Category Archives: Europe
Champions League: the day London became just a small town in Germany
150,000 supporters arrive for all-German Champions League final at Wembley
For one day only, the Wembley Tavern was a sea of garish yellow and black on Saturday as it played host to chanting Borussia Dortmund fans, while Thirsty Eddie’s on the High Road was reserved for Bayern Munich supporters.
Amid a surge of support for Germany’s premier league, the Bundesliga, an estimated 150,000 Germans – Dortmund fans in bright yellow sunhats and shades, and Bayern followers in red, some in lederhosen – took over the capital for the day before the Champions League final at Wembley.
Dortmund, famous for their vociferous support and charismatic young coach Jürgen Klopp, had arrived with a poster proclaiming: “You were hoping for a final between two English teams. Or at least for a stadium full of hot Spanish chicks. Instead you got the Krauts. Have fun.”
But domestic enthusiasm for the all-German clash, between an all-conquering Bayern side who beat Barcelona 7-0 on aggregate in the semi-finals and a swashbuckling Dortmund team that has captured the hearts of most neutrals, has slowly grown.
Many of the fans mingling outside The Globe in Marylebone Road, a traditional pre-match Wembley watering hole, said the fact it was an all-German final added spice to the occasion. “If you lose against Barcelona or Chelsea you can get rid of them fast. But if you lose to Dortmund, you have it for a whole year,” said Bayern fan Arne Gesemann, the owner of a record label, who tasted heartache in 1999, 2010 and 2012 when Bayern lost in the final. “It is a good time for football in Germany. We’ve got to enjoy it while it lasts.”
The debate about whether the Bundesliga, with its safe standing areas, affordable prices and vibrant atmosphere, has stolen a march on the Premier League’s array of overseas talent, has been a feature of the buildup.
“It’s great to see the English people are really behind us. As a young child I was a fan of Liverpool and I’m really sad that when I was here last year, I had to pay a fortune for a ticket,” said Ralf Baudzus.
“Football is the people’s game. Reduce the prices and you’ll have a great atmosphere again. English and German supporters are more or less the same.”
At the other end of the Jubilee line in Stratford, sport collided with commerce at the Uefa-sanctioned “Champions Festival” on a concrete expanse appropriately sandwiched between the Olympic Park and the Westfield shopping centre.
Several thousand German fans, plus some curious locals, had made their way to a heavily promoted event that acted as a cross between a showcase for Champions League sponsors and a celebration of the history of the European Cup.
It was part of a conscious attempt by Uefa to make what it claims is the biggest sporting event in the world into a week-long celebration for the host city. Other events include an installation in Trafalgar Square and the women’s Champions League final.
As families queued to have their pictures taken with the European Cup and visitors pondered paying £5 for a pint of beer or £100 for a replica match ball, a group of Munich fans insisted their reputation for arrogance was undeserved – before predicting an easy victory.
On police advice, Uefa had turned down applications for public viewing areas on big screens and some pubs in central London were not admitting supporters, leaving some unsure how to prepare for the big match.
“There is no atmosphere on the streets here because everything is forbidden. We hope we can enjoy the game but the day is not so nice. Nobody knows where to go,” said Sarah Thoms, who had travelled from Dortmund.
“In the city, the pubs are closed to fans. I don’t understand why London got the Champions League final if they don’t want people to live the atmosphere for the whole day.”
Hermann Roden, a member of Bayern Munich for 24 years, had arrived in London on Friday with his family. Like other Bayern supporters he proudly sported a scarf bearing his name, awarded to fans when they become a member of the club, over his traditional lederhosen.
He said that the papers in Germany had been full of the praise for the Bundesliga in the runup to the final. “It is affordable in Germany and the stadiums are very new since the World Cup in 2006. That makes the difference. Since 2002, the youth programme is also paying off and we have homegrown players coming through to the national team.”
But some football cliches are the same the world over. Andreas Spiekermann, an office worker from Dortmund, had got lucky in the club’s ballot after 500,000 fans had applied for 24,000 tickets. “I hope it will be a good match. But whichever side wins, German football is the winner,” he said.
