Can EURO 2024 save Germany from its identity crisis?

I had hoped 2024 would be the year Germany shakes off its sense of decline. Things aren’t going so great. But hope could be around the corner...

Sometimes it feels like Germany is becoming one of those countries that makes you wince when you read a news article about it.

The establishment’s refusal to tolerate criticism of Israel due to guilt from genocide committed 80 years ago has led to it effectively becoming the biggest global cheerleader for atrocities which are happening in the here and now.

The mainstream’s hardline stance on the Middle-East conflict has alienated Germany’s large Muslim population, who are facing rising instances of hate and disrimination.

The extremists among them feel vindicated and emboldened in their Antisemitism and rejection of German society. The murder of a policeman in Mannheim last weekend by an Islamist knifeman, who had attacked an Islam-critical demonstration, has further racked up tensions.

Elsewhere, preppy rich kids partying at a nightclub on the posh island of Sylt in the North Sea share videos of themselves singing: “Ausländer raus, Deutschland den Deutschen” (Foreigners out, Germany for Germans) over an extremely catchy Eurodance classic.

Sure, maybe they were singing it as an ironic meme, with the misanthropic edgelord humour you would expect from entitled kids of the elite. But the fact this happened out in the open and was shared on social media speaks to how language that would have been completely beyond the pale 10 years ago has once again become salonfähig, part of polite society, including among young people.

It’s the German far-right’s “Will Grigg's on fire” moment. The song being sung over, Gigi D’Agostino’s L’Amour Toujours - once a hit among loved-up eccie-fuelled ravers in the late 90s - has already had to be banned at Oktoberfest and clubs in Mallorca to avoid more videos emerging of German lads and ladettes having the best time chanting far-right slogans.

The AfD, who have recently been disowned by Marine Le Pen due to their fondness for the Third Reich, continue to set the tone politically. The coalition of SPD, Greens and FDP may have secured the eternal support of the stoner population, but on the big socio-economic questions, they’ve been swept away by the constant deluge of geopolitical crises and sunk by their own in-fighting. Recent months have seen a string of violent assaults against politicians. A big shift to the right seems inevitable in all upcoming elections.

Basically, Germany could really do with a win right now, with something that can bring people together.

Well it’s a good thing that EURO 2024 is just around the corner. There is no better short-term boost for a country’s self-esteem after all than its national football team doing well in a major tournament, especially if they happen to be hosting it.

Germany knows this all too well. The 2006 World Cup, when for four sun-drenched weeks the country hosted humankind’s greatest communal festival, has become known as the Sommermärchen (the summer fairytale). It represents a promised land in the collective consciousness, a time when Germans first started to get together and be like: “You know what, maybe we’re not so bad after all. Let’s get the flags out again!”

The unfancied German team, coached by star striker turned California good-vibes guru Jürgen Klinsmann, made it to the semi-finals before losing to eventual champions Italy. Although they didn’t lift the cup, the team made people smile and ushered in a new era of positive and exciting football which culminated in a World Cup triumph in 2014.

18 years later, a lot has changed. The political, social and economic problems facing German society are far more serious than they were in 2006. Certain commentators, like the German-Jewish author Max Czollek in his 2018 bestseller Desintegriert Euch! (De-Integrate Yourselves!), argue that the black-red-gold fetishisation that emerged during the Sommermärchen helped to lay the foundations for the rise of the openly nationalist AfD. It’s a boiling hot take, but one which probably overreaches a bit.

National football teams are a mirror into an alternative society in which socio-economic disadvantages and cultural prejudices don’t hold people back, in which achievement is the only thing that matters. Once the referee blows that whistle, the outside world melts away, and everyone is equal. A working-class sport like football, with low barriers to entry, is one of the only instances of a genuine meritocracy.

In recent times, the very diverse young teams of France and England have represented their countries with pride. They’ve managed to spin a positive national narrative which serves as a retort to the apocalyptic projections of the far-right. Now it seems a revitalised German national team could be poised to do the same.

36-year-old coach Julian Nagelsmann, who never kicked a ball professionally and has always been viewed with scepticism by the proper football man types, seems to have finally managed to get a tune out of a team full of talented youngsters that had previously struggled to play with any kind of cohesion or spirit.

21-year-olds Florian Wirtz of Bayer Leverkusen and Jamal Musiala of Bayern Munich are arguably the two most exciting and likeable young players in world football. Wirtz is the undisputed star man for his club, coached by footballing savant Xabi Alonso, who went unbeaten all season in domestic competition. He has already made people smile with a viral social media video in which he matter-of-factly ranks variations of potato from worst to best. Musiala has a distinctive bandy-legged dribbling style which makes him the most elusive and slippery wingers seen for a long time.

Kai Havertz, the likely starting centre-forward, represents the archetype of the Nachwuchsleistungszentrum generation of footballers, raised in the rarified and sheltered air of Germany’s elite performance internats. His haughty appearance and ability to do everything with perfect precision while also seeming entirely ineffective gives him the sad air of the protagonist if Kafka had written a football-based novel. But he has just had a good season at Arsenal to be fair.

Niclas Füllkrug, a buck-toothed underdog who rose up from the lower tiers, offers the good old-fashioned number nine option. Leroy Sané is one of the most sublime and graceful footballers on the planet.

