ALISON SMALE
NYT Syndicate
In Germany, museums are usually hallowed, hushed halls of high culture. The brash concrete-and-glass structure right outside the main railway station of this changing Ruhr city breaks the mould.
Just 16 months old, the national museum to the national sport of football has charged into visitors' consciousness like one of Germany's soccer greats dodging and weaving to score a crucial goal.
To its millions of fans the world over, football, or soccer, is more than mere sport. It is ” choose your favourite description ” a religion, an obsession, a pastime that inspires higher purpose in a humdrum life, fuses the individual to the collective, and infuses that collective with national feeling.
In Germany, all of that is true, and then some.
Since soccer first made its way here from England, where the Football Association was established in 1863, it has reflected both the pride and the darkest pitfalls of German history. It is this chronicle that distinguishes the Dortmund museum from similar soccer shrines across Europe and around the world.
Fussball, as soccer is known here, looms large in the national psyche. In a country of 81 million people, the national soccer association is just shy of 7 million members. There are 25,075 local soccer clubs. Freekickerz, a soccer website, is the biggest YouTube site in Germany, with more than 5 million subscribers. Men, in particular, schedule important life events like weddings around (even more) important matches.
"You know the famous saying," said Uli Hesse, author of a book on German soccer."There are three most popular sports in Germany: football, football and football."
Accordingly, the German Football Museum in Dortmund had more than 200,000 visitors in its first year, and the appeal is growing, according to the city's proud mayor, Ullrich Sierau, an ardent fan of a multimedia museum he hails as"almost a visualisation of Germany."
"It shows you the connection between society and football," he said.
Any soccer fan ” in fact, almost any German ” will tell you that the moment the country first felt able to return with dignity to the international arena after the evil of Nazism came with what is known here as"the miracle of Bern," the 3-2 victory in Switzerland over favoured Hungary to win the World Cup in 1954.
Museum visitors are thus greeted with life-size portraits of the 1954 West German team and biographies of the players, above all the captain, Fritz Walter, and the coach, Sepp Herberger. A 1950s radio set broadcasts the commentary to the game ” one player is hailed as"a god of football" ” and a vintage TV shows black-and-white footage of the match.
A sign reminds visitors that most Germans then could not afford a TV, and thus are seen in black-and-white photos clustered around radios or the open windows of bars with televisions. Also on display is a quotation from a distinguished historian, Joachim Fest, placing the 1954 victory squarely in the Wirtschaftswunder, or economic miracle, that was West Germany after Nazism.
"There are three founding fathers of the Federal Republic," Fest said, referring to the first two postwar chancellors and the soccer triumph."Politically, it's Adenauer. Economically, it is Erhard. And mentally, it is Fritz Walter."
Thomas and Christiane Kurz, 63 and 53, are too young to remember the match itself. But on a recent Sunday they sat rapt, hearing the ecstatic commentator proclaim:"Aus, aus, aus, aus. Das Spiel ist aus. Deutschland ist Weltmeister!" ("Over, over, over, over. The game is over. Germany is world champion!")
The Dortmund museum has fun features, like one that lets you become your own game commentator from actual broadcast booths. Visitors can vote on whether the notorious third goal for England ” when it clinched its lone World Cup, against Germany in 1966 ” was, or was not, over the line. (The vote on a recent visit, perhaps no surprise, ran 57 percent against England.)
But the museum does not shy from Germany's past. The national team of 1941 is seen giving the Nazi salute before a game in Sweden. An infamous 1944 propaganda film runs, showing Jewish inmates at the Nazis' Theresienstadt camp near Prague playing soccer and ostensibly enjoying a relaxed life. (In reality, most were about to be shipped to Auschwitz.)
The German Football Association's ban on women's soccer from 1955 to 1970 is also related in detail ” as are the considerable achievements of Germany's female soccer team since. That story, noted the museum director, Manuel Neukirchner, provides two of the biggest surprises for young visitors.
"We ask: What do you think the German 'football Frauen' got for winning their first European title in 1989?" Neukirchner wrote in an email."The kids say money. The truth is ” a coffee service.
"Next we say women's football was banned not in the Middle Ages but in the middle of the 20th century ” where was that? The answers are: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia. And the truth is: West Germany.
"Those are the Aha! moments where the discussion goes far beyond football."
Lutz Engelke, the Berlin-based designer of the museum, said weaving in national history was a prime aim."Soccer and society are actually very, very close," he said."Football is not just sport, but cultural, social and political history."