soccer worldcup – germany enters the semifinals and a slight change in celebration

30.June 2006

boy oh boy, i am not a big soccer fan but this soccer worldcup is taken germany by storm.the pictures below were taken in cologne after germanys 5:3 win over argentina in the quarterfinals of the soccer worldcup. first of all it was a tight game and i was not to sure of the outcome but … wow … once the german team succeeded people were just dancing in the streets celebrating and driving all over town waving flags and honking their horns. in the university district the celebrating crowds even blocked a complete intersection while celebrating. i even saw argentinian fans joking around and celebrating with the german crowd. it was amazing!

to every other country all this flag waving and celebrating would appear to be quite normal but remember now this is germany we are talking about.
in my 32 years of living here i have never seen so many flags and so many young people positively celebrating their team and also celebrating the feeling as a nation.
throughout the last decades hanging a german flag somewhere close your house would have made a lot of people suspicious and you would have caused a lot of commotion. people who did where always strange and got the stereotype of “something is wrong with him/her. maybe he/she is far right wing, or had something to do with the neonationalists.”
a lot of young germans i know either also disliked their own country (“as soon as i can i will leave this country”, “yeah germany sucks!”, “i like france better” … and so on) and wanted to leave the country as soon as possible or at least did not care for germany at all.

of course this is quite understandable if you take a look at the past and germanys darkest hours in the 1940s/50s. being proud of your country as a german always left a bad taste in your mouth and was something you’d rather not do (even 50 years after the second worldwar).

also as a german you did not want to offended anybody that has had relatives lost throughout the war or the holocaust (i am still very sensible to that but do love to discuss the view on germany with people from other european countries).
as kids we had to listen to the dark history of germany and everything that happened over and over. we were shown the videos of all the dead bodies, the concentration camps and the war. i think we had that topic about once every year in history class.
of course that was not a bad thing in order to understand the cruelty and wrongdoings of germany during that time. i am quite sure that every kid has understood how wrong all of this has been.

so if you hear of everything that has gone wrong in that time of history it is quite understandable that representing your country with pride was nothing a german felt too good about in the past.
the consequences though were in many cases neglecting your heritage and even such absurd things as adopting other cultural backgrounds as their preferred own.

as a kid growing up in germany througout the 80s i just took all of that for granted and never questioned why other countries could show pride for their country and we did not.

the first time i recognized that there were huge differences how other people felt about their country was during my 1.5 year stay in the usa. all of the sudden there were american flags everywhere, ribbons for every event (for instance yellow ribbons to support the US troups in irak) and the anthem of the country was sung at every major football game or school assembly. it was plain to see that these people were proud to be americans and had a feeling as a group. they also had a sence of contributing to america as a whole.
while waving flags and singing anthems is questionable to a lot of germans, having returned to germany i personally felt that something is strangely missing in our culture.

in my opinion we germans do not feel as a group. we just feel like individuals. there used to be not much pride in the positive things germany has achieved in the last 50 years and there are not much people that would contribute something to help germany as the whole. everybody just seems to care for him-/herself and neglects his heritage.
i found this quite sad and even though i do hope that germany will never forget his wrongs i also do hope that the next generations will find a positive feeling about their homecountry.

but right now things have definetly changed a bit and i am still quite astonished to see people decorating their cars with little german flags and colouring their faces with black, red and gold for celebrating the fifa soccer worldcup.
the little car flags really are a phenomenon, no matter if it is a big honkin audi A8 or a little VW fox everybody from the housewife to the big corporate manager seems to have one of those little german flags attached to their car.

all of a sudden germany like all other countries does celebrate it’s team and people.
all of cologne is an amazing mixture of people from all over the world supporting their teams. allthough of course there is a competition between the teams the fans just seem to have one big celebration alltogether. it is just an amazing experience to see how all fo this is changing germany and it’s people.
i would have never expected that from a soccer-tournament.

from my perspective this is a very postive time for germany. i have never seen germans acting that much as a group of people – not just a bunch of individuals – with so much positivety and even a bit of pride. you can feel a special kind of positive vibe and engery in all of us.

so we are all excited about the halffinal game against italy on tueday.
and for the first time in my life i feel like i can openly say “go germany!” with a bit of pride and “yes” our car has a little german flag attached to it, too.

Artikel gespeichert unter: Daily life