Germany, playing for more than a win

Germany's coach Joachim Loew lights a candle in Enke's memory

On the eve of the World Cup, players reminded the press that this tournament was different.  This year, they were playing in the wake of traumatic loss, and would do their best to honor the memory of Robert Enke, the German National Team goalkeeper who committed suicide in November 2009.  In his story for The Guardian, Dominic Fifield explains:

The recognition that they had been oblivious to a team-mate suffering so deeply struck home with Germany's players, who were told the news of his death by the national coach Joachim Löw and the manager Oliver Bierhoff as they prepared for a friendly against Chile.

"To have not realised ...well that makes you feel helpless," said Ballack, who had known Enke since he was 13. "There was shock, emotion, lots of tears. The service and memorial were good, a chance to say goodbye to him. We have to learn from this. There is the illness, but also the combination with football and being famous."

Ballack continues:

"He was scared to speak about his problem because he was scared to lose his child, or his job. Or to confess to having a weakness to other players. People have weaknesses. We should accept it. This should never be forgotten. It was a hard time, for everyone close to him and for us, as players. He will always have a place in our team. The players, the staff, the management all knew him, and it's still in our minds, and in the fans' minds. The further Germany go in the, the more emotional it will get." (Dominic Fifield, "Germany spurred on by the memory of Robert Enke" in The Guardian, June 11 2009)

His teammates were devastated not only by his death, but by the realization that someone on their team, a friend, had suffered so much and had not been able to share this burden with them. His death put things in perspective.

It is easy to fall back on stereotypes about the German squad - as clinical, for example - but this particular squad defies such templates not only in the dynamism and vision of their game, but in their public embrace of Enke's memory and in their support for other athletes struggling with depression. The squad has promised a portion of any bonus it earns from the World Cup to the Robert Enke Foundation - set up by the German FA to support research and treatment of depression.

That the team has come together like this, in the wake of such a sad loss, around such a taboo subject (especially in the macho and often heartless world of sports cultures), is truly inspiring.

(See November 2009 post: "On the Suicide of Robert Enke")

More thoughts on more losses (Mexico, England and the unfairness of it all)

It was all too much today - one great goal ignored (Lampard) and one totally, unambiguously offside goal allowed (Tevez). We watched some teams exploit their good fortune, and others collapse in the face of their bad luck.

It's become a World Cup scripted by Emile Zola. I am thinking of his utterly depressing novel L'Assommoir (the word means a dive-bar one goes to only to get hammered). At a key juncture in the story, the lovable drunk Copeau is doing his best to get his life together, but takes a bad fall at work and breaks his leg. His life is a fast downhill slide to abject poverty from there. He just doesn't have the constitution to overcome the kind of bad luck that in fact breaks a lot of people. My students always dig that novel, because this story feels real - the story of bad things happening to decent but very flawed people.

Is it in the service of realism, I wonder, that Sepp Blatter wards off all pressure to use technology to, say, confirm that, indeed, the ball has crossed the goal-line? Is that what he means by human drama - Life is not only unfair, it's a cruel and pointless venture?  

I don't think England had a win in them today - it didn't seem like it. Not when faced with Özil, Klose, and Podolski on the attack.  Germany played brilliantly - and, really, that's why they won.  But, like a character in a Zola novel, England can now stew in its bitterness, feel robbed, and pour more of its energy down the drain in a stream of complaint.

Mexico - oh, my heart.  The first twenty-six minutes of the match today were pure, insane delight. But then the magic fell apart with Tevez's offside goal. Players saw the disaster replayed on the stadium screens (as happened after Lampard's un-goal as well). That could not have helped matters - it was impossible to miss: Tevez was so offside that he must have known it himself.  The hand of God, moving one of his pawns into position. That sort of thing is dispiriting. So a few minutes later we see El Tri give up another goal with a limp pass - the sort of mistake made by someone who feels the decks are so stacked against them that the game isn't worth playing anymore. You feel screwed by the system, so you screw yourself.

Argentina played beautifully, Tevez made sure we knew he was more than a cheat, and fired one of the best shots of the tournament in the 52nd minute. Great teams exploit luck and the other side's error. They are captains of a lucky universe.  The rest of us pretty much just go down with the ship.

Q & A regarding Hertha provokes random thoughts on Berlin (and German) soccer

Q from Gustavo Arellano: And now for something different: a great story on the last sad days of a soccer club before it gets kicked out of germany’s top division. Jennifer Doyle: where do these fans rank on the political scale of things? Are they progressives like Barça, or fascists like Lazio? (German Capital Bids Auf Wiedesehen to Top-Flight Football)

A, of sorts: Thanks Gustavo! Read on only if prepared for the distortions of my extremely uneven knowledge regarding German soccer. Hertha has had a spectacularly bad season - they nearly qualified for the Champion's League last year, and now they've been relegated. I will leave The Guardian's Raphael Honigstein to diagnose Hertha's demotion:

In fact it's nigh on impossible to look at the terrible fate that has befallen Hertha Berlin as anything else but divine retribution for sins committed in a former life. Or last season, to be more accurate.

