Germany didn't win the World Cup this year, but it did win a long battle with its own low self-esteem, writes Derek Scally in Berlin
The 2006 World Cup in Germany comes to a close tomorrow after a month of surprises. The Argentinians and Brazilians will never forget getting knocked out in the quarter finals. The French side romped through to the final, proving wrong everyone who wrote them off as too old. But the greatest surprise of this World Cup was that sprung by the Germans, on themselves and two million visitors.
For four glorious weeks, Germany partied like it was 1989. In hindsight, the fall of the Berlin Wall was really a private function in the public eye, a reconciliation of estranged German family members with the world as eyewitness. The World Cup 2006 was a month-long Love Parade, a party where literally everyone was invited - not just ticketholders - and two interesting moments collided: Germans learned to stop worrying and love Germany, and the rest of the world realised that it didn't know Germany at all, but was now awfully glad it did.
For centuries, Germans have travelled the world looking for themselves. That need to travel only grew in the post-war years after Nazi ideology contaminated the idea of national pride and identity. But in 2006, six decades after the Nazis were defeated in the war they unleashed on the world, the German nation finally found itself: at home.
There were signs something interesting was happening in the immediate days after Germany's opening match victory. My moment of clarity came in the most unlikely of places: a makeshift nightclub in a disused public swimming-pool in the former East Berlin. A small crowd of Germans and visitors were dancing into the wee hours when the too-cool-for-words DJs pulled out German flags from beneath the turntables and started waving them in time to the music.
Until now, the only people who normally waved flags in Germany outside football matches were a tiny group of skinheads with heads full of resentment where their brains should be. And yet here were two DJs, the kind of people who like to give the impression that they set trends rather than follow them, getting a huge cheer from the crowd for a spontaneous show of what seemed to be pride. Within days the entire country was floating, blissfully, on a rippling sea of black, red and gold. Flag companies worked around the clock but still couldn't meet the demand.
"It's nice that I'm no longer the only person with flags on my car," joked President Horst Köhler.
Those who couldn't lay their hands on a flag could wear one of the 15 million German flag temporary tattoos given away by the newspaper Bild. The streets were filled with cheering, smiling, happy Germans.
"I think we always had a feeling we were cool but now we have learned it ourselves," said Markus Waitschies, a journalist friend with the Berlin tabloid BZ. The friendly World Cup fever also gave expats the feeling of having moved to another country overnight, without having packed a suitcase.
FOR THE LAST few years, Germany has been gripped by a self-perpetuating gloom of teutonic thoroughness. Flaccid economic growth and a seemingly unstoppable rise in unemployment to more than 11 per cent had become national obsessions in a country used to being top of the class. Compounding the problem was an unshakeable belief by a huge section of the German population that only the government can, should and must fix everything that's wrong.
Contradicting this belief, however, was the deep-seated German instinct to beat up instantly any politician who dares implement change - read cuts - that might improve things. The conservative media and policy wonks repeated the mantra "Deutschland ist Kaputt" for years until they had achieved their goal: chancellor Gerhard Schröder out of office and Christian Democrat (CDU) leader Angela Merkel in his place.
Improving economic indicators and a feel-good media campaign appear to have had their influence, and the mood wasn't as black as it was a year ago. But worry still overshadowed the months before the World Cup: the threat of terrorism; a tidal wave of prostitutes ready to swamp the country; no-go areas in eastern Germany for black visitors; and a nasty campaign against national trainer Jürgen Klinsmann orchestrated by the tabloid newspaper Bild.
This level of pre-tournament angst makes all the sweeter the Germans' post-tournament surprise that its visitors came, saw and liked. Even though it looks like the World Cup wasn't a short-term economic bonanza for the Germany economy, a poll showed that around 90 per cent of the two million visitors were sure they will come back to Germany on holiday.
Besides the football, the country offered something for everyone: the American fans couldn't get enough of the public drinking, the English couldn't get over the legalised prostitution. Everyone was amazed at the German ability to move 50,000 fans out of a stadium and back into the city centre on public transport in half an hour. Accredited journalists were allowed travel first class anywhere on the ICE high-speed train network, hurtling around the country at 300km an hour, and for free.
But the biggest surprise was how quickly stereotypes of stiff, surly Germans were banished by the warmth of the welcome. Even the Togo national side and fans were celebrated like champions when they arrived in the town of Wangen, about as far south in Germany as you can go. The town was draped with Togo national flags for the month and the locals had organised a town festival in honour of their guests.
The friendly welcome was returned tenfold by visiting fans, giving the hosts the greatest gift of the World Cup: proof to convince even the die-hard pessimists here that the rest of the world doesn't dislike Germans. The greatest test of this was the arrival of 80,000 England fans who might otherwise never have come to Germany, in particular those who move their lips while reading "Achtung! Surrender!" tabloid headlines.