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Champions League: the day London became just a small town in Germany
150,000 supporters arrive for all-German Champions League final at Wembley
For one day only, the Wembley Tavern was a sea of garish yellow and black on Saturday as it played host to chanting Borussia Dortmund fans, while Thirsty Eddie’s on the High Road was reserved for Bayern Munich supporters.
Amid a surge of support for Germany’s premier league, the Bundesliga, an estimated 150,000 Germans – Dortmund fans in bright yellow sunhats and shades, and Bayern followers in red, some in lederhosen – took over the capital for the day before the Champions League final at Wembley.
Dortmund, famous for their vociferous support and charismatic young coach Jürgen Klopp, had arrived with a poster proclaiming: “You were hoping for a final between two English teams. Or at least for a stadium full of hot Spanish chicks. Instead you got the Krauts. Have fun.”
But domestic enthusiasm for the all-German clash, between an all-conquering Bayern side who beat Barcelona 7-0 on aggregate in the semi-finals and a swashbuckling Dortmund team that has captured the hearts of most neutrals, has slowly grown.
Many of the fans mingling outside The Globe in Marylebone Road, a traditional pre-match Wembley watering hole, said the fact it was an all-German final added spice to the occasion. “If you lose against Barcelona or Chelsea you can get rid of them fast. But if you lose to Dortmund, you have it for a whole year,” said Bayern fan Arne Gesemann, the owner of a record label, who tasted heartache in 1999, 2010 and 2012 when Bayern lost in the final. “It is a good time for football in Germany. We’ve got to enjoy it while it lasts.”
The debate about whether the Bundesliga, with its safe standing areas, affordable prices and vibrant atmosphere, has stolen a march on the Premier League’s array of overseas talent, has been a feature of the buildup.
“It’s great to see the English people are really behind us. As a young child I was a fan of Liverpool and I’m really sad that when I was here last year, I had to pay a fortune for a ticket,” said Ralf Baudzus.
“Football is the people’s game. Reduce the prices and you’ll have a great atmosphere again. English and German supporters are more or less the same.”
At the other end of the Jubilee line in Stratford, sport collided with commerce at the Uefa-sanctioned “Champions Festival” on a concrete expanse appropriately sandwiched between the Olympic Park and the Westfield shopping centre.
Several thousand German fans, plus some curious locals, had made their way to a heavily promoted event that acted as a cross between a showcase for Champions League sponsors and a celebration of the history of the European Cup.
It was part of a conscious attempt by Uefa to make what it claims is the biggest sporting event in the world into a week-long celebration for the host city. Other events include an installation in Trafalgar Square and the women’s Champions League final.
As families queued to have their pictures taken with the European Cup and visitors pondered paying £5 for a pint of beer or £100 for a replica match ball, a group of Munich fans insisted their reputation for arrogance was undeserved – before predicting an easy victory.
On police advice, Uefa had turned down applications for public viewing areas on big screens and some pubs in central London were not admitting supporters, leaving some unsure how to prepare for the big match.
“There is no atmosphere on the streets here because everything is forbidden. We hope we can enjoy the game but the day is not so nice. Nobody knows where to go,” said Sarah Thoms, who had travelled from Dortmund.
“In the city, the pubs are closed to fans. I don’t understand why London got the Champions League final if they don’t want people to live the atmosphere for the whole day.”
Hermann Roden, a member of Bayern Munich for 24 years, had arrived in London on Friday with his family. Like other Bayern supporters he proudly sported a scarf bearing his name, awarded to fans when they become a member of the club, over his traditional lederhosen.
He said that the papers in Germany had been full of the praise for the Bundesliga in the runup to the final. “It is affordable in Germany and the stadiums are very new since the World Cup in 2006. That makes the difference. Since 2002, the youth programme is also paying off and we have homegrown players coming through to the national team.”
But some football cliches are the same the world over. Andreas Spiekermann, an office worker from Dortmund, had got lucky in the club’s ballot after 500,000 fans had applied for 24,000 tickets. “I hope it will be a good match. But whichever side wins, German football is the winner,” he said.
