SPORT > The dutiful game

Adolf Hitler went to see what was probably his first football match during the Berlin Olympics of 1936. He had meant to attend the rowing at Gronau, but Albert Forster, the Nazi chief of Danzig, had persuaded him to come and watch Germany thrash little Norway instead. Joseph Goebbels, who watched with Hitler, would write: “The Fuhrer is very excited, I can barely contain myself. A real bath of nerves. The crowd rages. A battle like never before. The game as mass suggestion.”

But to Forster’s mortification, Germany lost 2-0. “Not fully deserved,” Goebbels noted. Hitler never saw a football match again. Only after his era did the German football team become an emblem of the German nation. The current team is a national joke, and yet as the country prepares to host this summer’s World Cup, football still helps define the idea of Germany.

Football took off in Germany thanks to the first world war. The troops on the western front played for relaxation and after the armistice they took the game home with them. But the German football team long remained poor. This continued even when Sepp Herberger became Reichstrainer of the national team in 1937, with a swastika on his tracksuit. He would keep the job for 27 years and practically invent German football, yet the 1938 World Cup in France, his first in charge, was a disaster. “Sixty million Germans will play in Paris!” the Nazi newspaper Volkischer Beobachter had trumpeted. After the Germans were swiftly knocked out by Switzerland, Zurich Sport teased: “So 60 million Germans were playing. We only needed 11 footballers.”


It summed up the bad luck the Nazis had with football. They never got used to the game’s uncertainty. After another defeat to Switzerland on Hitler’s birthday in 1941, Goebbels wrote: “Definitely no sporting exchanges when the result is the least bit unpredictable.”


Yet during the war the German team continued playing internationals. Albert Sing, who played in Germany’s last eight wartime matches between April and November 1942, remembers the pressure. It wasn’t so much that the Nazis demanded victory, Sing told me when I visited him in his retirement village in Switzerland, as the fact that the players knew what would happen if they played badly and were dropped from the squad. “You’d go to the front,” he laughed. And anyone sent to the Eastern front in 1942 would very probably die.


In the end the players were sent to the front after beating Slovakia 5-2. This was partly to pacify the mothers who had lost their sons and were asking why others were swanning about playing football. “A month after the dissolution of the team two players were dead, Urban and Klingler,” recalled Sing. Klingler had scored a hat-trick against Slovakia.


Football disappointed the Nazis, yet it was never that important to them, explains Wolfram Pyta, professor of history at Stuttgart University, in a wonderful essay on German football. The Nazi idea of the German nation revolved around soldiers. They were the national heroes. Footballers were scarcely relevant, Pyta says.


The former US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, spent his childhood in Nuremberg and, like many German boys in the 1930s became a football nut, though a contemporary remembers him as a terrible player. In a famous essay on football and politics written before the 1986 World Cup, Kissinger explains that German football entered the postwar era without a clear heritage. It had never been particularly good, and the national team never very significant.


That changed one Sunday in July 1954 when West Germany beat Hungary in Bern, Switzerland to win the World Cup. The Germans were captained by a former paratrooper, Fritz Walter, and coached by Herberger, now divested of swastika. The match was like a movie long before The Miracle of Bern became the top-grossing film in Germany in 2003. The Hungarians, unbeaten for years, went 2-0 up after only eight minutes, but the Germans drew level in the next 10, and scored the winner six minutes from time. There were then only about 40,000 television sets in Germany, so tens of millions of people on both sides of the Wall listened to the game on the radio. Many had never heard a football match before. The final whoops of the radio commentator Herbert Zimmermann - “Aus [”over”]! Aus! Aus! Aus! The game is over. Germany is world champion!” - entered the national memory.


An 11-year-old pastor’s son named Friedrich Christian Delius listened to the game that day. Later he wrote a novel called The Sunday I Became World Champion. “I still feel a personal, speechless feeling of victory,” Delius explained, “and I am not alone. For us children the victory was a liberation, perhaps because our fathers, who had survived the war, could finally permit themselves to appear more relaxed and happy.”


