness which have enlivened the country for the past month will have an effect on life here in the years to come, but even if they don't, wasn't it nice to have a month of madness, a month with the hair down and the sink filling up and nobody even noticing the tax increases being ushered in while everyone is in party mode.

I remember in 1981, the pair of us going to Dachau one day and finding this cold awkwardness from the Germans we met along the way or asked directions from. They had nothing to say. There was nothing to say. It's almost unique in the world having these sites within your own borders which stand as eternal testimonies to your race's shame. We are used to monuments and days which celebrate ourselves.

Germany has to live with its past as has the rest of the world, but generation after generation can't go about in sackcloth.

I met a man (inevitably on a train) this month and fell to talking about that trip in 1981 and other things: the World Cup of 1974, which Germans seem to have found quite joyless and stressful. He said the first half of the century left decades of stress and guilt in German heads.

He pointed out as we swapped memories of 1974 that on the train together in 2006 we were 32 years away from that tournament. If you subtracted 32 years from 1974 you were back in 1942. And you think a football tournament leaves a legacy.

The World Cup ends in Berlin's Hauptbahnhof, which is like a festival of transience all month. Fans from everywhere, going everywhere, mingling and crossing and singing at each other. As Paul Simon said, wish I could spent my life in railway stations.

Our talent for always choosing the wrong seat on trains means we have spent a month riding through Germany backwards. It's been instructive and for the most part fun.

We queue for the last train ticket. Long story but after last night's final we were to catch the night train from Berlin to Cologne.

"Need a reservation on the ICE 2700, bitte," we say to Hans.

"You'll be lucky," says Hans. He has conversational English so we opt to continue our discourse in that tongue. We pause the learned chat as he scans the computer.

"Ah, you're lucky," he says. "One window seat. If you wanted to go on to Paris you would be in big trouble."

"Hmmm," we say, "dodged a bullet there."

"Intercity Express 2700," says Hans typing in the details. He takes my press pass, which also serves as free rail ticket for the month. (Unlike the England squad, we've had access to first-class coaches while here.)

"One window seat. I guess. Who's up at that time of night? Railway workers, I hope."

"And journalists," says Hans. "All the sad bastards."

And with a big grin he hands me back the press dangler, now useless, and the last train ticket of the month. It feels like we should hug, butthere's a long, impatient queue behind - and maybe a few games of football haven't changed Germany that much.