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Swedish riots spark surprise and anger
As inequality and segregation start to rise, the spread of youth disorder has shaken ethnic Swedes and older immigrants alike
The pace of the neighbourhood watch suddenly picks up. “Here’s the fire we’ve been waiting for,” grins Samiy, an Iraqi in a bulky jacket.
It’s half past two in the morning and Samiy, along with dozens of others from local Islamic groups and community organisations, has spent the night patrolling the streets of Husby, the suburb at the centre of riots in Stockholm.
Soon there’s an acrid stench of burning plastic, and flickers become visible around the footbridge that the group is now jogging towards. A dumper truck on the road below is burning as a crowd of young men look on. Most claim to be watchmen, but as soon as a fire engine arrives, 10 or more rush to the bridge and begin pelting a firefighter who runs up.
“It’s enough. It’s enough,” cries Jamil Hakim, from a group called Safe Husby. “Two nights was fun. But it’s enough. It’s not fun any more.”
The crowd turns to see a phalanx of police in full riot gear marching up a ramp to the bridge, protected by a wall of transparent shields. Immediately, the stone throwers – most barely more than children – sprint into the darkness, while Hakim confronts the police. “Get lost! Please, just disappear,” he says.
By Saturday morning, the usually calm Swedish capital had been rocked by six nights of disorder, with up to 200 cars set ablaze, fires in schools, police stations and restaurants, and about a dozen police officers injured. Police estimate that more than 300 young people have been directly involved, of whom 30 have been arrested.
What began in Husby last Sunday has spread to more than a dozen of the city’s other suburbs. And on Friday night, while police reported a quieter night in the capital, fires and stone-throwing were also reported in Uppsala, Södertälje, and even further afield in Linköping and Örebro, in central Sweden.
The morning after the truck-burning, however, Husby seems idyllic. There’s a busy vegetable stall in the main square and a group of elderly men sipping beer in the sun. The rows of seven-storey blocks, built in the 1960s and 1970s as part of Sweden’s “million homes” project, are all freshly painted, the gardens and playgrounds well-tended. At the local school, the windows broken the previous night are already being fixed.
“If you have broken windows and they see it, they will crack other windows, so we must fix it immediately,” says Christer Svensson, who has come in to do the work. “I don’t care, I make money out of this.”
Outside the new library, which opened last month, another white, ethnically Swedish handyman is busy painting. “This place behind me, they’ve just spent 40m kronor [£4m] on it,” he grumbles. “They don’t talk about that when they talk to the TV, do they? They talk about the problems, they don’t talk about everything people are doing for them.
“These people, they should integrate in this society and just try a little bit more to be like Swedish citizens.”
Scratch beneath the surface and this is a sentiment shared by many in a country that arguably has the world’s most generous asylum policies. Sweden has taken in more than 11,000 refugees from Syria since 2012, more per head than any other European country, and it has absorbed more than 100,000 Iraqis and 40,000 Somalis over the past two decades. About 1.8 million of its 9.5 million people are first- or second-generation immigrants.
“This is one of the countries that treats immigrants the best,” says Mohammed Hassan, a Bangladeshi studying in Husby’s new library, who previously lived in Brick Lane in east London. “It’s much, much better than any other European country in which I’ve travelled.”
So it has come as a shock for many Swedes to discover the scale of resentment. It’s not hard to find it. Aleks, whose parents came from Kosovo, says: “I hate the police. I hate the cops. I think setting fire to cars in the neighbourhood should stop, but I don’t think throwing rocks at the cops should stop.”
The trigger for the riots – police shooting dead a 69-year-old Portuguese man called Lenine Relvas-Martins – has been dismissed as an excuse. But his neighbours are still incensed. “They had a bastard-load of police here. You would have thought there was a huge group of terrorists, not a man with a little knife,” complains Milos, 73, Relvas-Martins’s neighbour since 1984. “If he was Swedish they never would have shot him. I’m sure about that.”
Martins had been brandishing a knife on his balcony, angry after a confrontation with local youths. Police then broke into his house and shot him in front of his Finnish wife. They say she was at risk. She denies it.
