This Saturday, for those interested in such things, I’ll be watching a Teutonic festival of football. Two German Titans of the game, namely Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund, descend onto Wembley for the first ever all-German Champions League final.
What is interesting to witness is the reaction from our press towards what would have been coined by certain newspapers in the past as “an invasion". It seems to me that we are starting to love our German cousins and what in the past (so excruciatingly highlighted in football) was a blatant antipathy towards Germany, has melted into an almost gooey tenderness.
As an Englishman married to a German, the somewhat stiff relationship between our two nations has often amused me.
The great thing is our slight frostiness towards all things Germanic (Ok, everyone loves a good beerfest, and boy do we love those autos.) is melting away, and Germans see that in these wobbly economic times, the Brits are fairly reliable partners even if we do sometimes run upstairs to our bedroom and slam the door like an hormonal teenager when it comes to Europe.
Wembley hosting this year’s final has put our relationship under the microscope for a few days (At least in the back page articles) and it has been interesting to gauge the tone of not just the broadsheets but the red-tops too. “The Germans are coming”, “the towels are already down”, but for the first time we as a nation are happy to say “wilkommen”.
Lets face it, we are not so different. The English are a pick-and-mix nation but a lot of us would consider ourselves Anglo Saxon. The British Royal Family, the last sinuous connection to our more illustrious past, is itself coursing with German blood.
The differences between our two nations are many and varied. And yet, there is a cultural DNA that we share and understand. A lot of it is down to language. I certainly feel more affinity with German than with French (despite the mind numbing declensions), but it’s more to do with a feeling of familiarity. When I visit Germany, the cultural shift is not as great as with other countries. I love France, for example, precisely because it is slightly more exotic than England, not because it feels like home. I am of course making a massive generalisation, the minutiae of cultural differences between our two countries could fill libraries but despite these we do share something, perhaps like twins separated at birth, who meet and seem to know instinctively they share the same mother.
Yes, I hear you screaming about the big white elephant in the room. I have been trying not to mention the war but its difficult not to when explaining our love/hate relationship with Germany. No one reading this blog needs a history lesson, so perhaps what is more interesting is to ponder how our relationship would have developed if there had been no world wars to speak of? Would Britain and Germany have embraced each other as brother and sister? Would there have been room for both our Empires? Perhaps not.
Of course it’s impossible not to have our relationship with Germany flavoured by 20th Century events, but what’s interesting is that finally the football press have decided to put that old warhorse to sleep when mentioning German football.
In years gone by the press here would have begrudgingly accepted their talent, but swiftly reminded everyone that, well, we won the war, and who do these Germans think they are anyway? They would have commented on how coldly and ruthlessly efficient they are. Assassins of football who will, if we’re not careful, dispatch us with disdainful insouciance. “Football is a game played by 22 men for ninety minutes and in the end the Germans win” to quote Gary Linekar. (Well I suppose this time we can be assured of that!) But, they cry, is it really entertainment? No, give us a Brazil any day.
This time I have noticed real respect and admiration coming from English football supporters, and even more bizarrely, the English press* towards these two teams.
As we all love an underdog here most of us will be rooting for Borussia Dortmund, who play a lovely expansive and high tempo game of football, have a noisy and passionate following, and own a steeply raked cauldron of a stadium that most English fans would gladly claim as their own. They also represent the industrial heartland of northern Germany, their fans are factory workers and blue collar types, echoing the working class roots of English football in Northern industrial towns such as Liverpool and Manchester. We understand the demographic landscape.
But in all honesty we have been purring over the lavishly skilled and powerfully gifted Bavarian Motor Works that is, and forgive me for labouring the metaphor here, perhaps the ultimate footballing machine. Bayern Munich are clearly the best team in the world now, having overcome the achingly beautiful but ultimately fragile Barcelona. The interesting thing about that is that Bayern beat them at their own game, just more powerfully and with a quicker and more efficient engine.
Let’s not hide from the truth; we are sometimes quite understandably jealous as a nation of how things are done in Germany. We perhaps accuse them of more than a little arrogance. But a flourishing Germany is good for Europe, and we should be celebrating their prodigious industry. And let’s not forget, Germans know how to throw a party.
When the 2006 World Cup was held there, they created a footballing fiesta of a type that the English FA would have had a hard time fitting into its dry corporate blueprint. It was the first world cup to allow every fan in the home nation to come to a platz in their local town and watch together on the big screen. They could drink beer. They didn't charge the earth for tickets (this is true of the Bundesliga too) nor make them impossible to get hold of.
The 2006 World cup saw Germany for the first time wave its flag without apology. You could almost hear the collective sigh of relief as a united Germany sang their national anthem with gusto and pride, and we applauded. Once England had been duly and inevitably dispatched at the quarter final stage, was I alone in wishing Germany on against the Italians? Perhaps, looking back, it was because Germany failed so heartbreakingly close to a final on home soil that we cared. It made them so English-like in defeat.
This leads me to a very important difference in our two nations: Germans just don’t feel the need to apologise about winning, whereas we always seem to feel a little uncomfortable with a triumph. We can’t seem to shuffle of this tall poppy syndrome. Manchester United, for example, are hated mostly because of their serial winning streak. They have become “arrogant” by continuously winning. It’s as if we feel that consistently being on top is a little unnecessary. One or two triumphs are fine, but really, twelve or thirteen? That’s taking the mick isn’t it? Let some other poor chap have a chance.
This is the kind of collective sensibility that Germans have a hard time relating to. It’s also what makes the British sense of humour so popular. We’re not afraid to have a pop at ourselves, and we love to wallow in our national failings and actually pride ourselves in them. It’s what makes us charming. Germans get this but find it a bit silly.
To be honest, Germans never really had a problem with us, only with the stubbornness we have in this country to accept change and embrace new and innovative ways of doing things. It leaves them perplexed. I tend to agree with the Germans on this. We are very slow to adapt to a new way of doing things. This has affected our industry, as well as our football. It’s simple. When we won the world Cup in 1966, instead of using it as a Launchpad and creating a dynasty of winning football teams, we sat on our laurels and slowly reverted back to mediocrity. We refused to evolve our style of play during the seventies and eighties and consequently fell behind other nations, but somehow carried the belief that our way was still the best. Is this not arrogance?
Now let’s look at Germany. After the great failure of Euro 2000, where for the first time they failed to make it to the knockout stage of the tournament, what did they do? A complete overhaul of both grass roots football and their national league. As a result, new players are coming through now that play a style of football bang up to date and able to compete at the latter stages of a major tournament. The pool of young talent with a German passport is frightening.
With apologies for the simplistic footballing analogy, (I get to write about football that way!) I think seeing how Germany has enjoyed its football in the last few years, the wonderful stadiums, affordable tickets and the close relationship the clubs have with their fans has turned our heads. Our corporate football culture with its “loads ‘a money!” posturing is alienating our football fans and we can see the fun the Germans are having in their stadiums. Perhaps this time they will be serving humble pie to the corporate boxes at Wembley, and we can embrace the German way of doing things.
Now all that’s left to decide is who makes the better sausage. I’ll leave that one for another time!
*I say English press as the Scottish and Welsh have never had a problem with supporting Germany against the English football team!)
