Germany’s tabloid press drew its conclusions from the World Cup victory over England and offered to end almost half a century of pre-match media skirmishing. It was a kind of Armistice Day; the tabloid guns fell silent. No more: Surrender Fritz, ze War is over for you ? No more: You have only yourselves to blame, you lazy Tommies!
It hardly bears thinking about.
“Dear Englishmen,” wrote Bild in an almost courtly missive, a sign perhaps of things to come. “We concede without any ifs or buts: that was A GOAL yesterday, you were cheated ... let’s call it quits. And simply enjoy our great future duels between our teams.”
Naturally, offers like these do not come without at least one condition attached. A tabloid does not simply abandon its stock in trade, the ethnocentric cliche. All England, has to do, said Bild “is concede that a goal was not scored in Wembley.”
The talk was of the 1966 World Cup final when Geoff Hurst bounced a ball into the German goal. For the past 44 years Germans have been complaining, saying that the ball was not behind the line, and have enlisted scientists and film analysts to study the goal. The Germans now clearly fear that England - backed up by the televiewing world - would launch a similar crusade to right the wrong of yesterday’s non-goal.
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It was not just Bild harping on about the Wembley goal. The serious Frankfuerter Allgemeine Zeitung described it as ‘Revenge for Wembley’, the headline of the Sueddeutsche Zeitung was ” Sorry, England”. Der Tagespiegel in Berlin had a full page phtograph of Mani Neuer, the German keeper, looking over his shoulder at the ball that was clearly behind the line. The photograph made any commentary superfluous.
But Bild, a mass circulation paper which claims 12-million readers, went a step further than the competition, addressing an open letter to God. Under the circumstances, the tone was a little whingeing:
“”Thank You, God of Football! You took your time to correct the injustice. We had almost stopped believing that it would happen. Now, after yesterday, we have made our peace with Wembley ... this cursed football moment has been passed from generation to generation. Now the curse is broken.”
God has apparently not yet replied but under the German press laws would have the right to reply, printed with equal prominence as the original story. That is, the whole of page 15.
The Berlin BZ meanwhile tried to keep things in perspective and declared the Germany victory to be “the game of games.”
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“We have scored a historical victory against England,” Michael Gronau, the BZ commentator, said. “This is something that will cause pain for decades to come to the men from the island. Despite all the understandable English anger about the disallowed goal, I have to say the German XI played the game of the tournament. With a lightness, free of arrogance, they dismantled the English piece by piece.”
Gronau added ominously: “This is the team of the future.”
Television commentators joined in the national dance on the graves of the English. One report on Sat 1 breakfast television depicted the British as binge-drinkers unwelcome across Europe - the implication being that Germany did not just score a few goals, it had scored a moral victory with discipline and other German virtues.
An anchorman on the news channel N 24 offered a British guest a box of paper tissues to wipe away his supposed tears. Across Berlin, many of the 10,000 resident Englanders found themseles patted on the back and offered apologies in English. The word “Sorry” was usually accompanied by a broad grin: this is the country, after all, that invented the word schadenfreude - the taking of pleasure at the misfortune of others - and on Monday the whole of Germany seemed to be celebrating a Schadenfreudefest.