The police then inflamed the situation last Sunday, reportedly calling young people causing a disturbance “monkeys” and “negroes”.
“They seize people, and strip them and really embarrass them in front of their friends,” complains Yusuf, a young Somali. Yusuf used to live in Birmingham, but says he prefers Husby. And there’s no doubt Husby has better facilities than deprived areas in Britain. But it is also more segregated. About 85% of people here have their origins outside Sweden.
“The politicians are thinking the wrong way. They want to help people, but you never help people when you put 30,000 to 50,000 in one place,” complains the man painting at the library.
Camila Salazar, who works for Fryshuset, a Stockholm youth organisation, says: “For a lot of people who live in segregated areas, the only Swedes they meet are social workers or police officers. It’s amazing how many have never had a Swedish friend.”
A third of the 2,500 white, ethnic Swedes who lived in Husby 10 years ago have left. “My children say: ‘Why don’t you leave there? All the Swedish have gone,’” complains Milos. “There’s only three Swedish families left in this whole block.”
Inequality has also grown faster in Sweden over the past decade than in any other developed country, according to thinktank the OECD, which puts the blame partly on tax cuts paid for by reductions in welfare spending.
According to official statistics, more than 10% of those aged 25 to 55 in Husby are unemployed, compared with 3.5% in Stockholm as a whole. Those that do have jobs earn 40% less than the city average. But Aleksandar-Pal Sakala, an IT consultant and politician for the centre-right Moderate party, has little sympathy. “It’s nonsense, this leftwing propaganda that the schools are bad and there’s no jobs. Some people are too lazy. They feel they have less respect if they work in a low-status job,” he says. “When I came here from Belgrade, I was cleaning. I worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week.”
Kista, only 20 minutes’ walk away, is Sweden’s Silicon Valley, with more than 20,000 people working in IT, but Sakala says most Husby people can work only in Kista’s giant shopping centre. “Many people living in the area are not qualified for IT jobs.”
More than a quarter of Husby’s adult population has only GCSE-equivalent education, compared with a tenth for Stockholm as a whole, and only a third have any further education.
However, Esmail Jamshidi, a 23-year-old medical student born and educated in Husby, says young people don’t lack opportunities.
“It’s a very recent development, this ghetto mentality,” he says. “Immigrants come here, and most leave after a decade or two. A very small percentage of them don’t, and this last group are left. And then the next war erupts and another group of people come, and, again, the vast majority make it. What we see now is the kid brothers of those who got stuck here, and now there are so many of them that it’s starting to be a problem.”
The older generation of immigrants seems as puzzled by the anger as Swedes. Ali, the owner of Café Unic, a Persian cafe in Husby’s main square, says he tried living in America but came back. “I love this country. I mean it,” he says. “I’m telling my kids every day to remember that you are born here, in Sweden. I love this country because of the way they built it: because of my taxes, and other people’s taxes, everyone has a nice place to live. It’s a very, very nice and good idea.”
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Tornado rips through central Russia – video
Amateur footage captures a tornado ripping through residential areas 110km southwest of Moscow on Thursday
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Tornado rips through central Russia – video
Amateur footage captures a tornado ripping through residential areas 110km southwest of Moscow on Thursday
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The hottest French film star of 2013: Omar Sy
The most successful French-language film ever made, Intouchables, has turned Omar Sy into an international star
Intouchables (known as Untouchable in the UK) is the most successful French-language film ever made. And just as the previous title-holder, Amélie, turned Audrey Tautou into an international star, so Intouchables is having the same effect on Omar Sy. But where Tautou, gamine and Gallic, belongs to a highly bankable tradition, Sy is a one-off, at least for now. He’s the country’s first black superstar.
The fourth of eight children raised in the banlieue by Senegalese Mauritian parents, the 35-year-old is France’s darling: as well as winning best actor at the 2011 Césars, he was voted the nation’s most popular person in a poll for Le Journal du Dimanche. A hefty share of the $269m raked in by Intouchables must be attributable to his smile.
