“ACHTUNG! SURRENDER.” The Daily Mirror’s front page on the morning of England v Germany at Euro 96, the last big Wembley occasion a bit like the next big Wembley occasion, made a huge impression at the time.
And not because it was particularly inane or stupid, although it was also those things, but because people liked it. It was (kind of) funny in canned-laughter sort of way. Mainly, it said all the things.
“For you Fritz, ze Euro 96 Championship is over,” was the sub-header. Note “Ze Euro 96”, not “the” because Germans speak like that, although those words are presumably being said by an English person, so it’s a bit confused. There was also a dotted line with the words “cut out and put in your window” so that people would know to cut this out and put it in their window.
The masthead carried the heading Pearce in Our Time, because one of the cover stars was Stuart Pearce. Again this was a bit muddled as Neville Chamberlain, who this phrase references, was seen as an appeaser, as opposed to a screaming disembodied head in an infantry helmet, as Pearce is depicted. There was also a side panel by the paper’s editor, with the headline “Mirror declares football war on Germany”.
I remember thinking at the time it was all very clever, wry, postmodern, playful, irreverent, smart. But then, I was four years old. And slow-witted.
This is all by the by these days. The past is a different country. We did things more racistly there. But it does still seem bizarre that this was the state of public discourse around playing a football match against Germany.
Although less so perhaps when you consider the current prime minister was in Brussels at the time writing dubious stories about bananas and under-sized Italian condoms. Nothing is wasted. On Tuesday night Germany will play their first game in England since 1972 as a nation where English people can’t simply go and live and work. Achtung Fritz! And thank you, football, for this useful little nudge along the way.
Getting Germany Wrong. Look back down the years and this has been a common thread. It is sadness. Perhaps we can get past it.
It has certainly been refreshing to hear the England players sounding completely un-bothered by anything other than now, unattached to that past, a group of young people people seeing just a game. Although in the wider world there was an element of delusion in the instant reaction to news of Tuesday’s match-up.
The Germans! Wouldn’t you know it? Our greatest, our deepest rivals, our nemesis. Except, in reality, this this isn’t a close rivalry at all, not if we accept the standard definition that both sides need to be aware that it exists. Germany have won seven major tournaments. Germany have reached 15 semi-finals since the “one World Cup” of 1966.
Their most intense footballing rivalries are among their peers: Italy (nine finals), the Netherlands (14 semi-finals), France (world champions, neighbours). In this company England are a minor cast member, the bumptious cartoon dog, dukes up, who keeps on yappily inserting itself into the centre of the story.
Often in a way that has little to do with sport, but is instead a part of, that oldwartime rag, the bomber command schtick. Getting The War Wrong: this began in earnest at the 1966 World Cup, where Hugh McIlvanney wrote in the Observer about West German colleagues “bewildered and appalled by the militaristic nationalism of the English”. Bild’s editorial called English sports reporters “chaps who write their copy in steel helmets and gas masks”.
This spirit is still knocking about. It was there when England last played in Germany, and the train to Signal Iduna Park was full of travelling fans singing, in a knowing, semi-ironical way, about English bombers (in the same region where RAF high explosives killed 21,000 people: classy).
It was there last week ago in the same songs that are sung every time England play. Can I just say, on those songs, as someone whose family arrived here on a Red Cross plane from Berlin, and who grew up with the sound of shouted German echoing around the linoleumed hallways by people who cherished the welcome they found in England, that this stuff isn’t really harmful or hurtful to Germans, who don’t think quite so much about the war. But it is harmful to English people because it’s cretinising and pointless.
Move on. Other things can happen.
There is still hope of course, if only because the Anglo-German sporting relationship has so often been a warm and mutually beneficial thing. The great Jimmy Hogan, Wunderteam coach, toured Germany after the first world war giving instructional public demonstrations of keep-ups and shooting that drew rapturous receptions, spawning a generation of German coaches, and eventually escaping the Third Reich with his life savings sewed into his plus fours.
More recently a crop of older German men, among them Uwe Rösler and Jürgen Klopp, grew up listening to crackly tapes of English crowds, tuning into the Kop or Old Trafford like they were the Beatles and the Stones.
Meanwhile, find me an English person who doesn’t secretly love Thomas Tuchel, who comes looming into shot after every Chelsea game like the kind of absent-minded super-brained uncle who comes around at Christmas, crashes his car into a hedge and accidentally builds a working helicopter out of toothpicks while he’s peeling the sprouts.
Beneath that localised war-balls this has often been a fond relationship; one that feels closer and more vital in a more isolated Britain. As Bild’s editorial on the 1966 final concluded, “we hope that the London crowd will remember the good reputation England enjoys as the motherhood of sport and fair play”. Achtung, and time to surrender all that for good.
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