FIFA World Cup 2006 [R]

Well done Germany

Plaudits all round for football, weather, stadiums and hosting a brilliant competition...oh yes not over yet

I want to see France win for Zidane

Why don't you just own up to the fact that you're a repressed nationalist, nimh?

I'm going to go retreat to my more peaceful conversation with political opposites on a mid-east conflict thread.

Seeing Kahn actually shed a tear will be an image that will be difficult to forget.

GERMANY'S NEW-FOUND PATRIOTISM.
Patriot Games
by Andrew Curry

Germany's World Cup aspirations ended this week in a heartbreaking loss to the Italians. While winning the championship certainly would have pleased the country's soccer fans, something more historically significant emerged from the games, something of which all Germans should be proud: a new sense of German patriotism.

In Germany, national feeling has always run either too hot or too cold, but never just right. But since the World Cup started on June 9, there's been a sudden outbreak of perfectly innocent flag-waving here. Everywhere--from streaks of face paint and Mohawk wigs to cars and apartment buildings festooned with black, red, and gold--the German tricolor has been flying. Along the city's "Fan Mile," which stretches from the Brandenburg Gate to the middle of Berlin's usually quiet Tiergarten, a sea of patriotic fans swelled with every German victory.

At first glance, this was a little unsettling. Under ordinary circumstances, flying the German flag anywhere but on top of federal buildings is looked down upon. Patriotic displays aren't quite taboo in Germany, but they are certainly politically incorrect. Perhaps for Germany, then, the best thing to come out of the 2006 World Cup may be something Americans take for granted: an understanding that it is possible to be proud of one's country without being a nationalist. [..]

Like students all over the world, Germany's post-war generation spent the '60s fighting the establishment and dragging their country's past out into the light. The often violent protests of 1968, for example, included demands that professors with Nazi ties be removed from the university system. Confronting the past forced Germans to alter the way they viewed their country, and made it difficult to be proud of being German.

In the years afterwards, the sins of the past became a constant theme in the German political and educational systems. [..] By the 1980s, Germany was the European Union's strongest supporter. For young Germans, it was much more appealing to be European than German. [..] Field trips to concentration camps were a feature in German schools; flags and the national anthem, on the other hand, were still anathema.

And so the recent flag fever has prompted a typically German round of hand wringing. One think tank suggested changing the national anthem, or at least prefacing it with a warning. Schools debated whether to forbid kids from coming to class wearing national colors. In an attempt to preserve the Berlin police force's neutrality, police officers here were ordered not to wear or fly the national colors. [..]

A few weeks before the Cup started, former government spokesman Karsten-Uwe Heye [..] warned black soccer fans to avoid the East German countryside, calling the provinces around host cities Berlin and Leipzig "no-go zones." The warning was widely discussed, and politicians pointed out that it amounted to a win for neo-Nazis looking to keep foreigners out of Germany. [..] "There is a problem, and we should talk about it," says Fuecks. "But [the] majority of people don't agree with these radicals, and there's a growing civil consciousness and awareness of the problem."

Which is why it is tempting to view the public displays patriotism as a hopeful sign. Neither nationalism nor self-loathing, the feeling here is one of pride without hate. Reports of serious fights between German and foreign fans can be counted on one hand [..]. Despite over six million visitors since the beginning of the Cup, only one serious breach of security occurred when a driver broke through crowd-control barriers last Sunday and injured almost two dozen fans.

Of course Germany has celebrated during past World Cups, but never with the patriotic outpouring--and the sense of community--of the past few weeks. In fact, Berlin probably hasn't partied this hard since the fall of the wall in 1989. That party was more a celebration of freedom than of patriotism. But Germans today can be proud of being German without forgetting or denying the past. Though Germany's flurry of flags is unlikely to outlast the World Cup, hopefully the country's new-found patriotism will.

Andrew Curry is a Fulbright Journalism Fellow in Berlin and a former general editor at Smithsonian Magazine.

Thanks guys for at least adding some levity to the **** - these two bits made me LOL, which is always a good thing

Ticomaya wrote:

Why don't you just own up to the fact that you're a repressed nationalist, nimh?

Craven de Kere wrote:

I'm going to go retreat to my more peaceful conversation with political opposites on a mid-east conflict thread.

In 1998 the French celebrated joyously when their multi-ethnic squad won the World Cup. But in the eight years since, the country has been riven by racial tension, and that sense of national unity is a distant memory.

From today's The Observer



Online version to be found here: France: a country of two halves

Yet despite all the infighting and the doubt and the self-questioning and politicisation, the fact remains that France has cast off the gloom that has shrouded the nation for months and is basking in an unexpected outburst of solidarity, patriotism and pride, perhaps all the more powerful for being, depending on what happens this evening, transient.

More than 1 million spectators in front of the Brandenburg Gate

Blair is a smarmy, cheesy git.

I don't like him.

Visiting British supporters and journalists were amazed at how well and wholesomely the Germans could party without it all ending in a "drunken brawl", the Independent newspaper said.

Some observers said it was a relief that the stubborn perception of Germans as a hard-working, punctual and humorless people has at last been given the boot.

Spain's liberal daily El Mundo remarked that the event managed a feat no German leader has pulled off since the country was reunified in 1990.

"It has given birth to a new, healthy patriotism and helped a demoralized people to dream again," it wrote, adding that Germans have for decades been taught "that pride could turn into a dangerous superiority complex and lead to historic errors which you will have repent for the rest of your life."

With the World Cup, the German youth has "rejected this belief and rid the country of the ghosts of the Third Reich", it concluded.

But Austrian political analyst Anton Pelinka said he does not believe that Germans have changed much.

"What has changed are not the Germans, who are far more 'normal' than many people would believe, what has changed is the way Germans are viewed by the rest of the world," he said. "Even before the World Cup they were not as uptight as the cliché would have it."

Sylvie Goulard, a lecturer at Paris' Institute for Political Studies, agreed.

"We have seen a cheerful, good-natured country," she said. "But this is not a surprise for those who know Germany."

Roger Cohen, a former correspondent for The New York Times in Germany, told Stern magazine he too was convinced that "the Germans have not turned into another nation overnight."

He said he hoped the "liberating effect of the World Cup would not only change the world's view of Germany but also adjust the nation's self-image, unshackling it from the family tree and bringing it closer to the multi-ethnic reality."

Blair is a smarmy, cheesy git.

I don't like him.