The 2006 World Cup was celebrated as a 'fairytale' - Euro 2024 will show a changed, pessimistic Germany

Gavin Cooney

“IN GERMANY”, WROTE historian Michael Stürmer, “the purpose of history was to ensure it could never happen again.” 

A central principle of the modern German state has been its determination to confront the horrors of its own recent history: it is partly for this reason the Holocaust memorial in Berlin was built so close to the national parliament building. On their way to work, Germany’s law-makers must acknowledge yesterday’s sins before they legislate for tomorrow. 

The persistent acknowledgement of the atrocities begotten by Hitler’s nationalism bred in Germany a deep scepticism in nationalism and its emblems. Germany would instead define itself by what philosopher Jurgen Habermas termed “constitutional patriotism”, a belief not in German exceptionalism or heroic myths but in democratic processes and institutions. Any stubborn nationalist threads would be choked in the weave of integration into the European Union.  

This was why, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was far rarer to see the national flag flown in Germany than it was to see the Union Jack in Britain or the Stars and Stripes in the United States. 

And then along came the 2006 World Cup.

The first major tournament held in unified Germany was a sun-splashed month of sheer public exuberance, that quickly became known as a Sommermärchen, or summer fairytale. That moniker seems faintly ridiculous given that Germany lost in the semi-finals, but the team’s success was to amplify the month’s giddy tone.

Gone was the stern-faced excellence of previous German teams. Instead, here were a bunch of jaunty, loveable losers; a diverse team led by the American-accented Jurgen Klinsmann. Where previous German managers held the impassive face and surly demeanour of a tax collecter, Klinsmann radiated the sunny air of a man who made a baffling fortune consulting Silicon Valley tech giants on how to improve employee morale. 

The defining image of the tournament was the profusion of German national flags, flying so widely that they mosaicked into the tournament’s backdrop. This was a sharp departure in German life but it was all part of the sommermärchen: a giant, global coming out party for the unified, modern Germany, where now even the national flag could be flown without guilty encumbrance. 

German flags display their colours at a screening of their quarter-final with Argentina at the 2006 World Cup. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

Almost everyone was on board. The Association for the German Language’s word of the year in 2006, for instance, was Fanmeile, which translates as “fan mile”, in reference to the hundreds of thousands of fans who gathered at public screenings of World Cup games. 

With the wall in dust, the Eurozone economy booming and Germany’s political situation in a decades-long run of stability, the 2006 World Cup felt like a piece of theatre designed by Francis Fukuyama to prove his point that we had reached the end of history. 

What quaint naivety.

German nationalism is once again on the rise: the far-right Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) are nationally polling at around 18%, having recently been as high as 21%, and are projected to finish second nationally in the EU elections held last weekend. 

The AfD were formed in 2013 and have spent the subsequent years travelling further right. Like many of the parties on Europe’s populist right, they are sceptical of the EU, deny climate change and are firmly against immigration, but elements of the AfD are too extreme even for France’s Marine Le Pen, who broke their respective parties’ alliance after recent comments from the AfD’s Maximilian Krah, who told journalists that SS members weren’t automatically “criminals”.

A German court this year ruled the AfD represented a “threat” to Germany democracy. 

“If there were a [general] election this weekend, the AfD would have 18,19, maybe 20%. This is dangerous and troubling,” says Dr. Clemens Heni, who is the director of the Berlin International Centre for the Study of Antisemitism. 

Heni was not among those to go along with the sommermärchen narrative, writing in the tournament’s immediate aftermath of his unease at the image of so many national flags being flown, describing it as a “nationalist event” rather than a football tournament. 

“All of those people who later founded the AfD: in my view, this is a partly a result of this nationalist movement in Germany,” he tells The 42. ”Before that, a German flag was exclusively flown by right-wing extremists. In 2005 the mainstream people would not fly the flag; it’s not like flying the Union Jack in the UK, for example.

“The World Cup in 2006 was definitely a turning point in recent German history, as it showed you can be very proud of your own nation and make fun of other nations, as we are very proud again.” 

His was not a mainstream view at the time and it is not the sole reason for today’s rise of the AfD: it’s not the case that they would not exist today if only Germany hadn’t gone and staged the 2006 World Cup.

