Existential turmoil already enveloping Germany, Euro tourney

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/06/2024 (822 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A few hours before attending Monday’s friendly match between Germany and Ukraine in Nuremberg, chancellor Olaf Scholz was examining a sandbag wall in Reichertshofen — a small Bavarian town battling south German flooding that has so far claimed at least six lives and displaced thousands.

The day before that, he had introduced Volkswagen’s new electric vehicle and endorsed a strengthened NATO border as a deterrent to Russian aggression.

If there seems to be a lot going on in Germany, it’s because there is. The country will vote in EU elections this weekend, and Ursula von der Leyen, who makes her home near Hanover, has been making a last, desperate push to limit the predicted success of the far right.

So many things are happening at once, and the several hundred-thousand foreign football fans expected for Euro 2024 haven’t even arrived. That’ll happen through much of next week, and on Friday, finally, the tournament will kick off with Germany facing Scotland in Munich (2 p.m., all matches on TSN).

It might as well be a year away.

As if the country’s news cycle somehow had room on its merry-go-round, in the midst of everything else the public broadcaster ARD aired a controversial documentary about diversity in Die Mannschaft. At the heart of the film was the result of a carelessly-conducted poll that asked participants whether they’d like more white players in the national team.

To the Germany set-up’s credit, no time was wasted in denouncing what manager Julian Nagelsmann tersely labelled a “crap poll” (“Scheiẞ-Umfrage,” to directly quote the profanity). When asked about the ARD program by a Bild reporter on Sunday, he replied that it was “racist” and “insane” to even put such a survey to the public.

Bayern Munich right-back Joshua Kimmich expressed his outrage as well. In a press conference at the national team’s Herzogenaurach training base, he remarked that anyone who knew anything about football understood its ability to bring people of different nationalities, races and religions together.

“That’s what our team is all about,” he said, adding, “When you consider that we’re about to host a European Championship, it’s absurd to ask such a question when the aim is actually to unite the whole country.”

Nothing either Schulz or von der Leyen has said or done these last few weeks will have reached as broad an audience as that commanded by Nagelsmann and Kimmich. The two might as well have been out on campaign, shooting down the arrows of the proudly xenophobic AfD party.

If the Germany squad hadn’t intended to be part of this spring’s political discourse, they certainly rose to the occasion when it was asked of them and left zero grey areas regarding their stance — a rarity in politics, and in German football for that matter.

Ahead of last weekend’s Champions League final against Real Madrid, Bundesliga representatives Borussia Dortmund announced a sponsorship deal with weapons manufacturer Rheinmetall.

The agreement was protested by Dortmund fans inside Wembley Stadium, and a statement from the club’s supporters’ council articulated “doubts about its compatibility with Borussia Dortmund’s values.”

A column in the typically cautious Süddeutsche Zeitung termed the transaction “a banalization of the arms business,” while a writer in the more local Ruhr Nachrichten chided the “hypocrisy” of denouncing “a company we need.”

Germany is undergoing an internal examination of its militarization — a phenomenon Schulz has called a Zeitenwende, or epochal shift — and the existential grappling has, not surprisingly, enveloped its football as well.

Not a day will go by during the Euros in which a player or coach isn’t asked to comment on world events; political banners will be sighted and slogans heard at almost every match.

The interior ministry is purportedly prepared for “all conceivable dangers,” and yet there’s an almost collective understanding that this tournament might as well be contested on a tinderbox. It’s a nervousness that, in a much lesser but pertinent context, the national team shares as kick-off nears.

European champions on three occasions, Germany haven’t won a knockout match at a major tournament since edging Italy on penalties in the Euro 2016 quarterfinals.

They’ve not progressed beyond a World Cup group stage since winning the trophy a decade ago in Brazil, and their Euro 2020 campaign concluded when they lost to England in the round of 16.

Nagelsmann is only in his job because his predecessor, Hansi Flick, suffered the ignominy of becoming just the second Mannschaft manager in history to win fewer than half the games he coached.

Himself a risky choice after getting the boot at Bayern Munich, the 36-year-old has made a number of bold selection decisions that have put the nation even further on edge.

Defenders Mats Hummels and Niklas Süle, both of whom were part of the Dortmund side that reached the Champions League final, were omitted from the squad for Euro 2024. Also dropped were Leon Goretzka, Serge Gnabry and Timo Werner. Their places went to the likes of Waldemar Anton, Maximilian Mittelstädt, Aleksandar Pavlović, Maximilian Beier and Deniz Undav.

World Cup-winning midfielder Toni Kroos, meanwhile, was coaxed out of international retirement and will play the final games of his career over these next few weeks.

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It’s a potentially formidable team, efficient in the centre of the park and electrifying in attack. Conversely, the awkward melding together of different generations, personalities and skill-sets could yield a lineup that struggles against elite, coherent opposition.

Nagelsmann, however, not only believes in the players selected but sees his group as a cross-section of German society, as a redefinition of what it means to be German. In what is already a consequential spring and summer in Germany, the European Championship is quite appropriately as delicate as everything else.

“The special thing is this is a home Euros,” he remarked at last month’s squad announcement. “Everyone in the country should identify with this team.”

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