In the centre of the park, captain Ilkay Gündoğan has quietly been one of the best midfielders in the world for over a decade. The same is true of veteran Toni Kroos, who will bring his glittering career to an end at the tournament and will be extra motivated to prove his detractors wrong. He may be the most decorated German player of all time, but he has never been embraced by the football traditionalists, who romanticise the Sturm und Drang of traditional German midfielders in the mould of 90s icon Lother Matthäus over Kroos’s measured tactical passing game.

The defence also boasts several of Europe’s elite performers over the past season, like Antonio Rüdiger, Nico Schlotterbeck and Jonathan Tah. Goalkeeper Manuel Neuer still cuts an imposing figure between the sticks after 14 years in the number one jersey.

But more importantly from a political perspective, the team will project a positive representation of a multicultural modern-day Germany, with some old-fashioned Kartoffeln like Thomas Müller in there for good measure too. But it seems like a sizable chunk of the population will remain unmoved no matter what happens.

A recent poll by public broadcaster ARD asked the question: “Would you like to see more white players in the national team?”, to which 20% of respondents said yes. Julian Nagelsmann came out swinging against ARD for their “shitty survey”. The job of journalists is of course to ask difficult questions and reveal uncomfortable truths. So perhaps the ire should be reserved not for the survey, but rather for the 20% who struggle to see non-white people as German. Incidentally, 20% is more or less the polling average of the AfD this year.

Should Germany manage to go all the way, the image of Turkish-German Ilkay Gündoğan lifting the trophy will be heralded as a triumph for diversity and a middle finger to the nativist right. The symbolic power will be undeniable.

But we’ve been here before. And time and time again, history has shown that football’s power unfortunately remains little more than symbolic. Back in 1998, when a diverse France team lifted the World Cup on home soil, ecstatic commentators proclaimed the beginning of a new era of harmonious coexistence between white French people and those with backgrounds in former colonies in the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa. Since then, France has seen huge riots in the Banlieues, mainstream acceptance of the far-right and murderous homegrown Jihad. Gareth Southgate’s polite leadership of a likeable young England team hasn’t cured the darkness that stirs within Brexitland.

The feel-good glow provided by footballing success can also have a toxic flipside. Gündoğan himself will know this better than most. He had a big supporting role in German football’s biggest identity crisis to date: the Özil affair.

Mesut Özil, born and raised in Gelsenkirchen in Germany’s heavily industrialised Ruhr region, was sent from above by the footballing gods. He had otherworldly creative talent and an unparalleled gift for setting up his teammates. He was a shy and awkward boy from a Turkish family, and his graceful and delicate style of play differed from the hard-nosed German ideal, but nothing could prevent him from becoming the breakout star for the national team at the 2010 World Cup.

That same year, he was given a Bambi - a major showbiz award - in the newly invented category of Integration. The young Mesut’s footballing gifts were enough to turn him into a model example of successful assimilation into mainstream German society.

But Germany’s idealised vision of itself as a successful multicultural society started to wear off amidst a complicated political climate. When people fleeing war and despair in the Middle-East arrived en masse in 2015, the German mainstream initially embraced a Willkommenskultur. But this soon turned on its head. The AfD emerged out of nowhere as a major political force.

Mesut Özil continued to be one of the national team’s standout performers. But then, not long before the 2018 World Cup, he and Gündoğan made the mistake of being photographed alongside the autocratic Turkish president Erdogan.

The photographs caused a stir, but they probably would have been forgotten if Germany had played well at the World Cup. But they didn’t. They were eliminated in the group stage for the first time ever. And the tabloid press needed a scapegoat. Who better to pick on the delicate little Turkish-German, the passport German, who didn’t seem to care anyway, who didn’t even sing the national anthem.

Despite being one of Germany’s best players, Özil was hounded. He had made a big personal sacrifice in choosing to play for Germany over the country of his parents. As long as the team was winning, Germany was delighted to be able to wrap him in the flag, to hold him up as a symbol for successful integration. As soon as things went wrong, Özil was the embodiment of Muslims’ failure to assimilate in German society.

Özil took the message to heart, and brought his international career to a premature end. His most recent public sighting was last summer, when he posted a picture on Instagram from an Istanbul gym with a tattoo of a howling wolf on his chest. The symbol is the badge of the extremist Turk nationalist group the “Grey Wolves”.

The whole story is a tragic parable for the communitarian direction German society seems to be heading: an increasing mainstream acceptance of nativist far-right discourse, a large Muslim minority feeling this rejection and retreating further into themselves.

Maybe we’ll get Sommermärchen 2.0. But how much difference would it make?

Let’s not get it twisted, football is an extremely powerful stage of international theatre. We can project all kinds of compelling stories on it. But it’s also not that deep.

The 2019 Grand Prix de Jury winner at Cannes, Les Misérables, opens with celebrations on the Champs Elysees following France’s victory in the 2018 World Cup. We are introduced to the protagonists as they board the train for central Paris from the rundown Banlieue of Montfermeil. All of them are kitted out in France replica jerseys with names like Mbappé or Dembélé on the back. They join the crowds, as people from all backgrounds get together to celebrate being French. After this dreamy opening sequence, we’re brought tumbling back to earth; the rest of the film shows the same characters locked in a vicious cycle of violence and resentment with the institutions of the French state.

Football can provide a nice balm from real social problems, it is one of the very few things capable of bringing people from different classes and backgrounds together. But it can never be anything more than that. Once the party ends and the flags are taken down, reality crashes back into place.