In the
course of the current European football championship, the exclamation, “Schland,
o Schland!” can be heard and read frequently here in Germany – most commonly as
an exclamation of joy by generally younger people on Facebook – after the
German team has scored or won a game.
The word Schland was invented six years ago by
the German TV comedian and personality, Stefan Raab. Raab is a difficult
phenomenon to explain to non-Germans. He’s like a cross between Jon Stewart
(though without Stewart’s absolutely biting political side) and Conan O’Brien,
and is immensely popular, particularly with people between fifteen and thirty
five. From his beginnings as a clown with an MTV-clone in the early nineties,
he has become involved in all kinds of media projects, including a number of
attempts at the Eurovision Song Contest, which his protégée, Lena Meyer-Landrut,
won with the song “Satellite” in 2010.
In the
course of the World Cup in Germany
in 2006, Raab coined Schland as an
abbreviation for Deutschland, as
spoken by a drunk. When Meyer-Landrut won the Eurovision four years later, a
student group from Münster, who called themselves Uwu Lena, covered her song in
a spoof version as a statement of national pride in the German team playing at
that year’s World Cup in South Africa. They replaced Lena’s
lyrics “Love, o Love,” with “Schland, o Schland,” and landed a surprise hit.
All right,
so now I’ve presented you with a load of trivia about German pop culture and
you’re starting to wonder about where I’m going with all this. Actually, I see
it as exemplary for the development of a new kind of national identity in Germany – an identity
of a new generation which has finally managed to liberate itself both from the
abomination of megalomanic Nazi racism and the cringing, ashamed self-doubt of
the post-war generations.
I’ve lived
in Germany
for over a quarter of a century now. In many respects I feel completely at home
here, yet there is a part of me which clings to my essential Irishness, that
part which refuses to apply for German citizenship (though I would be entitled
to do so), that part which still chooses to see myself as an outsider, an
observer of the culture in which I today probably feel more comfortable, if I am
to be completely honest, than in the Ireland I left in my mid-twenties. It is a
Germany
which – in common with most Western European countries – is becoming ever more
multi-racial and multi-cultural, even if this process is (also in common with
most Western European countries) accompanied by persistent teething troubles. Certainly
there are nationalities and cultures which contain significant proportions who
have major problems with integration into modern western societies
(particularly those with an Islamic component), but the statistics now claim
that nearly a third of all those living in Germany today have a migrant
background of some kind, and in many areas the majority of children being born
have migrant roots. If you look at the German national football team currently
competing in the European Championship, five of the eleven players at the
beginning of each game up to now have had a migrant background of some kind.
I’m back to
football again. And this is no accident, for – in a very strange way – football
has been one of the major catalysts for the formation of this new German
identity.
By football
I mean, of course, soccer – in common with most of the world. Sport seems to be
an area in which the USA
travels a different road. America
may cling to that strange ritual involving quarterbacks, line-outs, touchdowns
and other incomprehensible terms surrounding what seems to be some arcane form
of rugby; most of the rest of the globe regards it as a weird eccentricity. And
as for baseball … well, there’s no accounting for tastes, I suppose.
For
Germans, at any rate, football (soccer) is very definitely a part of the
national soul, and an important one at that. It is a generally accepted fact
that the Football God moves in mysterious ways which cannot be divined by his
countless millions of worshippers worldwide, but, in the case of Germany,
football has played a significant role in the history of a country trying to
redefine its national identity in the wake of the indescribable catastrophe of
Nazism.
In 1954,
the German Federal Republic
(then in its initial West German iteration) was in its infancy, and very much
under probation. The decision to grant a generous peace, to allow a rebuilding
of Germany was controversial; while the American line, championed above all by
Secretary of State George Marshall, prevailed, there were many among the allies
(especially in France) who would have preferred to see Germany permanently
politically and economically annihilated. And most Germans themselves were
deeply traumatised; after having followed the ghastly Nazi chimera for over
twelve years, they were profoundly defeated, dazed with guilt, uncertain as to
their capabilities regarding the future, insecure about their very identity. Millions
had died, millions more been made homeless and turned into refugees, hundreds
of thousands of young men had disappeared as prisoners-of-war into the Soviet
gulags. Numb, they had started to tidy up the rubble and take refuge in two of
their most familiar qualities, their ability to work hard and organise well.
The result was the beginning of the Wirtschaftswunder,
the Economic Miracle.
As part of
the post-war normalisation, a German team travelled to the World Cup in Bern in 1954. Against all
expectations, they reached the final and defeated the highly fancied Hungarians
3-2. The Miracle of Bern became one of the defining moments of the fragile new
(West) German identity. Suddenly, nine years after the end of the war, it
became possible to be momentarily proud to be German. In the midst of all the
guilty confusion there was an instance where there was a collective feeling of
national oneness, one that was allowed,
legitimate. It was a signal that things could move on, that the past – while
not forgotten, never to be forgotten – could perhaps be surmounted; that
whatever it meant to be German need not be exclusively, definitively and
eternally defined by jackboots and swastikas, by fanaticism and Auschwitz – by shame.