It helps that there is some overlap between Sy’s rags-to-riches story and the plot of his breakthrough film. In Intouchables, a buddy movie in which the buddies cross the divides of age, class, race and mobility, Sy plays a street tough who lands a job caring for a paraplegic billionaire. In the process, he transforms not only his own prospects but the lives of a supporting cast of upper-class stiffs.
Sy recently moved to Los Angeles, though he insists he will continue to pay taxes in France, perhaps wary of following too closely in Gérard Depardieu’s footsteps. He now has a slate of US movies lined up, including superhero blockbuster X-Men: Days Of Future Past, in which he will star alongside Michael Fassbender and Jennifer Lawrence.
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The hottest French films of 2013
This year’s Cannes film festival showcased a crop of French films that are well worth looking out for when hit the UK
Lovers of French cinema have plenty to look forward to. At the Cannes film festival we were treated to an intensely French spectacle, certain to be released in British cinemas very soon: Jeune Et Jolie, or Young And Beautiful, by François Ozon, the story of a young woman’s sexual awakening. Perhaps only French cinema could get away with this trope, but the performance by newcomer Marine Vacth is tremendous, and the cameo by Charlotte Rampling is enjoyably bizarre.
Marion Cotillard is one of the best actors in the world; her face conveys emotions and thoughts with miraculous clarity and sympathy. This year, she is starring in The Immigrant , the new film from American auteur James Gray, which is sure to be a draw for all those who love this great French performer. Another actor who is emerging as one of France’s biggest stars is Bérénice Béjo, who was in Cannes with Le Passé (The Past), a brilliant film by Iranian director Asghar Farhadi; this, too, is certain to arrive in the UK before long. She plays Marie, a woman who works in a Paris pharmacy, harassed and hassled by life and by her romantic situation. Marie is trying to finalise her divorce from an Iranian husband, who has arrived in Paris to sort out the paperwork, while at the same time embarking on a relationship with a man who has emotional burdens of his own. Béjo’s performance is a marvel. UK cinemagoers may know her as the silent movie star in The Artist. Now she confirms her talents as a grown-up, intelligent presence on the screen. France and the French will be a potent force in cinemas this year.
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The hottest French art exhibitions of 2013
New exhibitions of works by Marc Chagall and Honoré Daumier show the wild imagination and audacity of French modern art
France invented modern art. The French Revolution gave art in Paris a courage and appetite for experiment that vivify it like chocolate in a brioche. By the early 20th century, the city had become the unquestioned centre of all that was new. Picasso dismantled reality in his cubist still lifes. Brancusi created dream images of fantastic birds. Neither of these French art heroes was born in France; it was where you had to go to be truly modern.
Marc Chagall, whose art is celebrated at Tate Liverpool from next month, was drawn to Paris in 1911 from his native Russia. He was instantly influenced by its buzz of art movements, from cubism to fauvism, though he denied belonging to any one tendency. His magic-realist paintings use the fractured vision and expressive colours pioneered by modern artists in Paris to imagine a fabulous version of his Russian Jewish childhood. His genius is at once very Russian and very French.
The daring of modern art was pioneered by bohemian rebels. Honoré Daumier, whose drawings and paintings are at the Royal Academy this autumn, went to prison for caricaturing the French king and dedicated his art to championing the weak. His grotesque style helped lay the foundations for the French experiment.
What do these artists have in common? Wild imagination, freedom and audacity: a tricolour of artistic greatness.
• Mark Chagall is at Tate Liverpool from 8 June-6 October.
Honoré Daumier opens at the Royal Academy, London, in October
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The hottest French It girl of 2013: Julia Restoin Roitfeld
Her mother is the former editor of French Vogue, she was photographed by Mario Testino at 10, and her new baby blog rivals Gwyneth’s… Julia Restoin Roitfeld is 2013′s ultimate It girl
As a four-year-old, Julia Restoin Roitfeld would sit on her mother Carine Roitfeld’s lap at fashion shows in Paris. At 10, she was photographed by Mario Testino for Vogue Bambini. In her 20s, she became an art director, muse, model and Parisian It girl, before moving to New York. The designer Tom Ford described her as “exactly what beauty is to me” and, when she gave birth last year, he gave her a pair of black suede kitten heels in baby size for her newborn daughter.