Every German of a certain age now has a story of that day. When I asked Bernd Holzenbein whether playing for the German team that won the World Cup in 1974 had been the highlight of his life, he replied: “Just like everyone I saw the final of ‘54, as a small boy, on the only television set within a radius of perhaps 10 kilometres. Those players were my idols. I devoured Fritz Walter’s books. 1954 was a symbol of German resurrection. 1974 was less important.”


No doubt the significance of Bern has become stylised in the retelling, particularly in the 1990s when Germans began digging up the happier bits of their recent history, but something momentous did happen that day. The phrase associated with it is, “Wir sind wieder wer” (We are someone again). Finally postwar Germans could be proud of Germany. Yet how could the national team come from almost nowhere to captivate the nation? Pyta says it’s because the country had lost all other national symbols. The flag, anthem, militarism and past heroes had been discarded. Germany was the first nation-state without public nationalism - until that Sunday in Bern. Pyta goes so far as to call that match “the founding myth” of the Federal Republic.


The victory became a clunky dance between the new and old Germanys. All over Germany, when the tune of the national anthem was played to celebrate victory, crowds sang the forbidden lines, “Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles”. Bavarian radio broke off its live coverage of the team’s victory celebrations in a Munich beer cellar after the president of the German Football Federation, Peco Bauwens, began a eulogy to the “Fuhrerprinzip” (the Nazi idea of leadership).


And yet a new kind of German nationalism was born that day. Germans could now unite, in a quieter low-key postwar way, around their football team. Besides the D-Mark it was the one national symbol they were permitted.


Many artists contemplating postwar Germany turned naturally to Bern. Subversive filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder used it in the magnificent finale of The Marriage of Maria Braun. Maria, a dance-hall courtesan turned successful postwar businesswoman, blows herself up in her mansion by lighting a cigarette in the gas oven, while from the wireless set behind her Zimmermann celebrates German victory: “Aus! Aus! Aus! Aus!” To Fassbinder, any German resurrection was suspect.


Gunter Grass, Germany’s Nobel Prize- winning novelist, later included the Bern match in his collection My Century. “What would have happened to German football,” muses Grass’s character, if Hungary’s late equaliser had not been disallowed for offside, “and we had again left the field defeated rather than as world champions... “


The answer is that the German football team might never have become such a symbol of Germany. This could have happened: the national teams of Italy, Spain, France and Russia don’t have nearly the following that Germany’s does. The German team won the World Cup again in 1974 and 1990, yet it never quite escaped the shadow of Herberger. After the war he had decorated his house with pictures of the Christian Democrat chancellor Ludwig Erhard and his favourite Social Democrat politician Herbert Wehner, and continued to coach Germany until 1964. He then handed over to his anointed successor Helmut Schon, who had played for Germany under him in the Nazi years. Schon kept the job until 1978, when he handed over to his anointed successor Jupp Derwall. In other words, there was a long continuity in the era that had begun with Herberger in 1937.


This mattered because the German style of play even today remains the lovechild of Herberger and Nazism. The way a country plays football is often said to reflect enduring national characteristics, but in fact it can be suddenly created. Before Nazism, the Germans seem to have played a soft, slow and skilful football. Then they were subjected to 12 years of rhetoric about war, valour, strength and above all Kampf, a word so central to the Nazi mind that Hitler used it in the title of his autobiography. Kampf literally means “struggle”, but even before Nazism the German word was used with far greater frequency than the English one. A battle was a Kampf, any attempt to do anything difficult was a Kampf, and the Nazis often described life itself as a Kampf (often a Kampf for existence). During the war the nation’s press was filled each day with the manly sacrifices of the Kampfer at the front.


The word was also obsessively overused in German football during the Nazi years. A match was a Kampf, a battling footballer a Kampfer, and to play in a battling manner was kampferisch. After Germany lost to Sweden in 1941, Herberger noted: “The forwards are too soft! No Kampfer!! Against Sweden one can only win with strength and Kampf, speed and hardness!!”


