Germany

We did not plan that our stay would coincide with Germany hosting the World Cup. It just happened that way. But what fun it's been to be here amidst all the revelry, truly international revelry. Germany itself is surprising itself with the good mood it's put everyone in. There has been some play here in Munich. It is impossible to get tickets. Apparently they are spoken for well in advance of the event. I saw some people wearing sandwich boards around the Marien Platz, the focal point of the city, asking for tickets. But with the tickets actually associated with specific people, like airline tickets are, I don't see how that would work.

In lieu of actually attending the play, there is a public viewing area up on a big lawn at the 1972 Olympic Center. That place gets jammed packed too. We were up there at another event the day that Brazil knocked Australia off. We were traveling by U-bahn, the subway, from Marien Platz. The trains were jammed packed at 2 pm. Swarms of green and yellow accoutred Brasilianos turned the trains into rolling fests with their singing and carrying on. The match didn't even start until 6 pm. But they all went out anyway and boiled in the hot sun for four hours before the play even started.

This being Bavaria, it's filled with beer gardens. These are wonderful outdoor spots, usually shaded with very leafy trees. They are in summer the pivot points about which German society revolves. There's much socializing and revelry at these beer gardens normally. But with the World Cup in the country and sometimes in town, every beer garden has turned into a public viewing area for football play. So the play is not just something people watch at home, by themselves or with small groups of friends. Every match is a public event. America does have sports bars. But it's just not the same as these massive viewings at Bavarian beer gardens.

We live well outside of Munich, near the Starnbergersee, one of the largest lakes in Germany. Our apartment is the top one in a three-story building. It has very nice skylights, that we now open, to cool the place down and the enjoy sleeping in the almost-outdoors. We've noticed now that whenever there's play, we can hear people in high spirits down by the lake, carrying on until 3 or 4 am. They know how to celebrate.

One interesting aspect of this involves German nationalism, and there has been a lot in the press about that. The average German of my generation has had nationalism drilled out of him or her. The patriotism that comes normally with being American, national pride, has been purposefully removed from the German character because of Naziism. Yet with all this football fever, many people, especially young people, are waving the German tri-color, obviously proud of being German. The nation is watching itself and this phenomenon closely, commenting on it in the press, and thinking deeply about it.

I was on the way home one night after a match that Germany won. The train home was one that goes further on up into the Alps to a small place called Mittenwald. There was a small group of German kids, 17 or 18 years old, waving a huge German flag out the train window. They were chanting, "We're on the train to Berlin!", "We're on the train to Berlin!", meaning that Germany was on the way to winning the final match in Berlin. A man next to me was snickering and then politely told them that, no, they were on the train to Mittenwald, a dinky place in the opposite direction to Berlin.

Last night we were invited with a group of Cal Poly students who are studying here to the home of Dieter Kraft. Dieter was the first Munich professor to do an exchange with Cal Poly back in 2000, when the program was new. We got to be friends back then. Since then he's regularly held an annual barbeque for Cal Poly students in his backyard. He hasn't had a TV since 1972, but he just bought one, and it is suspicious that it was just one week before Germany took on Argentina in the quarter finals. All the Cal Poly students were in high spirits, all rooting for Germany. Mrs. Kraft commented to me that she was really enjoying seeing their festiveness and was surprised that all were rooting for Germany.

Dieter's patriotic son

Cal Poly student revelers (and Dieter)

Friends of ours, our German teacher actually, told me that her husband had commented derisively about a friend who had actually bought and was displaying a German flag. So deep does this anti-nationalism run in today's German culture. So I had to ask her what her husband would think about an 11-year-old American kid buying two German flags, a big one simply for waving and one to display on the car window. Was that okay? No answer yet.


Brasilianos swarm U-bahn		Public viewing at Olympiazentrum