As the scion of a Paris fashion dynasty – her mother was editor-in-chief of French Vogue and her father created the French brand Equipment – Restoin Roitfeld, 32, might seem a little too haute couture to offer down-to-earth style advice for new mothers. But her new blog, Romy & The Bunnies – part diary, part family scrapbook, heavily accessorised with stuffed rabbits and flashbacks to her chic pregnant mother in 1980s Paris – is fast picking up a following. Inspired by her motto, “You can have a job and a baby and style and a body”, it’s an eclectic mix of advice and tips from models, fashion insiders and working parents. There’s even advice on nappy bags for men (her partner is the Swedish-born Croatian model Robert Konjic).
Restoin Roitfeld, who was still modelling her own underwear designs in the early stages of pregnancy, had her daughter, Romy, in May 2012 and launched the blog this March. When we speak, Romy is upstairs with her nanny. “When I was a child we had a nanny all the time,” she says. “I really wanted to do the opposite at first. I made a point of spending every minute with my daughter. I couldn’t care about work; I just wanted to be with her. I had never even babysat. I was scared of holding a baby. Then it all came very naturally.”
Several months in, she got a nanny and she now works at least three hours a day on the site, which has been compared to Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, though it’s less preachy. “My site is a beauty and style guide, not a parenting guide,” she says. “I’m not the right person to give parenting advice – it’s too personal.”
She’s baffled by the fuss over French parenting manuals such as French Children Don’t Throw Food. “I feel very French. My baby was born in New York, but I want her to have French culture. I’ve gone back to singing the French songs I did as a kid. But all these books about French tips… French diet, French education, French schools?”
Her only observations would be: “French schools do a lot more homework and longer hours: say 8:30am to 5pm, with homework on top. And I think people perhaps don’t breastfeed as much in France. My girlfriends don’t, my mother didn’t, I don’t even think my grandmother did. But I wanted to.”
Of French women, she says: “We’re coquettish. It’s funny: you could say French women look put-together but we don’t spend that much time in the bathroom, and tend to go for really minimal makeup during the day. I do, especially now I have a baby.” Where exercise is concerned, she says, “French women don’t work out that much – we don’t have the gyms that are open all hours that exist in the US. Maybe it’s about food. French people don’t snack – it’s just not part of the culture.”
She’s now considering designing a range of maternity clothes that women can keep wearing after the birth. Even at the smartest New York shops, she was appalled by what was on offer. “Everything was so awful, as if just because you’re becoming a mother, you didn’t like fashion. It was too mumsy or girly-girly. Topshop seemed the only one working with the trends and reproducing them for pregnant women.” She feels good maternity clothes should work beyond pregnancy. “I still had a little bit of a bump afterwards. That was harder than when I was pregnant. When I was pregnant I wanted to show it; afterwards I wanted to hide it.”
As for dressing children, the blog carries illustrations of Romy in her various styles. These display the Parisian tendency to dress babies in vintage wear – ideally one’s own baby clothes. Her mother had a collection of Victorian-style baby-wear, which she handed down. It’s closer to the French baby shop Bonpoint, with its traditional knitting or cord in muted tones, than the bright colours of the Anglo-American high street.
“At the start, Romy was just in white T-shirts, leggings, easy to wash,” she says. “I’m not a big fan of designers for kids: it’s cute, but they dirty themselves so quick. And it only works for kids if they are not replicas of adult outfits.”
What about the Tom Ford kitten heels: does her baby wear them? “Oh no, they’re not for wearing!” she says. “I can’t even get them on her foot to photograph them. They’re still in a box wrapped in tissue paper.”
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Bayern Munich are the club Germans love to hate | Comment
Borussia Dortmund will have most neutrals on their side, and for good reason – the match is as much about politics as football
A friend tells the following story. In 1999, he was watching Bayern Munich play Manchester United in a bar in Kiel, high up in the northern tip of Germany. Most of the people were drinking, chatting, playing cards – they barely looked up when Bayern took the lead. But when Manchester equalised in the 91st minute, a loud cheer went around the room. When the English team scored an unlikely winner two minutes later, people were in each others arms, singing, dancing on the tables.
