Waving the Flag – Patriotism and the Germans

    ‘My son Paul is crazy about the World Cup,’ said my friend Jan in Munich.  ‘He wears the team kit all day.  He’ll eat only World Cup-branded yoghurts.  And now he has covered his whole body with Team Germany tattoo transfers.’  
    Jan went on, ‘Last week – after Germany beat Australia – he insisted that I also wear a tattoo.  I tried to resist but four-year-olds can be very persuasive.  As he transferred it on to my shoulder I suddenly realised that I was wearing the German colours for the very first time in my life.’



    Americans grow up wrapped in the flag.  The stars-and-stripes flutters above every school and in the background of every Bruce Springsteen video.  Canadians never travel abroad without a maple leaf pin.  Australians sport their flag as a swimming costume.  But until recently the few Germans who raised their national colours were considered to be unusual at best, and right-wing extremists at worst.  No German put his hand over his heart while singing the national anthem.  No school flew the flag when Jan was a boy.
    ‘How did we learn not to wave the flag?’ asked Jan, a world traveller who is nearing his 50th birthday.  ‘We simply did not do it.’

    But this month almost every other car in the land flaunts the schwarz-rot-gold.  Germany flags – along with those of England, Brazil and Argentina – hang from a dozen balconies along my street.  Girls parade their colours in the U-Bahn.  So why is it that Germans have been so reluctant to show pride in Germany – until now?

    ‘In being German you are always aware of the past, and there are a lot of things of which you cannot be proud,’ Jan explained to me.  ‘During the time of the Third Reich flags flew all over Germany, and they weren’t even our own.  This meant that we developed a disturbed relationship with flags.  So for decades afterwards there was a very strong counter-reaction.  We hid away our flag – and our patriotism.’

    Four summers ago the country rediscovered patriotism when it hosted the last World Cup.  In 2006 Germans realized that they could feel pride in their team and nation without suffering a sense of guilt for crimes committed during the Second World War or under the communist regime.  
    Chancellor Angela Merkel observed at the time, ‘People are waving flags without having to justify themselves.  Fifteen years ago, things were different.  Our relation to our country has become something beautiful, but in a normal and not an arrogant way.’
    ‘I agree with Frau Merkel,’ said Jan with a laugh, ‘which is quite unusual for me.  During the 2002 World Cup, which was played in Korea and Japan, I don’t remember anyone waving the Germany flag.  By 2006 it had changed.’

    But not everyone is at ease with the born-again nationalism.  Last week a thoughtful, 16-year-old Berlin student told me, ‘This football frenzy and flag waving leaves me feeling ... uneasy.  I worry what foreigners will think of us.’
    I assured her that, for me at least, today’s nationalism is benign, especially in the context of World Cup football.  But my answer didn’t satisfy her.
    ‘One thing keeps bothering me,’ she went on.  ‘At school we’ve been studying the Second World War for two whole years, and every time the teacher brings it up again the whole class moans.  But you know, no matter how often we talk about it, one question remains unanswered.  We know what happened and when it happened but none of us can answer how it happened.  How was it possible that so few Germans stood up against fascism?’

    Germany’s pride in itself has been reestablished through the remarkable achievements of the post-war years, with the passage of time, in European integration and the reunification of the country’s two halves.  Yet it this question, and the untiring determination to find an answer, which most enhances Germans as individuals and as a nation.  Modern Germany – in a courageous, humane and moving manner – continues to subject itself to national psychoanalysis.  More than any other nation – football-playing or not – Germany insists on facing its history, in the conviction that for the psychic health of a society past actions must be understood as a condition of healing.

    For these reasons Germans rightly celebrate themselves; in Aachen, in Wolfsburg, in Frankfurt, and even in Munich, where my friend Jan is settling down to watch Team Germany push on to victory – with four-year-old Paul on his lap and Germany’s national colours discreetly, finally, displayed on his shoulder.