What is so striking about post-WM Germany is the lull after the
storm. Less than a week after the Championship finals, everything
seemed to be back to normal on Germany's streets. Yes, there was some
public excitement about Jürgen Klinsmann's decision not to prolong
his contract as coach of the German football team, but even this
excitement quickly subsided when continuity was guaranteed: Yogi
Loew, Klinsmann's assistant for the last two years, was nominated
chief coach. One can feel, of course, a widespread satisfaction among
Germans as to the smooth and flawless organization of the games and
the absence of the much dreaded violence and tumultuous incidents
that were expected from football fans and other rowdies, mainly right-
wing extremists. Germany now looks forward to the Love Parade and St.
Christopher's Day in Berlin and goes on enjoying the fine weather,
known as _Kaiserwetter_, associated nowadays not with Kaiser Wilhelm
II but with "Kaiser" Franz Beckenbauer. Beckenbauer himself, while
describing the friendly atmosphere of the WM, made the following
statement: "This is how God would like to have his world going" ("So
stellt sich der liebe Gott die Welt vor").

The pictures that went around the world, showing cheerful Germans
costumed in the German national flag or cars ornamented with the
German colors already belong to the past, along with other
ostentatious expressions of German nationalism. Dani Cohn-Bendit
pointedly summed up the situation: The Germans, yearning for a non-
stop party, played Indians with war colors on their faces during the
WM, but when this party was over they just went on to the next one.
Coming from a land where the consumption of alcohol is limited, I was
not sure whether the intensive beer drinking around me (not
exclusively by Germans) was secondary to the "real thing"--watching
the games, or the other way round: That the games served only as an
excuse for consuming enormous quantities of beer.

The discussion revolving around the alleged danger of Germans showing
their colors during the games seems retrospectively insignificant.
The colors as well as the words of the actual German national anthem
have nothing to do with the dark pre-1945 past. Germans just looked
for a legitimate way to demonstrate allegiance to the national
collective and did it the same way as other nationals and football
fans did and usually do. "I'm not a football fan, but it feels good
to be able to demonstrate German patriotism", was the symptomatic
remark made by a woman on TV. The expression _zusammenhalten_,
togetherness, was the essence of what many Germans felt during the
WM, thus overcoming tensions between East- and West-Germans, and at
long last without feeling guilty about this sentiment. Many used the
adjective "unverkrampft" (natural) to describe their feeling.

I went to three games and observed the audience around me singing
their national anthems. Indeed the Germans seemed to sing their
"Unity and justice and freedom" with conviction, but it was nothing
compared to the way the French and even more so the Italian and
Argentinian fans sang their national anthems, with boundless
enthusiasm and devotion. Even the words "pride" and "heroes" used by
Germans in this context was harmless--referring to football players
as heroes, being proud of a football team or of the ability of
German society to organize a mega-sports-event does not necessarily
remind one of pre-1945 German _Nationalstolz_ (national pride). Or
maybe not?

One of the most impressive pictures of the Olympic games of Berln
1936, published by the Third Reich, was the one showing Jesse Owens
and Lutz Long (Owens' competitor in the long jump) sitting amiably
next to each other, black and white, "negro" and "German", smiling
into the camera, the perfect image of two buddies. The slogan used by
Goebbels for the 1936 Olympic Games was: "We call upon the youth of
the world". The Third Reich was successfully able to present itself
as a friendly host of the youth of the world, and the foreign
correspondents who reported from Berlin described a society that less
than a year earlier accepted the Nuremberg racial Laws in a
flattering manner. I do not intend to suggest an improper comparison
between 1936 and 2006, only to direct the attention to the possible
discrepancy existing between the surface and the essence of social
behavior when it comes to such events.

A still relevant and meaningful photo taken during the WM showed
German Turks cheering the German football team, including a Turkish
woman carrying a shawl with the German colors black, red, gold. This
picture defies the general impression widespread among Germans--that
the "Foreigners", especially the Turks, are against integration into
German society. After all, it was relatively easy to implement
Germany's slogan for this WM, "Zu Gast bei Freunden" ("Hosted by
friends"), as long as the foreigners who were the objects of this
friendliness were football fans, including those from Africa or Asia,
who visited Germany as tourists, not as potential habitants of this
land. It was and still is a different story when it comes to
immigrants or _Auslaender_ who wish to stay for a longer period in
Germany. Did this picture of German Turks bring about a change of
mind in Germany?

Apparently not. It is the ongoing discussion concerning the
integration of the immigrants and _Gastarbeiter_ into German society
that is indicative of the more authentic attitude of Germans towards
their nationality and towards what they consider as foreigners. Even
though it is an established fact that the immigrants contribute
immensely to the German economy (without them the welfare system may
collapse even faster) and culture, nearly a third of the autochtone
population believes that Germany invested too much in the process of
integrating newcomers. The real problem is the attitude not towards
tourists but towards those who are in Germany to stay. Here, on the
everyday level, one can observe the common reserved attitude of the
Germans towards what they consider foreign. This attitude does not
seem to be racist in the old fashioned way --it concentrates not so
much on the color of the skin or the shape of the nose of its object
but rather on cultural symbols, mainly on the German language.
Miroslav Klose, who shot five goals for the German team, came
originally from Poland and is an example of this attitude: Just
because of his imperfect German he was sent in the age of eleven to
the third instead of to the fifth class--a very common experience of
foreigners who are considered retarded only because their command of
idiomatic German is shaky. The discussion concerning this approach
reached its climax just when the WM ended. The Kanzlerin convened a
"summit conference on integration" after the SPD also made its
suggestions on the matter: The least precondition for integration
agreed upon by all political parties is the knowledge of the German
language. If one does not pass the exam the punishment will
immediately follow. Those who believe the Germans who repeatedly
proclaim that they are Europeans may wonder: as true Europeans the
Germans should have acknowledged any European language as _entre
billet_ into German society. Considering the German language as the
prerequisite for entering the European Union seems to me a stronger
proof for the persistence of old fashioned German nationalism than
waving the black-red-gold flag during the WM. By the way: As a
visitor to the stadiums I would have wished the policemen and
security personnel to be able to better communicate with us visitors
in English or in French.

On the other hand, there is one important aspect of coping with the
past and with national traditions that did not get enough public
attention, because it did not reach the average football fan--namely,
the history of German football before 1945. It is common knowledge
that Germany won the World Cup for the first time in 1954, nine years
after the demise of the Third Reich in what became known as "the
miracle of Bern". But the presidents of the DFB (German Football
Association) considered the times ripe for an effort to cope with the
history of German football before 1945, the same way as other public
and private institutions (such as the Deutsche Bank or the DFG, the
central Institute of scientific research) did. A professional
historian (Nils Havemann) has been assigned to write the history of
German football during the Third Reich, conferences concerning German
football during and before the Third Reich or the role of Jews in
German football before 1933 and their fate after 1933 were held, and
a new prize, the Julius Hirsch prize (commemorating a Jewish player
of the German national team who was murdered in Auschwitz) was set up
by the DFB. The question of collaboration with the Nazis as well as
the contribution of Jews to German football were at the center of
those conferences. Last November I was invited to speak before the
Bundestag of the DFB about these questions. The readiness of such an
organization to address this black spot in its history seems to me
more indicative of the relation between present-day German football
and nationalism than the fact that the German colors dominated the
Fan-Meile when the WM was going on.

Moshe Zimmermann
Hebrew University

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