Seen from here, it's hard not to be fascinated and appalled by the minority of the English who have an obsessive-compulsive relationship with Germany, tainted with bitter envy and a lack of curiosity beyond 1945. Despite the regular kicking Germany gets in the British press, the Germans by and large have huge admiration for England and were tickled and relieved at their praise. To give them credit, the England fans behaved extremely well, particularly after the real troublemakers were weeded out and kept at home.
The greatest compliment I think I heard during the whole tournament came from an England fan after their opening match in Frankfurt. Walking down the promenade along the River Main, sun in the sky and beer in his hand, he turned to his friend and remarked: "It's f***ing marvellous here, innit?" Despite fears to the contrary, the huge majority of England fans got on well with German fans and with the German police. When dozens of fans starting jumping into the river off a Frankfurt bridge one night, a German policewoman hollered over a bullhorn in Schwarzenegger-accented English: "Dear Fans. Stop jumping into the river. It's f**king stupid." Her Terminator-style intervention amused the England fans no end and they actually stopped jumping.
THE POLICE WERE the off-field heroes of the tournament, standing around in bulky uniforms in 30-degree heat, tirelessly helping fans with directions, reuniting lost children with parents and even helping fans fix their face-paint and headgear. Amid all this goodwill, it seemed beyond cliche that, of all the visitors I met in the last month in Germany, the only person to mention the war - three times in one evening, in fact - was a Daily Telegraph journalist over to cover the tournament. It was his first time to Germany and it was clear he was bowled over by it all. When he raved about the consistently sunny days over the last month, I couldn't resist telling him with a straight face that it was what Germans still called "Führer weather".
Away from the fans and flags, though, many German intellectuals developed a double dose of stomach ache thanks to the World Cup crowds and the burst of patriotism that came with it. While hundreds of England fans streamed to the former Nazi parade grounds in Nuremberg - and had to be ordered by police to stop giving Hitler salutes - German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk said he was reminded of what Thomas Mann described as the "demonic territory" of mass rallies.
"We are scalded children since we experienced that collective exhilaration can always be the product of a certain political stage direction," he told Der Spiegel magazine. "Emotional liturgies like this are created using particular rules. Saturday afternoon entertainment and the will for war are psychological neighbours." For Germans, the exhilaration of supporting the national team has served as an emotional valve in the last decades. Of course, winning the World Cup regularly helps too: the 1954 win is hailed to this day in Germany as the "Miracle of Bern" that gave Germans the sense that they were somebodies once more after a decade living as pariahs.
But bringing the world of football to Germany was always going to force the country to address the riddle: how can we celebrate the World Cup if we can't celebrate ourselves? West Germany adapted to the abnormal normality of its shattered postwar relationship to nationalism, reflected in the remark of the country's third president, Gustav Heinemann, in the 1970s: "I do not 'love' any nation. I love my wife." The idea that a "normalisation" of German identity was possible or even desirable was first raised in intellectual circles in the 1980s and reared its head again in the post-unification euphoria.
But it gained momentum only in the 1990s after successive German presidents tried to put the country through a decontamination chamber by sowing the idea that a patriot loves his homeland and people, while a nationalist despises other homelands and peoples. That process culminated in the inauguration speech of president Horst Köhler two years ago when he remarked: "I love this country". This change in attitude drew applause but also boos from intellectuals who are ill at ease with this attempt to establish a new German patriotism.
'IT'S NORMAL IN a society that certain values will change over time. But what 20 years ago was the preserve of extreme right has now arrived at the heart of German society and is called 'normal'," says Prof Bernd Ternes, a sociology professor at the Free University in Berlin and in Zürich. "What happened during this World Cup is not normal, it's just the country being hustled by the media into a trivial mass democracy."
As the World Cup hype fades, a new chapter in the debate about German identity kicked off. For the rest of the country, one star will remain in the sky for German fans: Jürgen Klinsmann. The 1990 World Cup champion turned national trainer took a big chance and a huge amount of flak for putting his faith in a group of untried twentysomethings and radical, new training methods. But his energy and optimism prevailed and he emerged victorious from the tournament as well as in a long-running war with Bild, football 'Kaiser' Franz Beckenbauer and the rest of the German football critics.
After criticising, questioning and belittling his every move as trainer for the last two years, they have had to eat their words and beg publicly for him to stay on. Regardless of his decision, Jürgen Klinsmann is a national hero for achieving the near-impossible: he took the German football team out of the defensive, and brought the nation along too.
"This was a chance see that we can change, that we can shine with optimism not pessimism," says journalist Markus Waitschies. "Of course there's a question about whether things can stay this way, but it is a start."
The World Cup wagon packs up and moves on tomorrow, but it looks like the German team - and Germany itself - has a great past ahead of it.