It was, of
course, only football. But football can be a lot – a channel where national
pride, competitiveness, the innate, almost crazy human impulse to prove one’s
group/clan/tribe/nation to be and be recognised to be the best, the greatest,
can be ritualised, played out and expressed in a way in which nobody is hurt,
exploited, made homeless, enslaved or killed. In the words of Peter Gabriel,
“games without frontiers, war without tears.” In 1954, balsam for the
traumatised German soul.
Thirty-six
years later, in a period of less than a year, the post-war European (and world)
settlement, stabilised and set in a concrete balance of fear between two blocs
was swept away. In a historically unprecedented peaceful revolution, the
hegemony of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe had basically dissolved and
even in the USSR
the Soviet system was winding itself up. The most concrete symbol of the Iron
Curtain, the Berlin Wall, had been torn down and the reunification of the
divided Germany
had been agreed and was in the last stages of preparation.
1990 was
once more a World Cup year and in Rome West Germany, playing in their final
tournament before the accession of the GDR to the federal union established by
the western allies in their zones of control after the war, once more became
the world champions. Those were months of euphoria in Europe, and especially in
Germany,
where anything seemed possible, where everything seemed positive. Germany winning
the world cup appeared, as it happened, to be almost inevitable, the Football
God for once in accord with all the other portents and tendencies of history.
The icing on the cake, the unity of heaven and earth.
Yet 1990
also marked the end of an era. The World Cup of that year was the last major
global event in which West Germany
appeared as a separate entity. It was not only the GDR which disappeared;
though formally the states making up the former territory of East Germany
simply joined the already existing Federal Republic of Germany, in fact this
accession factually also meant the end of that entity in which Germans had
proved that they could be good European democrats, what German historians today
are increasingly beginning to call the Bonn
Republic. Seen from this aspect, the victory of the West German team in the
1990 World Cup can be regarded as a final accolade, a way of proclaiming to a
brave new world, “Mission Accomplished!”
These brave
new world moments tend not to last. In the euphoria of unification, the elder
statesman, Willi Brandt proclaimed, “Now let what belongs together grow
together!” That growing together has not always been an easy process,
economically, socially, culturally, and it is by no means complete. But in 2006
an event occurred which became a moment of coalescence, when a new kind of
German identity first expressed itself.
In the
months before the World Cup began in Germany there was a lot of the
usual public worrying about the whole affair. No nation or culture (except
possibly the Jews – that itself some kind of statement about the complex,
close, fateful relationship between these two cultures) is as good at public
worrying as the Germans. The opening ceremony had to be completely cancelled
because of a row. There were warnings about possible dangers for blacks and orientals
in particular areas of the former East Germany, because of neo-Nazi
gangs.
And then
the competition started and a month-long spontaneous party broke out. For the
first time since the war, Germans started waving their flags, decorating their
cars and themselves in the national colours of black, red and gold, simply
cheering the fact that they were German – just as the visitors from all over
the world were cheering the fact that they were Italian, Portuguese, Brazilian,
Australian. The German team reached the semi-finals, with every game being
watched by literally millions in public viewings in the major squares of every
German city. The event became known as the Sommermärchen,
the Summer Fairy Tale.
The
phenomenon has been repeated biannually ever since, whenever the European
Championships or the World Cup take place. And it has become even more than
just a celebration of being German; the other nationals resident in Germany
also celebrate their identities and
German towns become a multicoloured carpet of German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese,
Croatian and Turkish flags – with good-natured rivalry and ribbing between the
various nationalities.
Sixty years
after the end of the war, young Germans finally seem to have become comfortable
with their own identity – and the vehicle they choose to express it is
football.
They could
do worse.
* * *
This is
all, of course, a very particular view. It is true but it is not the whole
truth, for reality is more complex. Nationalism, in all its expressions, has a
dubious pedigree and is, arguably, the most destructive ideology the world has
seen in the past two hundred years. And German economic nationalism is a major
component in the current complex of financial and economic problems currently
facing Europe.
In an ideal
world, I would hope we could go beyond those bloody, sterile, exclusivist
expressions of nationality which have so shaped and malformed the world in the
past centuries, to a more inclusive, sharing vision of our common solidarity on
this planet which so many of us share. More and more thinking Europeans are
beginning to see these deeper questions as a positive possibility resulting
from the current Euro debt crisis. (Angela Merkel, the current German chancellor,
seems unfortunately completely ignorant of these deeper questions.) But the
need to belong, to feel part of a nation, and to express that identity seems to
be very deeply rooted in us – probably part of our primate hard-wiring. And,
for as long as a deeper feeling of fundamental human solidarity remains in a
(hopefully growing) state of development, I’m prepared to see those expressions
of nationalism like the German one I’ve described here as basically positive. Better
by far than pogroms, marching armies and terrorist bombs anyway.
Pictures retrieved from:
