text and photos by PATRICK LEJTENYI

BERLIN–On June 17, 1953, some 100,000 East German workers had gathered in the streets of East Berlin to protest new, stringent quotas and the threat of pay cuts. The Soviet Red Army, with the help of East German police, quickly quashed the uprising with a massacre, killing by some estimates over 260 people. The West German government, sensing, if nothing else, a chance for a propaganda coup, renamed Charlottenburg Chaussee, a wide boulevard running towards the Brandenburg Gate, Strasse des 17. Juni in commemoration. It still keeps that name today.

On Saturday, June 24, 2006—53 years and one week after the event the street was named for—an estimated 100,000 Germans gathered again. This time, they weren’t protesting. They were euphoric. Flags were waving by the thousands above their heads, casting quick shadows over the hordes gathered there in the hot, windless afternoon. Germany, the host of this year’s World Cup, was playing Sweden, and the Germans were feeling good about their chances.

This was the Fan Mile, the stretch of road running from Unter den Linden through the Brandenburg Gate and up Strasse des 17. Juni. The enormous crowd, overwhelmingly German, wasn’t thinking about history, unless it was in the making. They were happy, they were drunk, and they were proud to be Germans—for many, for the first time in their lives.

Remembering the man with the moustache

“Germans,” a Canadian ex-pat living in Berlin told me, “are kind of touchy when it comes to nationalism.”

Not that you’d know it, when it comes to football at least. The German flag is everywhere in Berlin: hanging from balconies, flying from cars, painted on faces, arms and breasts, strewn across bar windows—it’s as ubiquitous as the omnipresent dog turds and graffiti in the German capital.

Flag-waving is a new phenomenon in Germany, and the breadth of its enthusiasm comes as something of a surprise to the young Berlin residents I spoke to on a recent visit. For years, they say, being German just wasn’t that cool. Beethoven, Bach, Marx, Nietzsche, Goethe, Grass—all were overshadowed, irreparably and forever, by that funny little man with the funny little moustache.

“Our generation has never really been proud to be German,” one 34-year-old Berlin resident said. “In school, all we ever learned about German history was bad.”

A football fan himself, he was rooting for the national side, and against all the other favourites who might pose a challenge to the hosts down the line. But he and all the others I met in the predominantly young hip Kreuzberg district didn’t wave the flag and didn’t don facepaint.

“Germans of my generation aren’t patriotic at all,” another Berliner, this one 29, said. “We were taught since we were young not to be.”

Of course, much ink has already been spilled about Germany’s new feel-good nationalism during this World Cup (called, somewhat awkwardly, in German, the Weltmeisterschaft—literally, “World mastery,” which might cause some more delicate souls a little unease). The British press in particular has been enthusiastic about the tournament and has, for now at least, put away some of the older, sillier clichés about “Ze Germans.”

Right at the heart of the matter

But there remain still some lingering questions about Germany, especially in Berlin, where unemployment is stuck at around 20 per cent. For example, the German interior ministry recently stated that the number of neo-Nazis increased by 300 between 2004 and 2005 to 4,100, reports the International Herald Tribune. In the same period, the number of far-right skinhead bands increased from 106 to 142, and the number of right-wing extremists willing to use violence increased by 400 to 10,400.

The most recent German edition of Vice magazine, for instance, contains a map of Berlin and its “no-go areas” for non-whites. Much of the former West Berlin is superimposed with peace signs; much of the former East with swastikas. The most dangerous area for non-whites, according to Vice, is grim Lichtenberg, where unemployment can hover in the 50 per cent range.

Apparently, Vice wasn’t off the mark. Two and a half weeks before the tournament started, Giyasettin Sayan, a Socialist member of the Berlin regional parliament for Lichtenberg, was attacked and beaten by assailants who had called him a “dirty Turk.”

A month before that, an Ethiopian man was almost killed in Potsdam, a suburb to the city’s southwest.

Lichtenberg pride

“Lichtenberg!” a spotty teenager standing next to me at the Fan Mile watching the game against Sweden, screamed between tokes on a joint. “Lichtenberg!”

The kid certainly looked the Lichtenberger part. He was skinny, wearing a tracksuit and seemed desperate to grow a moustache, without much success. He had a sullen, badly-fed and rat-like look to him, born out of the same environment as mid-’70s Britain or rural red state America: one offering few economic prospects, and even less respect from society’s better educated, more cosmopolitan and wealthier mainstream.

By the time the match had ended—a fairly easy 2-0 victory for Germany, resulting in much parading down Yitzhak-Rabin Strasse and onto Unter den Linden immediately following the game, and more taunting to the defeated Swedes (“Auf wiedersehen! Auf wiedersehen!”) and chanting and singing and drinking and honking of horns for the rest of the night—I’d lost track of the young Lichtenberg boy. But as I followed the crowd along Dorotheestrasse towards Unter den Linden, I saw a group of young drunk Germans chanting, “Wir sind deutsch, wir sind deutsch, wir sind deutsch, DEUTSCHLAND!” (“We are German, we are German, we are German DEUTSCHLAND!”). The next verse was, “Sprichts du deutsch etc” (“You speak German?”).