Supporters of the Spreesiders will probably violently shake their heads in disagreement at this point, but this column has still barely recovered from witnessing one or two Hertha matches in 2008-09, when they played (if that is indeed the right word) a brand of football so dull, negative and downright misanthropic that one opponent after another lost the will to live. By the end of the campaign the whole Bundesliga was ready to commit hara-kiri, just to make the pain go away. Forget Jorge Valdano's notorious quip about Rafa Benítez's less than aesthetically pleasing Reds: you couldn't see the pitch for all the excrement in the Olympic stadium.

This year, it's more or less the same. Tedious but very competent catenaccio with excellent results has turned into slightly less tedious general incompetence without results.

To address your query regarding Hertha supporters -fans rioted in March, when Hertha lost a crucial match to Nuremberg. But, honestly, I don't know if that incident squares with Hertha's reputation, or if perhaps if this is just typical football-guys gone wild. 

I am a little creeped out by the "Hertha girlfriend" subsection of the club's page for female fans. Not for fans of women's football. Hertha does have an LGBT fan club - as does Barça, Man City, and a few other clubs who reach out to gay and lesbian supporters.


This brings me to your question - who is Berlin's Barça?: No side in Berlin - or anywhere - has managed Barça's ability to "brand" its progressive reputation. And as to Berlin's Lazio - at least one Berlin-based club draws more than its share of fascist fans (Dynamo - formerly the Stasi's team).  But of course it isn't the high profile club that Lazio is and seems to have tried and failed to wiggle out of  its terrible history and dubious present (by changing its name, then changing it back).

The media tag line regarding Hertha's decline focuses on Berlin as now the only European capital not to have a team in the country's top flight division.  But Berlin's reputation as a European capital has always been that of an atypical capital - a capital of atypicality. 

The city's romance, as a tourist destination, is built on fantasies of cabaret life and spy romance. It's basically the only city in Germany many of the alternative set care to visit - and, drawn by the relatively cheap rent, lots of those folks stay.

So, Hertha's spectacularly bad season is perhaps a higher profile version of the other "beautiful losers" playing in "poor but sexy" Berlin (that designation might just be the official signal for gentrification).  But for those teams, one must look beyond the Bundesliga. (FYI - The Global Game reviews a recent film festival gathering work about East German football - it's well worth reading.)

For example - check out at Türkiyemspor Berlin, playing in the unglamorous domain of regional football for a few years now. Türkiyemspor, founded by players of Turkish immigrant background, threatened to rise to the 2nd division in 1990-1991. Their campaign was ruined by an administrative error (read the history on the club's site). In an incident recalling Germany's attitude towards the workers it recruited from Turkey in the 1960s (Come! - a generation later: Leave!), a player who'd transferred to the club was mistakenly ruled ineligible and the games in which he'd played were either forfeit or replayed.  The club just missed being promoted. The German national FA later apologized for the mistake (!). Things went downhill from there. But the club is still around, and it has a women's team (actually, I think it has three). 

When in Berlin last year, I was supposed to attend a match between Türkiyemspor and Hallescher FC - it was postponed, ostensibly due to inclement weather but probably due to fears of violence from Hallescher FC fans, notorious for their racism. 

Hallescher FC was at the center of a particularly miserable incident in 2006. Hallescher fans heaped racist abuse on a Nigerian midfielder playing for Leipzig. Fed up with the ape noises from fans, and from being spat upon, Adebowale Ogungbure threw two fingers over his upper lip - as a salute to the fascists. Ogungbure was then attacked by fans. Incredibly, he was brought up on charges (making Nazi gestures is illegal in Germany) - they were quickly dropped. From Der Spiegel:

"I was just so angry, I didn't care. I could have been killed but I had to do something," Ogungbure told SPIEGEL ONLINE last week. "I thought to myself, what can I do to get them as angry as they have made me? Then when I lifted my arm I saw the anger in their faces and I started to laugh."

"I've faced some sort of racist abuse at about half the matches I've played," he said, but the spitting was too much on March 25. "I've never seen anyone spit at a dog or a cat in Germany -- why should I be spat at?"

Anyway, Berlin has lots of clubs not playing in the Bundesliga - and some of them, like Türkyemspor do interesting political work - to find them one needs to follow the love, not the money!