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ON THE TOWN >>>> Fans gather in Leipzig to watch matches on a giant television screen

World Cup Blog | Bruce Crumley Living It Up In Leipzig subscribe to TIME Printable Version email this story Bruce Crumley: Read all his blog entries

Posted Monday, June 19, 2006; 20.43BST
Who said football isn't cultural?! It brought me to Leipzig in the east of Germany, which even a decade-plus after reunification, I'd rather expected to have some, well, Soviet-y smells under its pits. Instead, it's impossible not to come away amazed not just how attentive even East German planners were to the drop-dead gorgeous architecture that provides this city its urban face, but also how well recent building has made this almost insanely rich historical and cultural trove even more functional. Plus, it's hosting the World Cup?! What more proof does one need that Leipzig kicks heinie?

Oh, and despite the brass bands playing near the city's beautiful original stock market, or the string duets doing it up under the statue of Johann Sebastian Bach outside the Saint Thomas church where the great composer worked and is buried, people here are thinking towards

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more visceral stuff. For example, officials at the Saint Nicolai church — birthplace of the protest movement that would spread to bring the Berlin Wall down — hung a mobile of mini-footballs and placards reading "Fairness" and "Friendship" from the 17th century loft ceiling that Bach once taught beneath. Its main park has been abandoned to FIFA fan functions.

Leipzig's entire, History-Land center is catered to World Cup events, visitors, and fun. This is the history field trip from heaven. Like most World Cup cities, Leipzig has decided to live to the beat of football each and every day of the tournament, and that quotidian excitement is hard to resist. But on match days like Sunday when France squared off against South Korea — the place becomes a wild, 400,000-inhabitant block party honoring the thousands of visitors who've follow the bouncing soccer ball here.

And because there's no better way of fully getting into the spirit — and helping fill in the ranks of French fans — a lot of younger residents slipped into blue shirts, bought French jerseys, wrapped the tricolor around their shoulders, or painted their mugs bleu, blanc et rouge and started shouts of "allez les Bleus". Little matter that these neo-French supporters brutalized "r"s and sprayed spittle when they enthused — colder fish French fans (from France) seemed glad to have the company, and even thought hard about letting the enthusiasm spread. Koreans seemed less impressed by the adopted adepts: something about real blond hair not looking as cool as that Chernobyl-hued result you get from bleaching black hair, uh, not-black. But no one is complaining. Who could here?

In addition to the stunning area in Leipzig's hyper-center that has been given over to Cup themes, fans who forego the tram to make the relatively short (30 minute) walk from the main train station to the Zentralstadion will find their senses thrown off. The mid-rise apartment blocks built from the 17th century onward are all still solid, albeit in varying states of repair. But whereas some give the impression of having been plucked right out of Russia's Petersburg, others look amazingly like Upper East Side New York brownstones. Still others could go unnoticed transplanted in Paris — one reason why Goethe once referred to Leipzig as a "little Paris"

Could there be a downside to a city where even manhole covers bear the municipal seal (who honors sewers?) putting on the footballing dog? Not for anyone who's visiting, of course: it's just sporting gravy on the otherwise succulent dish you'd get anyway. Still, certain residents say some of the spending involved will doubtless wind up costing them. "This is a city whose leaders have approved every building project there is — from the new stadium to the new underground line we don't need," says Leipzig school teacher and jazz musician and scholar Detlef Ott. "The joke here is, they're probably raising taxes now to finance all these things now that people are busy focused on the Cup matches." Still, Ott doesn't seem to mind the World Cup investment — and not at all the efforts made to make the event a happy, daily one for everyone involved.

What seems to irk Ott most is the footballing reality it will inherit. "Our team here plays in the fourth division," he says. "How can you fill such a big stadium with a team no one will want to watch?" Even in an Old World city like Leipzig, the modern world answer is obvious: find a deep-pocketed investor who'll buy the players to get the club rapidly into the top division, and draw paying tuchas into the spanking-new stadium's seats. As an ancient capital of trade and business, Leipzig shouldn't have a hard time figuring out how to make that work.

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