But Heni’s opinion of 2006 has slowly gained more widespread acceptance as the years have gone by, and it is evident in Germany’s approach to Euro 2024. As Kit Holden points out in his excellent book, Played in Germany, the colours of the German flag do not stand alone on the official logo for Euro 2024, which marks a change from 2006. Instead, they are included among the national colours of 11 other European countries. The organisers are self-consciously pitching this tournament as being a European event, of which Germany are a part. 

The two respective logos of unified Germany's major tournaments: only one of which features the German national colours standing alone.

“It’s a European Championship, not a German one,” Markus Stenger, the tournament’s managing director tells Holden. Philip Lahm, a tournament director, has written that the tournament the tournament should “restrengthen the European idea”; this is as much for Germany’s benefit as it is for Europe’s. 

If the 2006 World Cup was imagined as the child of Germany’s “constitutional patriotism”, Euro 2024 is presented as a kind of reversion; a re-commitment to those original ideas in which Germany’s nationhood is imagined and projected through its integration within Europe. 

But the version of the world in which Germany has sought to integrate changed utterly. 

To accentuate the point: the Association for the German Language’s most recent word of the year was Zeitenwende, which means turning point. Chancellor Olaf Scholz coined it in a speech following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Many of the exogenic changes now buffeting Germany will be evident over the next month.

Having wound down their nuclear power in cautious response to the accident at Japan’s Fukushima plant in 2011, Germany came to rely on fossil fuels for elsewhere, importing fully 55% of their natural gas from Russia. When that supply abruptly stopped, Germany avoided doomsday forecasts of chilly homes in winter but the economy did enter recession and the price of gas and petrol briefly doubled in some parts of the country. 

This inflation, Hens explains, is one of the reasons underpinning the rise of the anti-establishment AfD: price increases are always felt most keenly at the petrol pump. 

The AfD have made the bulk of their electoral gains in the east of the country, in the old GDR once separated from the west by the Berlin Wall. While the wall has come down, the divide remains. 

Still two countries: how Germany voted. (Black=Union; blue=AfD). pic.twitter.com/OUCM82ijcr

— Tom Nuttall (@tom_nuttall) June 10, 2024

Leipzig is the only eastern city selected to host Euro 2024 games – Berlin’s Olympic Stadium is in the western part of the capital city – and only two of Germany’s 26-man squad were born in the old East. 

Germany’s economy entered a technical recession in 2023, with its car industry – which has huge cultural and economic significance – struggling to match the innovation and production of electric vehicles (EVs) elsewhere, especially in China, whose cheap and efficient vehicles have been described as posing a “significant threat” to the car production-dependent economies of European countries like Germany. The EU will this week announce tariffs on Chinese EVs, and in this context, it is jarring to see the official mobility sponsor of Euro 2024 is not BMW or Volkswagen or Mercedes but BYD, the Chinese EV manufacturer on whom the EU are slapping tariffs. 

Germany’s post-war pacifism and anti-militarism, meanwhile, is shifting in response to the war in Ukraine, and Scholz has this year pledged that Germany will meet the NATO-dictated target of spending 2% of GDP on defence, for the first time since the early 1990s. 

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Scholz delivered that promise on a visit to a factory of arms manufacturer Rheinmetall: the slow, normalising creep of war and defence spending into the mainstream of German society is evident in the fact that Borussia Dortmund have recently agreed a sponsorship deal with that very arms manufacturer. 

The German national team, meanwhile, has been a microcosm of internal, national divisions for years: Mesut Ozil, a 2014 World Cup winner who was born and raised in Germany with Turkish ancestry, quit the team in 2018, citing racism and disrespect. “I am German when we win, an immigrant when we lose,” he said. 

Current manager Julian Nagelsmann, meanwhile, last week dismissed as “racist” and “insane” a poll commissioned by the national broadcaster ARD asking fans whether they wanted more white players in the German national team. 

Julian Nagelsmann. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

Like Klinsmann in 2006, Nagelsmann is a young, charismatic coach helming a Germany team stirring with potential after a miserable recent experience at a major tournament. The team’s recent run of results offers tangible hope of another wild, 2006-like ride on the pitch. 

Nagelsmann himself strikes you as a child of the constitutional patriots: he said on his unveiling as national team boss that he was going to use this opportunity to learn the words of the German national anthem. 

But whatever happens on the pitch and in spite of its organisers’ best efforts, Euro 2024 is likely to articulate a reproach to the heady naivety of the 2006 World Cup, and show that the mid-noughties’ optimism about the world has been shaken and dimmed.