Sunday, Jul. 09, 2006

Out But Not Down

By ANDREW PURVIS

It was fun while it lasted. the German team's run at football's World Cup, in which it reached the semifinals before being knocked out by Italy, brought a spontaneous outpouring of national feeling. Not since the Berlin Wall came down — some say not since before World War I — have Germans felt so good about being German. The German national colors appeared everywhere, from the antennas of Mercedeses to babies' bottoms. By July 4, Germans' embrace of the flag threatened to outdo even America's love affair with the red, white and blue. But now, amid memories of defeat and with the most popular sporting event on earth over for another four years, will the passion linger?

Certainly, there have been tears. we are crying with you! lamented the tabloid Bild. But Germany has avoided the rancorous postmortems that have examined the deceased hopes of other countries. Bixente Lizarazu, a French footballer and member of the national team that won the 1998 World Cup, who played nine seasons for German team Bayern Munich, has been watching proceedings. "One thing that has won Germany a lot of respect is it hasn't lost interest when its team lost," he says. "And being a good loser is important, because it's what it takes to one day become a good winner. So, even if Germany won't win the Cup it hosted, it has won pretty much everything else this event has to offer."

Foremost among these winnings: a new confidence in its identity. "It doesn't end here," filmmaker Hans Weingartner, 35, said after watching his team go down in the final minutes of extra time. "There is such a positive and euphoric atmosphere in the country that it won't go away after the games." Edgar Wolfrum, a historian at Heidelberg University, agrees. "The Cup," he says, "became a liberating symbol that allowed [Germans] to express something that they've always wanted to express. This is the first time young people have come out and identified with the German flag and the national anthem." The German President, Horst Köhler, suggested that Germany had drawn lessons from the experience that apply far beyond the pitch. The team, he said, "not only brought joy to the whole country but also the courage to tackle issues that appear very difficult. We are on the right track." He added, "We can achieve much if we dare to try something new."

There have already been concrete benefits. Not least for German football. "The Bundesliga and German fans don't get anywhere near the credit they deserve," says footballer Lizarazu. "You decide to play with a German club and people ask you, 'Germany? Why not Spain, Italy, England?' Because the level of football in Germany is excellent. And because it has, without doubt, the best stadiums in Europe today. And this World Cup has allowed the rest of the footballing world to see that, and take note."

The Cup has also been a boon for business. In June, three important indicators of activity in Germany's services sector reached their highest level since the survey was founded in 1997. German unemployment fell. All told, the games are expected to bring in some j2.2 billion to Germany's retail sector — and not just thanks to the legendary spending sprees of the England players' wives and girlfriends. "Although there is clearly a broader growth trend, the World Cup is having an impact," Silvia Pepino, a senior economist at JP Morgan in London, said last week. To capitalize on this impetus, German commentators are urging the coalition government of Angela Merkel to take a leaf from Jürgen Klinsmann's book. "Klinsmann's success is a lesson for politics," said an editorial in the Frankfurter Allgemeine daily. "He was able to push through what he thought was right." "We showed a whole new German face to the world," said the coach himself.

Merkel's own cheery appearances at the games helped boost Germany, too. An estimated 2 million visitors, plus a billion viewers of the tournament around the world, got a glimpse of a country that bore little resemblance to the humorless place that many outside its borders (wrongly) think it is. Bloggers confessed shock to see the stereotypes so thoroughly discredited. "Germans have an amazing sense of humor," wrote Rick Smith in a forum on the bbc website. "I just love them!" More muted praise came from the former French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. In an interview with Time last week, he said that Germans have "passed a new and important stage psychologically" with the tournament. "They showed a patriotism that was neither arrogant nor vengeful. We saw a modern country that is cheerful and self-confident. The Germans seem comfortable in the modern world."

Why shouldn't they be? Many of those who most visibly enjoyed the Cup were young, and half of them were women. Prior to the tournament, local papers were filled with angst about the possibility of neo-Nazi demonstrations; instead the whole thing was like a rock festival. Fans hung out on "beach" areas where sand and potted palms were trucked in, waded in artificial pools, drank huge amounts of beer and daubed themselves in the flag's Schwarz, Rot and Gold. Paul Nolte, 43, a history professor at the Free University in Berlin, said that while "my generation had the feeling that national symbols were something dangerous," young Germans have now shown they have no such qualms.

For many, of course, the colors do not represent patriotism in the old sense. Everyone at the World Cup waves flags — early in the tournament the Croatian and Swedish colors were as visible as the German ones. The day after the German team's loss, Stefanie Tybussek, 18, a student from Brandenburg, sported her German colors in her ponytail, on small flags tattooed on her arms, in a necklace and even on the tips of her fingernails. Tybussek pointed to a small silver dot underneath the German flag stenciled on her upper arm. "That's the tear for having lost," she explained. Asked if she was proud of Germany, she hesitated: "At the moment I am proud of our hospitality. We cannot really be proud of our past, can we?" Her friend Katharina Freisinger, 17, broke in: "We must show that we can be proud despite the past."

That's a pretty good message for any German to adopt; if the World Cup helped solidify it, then it did something quite wonderful. The sport was pretty great, too.

With reporting by William Boston and Regine Wosnitza/Berlin, Bruce Crumley/Munich and James Graff/Paris