Men in German football imbibed this sort of talk for 12 years. Here is Fritz Walter writing about a wartime game between his air force team, the Red Hunters, and a Cologne side: “Both goalkeepers are under constant fire... The Hunters’ defenders... defuse the dangerous projectiles. Leine’s ‘bomb’ [a hard shot] whizzes narrowly past the post... The men of Cologne carried their hopes of victory to the grave.” Many match reports of the Nazi era read like this. Aspiring German players learned that soldierly virtues were valued most. When Walter joined the army he received a letter from Herberger saying “A good footballer is also a good soldier!” The Nazi atmosphere inevitably made the German team’s style more aggressive and kampferisch.


Germany’s postwar leaders tried to eradicate the cult of the soldier. The army was all but abolished, references to dead Kampfer frowned upon, and the word “Kampf” itself began fading from the collective vocabulary. But long-established cults don’t suddenly disappear. Moreover, Herberger was still running the national team, and he perpetuated Kampffussball. He won in Bern with a team of Kampfer who defeated the more skilful Hungarians in the mud (the image of the trenches of the Great War escaped few observers).


The German game remains characterised by Kampf, strength and never giving up. Generations of the country’s footballers have been raised in a style of play set under Hitler. The military antecedents of this style are now forgotten, and would be considered an embarrassment if remembered, but they live on in players’ nicknames. The great striker Gerd Muller was “der Bomber”, any decent playmaker is a “Feldmarschall”, and Franz Beckenbauer, greatest German footballer of all, was “der Kaiser” - monarch and soldier in one. This soldierly tradition disappeared from German life but perpetuated itself in football, simply because in football nobody ever felt the need to eradicate it.


But Herberger didn’t build a great tradition on Kampf alone. He set a perfectionist tone that survived until the 1990s. A whiff of farce clings to almost every England manager, but in Germany, as the Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper once noted, manager of the national team has always been “a title that rings with respect, rather like head of Deutsche Bank or president of the Constitutional Court”. The German team was an institution with its own initiation rites. In the Nazi years, a novice international would be greeted with a practice known as the “Holy Ghost”, which seems to have consisted of the whole team pulling down his trousers and smacking him on the bottom.


The German team stood for a standard of excellence. True, there was booze, poker and illicit sex (in 1980 a Montevideo prostitute was asked at gunpoint to hand back $100, the amount by which she was judged to have overcharged a player) and players were also always squabbling. But that was the consequence of throwing together driven personalities. Everyone - the manager, the press, the players - demanded excellence. The German habit of scoring in the last minute, playing worse but winning, and winning on penalties, were nothing to do with luck but with concentration and drive. Striving to meet the standard of excellence, nobodies won World Cup medals.


The world championships of 1954, 1974 and 1990 were milestones in German nationhood. Each was celebrated on both sides of the German border. A few fans in East Germany even travelled to West Germany’s games whenever the team ventured behind the Iron Curtain. One of them was Helmut Klopfleisch. The country’s secret police, the Stasi, sparing no expense, would go with them. “K., by his behaviour at the People’s Republic of Bulgaria vs. the Federal Republic of Germany, has significantly damaged the international reputation of the GDR,” an agent reports sadly in a note in Klopfleisch’s thick file. The agent mentions a number of other football dissidents who likewise blotted East Germany’s noble reputation. In 1989 Klopfleisch was expelled from East Germany. He told me: “I spent 41 years of my life in the GDR, and now it feels like wasted time, though we lived then, and had fun sometimes. And, you know, it was a real consolation that West Germany were so successful. They always beat eastern teams. That meant a lot to us.”


It meant a lot to millions of Germans. Yet most of them expressed their pride quietly. When I asked Lothar Matthaus, who has played the most games for Germany, whether it moved him to represent Germany, he said: “It’s an honour to represent a whole country, such a big country where so many people play football. I don’t feel any more than that.” Germans of Matthaus’s age (born in 1961) rarely do nationalism. Pyta describes watching a German team during the national anthem before a match: “Not one moved his lips to sing along.” Most were not familiar with the third line of “Das Lied der Deutschen”.


These German football teams traumatised their neighbours. The worst memory in French football history is the defeat to Germany in the semi-final of the World Cup of 1982. A recent French documentary about the match featured the now middle-aged French players standing around in their civvies on the fateful field in Seville re-enacting the goals.