Borussia Dortmund, Bayern’s opponents this time around, may no longer be quite the romantic working-class club coach Jürgen Klopp tried to evoke in a Guardian interview during the week, but it’s likely that his boys in yellow have the majority of neutral fans on their side tonight. For a vast majority, being raised as a football fan in Germany still means learning to hate Bayern.
Where does this animosity come from? There is their knack for scoring late goals, the legendary Bayerndusel – the German equivalent of “Fergie-time” – and their history of rapacious capitalism. My own team, St Pauli, may be known as the “buccaneers” of the German league, but Bayern actually has a history of acting like pirates: raiding smaller successful clubs for their best players and leaving them to sink into obscurity, like they did with poor FC Karlsruhe in the 90s.
But sport is only half the reason. Munich is not only the richest club in German football – Bavaria is also Germany’s richest region. Federal Germany is a transfer union, and in 2011 Bavaria paid 3,663 million euros to subsidise poorer parts of the country, such as Berlin. It has not always been thus: until 1986 Bayern used to be subsidised by regions in the industrial west (where Dortmund hail from), and two years later it became the first and only region to transform itself from “receiver” to a “giver”. Nonetheless, no German politicians have been more vocally opposed to eurozone bailouts than those in the Bavarian CSU – its finance minister has loudly campaigned to have Greece chucked out of the euro.
There may be some unresolved psychological issues too. The first football chant every German child learns is the Freudian “Zieht den Bayern die Lederhosen aus”: “Pull down the Bavarians’ lederhosen”. One reason why we want to see them stripped naked may be that they have strong belief in their distinct cultural identity. A separate kingdom until 1918, Bavarians have they have their own folk costumes, their own political party, their own culinary tradition, a small separatist movement, a bloody castle as their own embassy in Brussels and an annoying habit of belittling other Germans as Preissn, “Prussians”. And yet, Bavaria’s ongoing economic and sporting success seems to imply that that arrogance is not entirely unjustified. Which is, of course, precisely what the rest of Europe finds so dislikable about Germany.
Over the last ten years or so, Bayern Munich have got very good at convincing the rest of Germany that they are not that bad after all. In 2003, they organised a charity friendly to pull back St Pauli from the brink of bankruptcy, and loaned Borussia Dortmund 2 million euros when the club was on the brink of collapse. They have insisted on TV money being distributed according to league position, when they could earn a fortune if it was assigned on the basis of viewing figures. They looked after troubled players like Sebastian Deisler, when other clubs might have just cancelled their contracts. Most annoyingly of all, they started playing free-flowing, inspirational football. Bayern promised an answer to that much asked “German question”: whether Europe’s largest economy can be strong and powerful without being evil.
About a month ago, that answer became a bit more complicated. On 20 April, it was reported that Bayern’s president Uli Hoeness, who has come to embody the club’s brand of socially responsible enterprise, was investigated for tax fraud. Just after German politicians had spent weeks lecturing Cyprus on dabbling in irresponsible casino-capitalism, it emerged that the man at the centre of Germany’s most successful football club had lost millions on stock market bets.
All this means that tonight’s match at Wembley is at least as much about politics as about football. Shortly before the Hoeness scandal broke, conservative politicians had been lobbying for a tax amnesty deal with Switzerland – did they know about Hoeness’s affairs? Hoeness has repeatedly expressed his admiration for the chancellor, and Merkel has had to confirm that she had met the Bayern president in private seven times in the last three years – now she is reportedly staying away from London today for fear of being photographed with him.
The Swiss tax deal collapsed partly because of opposition by her main rival in September’s elections, the Social Democrat Peer Steinbrück – who is also happens to be on the supervisory board at Borussia Dortmund. Borussia, incidentally, is neo-Latin for “Prussia”.
• Philip Oltermann is the author of Keeping Up With the Germans: A History of Anglo-German Encounters
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