So is there no new patriotism? Only a little euphoria? Or not even that? At least there’s an increase. Four years ago hardly anyone drove around with a flag on his car. “Good,” says Andrei Markovits,* who was born in Romania, grew up in Vienna, studied in New York, and is American, over a Coke after his lecture, “a World Cup at home still increases national feeling. The nation – Germany, that is – is getting special attention these days.”
Andrei Markovits says he fears every kind of nationalism. It has rarely brought about anything good. To cheer for the [local soccer] club was all right. “That’s not so atavistic,” says Markovits. But he doesn’t expect a new, nationalistic Germany. After July 9th, the emotion will be gone. “I don’t believe it will last.”
But there’s also the view that the World Cup won’t change much because so much has already changed. The great German celebration is only an expression of this change.
Supposedly, there’s a new patriotism of the heart, a love of country that shows itself in flag-waving and in chants of “Germany, Germany.” The little people, in particular, have felt that all they could expect from globalization is hardship. That’s why they’re now turning to the nation again. In this view, the elation over German successes is based on a feeling of being moved by emotion.
That feeling might exist. But anyone who’s travelling the country, who’s in the stadiums and hanging out in front of the large TV screens, comes away with the sense that the great masses simply want to celebrate. The flag or jersey is less an expression of patriotism than a desire to party. Whoever wants to join the party has to show the colors.
According to this view, the national colors are signs of belonging, but not so much to a nation as to an international party congress that is currently meeting in Germany. The good mood also contains a dose of patriotism, but that can be summoned only for one party event, namely for the games of the German team. When German soldiers set out for the Congo in the near future, there won’t be tens of thousands waving the black-red-gold flags they bought for the World Cup.
But this lightness is only possible because something has changed. You can learn this from Edgar Wolfrum, Professor of History in Heidelberg. He’s 46, that is, quite young for his job. He has shoulder-length hair and wears a striped shirt. His book Die geglückte Demokratie [The Successful Democracy], a history of the Federal Republic, was published in March.
The title itself already shows that Wolfrum is willing to cast this country in a positive light. But that doesn’t make him a cheering patriot. “I hate flags of any kind,” says Wolfrum. As for the national anthem, he says: “I actually find the stanza we have nice, but singing along? I don’t know.”
But he ventures to utter a word that is actually taboo in connection with Germany. It’s the word “proud.” “We can be proud of what we’ve accomplished,” says Edgar Wolfrum.
Meaning the leap from the Third Reich to a democracy in which institutions function in a stable manner and that strives for reconciliation and accommodation in its foreign policy. “There’s hardly a nation in the world that’s changed as much in 60 years as Germany,” says Wolfrum.
* Andrei Markovits is Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. He is the author of numerous books, including Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). At the time this article was written, he was “Visiting Professor of Soccer Studies” at the University of Dortmund – eds.
print version
return to list
previous document