The worst Dutch football memory is the lost World Cup final of 1974, recently mourned in a bestselling book. The worst English memories are probably the defeats to Germany in 1970, 1990 and 1996, summed up by the phrase “Thirty years of hurt” in the English football hymn “Football’s Coming Home”.


For years, fear of the German football team was intertwined with fear of Germany. The country was the largest in Europe, its economy wouldn’t stop growing, and who knew when it would next start a war? That fear prompted Margaret Thatcher and Francois Mitterrand to try to block German reunification after 1989. Germany’s victory in the 1990 World Cup seemed of a piece with its general dominance.


I came to live in Berlin as a student in September 1990. A week later, on the evening of October 3, I wandered down the Unter den Linden in Berlin to see Germans celebrating reunification. The country was about to become a superpower. Franz Beckenbauer, Germany’s victorious manager that summer, had said that with East German players about to become eligible, the national team would be “invincible for years to come”. The Unter den Linden was full that night, but apart from a few East Germans downing champagne, most people were wandering around quietly too. Like me, they seemed to be just looking. Walking down the most pompous boulevard of an empire on the night of its greatest glory, you seldom realise that this is the moment that the empire starts to collapse.


Since then Germany has become a country with a stagnant economy, a skeleton army, and a laughable football team. Germany has not won a prize or even a European Championship match since 1996. It has not beaten a front-rank nation since defeating England at Wembley in 2000. Having sufficed with two managers from 1937 to 1978, Germany has been through so many recently that in 2004 Spiegel magazine printed an application form for its readers to send in: “You want to manage the German national team? No problem!” The job went to the former German international Jurgen Klinsmann. He has not only continued losing while living in California, but also intends to get rid of the legendary German white shirts with the black eagle, thus stripping the team of all remaining mystique.


The German decline is mind-boggling for a country of 82 million people with three World Cups in the cupboard and whose football federation claims to be the largest sports body on earth with 6.3 million members. It can only be explained by the loss of Germany’s competitive advantage: other countries discovered Kampf.


Herberger made the Germans the fittest and hardest-working footballers on earth. But later their rivals began looking after their bodies: British footballers cut down on the beer, the French began to tackle, and big Italian clubs now have medicine cabinets the size of small hospitals. It then emerged that the west Germans could not compete on technique or grace. “Germans dance like refrigerators,” lamented the team’s then coach, Berti Vogts, in 1998. By far the most skilful player in the current side, Michael Ballack, is not by chance an east German. Ballack was raised under the old Communist system in Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz) where he was forced to do daily repetitive drills using both feet. It paid off.


The other players are so poor that Germany entered the last World Cup as perhaps the first team in history built around a goalkeeper, Oliver Kahn. They have now slipped to 22nd in football’s world rankings, though looking on the bright side, as Klinsmann always does, they still remain well ahead of American Samoa in 205th place. And in a generation’s time, with Germany’s collapsing birthrate, 22nd place will seem quite commendable.


The Germans have learned to laugh at their team. They have mastered the ironic self-flagellation that used to be an English speciality. The German establishment, too, seems to accept the team’s collapse. It is not seeking victory in the coming World Cup. German football tried victory, and it only irritated the neighbours. The goal this summer is to charm them. The slogan of the World Cup is “A time to make friends”. The event’s logo is a laughing face - a “smiley”, in internet jargon. The former interior minister Otto Schily admits: “A cheerful Germany, that’s not necessarily what people associate with us.”


Meanwhile the German advertising man Sebastian Turner is running a campaign to promote Germany worldwide, called “Land of Ideas”. He told me: “Country images are extremely stable. They are probably the most stable images you can have.” But this World Cup will be the biggest media event in history, and 20,000 foreign journalists will show up in Germany, many of them without match tickets. It’s the country’s chance to remake its image. Turner explains: “The Thailands of the world don’t care much about Germany, and they are probably right. After these weeks they won’t think of Germany again.”


This summer Germany can rebrand itself as a people of smileys who invented the book, the aspirin, the Porsche, the modern football shoe and so on. But if the Germans really want to remove the last vestiges of fear of Germany, they know what to do: keep losing football matches.