So you can go ahead and wave a little black-red-gold flag without having to feel bad. And that doesn’t mean that the Third Reich is forgotten, least of all by the historian Wolfrum. It’s only natural that the German attitude towards life takes on a greater ease as more years of successful democracy go by. That doesn’t mean that there will be constant partying, but the willingness to feel good will remain.
One German player who thinks about these things is Christoph Metzelder. On Friday, he’s sitting in the ICC and talking about his feelings shortly before the start of the game. “For me the national anthem is the emotional climax of an international game,” he says, these minutes with those eleven players side by side “show that we really stick together.” How “embarrassing” it used to be when the text had to be displayed on the scoreboard [because no one knew the words] – and how intoxicating it is today when an entire stadium sings with such gusto and as loudly as in Dortmund. He couldn’t even hear the music.
These days, Christoph Metzelder is experiencing a different country and a different World Cup, different from what he had expected.
Of course, “you have to laugh sarcastically” about Bild and all the others who are eagerly working on a new or actually an old attitude and therefore heap abuse on Ballack because of his T-shirt.
He says: “People aren’t thinking in categories such as victory or defeat. They’re freeing themselves from that sort of thing and enjoying the fact that we’re here. The World Cup has detached itself from us a little bit; it’s become the great festival of many cultures, which is celebrated in a really, really great and very open way.”
What’s happened here, what’s changed? The soccer player Metzelder believes that it’s a generational question: “My generation has, after all, grown up in one of the most stable democracies in the world. We’re not forgetting the admonition of those twelve years of the Nazi era; we have it in our heads. But we can live without inhibitions and worries, and we can also play soccer that way.”
Source: Dirk Kurbjuweit et al., “Deutschland, ein Sommermärchen” [“Germany a Summer Fairy Tale”], Der Spiegel, June 19, 2006, pp. 68-81.
Translation: Thomas Dunlap
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