An hour later, at the Alexanderplatz train station, I saw a group of teenage protesters standing outside an innocuous looking bookstore holding up signs reading, in German, “Why are we making friends with the world when we sell Nazi propaganda?” and others of similar sentiment. Older, drunker and much meaner-looking men began manhandling them and yelling unintelligible (to me) epithets their way. The kids didn’t do much to fight back until one of the men hurled his plastic beer cup at them. One kid then charged, shoving the drunk, and the last I saw of the melee before the crowd swallowed them up was a group of German cops rushing in, all business.

The next afternoon, when I brought this up with my Berlin friends over a drink at a beach bar on the river Spree behind one of the last remnants of the Wall, they looked perturbed but not terribly surprised. They had no idea why the kids were protesting the bookstore—it certainly didn’t have any kind of pro-Nazi reputation. Maybe, speculated one, the bookstore sold a work by an author who was not anti-Nazi enough?

A few days later I walked into the same bookstore but, other than a few history books that looked decidedly unsympathetic to the crimes of the Third Reich, saw nothing that would cause offence.

Shiny happy tournament

To be fair, FIFA, international football’s governing body, and the host Germans have been bending over backwards to eliminate or discourage open displays of race-baiting. From the cheesy, happy, smiley multi-culti World Cup 2006 logo (so multi-culti in fact that no discernable ethnic origins are proposed for the three weird, round, cheering faces of the tournament’s logo, coloured orange, green and blue) to several separate declarations by national captains against racism prior to matches, the watchword for the tournament was racial harmony.

And, by and large, it has seemed to work. An estimated one million people visited Germany for the World Cup, which concludes this Sunday. Thousands of fans rooting for Brazil, Ghana, Ukraine, Sweden and USA supporters could be seen walking the streets of Berlin—in fact, the foreign accent most heard streetside by me while in Berlin wasn’t the clipped and slurred English of the British chav, but the flat, nasal twang of the American Northeast and Midwest (some of whom were actually discussing the tournament). Just about the only French I heard was the excited squealing of a woman in a bar in Kreuzberg after France eliminated Spain. And that was greeted with good-natured German bonhomie from the rest of the bar’s patrons.

Berlin, however, and the rest of Germany might have been very different indeed if Turkey qualified for the World Cup. A big chunk of Berlin’s 160,000-or-so Turkish community lives in Kreuzberg, where the rent is still comparatively cheap. The mixed Turk-student population gives the neighbourhood a lively atmosphere, and most of them seemed to be rooting for Germany.

Turkey’s failure to qualify even came as a relief to some Berlin-based Turkish community organizations, which feared more than anything a Germany-Turkey match. That game, they believed, would set nationalist emotions at a fever pitch and threaten to further strain the divide between Germany’s Turkish population and the majority (an honour killing in Berlin of a young Turkish woman by her brother last year, and the nine-year jail term handed down in May, is the latest stress on the country’s multicultural fabric).

Avoiding the yob factor

But there’s no denying Germany 2006 has been a success—despite some questionable refereeing and abundant diving. The English-speaking press abroad and in North America can barely pass a day without gushing about how wunderbar Germany is. And while it can get tiresome, the litany of praise is almost infectious—the Germans are good hosts, many of the games have been exciting, and Berlin remains one of Europe’s most dynamic cities.

Even the thousands of German flags waving over the crowd at the Fan Mile seemed more jolly than jingoistic. Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, said the enthusiasm for the national side showed “a beautiful sense of normalcy” (my Berlin friends, by the way, seem dubious about her dedication to the game. “She wears a beeper so her PR people can tell her when to cheer,” one told me).

And there’s no way that German nationalism can touch, say, English nationalism when it comes to drunken boorishness or sheer stupidity. While England supporters were generally well-behaved this year, that’s probably thanks to some forward thinking on the part of the British police and customs officers. Some 3,000 known hooligans had their passports temporarily revoked during the tournament, barring them from entering Germany. At Stanstead, the small regional airport near London where my wife and I flew out on our way to Berlin, we saw two thick-necked men and their dolly-bird wives being stopped by police and their names being checked against a list of persons banned from travelling to Germany. All four wore frowns of exasperation and anger.

As the World Cup winds down, Germans can take some comfort in having run a well-oiled and generally positive tournament, even if the home side lost in a thrilling semi-final against Italy on Tuesday. And if the German tabloid press can’t raise itself above nationalist muck—the Bild called England then-captain David Beckham’s sister Joanne fat (“Arms, bust, bum, all very British”) and referred to his mother Sandra as “Mama-ham…the superstar mother with the peasant smile,” and referred to Italians as “lazy and greasy” before the Azzurri sent the German team packing—ordinary Germans seem at ease with their new sense of national pride.

But there is a feeling that the party won’t last. With the home squad fighting for a third-place finish on Saturday, the usual German unease about their future, their economy and Germany’s place in the world is expected to return, especially since it seems the German economy didn’t get the boost it expected from the tournament. Odds are the Lichtenberg teenager I saw at the Sweden game will face the same dim prospects he has now in four years, when FIFA moves the show to South Africa.